Author Archives: jcravens

About jcravens

Jayne Cravens is an internationally-recognized trainer, researcher and consultant. Her work is focused on communications, volunteer involvement, community engagement, and management for nonprofits, NGOs, and government initiatives. She is a pioneer regarding the research, promotion and practice of virtual volunteering, including virtual teams, microvolunteering and crowdsourcing, and she is a veteran manager of various local and international initiatives. Jayne became active online in 1993, and she created one of the first web sites focused on helping to build the capacity of nonprofits to use the Internet. She has been interviewed for and quoted in articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, as well as for reports by CNN, Deutsche Well, the BBC, and various local radio stations, TV stations and blogs. Resources from her web site, coyotecommunications.com, are frequently cited in reports and articles by a variety of organizations, online and in-print. Women's empowerment and women's full access to employment and education options remains a cross-cutting theme in all of her work. Jayne received her BA in Journalism from Western Kentucky University and her Master's degree in Development Management from Open University in the U.K. A native of Kentucky, she has worked for the United Nations, lived in Germany and Afghanistan, and visited more than 30 countries, many of them by motorcycle. She is currently based near Portland, Oregon in the USA.

Social media realities for Friday

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logoSome resources, stories and events regarding social media that will help you balance all the hype with the reality of using such:

  1. TechSoup’s final live Twitter chat in its Nonprofit Social Media 101 (NPSM101) series is Monday, May 23 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time USA. Join in for a lively discussion on the value, ways to use, and best practices in tagging. Tagging is used in almost all major social sites, including 5 of the 6 TechSoup features in its newly launched NPSM101 wiki (Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook). Thinking about how to tag your messages and photos will substantially increase the number of people viewing your online activities – and, ultimately, getting involved in your organization. You participate in this TechSoup Twitter Chat by following the tag #nptagging on Twitter, and including that tag in any of your own questions or responses during the event. You can also follow on this Tweetchat.com link. A Twitter chat event an intense experience, but I have enjoyed my participation in two of the last three TechSoup events way more than I thought I would.
  2. Few charities are raising significant amounts of money via social media, says a recent study regarding such. Fewer than 3 percent of the survey’s 11,196 nonprofit respondents reported raising more than $10,000 through such tools. Does that mean nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations engaging in social media isn’t really worth the effort? No. But it does mean that we need to stop talking about social media the way so many talked about the web back in the 1990s – that just having a presence will be a financial windfall. Donations come from cultivation, trust-building and proven results that an organization is getting results. Social media needs to be used strategically, and should be integrated into a variety of other, OFFline activities.
  3. By posing as a savvy junior analyst or a graduate student seeking sources for a paper, some people have been successful at building relationships with employees at certain companies and getting those employees to divulge sensitive information, as this story relates. I find it amusing that people ask me endless questions about Internet security related to protecting their nonprofit organization from a hacker, or preventing volunteers from violating confidentiality policies while never wondering if paid staff might do the same, but they never think about this very real scenario: staff willingly handing over information in a kind of online seduction. Confidentiality is an onling training issue, one that needs to be revisited repeatedly at organizations, and this proves it.
  4. Social media will be used against you. That’s one of the statements by an organizer of the Social Media, Internet and Law Enforcement conference in Chicago. Police have been using social networking sites to identify and investigate suspects, but now criminals are using such sites to identify and investigate law enforcement officers, including undercover police. In addition, hostage-takers and suspects who barricade themselves in buildings are monitoring social media to track police movements in real time, and gang members are launching their own surveillance operations targeting police. Nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations often have activists working against their work as well, and need to remember that those program saboteurs are also online.
  5. The U.S. State Department has quietly abandoned its America.gov site to refocus its efforts on social media. And I think it’s a bad idea. Not the social media part, but the abandoning the web part. Embrace social media – but do NOT get rid of your web site!

Happy Friday, everyone.

Ever-Changing Landscape of Nonprofits & Technology

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What nonprofits are doing now with the Internet is not much different from what online nonprofits were doing in the 1980s and early 1990s – offering questions to their networks to see what answers they might get (crowd-sourcing), talking about challenges they are facing and offering each other advice, reaching out to current and potential supporters, promoting activities and events, working with volunteers, etc. You can read more about these early days of nonprofits and the Internet in the 1980s, through 1995.

By 1990, there were already several nonprofit organizations and many dedicated volunteers and aspiring consultants who were helping to promote nonprofit use of the Internet and computer technology. Some of these organizations helping nonprofits with Internet technology survived and some didn’t. Their networks of regional offices grew – and sometimes broke up, with individual members going off in new directions. Some changed their names, and some changed their missions.

One of the organizations that grew late in this movement, NPower, a national network of nonprofit technology consulting and training organizations, is now restructuring, and this article in the Nonprofit Times details this restructuring, as well as touching on the ever-changing landscape of support organizations for nonprofits and Internet technology. And it’s written by Tim Mills-Groninger, someone who has been immersed in the nonprofits and tech scene as long as I have (and that’s a frighteningly long time, relatively speaking), so it’s details are right-on.

I know this isn’t breaking news. But it’s important news, because nonprofit organizations, NGOs, schools, libraries and other mission-based organizations need to know where they’ve been in order to know where they are going. Mistakes that were made in those early days of tech are being made again as the Internet gets rebranded as the Cloud and online social networking, as episodic online volunteering gets rebranded as microvolunteering, and as people are starting nonprofits or social enterprises to do with Facebook or Twitter what many nonprofits were doing with USENET back in the 1980s. Let’s learn from those mistakes instead of repeating them!

Governor’s Volunteer Awards Coming Soon

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In many states in the USA, the governor of that state has an annual event to recognize outstanding volunteer efforts. There are lots of categories of recognition for these award programs: for an outstanding senior volunteer, a youth group of volunteers, an individual youth volunteer, a corporate volunteering program, a life-time volunteer, and more. And in many of these states, like Oregon, applications are being accepted NOW.

(I just wish these award programs all also recognized outstanding volunteer managers – those who recruit, support and supervise volunteers, and make volunteer engagement possible!)

Some of these governor’s award programs also award people and groups on the regional level. And many of these award programs have trouble getting enough nominees to give an award in every category.

To find out if your state has such an award’s program, go to Google and use these searches:

  • yourstatename governor volunteer award (such as Kentucky Governor Volunteer Award)
  • yourstatename volunteer award (such as Oregon Volunteer Award)
  • yourstatename community service volunteer award (such as Iowa Governor Volunteer Award)

If your state never comes up in the search of any of those phrases, your state probably doesn’t have a state award for volunteers (and maybe you should start a petition so they do!).

I served as a judging panelist for the Governor’s Volunteer Awards in Texas in 1999; my category was group volunteering. I was also a judge for the National Volunteer Awards by Women in Community Service (WICS) (part of JobCorps) in 1998 and a member of the 1995-96 San Jose (California) Festival, Parade and Celebration Grant Review Committee. Having read so many applications for these awards – as well as reviewing more grant applications over the years than I care to say – I know what things that you need to include in a nomination form to make sure your effort gets considered for a governor’s award:

  1. Follow the nomination form guidelines precisely. Read the directions carefully and provide every piece of information asked for.
  2. Don’t just focus on number of hours done. What difference did this volunteer effort make? What is different now because of this volunteer effort? Answer this question in detail: So what? If you can include any hard data that proves you made a difference – changed minds and perceptions, a reduction in crime or pollution or hunger, an increase in something good like people people able to read or dogs being adopted – that better ensures your nomination form will go somewhere.

And don’t think this is a wasted effort if your nomination doesn’t get recognized; for students, you now have great information to use on scholarship and university applications. Nonprofits, you now have great information to feature on your web site and in funding proposals. You also have some fantastic information to blog about!

All this comes to mind because the Oregon Governor’s Volunteer Awards are now accepting nominations. A cash award of up to $500 will be given by presenting sponsor Wells Fargo to a non-profit of choice for each state and regional volunteer award recipient.

And unlike other governor’s award ceremonies I’ve been to, the Oregon awards ceremony is focused ON THE VOLUNTEERS. There are no high-profile guests, no long speeches by politicans – it’s all about hearing about the difference the award winners have made (are you listening California? Or Texas?).

Better life in rural communities with ICTs

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Sometimes, it’s a two-blog day…

I’ve already blogged today, about how training opportunities are all around you, but I have to blog again to note that today, May 17, is World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. The theme is Better life in rural communities with ICTs. It is the subject of NetSquard’s May Net2 Think Tank.

Some things I’ve written related to the subject of phones, smart phones, computers, Internet, etc. – improving lives in rural communities:

It’s a subject I’ve long felt passionate about!

The purpose of World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) is to help raise awareness of the possibilities that the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) can bring to societies and economies, as well as of ways to bridge the digital divide. 17 May marks the anniversary of the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention and the creation of the International Telecommunication Union.

The WTISD web site has lots of free information you can download and use to help you promote the day, and the material is in a variety of languages (English, ????????, ??????, Español, Français, ?????????????? and no text). Too late for this year? No worries – start planning now for next year!

 

Tags: ICT4D, net2thinktank, NetSquared, access, ICT, United Nations, rural, communities, community

Training opportunities are all around you

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If you are in the Portland, Oregon area, here is a great training opportunity: DIY TeamWorks, a program by Hands On Greater Portland, gives participants the opportunity to investigate Do-It-Yourself community projects related to mending clothes, growing plants, remodeling houses, cooking, or making crafts in the North/Northeast Portland area. The DIY initiatives that the Hands On Greater Portland program will focus on encourage people to make goods themselves rather than buy mass produced items, to create quality items (“better made”), to recycle, and to reduce waste. The DIY TeamWorks sessions combine DIY-oriented volunteer projects with educational materials to help participants better understand the “why” of DIY, and ways they might want to incorporate DIY approaches to their own organizations and programs, or in their individual lives. TeamWorks teams consist of approximately 10-14 individuals, led by a Hands On trained volunteer leader. These team members commit to volunteering for every project in the series, so check your schedule before signing up. When you sign-up for the first project, you are registering to participate in the entire TeamWorks experience.

Why is this a great training opportunity:

  • If you work in a program focused on children, on people re-entering the workforce, on immigrants, on victims of domestic violence, or on any population that could benefit from learning DIY projects, your training in this initiative could lead to the creation of a new program at your organization, or, at least, some new activities.
  • If you are an environmental organization, you could use this training to help your staff and volunteers become better advocates of DIY among your clients, customers and the general public.
  • If you work in a government housing project, you could use this training to develop programs for the residents with whom you work.
  • It could eventually lead to a partnership in some way between you and any of the organizations you encounter through this program.
  • If you want to work at any of the aforementioned types of organizations, this training would not only bump up your résumé, it would also help you get to know nonprofits in the area.

These kinds of training opportunities at nonprofit organizations abound: Girl Scouts offers training in leadership, event management and other areas, and many training activities for volunteer programs at various organizations give you knowledge you can use in the work place – someone who is trained in crisis counseling, for instance, may get noticed among a stack of job applications, because it will be seen as an ability to identify and help stressed co-workers. There is often a small fee associated with any of these trainings through nonprofit organizations, but the fees are more than affordable.

And that leads me to start thinking about volunteering itself as skills development for the work place, but that’s another blog…

Helping Southern states in the USA

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Disaster is striking in the American Southeast. Recent tornadoes and current flooding have brought devastation and heartache to many parts of the South, and messages are everywhere on various online communities, asking how to help. There is an incredible amount of misinformation being posted about how to help as well.

If you want to help the states affected by recent tornadoes and current flooding in the USA, you can:

  • Watch the news, and when you hear a county name for a state that is being affected, or a city name, look up the American Red Cross chapter, or the local Humane Society/ASPCA/animal welfare organization serving that area on Google. Most of these will have a web site that allows you do donate directly to the organization. The Red Cross provides emergency housing and various other emergency services to local people, but usually doesn’t allow pets in their emergency shelters; local animal shelters are struggling with abandoned pets and pets that aren’t allowed into emergency shelters. Your donations provide desperately needed funds to help both food and animals! The Red Cross estimates that it will spend as much as $31 million responding to these recent disasters; you can donate to the national chapter, but many feel better donating directly to chapters serving an affected area.
  • If you want to volunteer in a disaster-affected area, you need to be entirely self-funded and self-sufficient, formally affiliated with a credible organization, and have full approval of that organization to go to the area and serve as a volunteer. People affected by these disasters need to be protected from unscrupulous people who may use this situation to take advantage of others (it’s already happening), and people affected by these disasters deserve trained people who won’t end up having to be cared for themselves because they are woefully unprepared (yes, it happens). Here’s much more about the realities of volunteering to help after major disasters.
  • Unless you have read on a web site by an organization in the affected area that they are accepting donations of food and clothing, do NOT start gathering food and clothing for the affected area. It’s often much cheaper – and much safer – for a relief organization to buy food and ship it to an area, knowing they are buying exactly what’s needed, knowing the food is not spoiled, knowing it’s appropriate, etc., than to ask for donations and have to spend endless hours figuring out what food is usable, what is not, and trying to put together meals based on what is donated. If you are determined to donate items for an affected area, then call the local Red Cross and local communities of faith in the affected area and ask if they will accept what you are gathering to donate. And be prepared to drive to the area yourself – no one is going to come pick them up from you, as they are much too busy dealing with disaster victims. Also, note that organizations are saying they CANNOT handle any more used toys or cast-off clothing (they would prefer cleaning supplies and diapers!). More on donating things instead of cash or time (in-kind contributions).
  • You can also look at the web sites of high schools serving these affected areas; if they are in need of something (prom dresses, school supplies, etc.), they will say so directly on their web site.

Obviously, donating financially is the way to go if you really want to help. Even just $10 will help – and, yes, you can afford $10 (don’t buy coffee shop coffee for a few days, make your lunch for a few days, don’t eat from any restaurants all week, reduce your cable package subscription to the most basic for a month or two, etc.).

Use this as an incentive to call your local American Red Cross, right now, and start getting training for disaster in your own area. Why not at least call and attend the next volunteer orientation? There’s no obligation to volunteer just for attending the orientation!

Tags: nonprofit, NGO, not-for-profit, outreach, disaster, volunteer, tornado, flood, earthquake, tsunami, volunteers, donations, donate, canned goods, clothing, clothes

accessibility training May 17-19, 2011 in Austin

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John Slatin AccessU, a web accessibility training institute by Knowbility.org, is next week. AccessU “allows attendees to engage with world renowned accessibility experts to improve design skills and to understand both the need and the techniques for inclusive IT design. From the basics to the bleeding edge, AccessU will provide the resources you need.”

John Slatin AccessU
May 17 – 19, 2011
St. Edward’s University
3001 South Congress Avenue
Austin, Texa

Courses include:
Introduction to Accessible CSS
Advanced CSS for Accessibility
Social Media with Accessibility in Mind
Web Accessibility from the UX/Usability Perspective
Establishing a Corporate Accessibility Initiative: A Case Study
Planning a Usability Test with Disabled Users
Video Captioning
HTML5 and Accessibility
iPhone/iPad Web and App Accessibility
PDF Accessibility: Seeing the Forest Through the Tag Trees
Accessible WordPress Theme Development
Web Access: Legal Update
DreamWeaver Accessibility
Rebirth of Slick: Why Design Is Cool and Why It Will Make People Love Your Company
Accessible Office 2007
Everything You Know about JavaScript and Accessibility is Wrong
Success in an Accessible E-Learning Environment

 

Complete list of courses and presenters, and all info, here.

Is your organization a buzz kill?

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Is your organization a buzz kill to new ideas? Does your organization cry “It’s against our policies/It’s not in our policies!” when an employee member or volunteer suggests an activity – and the response isn’t because what’s proposed isn’t good idea, but because somone at the organization is afraid of… well, something?

Stephen Colbert has been trying to start a political action committee (PAC). At first, his parent company, Viacom, said it was illegal. So Colbert consulted with a lawyer and came up with a way to make creating a PAC legal. But the parent company for his show, The Colbert Report, still said no, sent Colbert a letter explaining why, and asking him not to read the letter on his show. So Colbert paraphrased the letter thusly:

We are stupid lawyers who hate fun. If you do this, we’re all scared because people might get mad at us. I think we just peed a little. So, even though we know it is totally legal and everything, and everybody wants you to do it, we’re not going to let you.

Sincerely,
Admiral John Q. Buzzshackler, Esq.

I laughed and laughed and laughed. I have gotten this message myself, not from lawyers, but from colleagues at organizations where I’ve worked or where I’ve volunteered – one fairly recently, when I made a very simple suggestion regarding a one-time social media activity to a very well-known nonprofit organization I won’t name now, but will be happy to if you buy me a beer. The emails I’ve gotten over the years, including most recently, can be paraphrased similarly:

“We are stuffy nonprofit/NGO/international development agency senior managers who hate fun and new ideas. If you do this, we’re all scared because people might get mad at us or someone somewhere may say something negative about it or we might have to work differently. Or we might have to actually work. I think we just peed a little. So, even though we know it is totally legal and that thousands and thousands of organizations are doing this successfully and it could lead to more volunteers and more support, and most everybody wants you to do it, we’re not going to let you.

Sincerely,
Secretary General John Q. Buzzkill

Happy Friday, everyone!

Putting it all on the Cloud

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The media and various consultants are breathless again with another new tech term. What’s gotten them all aflutter? THE CLOUD. Everyone’s talking about THE CLOUD. Everyone’s asking, Are you working in THE CLOUD?!

What’s THE CLOUD?

The Internet. Instead of saying the Internet, we’re now saying The Cloud.

Don’t you dare write me and say, no! no! The cloud is different!

When someone is talking about cloud computing, they are talking about information and software tools residing somewhere out on the Internet, on a server that may be across town or across the country or across the world, rather than on your desktop or a hard drive in your office. When you read and respond to email on a web site rather than your desk top, such as YahooMail or GoogleMail? That’s cloud computing. Also known as the Internet.

It’s not just email: more and more database software for nonprofits is cloud-based software, meaning that some or all of the software is online, and some or all of the information the software tracks – information about donors, volunteers, clients, etc. – reside on a server that isn’t at your office. You access and manage the information by going online.

Wikipedia has a good graphic that illustrates what working on the Cloud looks like.

Cloud computing is terrific – until it’s not. It’s great to read and respond to your email no matter what device you are using and no matter where you are – your laptop at work, your friend’s laptop in Barbados, your smart phone on a city bus – until you find yourself in a place where you have only a window of time for Internet access. Some airports give users just 30 minutes of free Internet access – that’s enough to download my mail to my laptop, but not enough to time to read and respond to it online.

Cloud computing is great for volunteer-tracking and volunteer-scheduling software, if volunteers can log in from anywhere and input their own information. It’s not so great when the Internet goes down and you need that information. And even in the USA, the Internet DOES go down…

Lack of consistent access isn’t the only concern: people and organizations have lost all of the information they have put out on the Cloud. GoogleMail and Flickr have deleted people’s ENTIRE accounts. Imagine losing ALL of your emails. Imagine losing ALL of your photos (with all those notes and tags and descriptions and what not).

Yesterday, I spent two hours editing a document on Google Docs – out on the Cloud. Google Docs supposedly saves your document every few seconds. After all of that work, when I closed the document, it disappeared. I logged in every hour for the rest of the day, hoping it would show up. 24 hours later, I logged back in and, yes, now the document is there – with none of my edits. Two hours of work gone forever. Someone recently made fun of me for always saving my Google Docs offline, and so I had stopped. I’ll be going back to doing that immediately…

And consider this: software vendors go out of business. I was contacted by a small nonprofit a few years ago that was frantic because the company they had used for a few years for all of their event registration was going under, and the company was not only not offering a refund on the nonprofit’s yearly subscription (which had JUST been renewed), but also, was going to take the systems offline before the nonprofit could find a way to transfer their information elsewhere. Their situation was heart-wrenching!

So, should your nonprofit or NGO go with the Cloud? Yes and no…

For your organization’s database that tracks donors, volunteers, clients and other vital information, Cloud-based systems are fine – as long as you have an offline backup of all of the information physically in your office, ready to access in case of emergency. Daily backups would be best, but even just a monthly backup would protect against disaster. When you are purchasing/subscribing to such software, ask the vendor how you will do these offline backups. If they say, “Oh, there’s no need for them!”, look for a new software vendor, especially if you are a mid-size or small nonprofit (such organizations have little recourse in cases of data loss, where as a large nonprofit may have the political clout to pressure a software vendor into spending the resources necessary to retrieve lost information – or to financially-compensate them for the data loss).

For your organization’s email, using the cloud is fine so long it also provides a way for individuals to also download their email when needed, write their responses offline, queue the email to be sent, and then send all the email at once when they get online access again. This is how my email works, and it’s proven essential for being able to work while traveling. For instance, I download my mail just before I get on the plane, I spend the ride reading and responding, and I send all that mail I’ve written (and download more) once I land. It was particularly essential while in Australia, where Internet access is surprisingly bad.

For organizations AND individuals: do online and offline backups of all your computer-based information. I use Mozy to backup my laptop information online once a week (in the middle of the night, while I’m sleeping). The first time you do an online backup, it’s going to take a looooooong time. But subsequent backups should be shorter, because only updated or new information will be backed up. I also have a hard drive that I use for my once-a-month onsite backups. And I sometimes burn my information onto a DVD or two, and give that DVD to a family member for safe keeping.

Don’t forget to back up your cell phone or smart phone.

So, in short: the Cloud is GREAT… until it’s not. Just like having all of your information on your laptop is GREAT… until it’s not.

 

Handling a social media faux pax

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I love this! Not the faux pax (actually, the faux pax is hilarious), but the brilliant way it was handled:

In February 2011, someone mistakenly tweeted from the American Red Cross account something that was meant to come from that person’s personal Twitter account. The tweet involved beer.

The American Red Cross said in their blog about the event:

We realized our honest mistake (the Tweeter was not drunk) and deleted the above Tweet. We all know that it’s impossible to really delete a tweet like this, so we acknowledged our mistake

And they acknowledged it with both a humorous tweet and this blog.

And here’s the kicker: the Twittersphere immediately embraced the mix-up and many pledged donations to the Red Cross! The beer brand that was named in the accidental tweet, as well as the micro brew community, jumped on board and further encouraged donations to the Red Cross.

Kudos to the American Red Cross for not putting together a crisis communications response committee, spending hours / days in meetings on developing a response strategy and then issuing formal apologies written in corporate-ease. No, instead, you handled it immediately, with humor and common sense, and knowing your supporters would do the same. You have cultivated meaningful relationships with the public and supporters for many years, and that cultivation paid off. That’s the kind of resilient, responsive, dynamic approach that will keep the American Red Cross around for another 130 or so years.

Other national organizations… they aren’t even reading this blog right now but, instead, are in a communications meeting to discuss if, perhaps, they might want to start posting to Facebook, or if, instead, they want to ban on use of such by their employees and volunteers – their fourth meeting about such in the last 12 months…

Red Cross – you are full of win!