Tag Archives: communications

The Trust Crisis

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The world is experiencing a trust crisis. People don’t trust their national governments nor their local governments – not elected officials and not public sector employees. People don’t trust established media outlets. People are pushing back against science and historical facts being taught in schools. People will believe an unverified viral video or social media post shared by a friend or family member but not an article by a journalist or peer-reviewed academic paper by a scientist.

In addition, in the USA, there has never been a time where there have been as many opportunities to talk directly to elected officials, via council meetings, town halls, open houses, social media, email, surveys and citizens’ advisory committees, yet people are staying away from these. Officials are talking to largely empty auditoriums and rooms and getting low returns for any surveys inviting feedback about projects.

Skepticism can be a healthy thing: it can encourage people asking questions that very much need to be asked and force a project designer to improve a design before anything gets built or launched. Answering questions can make the reason to do something even stronger. But these days, people aren’t even asking questions: they are dismissing outright anything government representatives or academic institutions or news sources say. They are saying civic participation doesn’t really matter.

I grew up in rural Kentucky, in a civically-minded family: one of my great-grandmothers worked for a local county government, one of my grandfathers was a city council member and active member of and volunteer with a variety of civic groups (he even helped rally support for a school tax back in the 1950s), my other grandfather was a minister and outspoken in the community on a variety of issues, my mother was a deputy sheriff and then assistant to the head of the county government for many years, my father was the local head of a political party in Western Kentucky, and both of my parents sometimes attended and often talked about local government and school board meetings they had attended. I always knew who was running in every local election long before I could ever vote. Politics and values – but never facts – were frequently debated at family gatherings. No one was discouraged from working on a political campaign, from writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, from voting, etc. I never once heard It doesn’t matter. It won’t make a difference Why bother? from anyone. My family didn’t always like what local government agencies or public schools did, but they believed it mattered to use official channels to find out what was happening and to let their opinions be known. I also got my undergrad degree in journalism from a university that, at the time, was widely known for its journalism training, worked at a few newspapers, have worked with journalists for decades, and have idolized journalism, when it is at its best, for most of my life. I have always had a paid subscription to a newspaper, even if, now, it’s entirely online.

In the eight years I lived outside the USA, I was often working on initiatives that encouraged civic engagement in other countries, and people – particularly women – seemed hungry to take part, and encouraging their government to be more transparent via its own publications and via its interactions with the media. It was incredibly energizing to encourage the kind of civic participation I had grown up with and to see people from a variety of cultures and economic levels jumping in and doing it their own way. As a result, when I moved back to the USA in 2009, I was inspired to do my best to be a part of local government, as a citizen and resident and maybe as a government employee, if I found the right position. In the first town I lived in Oregon, I joined the local government’s bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee. In the next town I lived, I joined the local government’s public safety advisory committee, the county’s public arts coalition and the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. I also went through the county sheriff’s 12-week citizens’ academy. I attended city council meetings and political candidate forums. And I have, indeed, applied for a few government jobs.

I’ve known where to look for these kinds of opportunities to observe government, and participate in such, because of my background. And I’ve come to it with a trust in the people that staff government, public schools and media outlets, a trust that was long-cultivated. I’ve never thought of them as anything but people, with strengths and weaknesses just like anyone, just like me. But I’ve realized most people my age and younger aren’t like me: they have a built-in distrust of these institutions. They also need more than one post to a Facebook page or one tweet announcing a meeting to be motivated enough to attend. They need more than one notice in their utility bill to be inspired to do anything. They need more than whatever worked 20 years ago to get them to that meeting, that open house, that presentation. Because for every one official message from a government office or school, they have gotten probably a dozen from family and friends about how whatever it is that office is doing isn’t in the public’s best interest, isn’t trustworthy, has nefarious intentions, or just really doesn’t matter.

Governments and public schools: in your outreach planning, you not only need strategies for meeting your legally-mandated public communications requirements and for letting people know about your events and activities, you also need strategies for cultivating, even rebuilding, trust with the community. And this is something you need to hire someone to do – don’t think you can get an intern to manage your social media and make it happen.

Cultivating or rebuilding community trust takes multiple steps and ongoing efforts – not just one public meeting or open house. You have to think not only about how you will invite public comment on activities but also how you will regularly show how public comment has influenced decision-making. You have to have strategies to make yourself aware of misinformation campaigns about your efforts and strategies to address them. How will you leverage speeches, presentations and meetings with civic groups, social media posts, surveys, community meetings and more not only to share information but to also find out what trust gaps exist and to address those gaps? I research and compile recommendations for trust-building on my web site about how to folklore, rumors, urban myths and organized misinformation campaigns interfere with aid and government initiatives, and those recommendations, which come from a variety of organizations, can be adapted to help any agency craft its own strategy for addressing the trust crisis.

Here are my related resources, which aren’t just my own ideas, but ideas from a variety of resources, with an abundance of links to other articles and web sites (and I would welcome suggestions for other resources as well):

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

Factors for Success for a Neighborhood or Town-Based Online Community

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Back in the early 1990s, before the World Wide Web began dominating the Internet landscape, there were different platforms that various individuals, groups and communities were using to share resources, have discussions, etc., and some city governments, like Cupertino and San Jose in California, were quick to try to harness such to create more transparency regarding information and decision-making with their constituencies.

Now, 25 years later, city and county governments in particular avoid online engagement. They will post information to agency Web sites but rarely offer a way to comment or discuss such online. A municipality may have a Facebook page for city government, they may have individual Facebook pages for different departments (parks and recreation, health department, etc.), and they may have a Twitter account or two – but citizens are actively discouraged from using the comments on Facebook or replies on Twitter to ask questions, report an issue, express an opinion, etc., and government employees, even volunteer members of government advisory boards, committees & decision-making commissions, are discouraged from interacting with anyone on a public online forum (some go so far as to encourage interactions via email as well).

In April of 2014, Ashley Roth, a resident of Forest Grove, Oregon, population 24,000+, started a moderated Facebook group for the community. She is neither an employee with a government agency nor an office-holder in the city, and she has no affiliation with any newspaper, nonprofit or civic group. Her vision for this online community was similar to those early regionally-based online community efforts back in the 1990s: to create an online discussion space, “a watering hole of sorts for the community, a bulletin board, a place to share events and get involved with volunteering and with the city in an uplifting manner. To positively impact your immediate surroundings and to encourage others to do so, leading by example with what you would like to see from everyone else.”

I’m profiling her Forest Grove Facebook Community here in my blog because I think it’s a great example of the kind of online community those Silicon Valley government leaders envisioned back in the 1990s, and I think the way Ashley administers the group provides a terrific model for any municipality that might dare to buck the current fear-based approach to social media and decide to use it, instead, to engage with their constituency.

What’s also remarkable about Ashley and this group is that Ashley has no formal training regarding meeting facilitation or online community management – yet, her group and moderation style are, in my opinion, a model for others. I’m on or have been on more online communities than I can count, starting back in the 1990s with USENET – my perspective is from more than two decades of experience.

I interviewed Ashley in April 2019 via email for this blog. In the interest of transparency, please note that I am one of the volunteer moderators of this community.

Ashley noted in our interview, “When I first started FGC, I only anticipated reaching roughly 500 members. Little did I know that 500 would more than quadruple in the first two years.” In fact, as of the date of this blog post, there are almost 8000 members of the community. The group averages anywhere from 15 to 40 posts a day – and comments in one day can be just a few dozen to hundreds.

The Forest Grove Facebook community’s region is defined as all of Washington County west of Hillsboro, including the rural communities of Cornelius, Gaston, Gales Creek, Banks and Timber. The group is moderated, but neither posts nor comments are reviewed before they are published – posts and comments are removed only if a moderator notices a violation or such are reported by a community member. The rules for the community are posted on the “about” section of the community, and set the tone for what the community should feel like as well as detail appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Reminders about the rules are posted to the community regularly:

Welcome to the Forest Grove Community page. This page was created by citizens of FG and is not affiliated with the City of FG or its employees. The admins and mods are all volunteers and help to run this page out of the kindness of their hearts :-). Our goal is to keep the community informed on events, history, local meetings and happenings in our town, along with healthy and constructive conversations between all of us. It is always best to lead with respect, as these are your friends, neighbors, teachers, gas attendants, waitresses and business owners. Let’s be exceptionally helpful, we can make this world what we would like to be if we lead by the example we would like to see.

There are rules implemented to make everyone’s life here easier, they are as follows:

  1. No spamming FGC with multi-level marketing posts or click bait. We DO have a weekly Friday post where you can add your MLM business.
  2. Slandering a specific person or small local business is highly frowned upon and can/will result in a muting or a ban. We understand rough days but follow protocol with the person/business first, then go ahead and vent.
  3. Small businesses in our area, feel free to post once per day if it applies to you. Local farms included. While big box stores are fine to share, let’s keep them to a minimum of one per week.
  4. Please refrain from publicly shaming people unless you have filed a police report and are actively searching for the vehicle/person.
  5. Politics are fine if they are local to our area. If you have a political discussion you would like to have with the group that is not local to our area, find an admin and run your idea by them first.
  6. Make it a goal to positively impact your community online, and in person.
  7. PLEASE feel free to share history, stories, photos, events in town, and any other information that may be beneficial to the community.
  8. Look at the list of admins, find one you are comfortable with, when it comes time to tag an admin, use your tagging power if you think a post should be examined.
  9. PM your admin of choice if you are iffy on what it is your posting, they can reassure you if it is appropriate for the page or not.
  10. Garage sales are totally fine to post, but personal sales (like classified ads) are not. If you have something for free you are giving away to a family in need, those are typically okay to post as well.
  11. Freedom of speech does not apply to facebook groups, If you want to freak out about free speech and censorship this can and will result in an immediate ban. Private FB groups do not have to cater to your opinions on how the group should be run. This does not make anyone a communist, you were invited into our living room and if you start breaking stuff you don’t get to stay.
  12. Try to keep the content FG related or related to our general area (Gaston, Cornelius, Banks, Timber, Gales Creek, Vernonia, Cherry Grove, Manning, Buxton, West Hillsboro, Dilley, Laurel) Thanks all! ~FGC Admins

People are added to the community by requesting to join through the Facebook function for such and then answering three questions:

  • Do you currently live in FG/Banks/Gaston/Gales Creek/Cornelius/Timber/Vernonia? What is your zip code?
  • Are you capable of maintaining civil discourse even in heated discussions?
  • Do you agree to check out the “about” section upon joining and agree to the rules posted?

Before approving a member, Ashley can see their answers to these questions as well as the name they use on Facebook, how many friends they have, how many groups they are a part of, when they joined Facebook, and any information they have chosen to share in their profile, such as where they live, where they work, where they went to school, etc. If they haven’t made their posts private, Ashley – and anyone else, for that matter – can see those too. Requests for membership are rejected if the person doesn’t answer the questions, joined Facebook only recently, has no obvious ties to the community, or has a page filled with especially volatile messages, such as tirades against various religions or ethnic groups, insults against ex spouses or ex employers, promotion of violence, etc.

“Profiles with no pictures, no friends, brand new profiles, and covered with troll pictures (yes this is a thing) are not accepted. I have to find at least 1-2 things on your personal profile or by your answers that ties you to our area. If you aren’t very clear, you don’t get to join.”

One of the keys to the community’s success is that Ashley adds new members slowly – just a few each day. “I try my best not to overload the community with new members, because let’s face it, not everyone interacts the same way, and if you add 100 people at a time, all at once, you’re going to have problems immediately.”

Ashley doesn’t manage the community alone: she has anywhere from 4 to 12 volunteer administrators and moderators at any given time. Deleting and banning members is still left entirely to Ashley, but the other resident volunteers help introduce topics, review posts and comments that have been reported by community members for review, delete inappropriate content and remind users of the group’s rules.

Moderators have also begun tagging posts so that certain posts can be more easily found in using the Facebook search function. Tags include:

#event

#government

#police

#volunteer

#fundraise

Ashley identifies and reaches out to potential moderators based on behavior she sees on the community.

“I look for people who are passionate about specific things. Whether it be animals or small businesses, local politics or are really good with laws. I find one trait that stands out above the rest and have them kind of make their presence in that area. I appreciate someone that can use their presence on a post to turn the post from a seemingly negative, into a positive as well. That is very hard to do, but once you get it down, it’s an amazing tool to have in your back pocket.”

The community has helped with recruiting volunteers for various agencies, such as a local homeless shelter, gathering items for a school or art project, rehoming dogs and cats, finding lost pets, educating each other about scams, coordinating ride shares, finding various resources and turning out a large audience for various events. Recently, a woman looking to borrow a sewing machine for a project ended up getting an old but useable machine donated to her. The kindness of someone in line at a grocery store, in a parking lot, or at any customer service situation is a frequent subject. There is a monthly photo contest to choose a new cover photo for the community and a regular Thursday thread for complaints on any subject. Ashley sometimes issues challenges to the community, such as describing their day in meme-form. One of the most memorable threads on the community was a debate about whether or not heavy cream and heavy whipping cream were the same thing, a debate still joked about among long-time community members.

A particularly satisfying moment for Ashley was at a forum for candidates running for the local city council. The organizer asked attendees to raise their hands regarding how they had heard about the event. Just a few hands went up regarding NextDoor. A few more went up regarding the local newspaper. More than half the room raised their hand when Facebook was mentioned – and most were referring to posts on the Forest Grove Community. At least two of the candidates mentioned the group specifically in their remarks.

“What a confidence booster it has been to know roughly 7,000+ of our community members have such a massive amount of trust in me, in what I’m capable of doing, what I bring to the table, and how well I maintain a healthy platform for civilized discussion. Of course, those rewards are typically met with just as much opposition, but I tend to side with light heartedness, it has taken me much farther than misery ever has :-)”

Even with the community continuing to grow and being relied on by so many residents for their information about events in the city, no public officials or only a few city employees will post to the group – and most such posts are in response to a specific incident that is leading to a lot of online speculation.  

“The presence of a city official on the community is rare, but it is huge. It helps us as admins to have someone with clear answers to come forward – their official answer shuts up the pitchfork wavers. This is especially true if the community needs an answer that no one else else can seem to find.”

Since city officials and most nonprofits and civic groups are reluctant to use the community, some volunteer moderators make a particular effort to share official news they see on the city and county government’s official Facebook pages, on the pages of local libraries, civic groups, community centers, churches, youth groups, etc. – far more resident volunteers share this information on the community than actual government or nonprofit employees. But since no one has a mandate to share this essential, public information on the community, many events and resources are overlooked.

Moderators delete posts that are only meant to insult (She’s stupid!) or that encourage violence or other criminal behavior (I think you should shoot that rooster that’s waking you up!). Criticisms of businesses are allowed but only if the person first talked to the business in question and tried to get a resolution, and only if the complaint is fact-based, with dates and a description of what happened, rather than out-and-out-opinions about what happened. Posts that show police work in progress in real time – like police with lights flashing outside of a residence – are also not allowed. Political news is allowed – announcements of legislators having a town hall, dates of a public hearing on a local issue, encouragement to vote, links to position papers about upcoming legislation, summaries of what happened at a city council meeting, etc. – but political discussions and debates remain difficult to manage and comments for such often get turned off, or even entirely deleted, when insults, accusations without sources cited and misinformation starts flying.

The busiest days on the community are probably when it snows and the group is flooded with questions and reports about road conditions and school closures.

“I was pleasantly surprised to see that I spend only an average of 1.7 hours on Facebook every day. An average no drama day I search for events to share, or a location/local business to highlight while I’m out running errands for the day.”

But what about a day when an argument breaks out about a new housing development or the closure of a beloved, or controversial, restaurant? “A high drama day, causes massive anxiety and underarm sweat, and I can stare at the page every ten or so minutes for the majority of the day.”

“I check the community page as I would a newspaper every morning, except now, everyone is their very own columnist, and some of them flunked out of basic English long ago and didn’t seem to learn about basic etiquette. You have to constantly add the content you want to see or you end up fighting battles against keyboard warriors all day and night. I think it’s important for moderators to be consistent, to be honest, to be fair, to be transparent about decisions and rules, and to show up. “

But it’s not always easy.

“There are new people added every day. These new people don’t understand the history of the page or why it is the way it is, so they come in and often will beat a dead horse, write angry messages, and belittle other people. Half the time they come around after a little one on one convo with me. The other half of the time I’m given a middle finger emoji and a threat of violence. That’s a reflection of them, not me. We go our separate ways or find a way to work together. Most members understand why it is all unicorns and rainbows, but there is a specific demographic of people that will never be okay with this way of thinking.”

“Every once in a while we have ‘rage quit the page’ posts, where a person feels so personally offended by having their commenting turned off on their post, or by being put in their place by someone sharing facts against their opinion. They make a list to bash the entire page, the admins, and the people of the town before leaving, after the bashing bandwagon shows up to play. The funny thing is, they tend to want to come back a month or two later. The irony of rage quitting is equivalent to just having a bad day and freaking out on anyone within earshot willing to listen. We move on pretty quickly and hope the domino effect doesn’t take place. Once one person starts, it tends to go haywire for a little while. “

“If you come in guns blazing and are VERY set in your ways and ideas, and won’t hear what anyone else has to say? Those are the most inappropriate for the community page. If your personal biases and what you stand for can be presented in a way where there is wiggle room for conversation, then, and only then is it appropriate for the community page. See also: politics, parenting, schools, restaurant blunders.“

And how does she try to calm someone down online?

“95% of it is just throwing a compliment at the most angry person on the post. They tend to either hush up or calm down. 🙂 “

Moderators will end commenting on threads if the thread turns into speculation or overly-negative commentary, or when the person who started the thread with a question has had that question answered.

There are many online communities set up for people working in a particular profession or people who have a particular hobby, but online communities set up for neighbors in a community can have a much more personal quality – for better or for worse. I asked Ashley why she thought people can get so emotional on or regarding this particularly online community:

“Every post hits home cause it is our home! Community pages are emotional because it is personal. Every change, every tree cut down, every new establishment and closing establishment. We feel it cause we ARE it. As much as I would love to have everyone on the same page emotionally, I certainly wouldn’t try to fill the ocean with a paper cup.”

It’s that personal nature of the community that can make moderation most difficult: people know each other, their spouses, their children and their extended families offline, face-to-face. They will encounter each other at school functions and city events. They may work together. They may be neighbors. That means a heated online argument isn’t something abstract: it’s with a real person in your actual, physical community. This can be particularly taxing for the moderators – especially the founder:

“I have had death threats, I have been hacked and had to change my phone number, email address and even my Facebook profile for a bit to ‘hide’ from people who hated that I took their ‘rights away’ from them because I have removed them from the group for violating our rules. And they stay off until they calm down and apologize and want to join the group again, of course, I am a sucker for second chances. A blessing and a curse. The ONLY thing that prompts threats are people assuming I am taking their basic rights away, freedom of speech, in particular. The threats can be unnerving. To say I am fearful is not true, but to say I am very careful is. To be a great admin, you must take shape, stance, and emotions similar to a robot :-)“

Ashley makes a screen capture of every post, comment or direct message to her, on Facebook or via another platform, that is especially insulting or is threatening, in case a situation with someone escalates to the point of needing a legal intervention which, so far, has not been necessary. Ashley has also taken breaks from moderating for weeks, even months at a time.

“Being a leader on a small town community page comes with much more heartache I can’t even begin to explain to you, but alas, the good is worth it in the end. I also had no idea that you CAN help people change their way of thinking, and to encourage mature conversation, and then watch it executed out of someone you never in a million years thought would be able to calm down and make sense. That was all just wishful thinking that has become reality, for the most part.“

Other, rival Facebook communities for the city have been attempted by those that do not like that the Forest Grove Community is strictly moderated. Two have survived – one with about 1700 members and about eight posts a day, another with less than 200 members. A group that is supposed to be just about “what’s happening” will go weeks with no posts at all. For whatever reason, the Forest Grove Community has not only lasted, but continued to grow.  

Ashley won’t be the moderator forever – but also hasn’t been able to find an agency or organization willing to assume responsibility for the group when she wants to step away. No matter who is in charge of the group, whether someone entirely on their own or someone representing a program or agency, that person will change the group with his or her own interpretation of the community’s mission and rules. It’s natural for online communities to change, evolve, splinter or even die off. But without a strong, community focused newspaper and/or local radio station, it’s hard to say what would keep so many residents informed and engaged to discuss local issues.

What is Ashley’s advice for other moderators of such regionally-based online communities, regardless of the platform used?

“Have a clear reason what the community is for and state it, repeatedly. Have a clear purpose for every message. Have facts to back up comments. Have patience to deal with folks from all walks of life and with a variety of communication levels. It’s all about what you say and how you say it that generates responses. I could piss everyone off in the same sentence as picking everyone up in the group, but they WILL remember the negative thing I said 10 times more than the positives. To put yourself out there, you have to be ready to do so. Remember that no one has the same heart as you. No one has the same interests, ideas, or opinions as you do. No one is superior or inferior to you. We all live here together. Sometimes shifting our own thinking is key to being an all inclusive community.

And don’t push yourself farther than your mental health can handle. ♥️”

Are you interested in starting an online community for a neighborhood, town, city, county, school, or other small, defined region, one that’s meant to promote civility, promote civil society and build understanding? Please see this resource to help you.

Also see:

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Growing misconceptions about the role of nonprofits in the USA

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In addition to sitting in on various local government meetings in the small town where I live in Oregon, I’ve been volunteering with a local unit of my state’s League of Women Voters, registering voters and sitting in on numerous candidate debates. My goal in these activities, which I’ve said before, is to compare what I’ve seen and experienced abroad working in international aid and development with what happens locally in my own community in the USA.

In doing these activities, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that greatly affects nonprofits in terms of how the public, the private sector and government think about them, and how the public, the private sector and government feel about their funding and support for such. There is a growing chorus of elected officials and their supporters who say variations of the following:

There are enough resources in our region, via nonprofits and communities of faith – charity – for anyone who is homeless, who has an addiction or has mental issues to get the help they need. All someone needs to do to get help is to contact those organizations. 

There was a time in the USA when poverty was successfully and completely addressed by charity, usually through churches, not by government. Charity used to help all the people that were poor, and we should go back to that way of addressing poverty. 

People who have addiction issues, mental issues, homelessness issues or any issues associated with poverty just aren’t working hard enough. They lack morals or willpower and they could stop their drug use or their slide into mental illness simply by choosing to, by really trying.

These statements are not true.

The truth:

Programs that serve the homeless, whether they provide temporary housing or more permanent housing, or even just serve food, are utterly overwhelmed all across the USA and do not have enough resources to help everyone that needs it. Their waiting lists for housing assistance are months, even a few years. And providing food and temporary shelter does not prevent homelessness nor reduce the number of people who are homeless.

Before the creation of Social Security, most people in the USA supported themselves into old age by working. The 1930 census found 58 percent of men over 65 still in the workforce; in contrast, by 2002, the figure was 18 percent. Children and other relatives bore the major cost of supporting the aged. The Great Depression swept this world away: many of the elderly could no longer find work and their family could not afford to support them anymore. To get by in that time, the elderly took to panhandling, moving into dingy, unsafe almshouses or poorhouses, many run by charities or churches, or simply dying impoverished, which was the fate that befell 1 in every 2 older Americans in the years after the 1929 stock market crash.

Homelessness and poverty can be triggered by a range of issues in the USA, including divorce, medical bills/bankruptcy, income vs. housing affordability, decline in public/government assistance and mental health issues. Simply getting a different, better-paying job usually isn’t an option for someone facing homelessness and poverty.

Addiction is a chronic disease that creates a compulsion or even a physical need to use drugs. Drugs, including alcohol, affect the brain’s “reward circuit,” causing euphoria as well as flooding the brain with the chemical messenger dopamine. A properly functioning reward system doesn’t result in addiction. Whether a person is born with a disfunctional reward system or if the disfunction results entirely from drug use continues to be debated and researched; most agree that a combination of genetic, environmental and developmental factors influences risk for addiction, and the more risk factors a person has, the greater the chance that taking drugs can lead to addiction. The initial decision to take drugs is voluntary for most people and often relates to a medical issue rather than recreation, but repeated use of drugs, including alcohol, can lead to brain changes that interfere with an addicted person’s ability to resist intense urges to continue to use. As with most other chronic diseases, such as diabetes, asthma, or heart disease, treatment for drug addiction generally isn’t a cure. Addiction is treatable,  however, like other chronic diseases, such as diabetes, asthma, or heart disease, treatment for drug addiction requires professional intervention and guidance – a person can’t address the issues entirely on their own.

So, that’s the truth. But how did the misinformation happen, and how does this misinformation affect nonprofits now?

The misinformation happened not only because of the political agendas of the people saying such; it also has happened because nonprofits have done a poor job of explicitly, frequently talking about the issues they are addressing and educating the public about those issues.

If anyone believes any of these myths, then any sense of urgency regarding homelessness, addiction or poverty vanishes for potential donors, whether individuals or corporate giving programs or foundations. In addition to these myths creating the idea that nonprofits, communities of faith and “charity” can address all the needs of anyone at risk for harm in a community, these myths also create the idea that poverty happens primarily because of bad personal choices: if you’re homeless, then you just have been lazy and not bothered to contact a nonprofit that could help you. If you are addicted to opioids, it’s because you lack willpower.

I’ve been looking at the web sites of various nonprofit organizations serving my communities and various others, and, for the most part, all I see are pleas for support, for donations. What I don’t see:

  • a list, with citations, as to what causes a man, a woman or an entire family to be homeless, with profiles of clients (actual names can be changed and photos can be taken in such as way as to hide the identity of clients)
  • what activities precede a person becoming addicted to a substance, particularly opioids, with profiles of clients (again, actual names can be changed and photos can be taken in such as way as to hide the identity of clients)
  • a list of exactly what donations to a nonprofit pay for (emphasizing why paid staff is needed, rather than relying solely on volunteers helping whenever they might have some time)
  • information on the number of people the organization turns away, or puts on waiting lists, because it does not have the resources to help them, information on what activities or services the community needs but that the organization cannot provide because of a lack of resources, etc.

Nonprofits have got to be much more deliberate and direct in all of their communications about the issues they are addressing, why those issues exist, and what resources they lack. If tax cuts and tax breaks for corporations have resulted in less money for these critical services, nonprofits must say so. 

Our futures depend on it.

Sources:

Homelessness in Portland, Sept. 26, 2018, Travel Oregon

Roads before homes: Our Homeless Crisis, March 18, 2015, The Oregonian

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, November 2016

National Alliance to End Homelessness. Homelessness: A State of Emergency.Feb. 6, 2016

“A Great Calamity Has Come Upon Us”, Jan. 23, 2005, The New York Times

16 Ways People Survived Before Social Security — Could You Do It?, April 12, 2018, GoBankingRates

What causes homelessness, downloaded Nov. 2, 2018

Why Are People Homeless?, July 2009, National Coalition for the Homeless

Understanding Drug Use and Addiction, June 2018, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (and see more sources at the end of this NIH article)

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Reporting impact should be EASY – why do so many struggle with it?

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I think the work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is one of the most important that my country, the USA, does.

I think foreign aid by the USA, or any other country, is vital to world economic stability and security. I believe foreign aid prevents wars and reduces human migration fueled by violence and poverty. I also believe foreign aid is just the right thing to do, to help people and our world.

Because I think USAID is so important, it’s difficult to see it stumble so badly, especially in a country I dearly love, Afghanistan. And that seems to be the case with Promote, an Afghanistan-based initiative that is USAID’s largest women’s empowerment program in the agency’s entire history. The Promote web site says:

The aim is to advance opportunities for Afghan women to become political, private sector, and civil society leaders and to build upon existing and previous programs for women and girls.

Three years after it launched, a USA government watchdog agency has reviewed the program and cannot find any concrete data that it has helped any women become political private sector or civil society leaders.

The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) was established by Congress to monitor spending by the USA in Afghanistan. In its report released last week, SIGAR cites a letter from USAID saying that the Promote program had “directly benefited 50,000 Afghan women with the training and support they need to engage in advocacy for women’s issues, enter the work force and start their own businesses.” The letter added that Promote had helped women “raise their voices and contribute to the peace and prosperity of their country.”

But the SIGAR report notes that these USAID claims for the program are not backed up by any measurable data, such as actual jobs, internships or additional trainings made possible because of Promote’s work.

The SIGAR report notes that:

  • The Promote program changed its performance indicators substantially in its first two years, greatly reducing the number of people it committed to serve.
  • Because it did not complete a baseline study early in its implementation, Promote lacks a starting point from which to monitor and evaluate the program’s progress over its first 2 years and to measure its overall impact in Afghanistan. In other words, evaluation was not baked in right from the beginning.
  • The Promote program delivers much of its programming through contractors, and SIGAR found that USAID/Afghanistan’s records on the contractors’ required deliverables were incomplete and inaccurate because management did not give contractors enough guidance on record keeping and tracking important information about deliverables in a consistent manner. In addition to such records being absolutely fundamental to being able to evaluate impact, the report notes that complete and accurate records are critical to documenting and maintaining institutional knowledge in a mission that experiences high staff turnover.
  • The report also notes that the program didn’t have feedback from contractors on the potential negative impacts of the proposed programming.

In some cases, attendance at a single gender empowerment class organized by Promote was counted as a woman benefiting from the program. One target was to help 20 women find leadership positions in the Civil Service, but none have so far, according to the SIGAR report. One of the few concrete results cited in a study of the Promote project was the promotion of 55 women to better jobs, but the SIGAR report says it is unclear whether the Promote program could be credited for those promotions.

Two people associated with the program that I have seen on social media have been very upset about the SIGAR report and the article in The New York Times about it. They are saying the data IS there – but neither could give me any links to it, say where the data is or how it was collected, etc. One said that the kind of data SIGAR is asking for is impossible because of two things out of the program’s control: the security situation in Afghanistan and because of the conservative nature of the country. To which I say: NONSENSE. Neither of those factors are reasons not to have the data necessary to evaluate this program – if those issues didn’t prevent activities by the program, then they would not prevent data-gathering about such.

Program results are not meetings, not trainings, not events, and not the number of people that participated in any of them. Those are activities and mere activities can rarely be reported as program results. What happened because of the meeting or training or event? What changed? What awareness or skill was gained? What happened to the participant at the meeting, or because of the meeting, that met the programs goals?

Here is just how easy it can be to evaluate a program: Create a survey to be delivered before or at the start of a meeting, a training or event for attendees. You can get answers to that survey as one big group exercise, as a series of small group exercises or in one-on-one interviews if its a low-literacy group or if you don’t believe the target audience will fill out a paper survey. Ask about their perceptions of various issues and challenges they are facing in relation to the issues you want to address. Ask their expectations of your meeting, training or event. Then conduct a similar survey weeks or months, with the same group, and compare the results. TA DA: YOU HAVE DATA FOR EVALUATION OF YOUR RESULTS. This is a very simplistic approach and just scratches the surface on all that the Promote program should have been gathering, but even just this would have been something. It would have given some indication as to whether or not the program was working.

Now, let’s be clear: this SIGAR report does NOT say the Promote program isn’t doing anything and should be ended. Rather, as the report itself says:

after 3 years and $89.7 million spent, USAID/Afghanistan has not fully assessed the extent to which Promote is meeting its overarching goal of improving the status of more than 75,000 young women in Afghanistan’s public, private, and civil society sectors. 

And then it makes recommendations to the USAID Administrator “to ensure that Promote will meet its goal in light of the program’s extensive changes and its mixed performance to
date.” Those recommendations are:

1. Conduct an overall assessment of Promote and use the results to adjust the program and measure future program performance.

2. Provide written guidance and training to contracting officer’s representatives on maintaining records in a consistent, accurate manner.

3. Conduct a new sustainability analysis for the program.

Here’s some tips regarding number 2:

  • give the representatives examples of what data should look like
  • explain the importance of reporting data that shows an activity has NOT worked in the way that was hoped for, and how reporting this data will not reflect poorly on the representative but, rather, show that the representative is being detailed, realistic and transparent, all key qualities for a program to actually work
  • engage the representatives in role-playing regarding gathering data. Have staff members do simple skits showing various data-gathering scenarios and overcoming various challenges when interviewing someone and how to address such. Then have representatives engage in exercises where they try these techniques, with staff playing the roles of government officials, NGO representatives, community leaders hostile to the program, women participating in the program, etc.
  • emphasize over and over that evaluation isn’t a separate activity from program delivery, done at the end of a project, and provide plenty of examples and demonstrations on what evaluation activities “baked in” to program delivery really looks like.

I developed this comprehensive list of questions to answer in preparation for reporting to donors, the media & general public with a colleague in Afghanistan, to help the local staff at the government ministry where we worked know what information donors and UN agencies regularly asked for, and what we anticipated they might start asking for; what subjects the media regularly asked about or reported on, and what we anticipated they might start asking about or reporting on; and what information could be used for evaluation purposes later. It was part of our many efforts to build public sector staff communications capacities in countries where I’ve served. We needed a way to rapidly bring staff up-to-speed on reporting – on EVALUATION – needs, and I think we did with these kinds of efforts. I hope Promote will develop something similar for those delivering their services, and make sure the lists are understood.

Also see:

Some people think they aren’t perfect enough to volunteer with you

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Meridian Swift has a terrific blog about the impression our volunteers-in-action photos might give, unintentionally. She imagines this scenario:

Yvonne took in the photos of volunteers working together, triumphant smiles on their busy faces. She imagined how dynamic these volunteers must be, and here she was, shy, insecure, and full of doubts. She wasn’t like them. They were so…amazing and who was she kidding, she was just stumbling through life. With a wistful sigh, Yvonne closed the tab and moved on.

She’s right, and not just about photos: when we celebrate volunteers on the organization web site or in a press release or at a ceremony, we celebrate things most people cannot do: volunteer for more than a decade at the same organization, in the same role, or volunteer 100 hours or more in a year. That isn’t to say that those volunteers shouldn’t be honored, but what about honors for the most tenacious volunteer, or the volunteer who made a big impact with a small project?

As Meridian says in her response to volunteers who may be thinking they aren’t perfect enough to volunteer, per the perfect-volunteers imagery:

You may think we want you to be perfect. What do we want? We want to do some good in this crazy world and we don’t have all the answers. We’re not looking for perfection. We’re looking for you.  

It’s something to keep in mind as you recruit and welcome new volunteers at your organization.

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I’ve been trying to warn about “fake news” since 2004

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Since 2004, I have been gathering and sharing both examples of and recommendations for preventing folklore, rumors and urban myths from interfering with development and aid/relief efforts and government initiatives. And for years, I felt like the lone voice in the wilderness on this subject. It was almost my master’s thesis project, but while I could find examples of widespread misunderstanding and misinformation campaigns interfering with relief and with relief and development activities, and government initiatives, including public health initiatives, I could not get enough people to go on record to talk about these circumstances and how they were addressing such. For a year, I contacted numerous organizations, particularly organizations promoting women’s health and access to abortion, trying to get them to talk about how these misinformation campaigns were affecting them, but if they replied at all to my emails or phone calls, they said they didn’t want to bring more attention to the problem, even if that attention was in an academic paper that people outside the institution may never read.

I went with another subject for my Master’s project, but I had gathered a lot of publicly-available information, so I shared it all on my web site, and I have kept it updated over the years as my time has allowed. I have always easily found many examples of myths and misinformation creating ongoing misunderstandings among communities and cultures, preventing people from seeking help, encourage people to engage in unhealthy and even dangerous practices, and cultivating mistrust of people and institutions. I easily have found examples that had lead to mobs of people attacking someone or others for no reason other than something they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend, to legislators introducing laws to address something that doesn’t exist, and influencing elections, long before such finally got noticed because of Brexit and the USA November 2016 elections.

In my original web pages, I said that this subject was rarely discussed, and for more than a decade, that was the truth: while I could find all of those examples, it was very difficult to find any online resources or published resources outside of academic papers about how to address or prevent misinformation campaigns designed to interfere with a relief or development effort, public health campaign, etc. Where was the practical info on how to deal with this? It was few and far between. For many years, mine was the only web site tracking such.

How did I get interested in this subject? I noticed stories my friends and family told often turned out not to be true, everything from spiders or snake eggs found in a jacket of a friend of a cousin that lives in another state, to why a local store closed, to something they had heard about happening on a TV talk show but hadn’t actually seen themselves. Then, while attending Western Kentucky University for my undergrad degree, I took a very popular class, Urban Folklore 371, where we discussed these stories, how they were spread, how the story changes over time and why such stories are believed. I was hooked on the psychology of rumor-spreading.

When I worked at a United Nations agency from 2001 to 2005, I made a joke to a colleague about the outrageous mythologies about the UN that so many people believed back in the USA – I’m not going to repeat them here, on this blog, but they are easy to find online. She gave me a confused look and said she didn’t know what I was talking about. So I showed her various web sites that promote this misinformation. She stood there, with her mouth open and eyes wide, staring at the outrageous graphics and text. “Is this a joke?” she asked. No, I replied, this is very real. I showed her more. “I can’t believe this!” she said. I explained that we could stand there all day with me showing her these sites, and these were just ones in the USA – I had no idea how many there were based in other countries, in other languages. And I admit I was starting to get angry, because not only did this seasoned UN staff member not know about this, no one I worked with at the UN had ever heard of these myth-spreading web sites. Conspiracy theories, pre-social media, were already affecting our work, yet, I seemed to be the first person to be talking about it, at least at my agency.

We have a saying in English: closing the barn door after the horses are already out. It means you are too late in trying to address an issue. Now, all these many years after trying to sound the alarm, I fear that there are entire generations of people that will now never be convinced that global climate change is real and devasting to communities, particularly to poor communities, or that will never believe that vaccinations do NOT cause autism nor infertility, or that will never believe that condoms can prevent HIV, or that will never accept fluoride in their water because they believe too many outrageous things I can’t even begin to list here, and on and on. I fear these generations are lost forever in having basic scientific literacy. And I fear that if we don’t make a concentrated, sustained effort on educating young people about science and how to evaluate information they are hearing and reading, more people will die, more communities will be devastated, more lives will be shattered.

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If I can’t find what I’m looking for on your web site, who else can’t?

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I saw an online article about an initiative in Afghanistan and I immediately wanted to donate money to it. So I followed the directions in the article, went to the web site, and looked all over for the promised “donate” link.

It wasn’t there. I even used the “find” tool. Nada.

Test your web site to see if anyone coming onto the site can find what they might be looking for. This is a great test to be undertaken by new volunteers. You could get a group of volunteers to use their smartphones or laptops (you should have a mix of devices and browsers being used) to go to the home page and try to find:

  • your information on exactly what services or activities your organization provides. They should rate how easy it is to find and how easy it is to understand.
  • your organization’s physical address.
  • your hours of operation (if applicable).
  • the “donate” link, and if they do, to click on it and see if they find all the info they want to donate to your organization. They should rate how easy it was to find the information on how to donate and how easy it is to donate (you do allow for online donations, right?!?).
  • information on what a donation pays for. They should rate how easy it is to find this information (if they ever do).
  • the “volunteer” link, and if they do, to click on it and see if they find all the info they want to donate to your organization. They should rate how easy it was to find information on how to volunteer and on what volunteers do at your organization, on how easy it is to use your online application process (if you have such), etc.

Here’s another test: ask them what they think, based on looking at your web site, your organization’s attitude is regarding volunteers. They could rate, on a scale, what messages your web site information regarding volunteer engagement says:

  • We involve volunteers because we don’t have to pay them; they are cheaper than paying people.
  • We involve volunteers to do the work staff doesn’t want to do.
  • We offer a variety of opportunities for volunteers, in terms of the amount of time they have to commit, the nature of the service they will provide, where they will provide service (onsite, online, in the office, in the field, etc.).
  • We value our volunteers.

You also want to hear if the web site works well on desktops or laptops and smartphones.

You could have volunteers do this from their home, over a week, and have an online survey for them to fill out, or you could have volunteers come into your conference room for an hour, bringing their devices, serve them some cookies or pizza and have them do the testing and feedback together, in-person.

On a related note, someone from your organization should also see how easy it is to find your organization online at all. Go to Google and Bing (yes, do it on both), and search for:

  • the exact name of your organization. Is your organization’s web site the first in the search results? Does it come up at all on the first page of results? If it doesn’t come up at all, or doesn’t come up early, it’s probably because you don’t have the exact name of your organization on several pages, if not every page, of your web site. Make sure you have this full name on “about us” on your Facebook page as well.
  • the acronym of your organization and the name of your city. Is your organization’s web site the first in the search? Does it come up at all? If it doesn’t come up at all, or doesn’t come up early, it’s probably because you don’t have the acronym and the name of the city where you are on every page of your web site.  I’m stunned at how many nonprofit web sites I find that never say what city (or state) they are in nor what cities they work in.
  • the word volunteer and the name of your city, and, perhaps, a word related to your organization’s mission (children, arts, homeless, dance, teens, women, etc.). Does your organization come up at all in the results? If it doesn’t, or doesn’t come up early, it’s because you don’t have the word volunteer and the name on your city on various pages on your web site.

Also try to find your organization on Twitter, if your organization has a Twitter account. Use a variety of names and acronyms that people use for your organization in your searches. Can you find your organization’s account? If not, then it’s probably because of how you describe your account on Twitter. Your account description also should have the full name of your organization and your acronym – do NOT use your mission statement instead! If you use your mission statement instead of your organization’s name, then it probably won’t be found by people looking specifically for your organization on Twitter.

If you have room in your Twitter description, you can also put in keywords to help people find you. What keywords? It depends on what your organization does, or the target audience for your Twitter account. For instance, in my own, personal account, I use these keywords, because I want people that are interested in these subjects to be able to find me when they do a search for such:      , , ,  

In your Twitter description, if you have room, you might want to put the hashtag for your area, if you want people in that area to find you. For instance, if I wanted to target people in Portland, Oregon specifically, I would put in #PDX in my Twitter profile (instead, I put it in tweets that target people in Portland specifically). If I wanted people in Oregon who wanted to volunteer to find me easily on Twitter, I would put #volunteer and #Oregon in my profile (again, instead of doing that, I put those keywords in tweets that relate to that subject specifically).

You can apply these recommendations for Twitter to your YouTube channel as well, to increase the numbers of people viewing your organization’s videos (if you have such).

Altogether, these are things your nonprofit, charity, NGO, school, government agency or other community initiative can do in ONE day to immediately improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Also see:

How schools & small governments should be using social media

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The days of everyone getting their information from one newspaper is over. Newspapers continue to disappear and most of those that are left don’t readily print school-related information anymore, like weekly lunch menus, sports scores, the dates and times of the Spring musical, etc. A growing number of people get their community information ONLY from social media. If your government agency, school or nonprofit isn’t posting to social media, you are leaving out that growing number of people.

Here’s the good news: you aren’t creating any new text to use social media. Rather, you are using information you already have prepared for other communications. If it’s public information, it needs to be on your mail social media accounts. Often, that means just cutting and pasting information from another platform.

I’ve added two new resources on my web site, one to help local governments to use social media, like Facebook, Twitter, etc., one to help schools to use social media:


Tips for small cities, towns and counties on using social media

To not be using social media to deliver information and to engage means you are denying critical information to much of your community and promoting an image of secrecy and lack of transparency. In fact, the lack of use of social media can be seen as your city council or county government trying to hide something, and even lead to rumors that are much harder to dispel than they would have been to prevent. This advice talks not only about exactly what your school should be posting to social media, but also how to handle tough questions and criticism.

 


Tips for schools on using social media

No excuses: your school needs to be using social media. Whether you are just K – 6 or all the way K – 12 or anything in between, your school MUST be using social media. To not be using it means you are denying critical information away from parents and the community.

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Your initiative should leverage UN days

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International days, weeks, years and decades, as designated by the United Nations General Assembly, offer excellent outreach opportunities for nonprofit organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations, charities, government initiatives and other agencies focused on improving and enriching communities and individuals, as well as protecting the environment. There is a commemorative day, as designated by the United Nations general assembly, for just about any subject you can think of. Here’s just a sample:

Cancer
Female Genital Mutilation
Women and Girls in Science
the power of radio 
Social Justice 
Wildlife
Women
Racial Discrimination
Poetry
Down Syndrome
Forests
Water		 Meteorology
Tuberculosis
Autism
Mine Awareness
Sport for Development and Peace
Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda
Health
Human Space Flight
Malaria
Tourism
Mountains
Migrants

and on and on and on. Now is a great time to look through the list and think about how you are going to leverage these days for your initiative’s mission.

You can use these designations to tie in your organization’s events and programs, through

  • issuing press releases about your work and how it relates to the day, week or year
  • posting social media messages that relate to the day, week or year’s theme
  • writing op-ed pieces for local media
  • blogging on a related topic, posting social
  • offering yourself for interviews to radio and TV
  • holding a special event that ties in with the day, week or year

If you mention these days, weeks, years, etc. on your blog and web site, and use the official Twitter tags for the events, you increase the chance of your organization coming to the attention of anyone doing a search online for information about these days, weeks, etc. and reaching an even wider audience.

For a list of these UN days, weeks, years and decades, see either this part of the UNESCO web site or this page by the UN Association of Canada. HOWEVER, note that, as of the start of December 2017, these calendars have not been updated with the 2018 designation. It’s not known of the UN will designate 2018 with any theme. The General Assembly has declared 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages.

The UN Decade of Action on Nutrition is 2016 to 2025, which means it’s still happening in 2018. The designation aims to trigger intensified action to end hunger and eradicate malnutrition worldwide, and ensure universal access to healthier and more sustainable diets for all people.

The International Decade for People of African Descent is 2015–2024, which means it’s also still being celebrated in 2018, as is the United Nations Decade of Sustainable Energy for All, which is 2014–2024.

The decade of 2011–2020, also all still being celebrated, has four designations:

There’s also the International Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures (2013-2022), which is designated by UNESCO, a UN initiative, but not the General Assembly. Rapprochement means reconciliation, increased understanding, restoration of harmony, agreement, cooperation or harmonization. The decade is meant to promote mutual understanding and reciprocal knowledge of cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity, and to foster dialogue for sustainable development and its ethical, social and cultural dimensions. The initiative offers a number of free resources you can use to promote the themes of the decade.

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No app can substitute for actually talking with people

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Back in 2001, when I started directing the United Nation’s Online Volunteering Service , then a part of NetAid, one of the first things I did was ask to spend a week answering emails from users. Before I arrived, the junior associates had recruited volunteers – unpaid interns – to do this, because they themselves hated doing it. They could not understand why I wanted to spend time doing such low-level administrative work myself. Neither could my new boss, who tried to give me a lecture about the appropriate work for someone directing an entire program.

I insisted, and I did it. Why? Because there was no better way for me to learn, in just a week, what the users of the service were asking and saying, what they understood, what they didn’t, and what they wanted. It took about two hours a day, total, and what I learned in that week, as well as other days when I filled in for sick staff and interns, was invaluable to creating effective strategies for the program. It also helped me better direct staff in how to support users of the service – our customers. Staff had never thought of those people on the other end of those emails, trying to use the OV service, as customers or clients, and I worked hard to change staff perceptions of the site’s users.

I worked at a professional theater back in the late 1980s. I had graduated from university less than four months before. I remember the executive director saying that he would cut any position in a time of budgetary crisis except the box office staff. He said that most of our audience would never interact personally with anyone other than the box office staff at the theater. Sure, many would get a call from the fundraising staff if they didn’t respond to the postal mailing about donating, but most – MOST – would interact personally only with someone in the box office. For most of our audience, the box office staff was their personal connection to the theater – not the actors on stage. That box office experience, therefore, should be STELLAR and have all the resources it needed to be such. That executive director made sure the box office staff was well-trained (and often re-trained), well-supported, actively supervised and well paid. And the box office staff, in turn, gave the marketing staff and fundraising staff invaluable information regularly on what our audiences were saying, information that was far more regular and reliable than any research consultant could provide.

I bring up these experiences which have shaped my approaches to communications and management of staff to this day because I am stunned at how, at most nonprofit organizations, NGOs, international agencies, government programs and more, many senior staff members are not aware of what staff on the front lines are dealing with, nor what clients or the public are saying. Yes, you should do a variety of surveys and focus groups and formal pulse-taking, and ask your staff to produce reports on what they are hearing via their interactions with your clients, customers, the public, etc., but there’s no substitute for interacting with customers yourself. That includes on social media. Why are you having inexperienced young people or a short-term intern manage your social media? Social media is about interacting, about engaging – not just one-way communication. If you had an onsite event for a large number of clients or the general public or donors, who would you have to facilitate that event – a short-term intern new to your organization, or a senior staff member? Who would your clients or the general public or major donors expect to work with them? What you would do offline, onsite at your organization with clients you should also do online.

And that brings me to apps and chatbots. I regularly see nonprofit staff post questions to online groups, trying to find a magical app or chatbot that will replace a staff member from having to actually engage with users, or replace a staff member actually having to read social media messages. TechSoup recently did a series of breathless blogs about how wonderful artificial intelligence and chatbots are for nonprofits. Yes, chatbots might reduce overhead administrative costs, but at what cost to the organization in other wasy?

  • Chatbots take away an opportunity for real people to interact with current and potential clients, donors, volunteers and others at a nonprofit organization, which denies an organization critical information that can help staff know whatcurrent and potential clients, donors, volunteers and others are saying, how they are feeling, etc.
  • They also frustrate people – many people will end their interactions with a chatbot once they realize it isn’t an actual human being and their questions aren’t being answered properly, and have a negative viewpoint of the company that uses that chatbot.

This response to the TechSoup blogs really sums it up well:

I have not ever had a satisfying experience with a chatbot. far too often there are unique situations and circumstances that cannot be anticipated or made a part of the program. It is immensely frustrating to be stuck talking to a chatbot that is only able to respond to things that are part of its program. I would rather have a little slower response and talk to a real person who listens and cares.

For-profit companies can get away with not having a reputation of listening and caring – they can still be profitable, despite such a perception. Nonprofits, however, cannot.

Not only do you need actual humans to interact with clients, donors, volunteers and the general public – you need senior staff to be doing so, at least occasionally. If these human interactions aren’t integrated into your organization’s practices and culture, and central to your strategies regarding public relations, they should be.

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