Networked Nonprofit

Many organizations and staff people consider themselves social. They are friendly and outgoing, host events, and thank donors regularly. In this book, we use the term “social” differently. We use it to mean the power of social media to change relationships among people inside and outside of an organization. This “social-ness” reflects more than individual habits; it refers to organizations like the American Red Cross who work differently in fundamental ways.
 
Working socially challenges deep-set organizational assumptions about leadership, roles, and structure. It forces organizations to think hard about what’s important to manage, and what can be left uncontrolled. Social culture strikes at the heart of what organizations value and how they operate.
 
Organizations with social cultures often:

• Use social media to engage in two-way conversations about the work of the organization with people inside and outside of the organization.
• Embrace mistakes and take calculated risks.
• Reward learning and reflection.
• Use a “try it and fix it as we go” approach that emphasizes failing fast.
• Overcome organizational inertial (“We’ve always done it this way”) through open and robust discussions.
• Understand and appreciate that informality and individuality do not indicate a lack of caring, professionalism, or quality.
• Trust staff to make decisions and respond rapidly to situations, rather than crawl through endless check-off and approval processes.

The Monitor Institute calls the organizational shift to a social culture Working Wikily (a term coined by the leading social change thinker and blogger Lucy Bernholz). This is a play on the term wiki, an online workspace for people and organizations to collaborate on ideas and strategies.
 
…Shifting the culture of an organization is not just about having new ideas or working with new tools; it means actually thinking about the work and organization fundamentally differently. Organizations need to practice being social and engaging with the outside world.
 
As the culture begins to shift, the issues that had been taking up a lot of time in staff meetings -- how to protect the organization, how to stay on message, how to avoid criticism online -- lose their potency. Organizations begin to spend more of their time talking to people inside and outside of the organization about the work, about the network, and about the possibilities of what they could all do together working together.
 

We know from our own personal experiences that some social networks, say an alumni network or a congregation, very energetic and active. In these networks, information and resources are shared easily and freely, and people enjoy and benefit from their participation. Conversely, other social networks are listless. Nothing happens in these networks, no one shares or does anything, and they don’t seem to have any energy or drive. What’s the difference between these networks? The first has a lot of the not-so- secret sauce -- social capital -- and the second one doesn’t.
 
Social capital is the stuff that makes relationships meaningful and resilient. Within such relationships two things generally exist: trust and reciprocity. People do things for one another because they trust that their motives are good and that they will receive something in return some time in the future. …
 
Social media builds social capital. In particular, online social networks are filled with it. That’s why people are connected to one another. And organizations need to build, nurture, strengthen, and use this capital for social change to occur.

Social media builds social capital because:

• People are easy to find online and on many channels. It is easy for individuals to find one another online without intermediaries, brokers, or organizations getting in the way. It is also easy for organizations to find people because what they do and believe and care about is visible.
• Talk is cheap. Having conversations is inexpensive online, unburdened by the constraints of mobile minutes and snail-mail stamps. Without these barriers, people and organizations can have multiple conversations at no increase in cost. In addition to words and thoughts, people can share photographs and videos online for free. Social media users can forward the messages of organizations to their networks at no additional cost to the organization. As a result, the cost to scale online efforts can be negligible for organizations.
• Serendipity is enhanced online. People can find one another, organizations, and causes online without needing any formal introductions. They can simply bump into one another or search for one another, and develop unexpected and powerful relationships.
• Reciprocity is incredibly easy. On-land reciprocity can take time and effort. You may need to buy a card and a stamp, or bake something in return, or remember to call at a decent hour to thank someone. Reciprocity online is incredibly easy and inexpensive. Sending a thank-you email can be done for free in seconds. Posting a thank-you note on Facebook for your community to see is just as easy and even more powerful because it's public. The same can be said of linking to someone on a blog, forwarding a Twitter message, or posting a list of donors on a website. Thanking people generously and publicly is an incredibly powerful and easy way to generate social capital online.

Free agents activists are an important, growing part of the social change ecosystem. They are not competition for organizations, but allies, amazing influencers who can attract large numbers of new people to support various causes -- if they are engaged well.
 
A few rules of engagement exist for working with free agents:

• Get to Know the Free Agents.  Organizations must prioritize building personal relationships with the key free agents in their network. Free agents may be bloggers or Twitterers, superstar Facebook Causes organizers, or passionate people with a large email list. The tools they use to build and nurture their network aren’t as important as the influence they wield outside of the organization’s walls. Organizations need to get to know who the agents are and what they are passionate about. Read their blogs and emails, call them, take them to lunch, and find out why they do what they do. Build trust now, and it will be reciprocated in the future.
• Break out of silos.  The ethnographer danah boyd notes, “We live in homogenous networks, and self-organizing magnifies cliques.” Nonprofit organizations need to help people to break out of their cliques not reinforce them. …Young people and free agents need to explore and learn about issues, sort out their feelings about them. Nonprofit organizations can help to create these places.
• Don’t ignore the newcomer.  It may go against the grain of traditional organizational thinking to spend energy cultivating relationships with un- credentialed, perhaps young, newcomers. But ignoring them is a lost opportunity as you never know who will share their stories and their passion for a cause, and move others to action.
• Keep the welcome sign lit.  Even if a free agent is passionately involved with an organization for a period of time, it does not mean he or she will be in the future. That's why they're free agents! They come and go at their discretion, not at the organization’s behest. Still, keep the doors open for them to return whenever they want with their large networks and good energy in tow.
• Let them go.  Free agents may not do what organizations want them to do, but that doesn't mean they aren't participating and helping. For instance, instead of donating, they might take out their megaphone and ask their networks to participate and give. They could also provide or leverage in-kind donations, and help organize events. Organizations need to let free agents participate when and how they want.
• Don’t be afraid to follow.  It can be difficult for professional staff to admit they didn't come up with a great idea. But worrying about who came up with what idea is a waste of energy. Ideas don’t have to born within institutional walls to be good. Organizations need to listen for the great ideas that are out there, leverage them (or just parts of them), and embrace their originators without needing to “own” either the free agent or the idea.

We are just beginning to see the myriad ways people can use the social web to share their passion for their favorite causes. Free agents are a huge, largely untapped resource for strategic thinking, organizations and free agents will become remarkable resources for one another.
 

Using social media is easy; but using them effectively for social change is challenging. It's important to understand exactly what social media can do for organizations, and then rethink how organizations could work by embracing them.
 
This book is built on a simple equation: Social Media Powers Social Networks for Social Change. When we discuss this equation with people working within nonprofit organizations, they sometimes miss the operative word: social. Their focus is on the gadgetry when it should be on embracing social ways of behaving. This distinction is key not only to using social media, but also to effecting social change.
 
One constant in life is that human beings want and need to connect with one another in meaningful ways. These connections are made through social networks that are the conduits for the conversations that power social change. The job of nonprofit organizations is to catalyze and manage those conversations.
 
Forty years ago, it was commonplace for people to throw trash out car windows as they sped down the highway. Today that's not acceptable behavior. The change didn't result from one person's or organization's efforts, or even one crying Native American in a television commercial. Change happened because individuals began to adjust their behavior based on the norms developed within their social circles. As friends, mothers, children, aunts, and cousins begin to change their behavior, so does everyone they know. Laws codify this behavior; they don’t create it.
 
Conversations through social media include two-way discussions between people, and between people and organizations. Conversations also include sharing information online, like photographs, for friends or the broader public to see and comment on, writing a blog post that stirs a conversation in the comments section, and raising awareness of an issue on Facebook. Conversations are the lifeblood of social change efforts. Without them, people would not donate, protest, change their minds, or pass new laws.
 
We describe social media as channels in this book, meaning vehicles for conversations. Networked Nonprofits engage in conversations with people using multiple social media channels. We also define social change inclusively for this book. Social change means any efforts by people and organizations to make the world a better place. It includes advocacy and direct service efforts, as well as conversations between people outside organizations about challenges that people and communities face. If the intention is to understand and fix problems, improve people’s lives, or strengthen communities, we consider those efforts part of the broad spectrum of social change.
 
Conversations activate the natural creativity and passion that people bring to causes they care about. …That’s what Networked Nonprofits working as social networks and using social media can accomplish.
 

Let's begin by facing and overcoming the fears and myths about social media use that simply aren’t true.

Social media are just for kids.
Remembering a world before the Internet does not disqualify a person from using social media well. The data about social media usage are also proving this assumption wrong. According to the Pew Center for American Life and the Internet, the average age of web users is mid-40s, the average age of Facebook users is climbing, and 95% of the population have mobile phones and use email.

Our constituents aren’t online.
The old assumptions of a digital divide that makes access to technology in low-income communities difficult to overcome no longer hold. Although a gap of access persists, it is closing very rapidly, and the almost universal mobile phone usage here and abroad will soon put this issue to rest. For a time, organizations will need to continue to reach out in traditional ways to constituencies with access problems or who are hesitant to use social media. But they should still prepare for a future where everyone is using social media.

Face-to-face isn’t important anymore.
Nothing will ever substitute for the power of people meeting face-to-face. No amount of clicking, pinging, and poking can build the trust that happens in a room between people -- ever. Social media augments relationships built on land. It is important for organizations to avoid the social media zero-sum game, meaning the presumption that because some things happen online now that they don’t happen on land anymore. Online and on land activities augment one another, they have to in order for social change to happen.

Social media isn’t core to our work.
It’s difficult to imagine any organization engaged in social change where relationship building, conversations, and connections aren’t core to their success. Social media strengthens these relationships and connections with people outside of an organization’s walls.

Using social media is hard.
If social media tools were hard to use, they wouldn’t be so wide spread. As Clay Shirky wrote, “communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”  But, as with anything in life, mastering social media requires practice. Everyone needs to try the tools to understand why they are so powerful and important, and to discover for themselves which ones they like and which work best for them.

Using social media is time-consuming.
OK, this one is actually true. It does take time to use social media, particularly in the beginning when there is a learning curve to master. However, once the workflow becomes a habit, Networked Nonprofits accomplish more with less time. And ultimately, when people and organizations become better at working with their networks and learn how to distribute their work rather than assume all the heavy lifting, their overall workload will decrease.

 

Networked Nonprofits are simple and transparent organizations. They are easy for outsiders to get in and insiders to get out. They engage people to shape and share their work in order to raise awareness of social issues, organize communities to provide services or advocate for legislation. In the long run, they are helping to make the world a safer, fairer, healthier place to live.

Networked Nonprofits don’t work harder or longer than other organizations, they work differently. They engage in conversations with people beyond their walls -- lots of conversations -- to build relationships that spread their work through the network. Incorporating relationship building as a core responsibility of all staffers fundamentally changes their to-do lists. Working this way is only possible because of the advent of social media. All Networked Nonprofits are comfortable using the new social media toolset -- digital tools such as email, blogs, and Facebook that encourage two-way conversations between people, and between people and organizations, to enlarge their efforts quickly, easily and inexpensively.

Networked Nonprofits know their organizations are part of a much larger ecosystem of organizations and individuals that are all incredible resources for their efforts. Networked Nonprofits are not afraid to lose control of their programs and services, their logos and branding, messages and messengers because they know that in return they will receive the goodwill and passion of many people working on their behalf. Working this way enables these organizations to reach many more people less expensively than they ever could be working largely alone.

But being Networked Nonprofits is not just an accident of birth. Any organization can become one, and many are in the process of doing so. … Unfortunately, too many nonprofit organizations are losing ground today because they fear what might happen if they open themselves up to this new world. These organizations are crashing into this set-me-free world powered by social media, unprepared to become Networked Nonprofits. Many of these fears are unfounded. [Next post: Let's begin by facing and overcoming the fears and myths about social media use that simply aren’t true.]