Uncool once more . . .

Twitter seems well on its way to becoming the social media tool that non-users love to hate.  A victim of its own good press and popularity, it’s now cool to be anti-Twitter.  This morning on NPR a proudly non-tweeting commentator exhorted us to keep our personal information to ourselves, to be more private, and to stop thinking that we’re cool.   And oh yeah, he threw in a cheesy gratuitous IT-geek insult at the end for punctuation.  Geez.  Uncool yet again.   Didn’t I pay my dues in middle school? in high school?  In college?  In graduate school?  Yikes!

Oh well.  Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether NPR’s Morning Edition Blogger John Ridley is the arbiter of coolness (he may well be; I would admittedly be among the last to know) I can tell you that I am an unabashed fan of  Twitter.   I can and do follow local events, thought leaders, interesting new friends, colleagues, and other non-profits.  In a very short amount of time it has found its way into a natural part of my work day, and I am delighted.  I was happy to see the responses to the Philanthropy.com blog post about non-profits and Twitter.  All the replies are positive and and reinforce my own experiences.  This is a great tool for community building and for conversing about relevant topics.

And if anyone wants to invite me and the rest of the IT team I work with to “two-for-one margaritas”  (read the aforementioned blog post)  I’ll be happy to go, but you’ll have to invite me the old fashioned way.  Email me.

 

 

social networking update–Twitter

My nonprofit has now been actively engaging with social networking for several months, and it has been very interesting.  While we were examining our strategy and our premise, silicon.com presented a much-tweeted about article titled “Twitter: The CIO’s best friend or chocolate teapot?”  After taking a moment just to enjoy the figure of speech, I learned that most of my CIO colleagues don’t have a Twitter strategy, nor do they think it’s part of their job TO have one.

It’s different for nonprofit CIOs, and it’s different still for nonprofit Human Services CIOs.  We need to be where our constituents and stakeholders are, and they are well represented on Twitter.  At KHS, we have an explicit strategy of disintermediation—of connecting as directly as possible with people who care about our mission and with people who could or are benefiting from our services, and Twitter is an important part of  that.

Twitter has helped us speak directly with adults with autism about our innovative (there’s that word again!) new Adult Community Autism Program, and has connected us more tightly with local media outlets.  It has also helped spark new conversations around our services in Moldova—especially during the days of the “Twitter Revolution” there.

On line communities and conversations come and go, but for me Twitter has become a part of my routine.  That feels like the beginning of a success story to me.

 

Social Networking so far . . . .

So far our efforts with social networking have produced mixed  results, which is not unaligned with our expectations.   All in all, though,  I’d say it’s been a success.

I’ll start not with the strategy, but with the functional areas of the organization we’re trying to impact.  Our first serious efforts were on behalf of Susquehanna Service Dogs (SSD), which is a program within Keystone Children & Family Services.  SSD holds PawsAbilities, its major fundraiser ,in March in Harrisburg PA.  It is a 2-day event and its success relies heavily on a large turnout.

This year we heavily promoted the event through Facebook groups and local event websites.  We recruited influential bloggers with service-dog credibility, to urge people to attend and/or to donate.  We tweeted before, during, and after the event.  We did live video streaming from some of the most fun events–like the dock dogs.  It was a lot of work!

The end result was more press coverage, happier vendors (they got much more exposure), a more connected support community, and about the same turnout as the prior year.  Given that the prior year was a year of very high attendance, and given that the US economy is very different this year (especially in mid-March) we’re calling this an enormous success.  The blogs are continuing and are generating real followers and creating distinct communities, which is wonderful.  The Facebook group has grown from about 25 members to over 700  (a squad!) and even our flagship website, www.keystonehumanservices.org is receiving new traffic.

Lessons learned  so far:

• This is a lot of work, and it doesn’t seem to fall naturally into any one area of corporate responsibility.  In our case, IT is the champion, but that seems to be relatively rare.  Whoever takes the lead needs to be prepared to add a fair amount of workload.
• The online toolset is still in a state of flux, so be prepared to try several before you land on the one(s) that are best suited to your organization.
• Be prepared for internal skepticism.  There are still people in my organization who firmly believe that computers are time wasters, and that most people don’t need access to the Internet.  As much as I would sometimes like to dismiss that thinking as irrelevant in this decade, I need to take seriously the underlying concerns.  We have serious work to do, and we mustn’t let ourselves get distracted by fads. I need to be able to justify this effort with clear strategy statements and with clear results.

that’s all for today . . . .

 

follow me on Twitter!

 

Human Services and social networking

Like many other organizations, the company I work for, Keystone Human Services, is exploring the use of social networking to expand  support of our mission.  Our approach to human services is community-centric. and our mission is to create opportunities and support people in becoming active contributing members of the community.  Until a few short years ago, everyone at Keystone understood the word “community” to mean the physical community—a neighborhood community, a school community, a faith community, a business . . . you get the idea.

Our understanding of community has definitely changed.  This blog is beginning to be a community;  Keystone has active groups on Facebook and other social networking sites; and, we are beginning to blog about our newest organization Keystone Autisn Services.  The past few months have been very exciting and encouraging as I watch the organization begin to engage with the questions that this change in approach brings.

We’re dividing our efforts as follows:  Blogging and microblogging/Social Networking/Online fundraising/friendraising/ and Cause Related Marketing.

Our bloggers and microbloggers are tweeting and blogging about special events like Pawsabilities, which benefits our service dog agency, about new service offerings, like the Adult Community Autism Program, and about volunteer opportunities.  On Facebook we have groups for our agencies and specialty areas, and causes for our services that rely on philanthropy to keep going.  We use Just Means to connect our message with other socially conscious business and non-profits, and we are embracing new opportunities to speak directly with our stakeholders.

We know we are in the early stages of understanding what these new ways of communicating mean to our organization and to the delivery of human services, but I do wish we were encountering more evidence that  other human services organizations  are trying these tools. 

Let me know your thoughts.  Is your organization choosing integration of these tools or are you firewalling to keep your focus on your traditional services? 

Looking forward to hearing your responses.