Tag Archives: nptech

Measuring the Networked Nonprofit has arrived

Leave a reply

A few weeks ago, I let you know that Measuring the Networked Nonprofit was on its way, bringing with it the combined wisdom of Beth Kanter and Katie Paine on how nonprofits can measure their impact in an era of free agents and networked activism.

It’s a momentous book. Organizations from governments to businesses to community groups to nonprofits have all struggled with whether and how to engage with the networked social world, especially when resources are scarce and stakeholders are feeling skittish. Measuring the Networked Nonprofit opens up new possibilities for accountability, learning, innovation and greater impact.

Today, Beth officially announced the book’s availability. It’s already been topping Amazon’s best-selling book on nonprofits for days because of advance purchases, which speaks to the hunger out there for this kind of practical information, framed in a hope-filled vision for the future of the nonprofit sector. (Beth and co-author Allison Fine articulated that vision in their previous book, The Networked Nonprofit.)

As Beth puts it, “The book is about how nonprofits can measure and improve results from leveraging their networks.” The advice you’ll find there has been “field tested in real-time as part of my work as Visiting Scholar at the Packard Foundation with 60 of their grantees who participated in a peer learning/focus group and contributed many of the case studies.”

And Beth will help you do a little extra good when you buy your copy:

I am donating my royalties to support the Sharing Foundation‘s college education program for young people in Cambodia. My family is sponsoring Keo Savon, who we met this summer in Cambodia. She is second year engineering student and by supporting her education she will have better economic opportunities.

In the interests of full disclosure (by which I mean deliriously excited bragging) here’s one more excerpt from Beth’s post:

To help those who need to learn to laugh at measurement, not fear it, I commissioned Rob Cottingham to create cartoons that capture the essence of each chapter’s advice. (There were numerous times when I snorted my latte from laughing so hard!).

(Which is why that waiver I have clients sign has such explicit language about burns and scalding.)

Beth and Katie have lined up a slew of events, but they’re also eager to hear from folks who’d like on in their community. In the meantime, if you’d like to support the book’s launch, Beth suggests four things you can do:

Buy a Copy of the Measuring the Networked Nonprofit

Attend a Book Event this month as part of our book tour

Share of photo of yourself with the book on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook and use the hashtag #netnon

Stay tuned to our blogs as we share more stories about how nonprofits apply the advice in the book and I’ll keep you posted on Keo Savon’s studies

And what do you want to bet they’ll be measuring all of it?

Theo Lamb and Darren Barefoot on the science of Facebook for non-profits

Leave a reply

After reviewing 1,000 Facebook posts and updates from 20 non-profits with large followings on the site, Capulet‘s Theo Lamb and Darren Barefoot can report

  1. a) that it’s a really good idea to get other people to tally the metrics for 1,000 separate posts – something they achieved through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; and
  2. people seem to just love simple, evocative text on top of a compelling image.

Actually, they can report a lot more than that… and they did, at last night’s NetTuesday meetup at downtown Vancouver’s W2 Media Cafe (a terrific space, by the way!)

Here’s my cartoon-blog post from the night…

Cartoon-blog notes from Darren and Theo's presentation

And here, if you want to dive in (and you really do), is the presentation itself, as they first delivered it at NetSquared Camp in the spring:

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 11: Maddie Grant

Leave a reply

Maddie Grant of DC-based SocialFish has done a lot of thinking about connecting online audiences with speeches, panels and presentations. More to the point, she’s done a lot of doing, including convening one of the most ambitious online conference approaches I’ve seen: NTC Online, the digital version of the Nonprofit Technology Conference held every year by NTEN.

In our conversation, she offers some great advice for event organizers, speakers and anyone who wants to use digital tools to help online and offline audiences learn. And after you’ve heard our conversation, check out these links:

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 10: Holly Ross

Leave a reply

This episode features Holly Ross from NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network. She’s a great speaker in her own right – and every year, NTEN hosts the Nonprofit Technology Conference. It’s a huge gathering (but remarkably relaxed and collegial), and we talk about what it takes to connect that many people online at a conference – and how speakers can make the most of a connected audience.

Some links and resources:

 

Cartoon-blogging at NTC 2012

Leave a reply

It was another great Nonprofit Technology Conference, my second in San Francisco… and my second cartoon-blogging outing for my friends at NTEN.

This time around, the good folks at Rally – a social fundraising platform, and the folks behind a very cool workspace – sponsored the graphic recording effort.

Which meant there were not one but two pens flying during various keynotes and breakout sessions. My colleague was the amazing Kate Rutter, who manages to combine detail, structure and composition in ways that amaze me. You can see the results of our work here.

I’m pulling together the last of my cartoon-blog images, and I’ll post them here soon. But in the meantime, here are the cartoons I drew from the floor of the conference. They include my notes from the session on social media policy, led by Idealware’s Andrea Berry and Darim’s Lisa Colton and centered around their free social media policy workbook.

Twitter for Good: positive social change, 140 characters at a time

Leave a reply

By now, Twitter’s media stereotype as the place you come to share details of your last meal is finally starting to fade, giving way to a growing understanding of its real impact on the world.

And while a lot of attention has been going to Twitter as a tool for marketing and PR, Twitter is also emerging as a powerful tool for social change. From fundraising to pay for a Cambodian student’s tuition to organizing the street protests that marked the Arab Spring, people around the world are using Twitter to advance important causes.

Now there’s a new guide for anyone hoping to make a difference in the world using social media: Twitter for Good: Change the World, One Tweet at A Time, by Claire Diaz Ortiz. (If her name sounds familiar, that may well be because she leads social innovation and philanthropy at Twitter.)

I enjoyed her talk at BlogWorld last year, where she set out her TWEET (Target, Write, Engage, Explore, Track) model of Twitter effectiveness. So I’m looking forward to reading the book, which launched today.

And if you are too, good news. Until midnight tonight, Twitter for Good is Twitter for Good for Free: you can download the electronic version at no cost from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and iTunes.

And if you miss that deadline, you can always enter to win a copy on Claire’s blog.

Cartoon-blogging at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in DC

Leave a reply

I’ll be heading to sunny (if the forecasts are correct) Washington, DC later this week to toonblog the Nonprofit Technology Conference. It’s an annual gathering of nonprofit tech practitioners who work with organizations large and small. I’ve been to previous NTCs in Seattle and San Francisco, and they were terrific.

I’m especially looking forward to toonblogging the session Beth Kanter is convening, I Found My Free Agent, Now What? That’s partly because Beth’s a good friend, a genuine expert and a fantastic facilitator, and partly because my mandate is to whip off cartoons as fast as humanly possible.

This will be only my third time in DC. I love it there; for a politics junkie, this is Disneyland. (They even have a 1:1 scale model of the White House!) If you’re coming to NTC too, please look me up. And if not, you can follow it on #11ntc on Twitter.

Let your fingers do the climbing… and the opting out.

Leave a reply
YouTube Preview Image

Two enterprising folks dropped by the Yellow Page Group corporate headquarters in Montreal and built a small mountain of more than 500 unwanted Yellow Page directories in front of it… and interviewed a YPG rep brave enough to defend the indefensible.

(How enterprising? One is Aimee Davison, who is currently blogging about doing 100 interesting jobs by the end of the year. The other is Kyle MacDonald, whom you may remember as the guy who traded a single red paper clip for a house.) (Not all at once. He traded steadily up.)

There’s a lot to like about this video, but let me single out just one thing: the fact that the corporate rep is there at all, and is allowed to make her case. That ultimately makes the piece far more effective and persuasive; you hear the pro-Yellow Pages argument, but see it contradicted by the video evidence the video-makers gathered.

The staggeringly bogus “only one per cent of Canadians opt out” argument might be my favourite moment, though. That number might well be accurate. But…

  • Given how little effort YPG puts into promoting their opt-out web page, and the fact you have to keep renewing your opted-out status, I’m pretty impressed that it’s that high.
  • And ask yourself: how high would it be if people had to opt in using the same process?

To opt out of getting the Yellow Pages: