Category Archives: Community Relations/Outreach

Zombies aren’t real, but disaster preparedness is

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As has been reported in all over the news for the last few days, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the USA has released a new document that offers suggestions on how to prepare for a zombie invasion. Here’s a nice blog summary of the CDC’s recommendations.

The recommendations are serious, even if the reason is not what the CDC is trying to do is get people to have the preparations in place for a variety of real possible disasters: destructive storms, earthquakes, floods, etc. And it turns out that the preparation for a fictional attack – could be zombies, could be space pirates – are surprisingly similar for reality disaster scenarios.

It’s a daring exercise by the CDC. I love it, but I’m already hearing pundits say, “This is what the CDC uses our tax dollars for? To be cute?” But the CDC isn’t trying to be cute; it’s trying to get the message out about disaster preparedness to people who aren’t getting traditional messages. There have been so many disasters just in the USA lately – massive flooding and highly-destructive tornadoes – not to mention the disasters overseas, and many people are becoming unconsciously resistant to calls to be prepared. 

The CDCs effort is getting huge media play, so the message is definitely reaching many more people. But is this campaign really a success? It’s a media success, certainly, but to know if this is really garnering outcomes, the CDC will have to find out if people really are better prepared for a disaster. Are more people storing the appropriate amounts of water, food, medications, tools and supplies, etc., as a result of this campaign? Have more people sat down with their families and come up with an emergency plan as a result of this campaign? Are all the people blogging and tweeting about this also making appropriate preparations? (before you ask – my husband and I have been prepared for natural disasters, zombie attacks and space pirates for many years now)

And note that the very real disaster of Joplin, Missouri is unfolding before our eyes, and as I am sitting here watching TV and writing this blog, a Joplin official is begging people NOT TO COME INTO THE CITY. Gawkers and un-prepared do-gooders are already getting in the way of rescue and relief efforts. If you don’t have training and resources to help people and animals in that area, if you aren’t prepared to be completely self-sufficient while in the area, providing for your own gas, food, shelter and safety while you are there, please stay away!

If you want to help Joplin, donate to the American Red Cross office nearest the area or to the national office. Also, look for animal shelters serving the area Joplin, Missouri area – all those that are not damaged will soon be over capacity with dogs, cats, horses and other pets and livestock from the area. They will be desperate for funds to transport animals elsewhere, provide food and medical care to the animals they have, etc.

And don’t forget Alabama: The Tuscaloosa Metro Animal Shelter is in desperate need of support, as they are completely overwhelmed with lost and abandoned pets, as is the Humane Society of West Alabama. The Greater Birmingham Humane Society will also need help with the influx of lost and abandoned pets. Making a donation will help buy food and pay for medical services. Adopting a pet from this or any nearby shelter will free up space for other animals.

Here’s advice for Volunteering To Help After Major Disasters. Please call your local American Red Cross and get training NOW for disasters LATER. They have training specifically for disaster response! Or consider volunteering with your local animal shelter NOW and build up your skills and your credibility so that you will be in a place to provide critically-need help in the future.

AND HAVE AN EVACUATION PLAN THAT INCLUDES YOUR PETS!!!

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!

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!

Twitter, confidentiality, nonprofits & more

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Nonprofits, NGOs, government agencies and other mission-based organizations: learn how to use Twitter… via Twitter! Today, May 9, at 9 am USA Pacific time, follow #nptwitter on Twitter. Much more detailed info at the TechSoup Community Forum. If you can’t participate at the time, you can view the discussion later by doing a search on #nptwitter.

But wait – there’s more! Last month, TechSoup hosted a free webinar to discuss ways to use social media to find, communicate with and build community among volunteers, lead by myself and Erin Barnhart. One of the questions that came in but that we didn’t answer to the asker’s satisfaction (our answer was all-too-brief) was:

As a nonprofit law firm for kids, I’m concerned about confidentiality with social media, especially Facebook. What are the hazards in this area?

Offer your answer, and read my own, on the TechSoup Community Forum.

I hope volunteer managers / volunteer coordinators in particular will view these resources. Too many of you think social media is something to be used by those working in your marketing or public relations department. You need to be using online tools to engage with volunteers and potential volunteers yourselves! I’ve been saying this since 1994 – you’re 17 years overdue! Here’s my own advice regarding online social media specifically.

When mega-news strikes

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You’ve got an event or major announcement planned for today. You’ve had the blog and the tweets and the Facebook status updates and the press release all ready to go for many days. You were ready to start posting at 9 a.m., and have a schedule for messages for the rest of the day.

And then – mega-news strikes. Not just big news – MEGA-news. that kind of HUGE event that pushes everything else off the news cycle for HOURS. Even days. That people will talk about for years to come: “Where were you when you heard about such-and-such?”

And you know that absolutely no one is going to read your messages, no one is going to retweet you, no press people are going to call you, and, perhaps, no one is going to attend your event.

What to do?

A lot of you are facing this today. I’m seeing some of nonprofits trying to insert their important announcements amid the endless messages relating to Osama bin Ladan. They probably know it’s a lost cause, but they did all this planning, they hate for it to go to waste…

What should you do with your event or major announcement when mega-news strikes?

It depends…

If your announcement was meant to generate press coverage, retweets, signups, etc., consider pushing the announcement a day or two later, even for a week, if at all possible. If that’s not possible, then revamp your schedule to include a reminder blitz in two or three days, and push your event signup deadlines as late as possible.

Do not cancel your event unless you are absolutely sure no one is going to show up or that the press is absolutely NOT going to cover your announcement.

And consider this: your event might actually be a gathering that people are needing, particularly if the mega-news is tragic. Consider what happened to Knowbility in 2001:

Knowbility is a nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas, and their signature event is the Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR), where volunteer teams of Web designers and developers with nonprofit organizations get together and build new Web sites (or enhance existing ones) to make them more accessible for people with disabilities and/or using assistive technologies. The teams meet the nonprofits they will work with mid week, spend an evening together, and then the web-building day is two or three days later, on a Saturday – all the teams come together in one place and go crazy with the one-day web-buildling. You’ve heard of barn-raisings? This is a web-raising! But in 2001, the day the teams were supposed to meet the nonprofits they were matched with was — the evening of September 12. The day before, on September 11, there was talk of canceling AIR. But someone said, “No, let’s do it. Maybe people will need this.” And so the events were held, as scheduled. And attendance was not only excellent, but the event evauations were filled with comments about how grateful people were to have had the opportunity to do something at a time when they were filling quite helpless. The event became one of the most special Knowbility ever held.

If you go ahead with your event in the midst of a mega-news event, be ready for the mega-news to come up and be discussed at your event. You may need to provide some time for that to happen. But it’s also okay to say, at some point, “Okay, let’s focus for the next hour on the reason we are here today…”

Ongoing conversations re: social media & volunteers

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There are some terrific conversations going on over on the TechSoup Community Forum regarding nonprofits using social media, setting policies for online activities, and more. Go ask your questions for your own nonprofit, NGO, government agency, etc. to get your own questions crowd-sourced – and offer your own advice/commentary!

Here are followup questions and discussions to the recent webinar on using social media to recruit and support volunteers:

“How does one find a “great trusted social media volunteer?”
Lots of tips already in answer to this question – offer your own!

Volunteers updating your organization’s blog – appropriate?
What editorial guidelines do you need for this?

When do you delete Facebook posts?

When do you remove posts on your organization’s Facebook fan page? What do you deem to be ‘offensive’ posts—versus those that might be odd, semi-coherent or off-topic? And do you have a formal policy

how do I set up a facebook page for my organization without locking it permanently to a particular person
Very detailed answers already!

What are the best tags for nonprofits to use in their social media activities?
How to get the right people viewing your activities!

Did you miss the live webinar last week on Using Social Media to Support, Involve and Recruit Volunteers? Then enjoy this recording of the event (slides and audio).

More questions on TechSoup you might want to answer or view:

Is it a worthwhile organization for a nonprofit to document what software they have

      , what software everyone is using, etc., and to share this information in a deliberate, obvious way throughout the organization, so that everyone can know what resources the organization has?

 

Sending text messages to 50 non-smart phones

    “Anyone have a great, cheap or free resource for sending text messages to 10-50 cell phones at once from a web site or special application on a computer (not a smart phone)? I work with three different volunteer groups that want this ability, but each group is a mix of smart phone and cell phone users.”

The Unofficial Web site re: your organization/program

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The Internet took away much of the control regarding information – what’s available and who controls it – that organizations and individuals had enjoyed previously. One of the results of this anyone-can-share-information platform is that there are many unofficial web sites for nonprofits, government agencies, NGOs and other mission-based organizations.

Look up a specific USA national park or state park on Google, for instance: you will receive a long list of web sites that offer information about that park’s features, accommodations, programs and more – but which is the *official* web site? It can be hard to find it amid the unoffical ones. And consider this: is the official web site as good as some of the unofficial ones?

You can go to the Peace Corps web site (which is excellent) and learn how to be a volunteer. You can also go to several unofficial web sites for advice, like Peace Corps Online, the “Independent News Forum serving Returned Peace Corps Volunteer,” or this one by contributors to the Unofficial Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook. Why do these unofficial web sites exist? What information do they provide that the official web site doesn’t? How does the Peace Corps feel about them? You might be surprised at the answer to that last question!

 

Unofficial web sites for nonprofits, government agencies and NGOs pop up for a variety or reasons. Some of these unofficial web sites are nothing but online ad farms; the goal is to use the well-known name of the nonprofit to get people to visit the web page and then click on advertising, for which the web site creator gets money (sometimes as little as a penny per click). But some unofficial sites are set up because someone feels passionately about a subject and feels the official web site does not provide all the information that is needed. Often, these people wrote the organization and suggested this or that change/addition be made. Maybe they got the standard, insincere Thank you for your email. Your suggestion will be taken into consideration. blah blah blah. Maybe they got no response at all. And months later, when nothing changes on the web site, they decide – hey, I’m going to do this myself!

Unofficial web sites may provide important information regarding your organization that isn’t available on your official web site. They may provide better information that what’s on your web site. In either case, they can be drawing traffic away from your official web site – or, in fact, they can be generating more traffic to your official web site and programs.

What should you do if you discover there’s an unofficial web site about your organization, a specific program at your organization, about volunteering with your organization, etc.?

  1. Determine why the site exists. Is this an ad farm, or is this an individual who cares deeply about your organization and wants to help people connect with it? Which it is will determine how best to approach those behind the site – if at all.
  2. If you cannot find a “contact us” link on the unofficial web site about your organization, go to the WhoIs database and see who owns the site; you will be able to find email addresses there for the site administrator/owner (as well as a postal mailing address).
  3. If the site is merely a verbatim repeat of what you already have on your web site, offering no different or additional information, write the site administrators and request they take the information down. Remember: for whatever you write, YOU own the copyright, and you have the right to demand your copyrighted information be removed. Welcome the administrator to link to your site, as an alternative, but make it clear that over-quoting is copyright violation.
  4. If the site implies that it is somehow officially-affiliated with your organization, write the site administrators and tell them this will need to change. Offer a sentence or two that you would like on the site that will clearly disclaim any official ties between the site and your organization. If no change is made and the site continues to portray itself as someone officially-affiliated, have your legal council write a letter.
  5. If the site provides inaccurate information, contact the organization and say so! Be specific!
  6. Is the site in response to a lack of information on your web site? If so, remedy the situation! You can ask the site administrator for permission to use his or her material on your site, offering him or her a thank you for that permission, or, you can create your own information that you believe fills in the gap on your own web site. Whether or not you remedy the situation will be determined by the Internet community; if they like your new information, they will replace links to the other web site to your own. If they don’t, expect that unofficial web site to remain high in Google searches.
  7. Does the site address subjects that your organization is not allowed to, because of legal/liability issues, or because it’s not directly related to your organization’s mission? As long as there is no violation of confidentiality policies, nor violation of the law, you may need to stay hands off. But not being able to include such information on your own web site doesn’t mean you can’t have a partnership with that official site. For instance, this unofficial web site for Peace Corps members, Peace Corps Online, is referred to by the Peace Corps official web site. And you will note unofficial volunteering web sites listed at the end of this blog that, I suspect, the parent organization or government agency is quite happy about.
  8. Is a thank you in order? Be honest: does the web page or web site drive people TO your web site? Is it well-written? Is it factually-correct? Does it address subjects that your organization is never going to do, for whatever reason? If your answer is yes to any of these, you need to write the administrators and thank them for the page or site, however much it hurts to have some of your information control taken away from you. It’s up to your organization to decide if this web site information needs to be incorporated into your official site, or if it’s actually a good thing that it’s outside the official fold. Either way, create a good relationship with the person or people behind this site. You might even be able to bring them into the fold as a volunteer!
  9. Educate staff and volunteers about this unofficial web site. Is it appropriate for them to refer people to these unofficial pages, for instance?

With all that said, I should note that there are two organizations I have created unofficial web pages for.

One is a for-profit organization that has an online questions-and-answers forum. The same questions about volunteering and community service get asked again and again. So I created unofficial pages that answer these FAQs. I have Google ads on the site that have generated enough revenue to pay for all of my web site expenses (which in this economy, was something I very much needed!). People, especially young people, that use the forum are getting their questions about volunteering answered more thoroughly than ever before as well. I still can’t believe this for-profit company didn’t think of doing it themselves.

The other is for a nonprofit organization. My page is regarding my favorite program that this nonprofit undertakes. IMO, the organization does a lousy job of helping its target audience access that program. Six months ago, I created an unofficial page to help people access that program – and it now ranks second in a Google Search on the program topic.

On a related note, see

Groups for “young professionals” exclude me

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I love networking. I love meeting people, hearing about the work of others, telling others about my work, finding ways to work together, learning things I didn’t know, sharing my knowledge, being challenged, challenging others, and on and on. Especially if red wine or beer is involved.

But, apparently, a lot of professional networking groups do not want me: I’m too old.

Consider a group here in Portland, Oregon, for example: it’s for young and emerging nonprofit and public sector professionals in the area. Or another group in Detroit, described as mobilizing young professionals to get the energy up at nonprofits and to bring new ideas to fundraising and outreach.

I find this again and again all over the USA: groups focused on technology, on nonprofits, on some aspect of nonprofit work (the environment, the arts, children, etc.) that say, explicitly, “this group is for young professionals who….” Because, you know, what the heck does someone over 40 know about the Internet? Or innovation? Apparently, we don’t try new things, we’re not risk takers, we’re not daring, blah blah blah.

The descriptions on the web sites and online communities of these organizations make it clear I am not wanted. It’s not just that I’m hurt to be left out of such groups and excluded from the networking and learning I so enjoy; I also think it’s sad that these groups isolate themselves from knowledge, skills and a diversity of viewpoints that group members might find particularly valuable, regardless of age. These “young professional” groups also contribute to the stereotype that people over 60, or over 50, or over 40 — take your pick on which group you want to stereotype — don’t have fresh ideas, aren’t tech savvy, aren’t innovative, do not like to learn and have nothing to offer.

I hear a lot about how traditional volunteering leaves out people under 35. I’ve been hearing about that since I was 30, actually. And I do see it in many organizations, hence my work over the last 15 years trying to get organizations that engage volunteers to create a diversity of volunteering opportunities that will appeal to a diversity of volunteers. I get that some groups have left out “young professionals,” and that these groups are trying to address that. But the solution is not to create an exclusionary group where no one but “young” professionals are welcomed.

Is your web site for everyone, or just the elite?

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For three days the last week of March, I was in a place that had very slow Internet access: a senior citizens home. No, I’m not a senior citizen yet, but my grandmother is, and I was staying with her while visiting family back in Kentucky.

I was profoundly disappointed to find so many, many of your web sites that were not accessible with a slow Internet connection.

People don’t visit web sites for flashy graphics or award-winning designs. They visit web sites – particularly those for nonprofits, NGOs, schools, state offices and other mission-based organizations — to:

  • get directions to your organization
  • find out where to park once they are there
  • see what hours you are open
  • read more about your upcoming programs, events or activities
  • find out how your organization involves volunteers and if volunteering is something that might interest them
  • see how your organization spends donations
  • see how your organization might help them, a family member, a neighbor, a friend, etc.
  • see if you have any jobs available
  • read about your accomplishments
  • and to retrieve various other information.

Do you want everyone to be able to access this information, or just those with the best Internet access?

Not everyone has broadband. Not everyone has a fast Internet connection. If your web site isn’t as accessible as it can possibly be, you are leaving out potential donors, clients, volunteers and others. And maybe that’s okay with you – maybe you are focused only on the elites of the Internet.

But if you do want to be a resource for everyone, then it’s high time you find out just how quickly your web site loads on a slow Internet connection. Ask your volunteers for help in finding people to test your site. To not do so is to say to many, many people, “We don’t want you as a donor, a client or a volunteer.” Do you really want to do that?