Teaching is Learning
Flickr Photo: kjoyner666I spent the latter half of last week in lovely Arlington, Virginia, at a communications and marketing training for the Kellogg Action Lab. Although I do love to talk, my favorite part of this sort of opportunity is usually the Q&A period, or after the presentation when folks stop by to talk further.
It's always exciting to discover that something I've said has inspired someone to think about things in a new way. But the best part is how much I get to learn from the participants. It's a real gift.
The Kellogg Action Lab was no exception. I focused on social media strategies for distributing your message, and I got as good as I gave. Here are just a few of the new ideas I walked away with:
Does social media give you a competitive advantage? Tim Brostrom, Director of Product Innovation for the Kellogg Action Lab at Fieldstone Alliance asked me this question at my first presentation. I didn't answer him very well, in part because I didn't really understand what he meant until I hunted him down in the sandwich line and monopolized his lunch.
A section of my presentation discussed how to get leadership on board with your plans, which included articulating an ROI for your proposed project. I usually give examples of ROI that include raising money, getting people to sign up for your e-newsletter, more press mentions, and the like.
Tim rightly thinks we ought to account for the competitive advantage of social media tools, when it applies. There will be some cases where using social media tools effectively gives you a competitive advantage over others in your space. If your audience has already embraced the philosophies and tools of social media, then your organization will be more attractive to that audience simply because you have embraced social media. I'll be chewing more on this idea for a while.
You Can't Generalize. It's easy for me to stand in front of a room and say "Young people are using these tools." I even use a chart that illustrates this point pretty well. The reality isn't that simple. I know AARP does some amazing things with their audience and technology. Conversely, not all young people have access to computers or internet access, so they can't participate.
It's not enough for us to say that this is a movement for young people. We need to be much clearer that every organization needs to do its homework and find out if the people THEY want to reach are using these tools. It could be as simple as surveying their crowd -- or they may need to find some deeper research about who's using what.
Success is often surprising. I heard a great story from a workshop participant: she found social media success at her church. A young female leader in the church loves Grey's Anatomy. She also loves her church. Why not put the two together? The leader created a blog about Grey's Anatomy that ties themes from the episode back to her faith. The blog has a strong following in her church. It builds community seven days a week, not just on Sundays. (Now I wonder if I can tie my current Mad Men obsession to nonprofit technology?)
These are just a few examples. I left the training feeling that I had learned as much as I had shared.
Now it's your turn: If you were at the training, share your big "Aha!" moment with me by commenting on the blog -- include your organization name in the comment please! -- or ask me a follow up question. Everyone who responds will get a special something from NTEN!
Alice, yes please!
Thanks in advance,
Robert,
Resource Generation is in the process of switching from an off-line database to the integrated version of Network for Good/Groundspring/Salesforce. I'd be happy to share info on the process.
Holly,
The talk was great, I came away from it excited about the tools you showed us and vowing to devote some time each day to trying them out. (I spent time with Bloglines this morning.) My Aaa-HA moment was when you said that new social media is bi-directional vs. the former unilateral direction of email and simple websites. It made a lot of things click. I'm gearing up to starting greeting my neighbors on the communications sidewalk! Thanks for the information and inspiration.
Holly, Rebecca, Gary, and everyone associated with the KAL,
Thanks much for a great learning experience. Each session provided new insights. It was especially rewarding to be able to link the learning from one session to the others and your efforts to do that are appreciated. Holly, my organziation started developing websites in 1995 (yes, we were early adapters) and I thought I was staying pretty much on top of things, but your presentation helped me see that I'm not and also realize that's OK. The more important thing is that the organziation stay current, but not necessarily every person. We can each play to our srengths and interests as long as we keep current overall. I also realized from your and Rebecca's presentation that we can do a better job of communicating our core message through various technologies. Our next Board retreat is in September and this will be a big part of the discussions.
Thanks again to all for an informative workshop.
Hi Beth -
I'm just reading Groundswell now, so I'm totally into that word. I think we there's lots of room to explore that idea in Module 2 of the We Are Media project. I need a couple of days to play around in there some more! thanks goodness we have you!
Carmen -
You are right! Everything has to work together! Of course, it's easier said than done. But it sounds like you are headed in the right direction. And knowing where you are going is half the battle!
Elizabeth -
To the contrary, I am fascinated by audience segmentation! But I am, admittedly, a statistics nerd. I could spend all day looking at spreadsheets. I think that if you apply Rebecca's thinking about who your audiences are, and then track their response to your messaging, you're going to learn a lot. Who knows, you may end up a statistics nerd too!
Robert - Glad that my four questions were useful for you. We're all just going to have to rethink what COMMUNICATION means in our organizations! We use Salesforce (in a limited way) at NTEN, and lots more of our members are using it every day. There's a great article about Salesforce from One/NW. Start there. a search on Google for "nonprofit Salesforce advice" will yield lots of other interesting tidbits as well....
Hi Patrick!
You're on to something here! If you broker in information, as many of us do, you're going to be well served by allowing your stakeholders to access, evaluate, and share that information in a more collaborative way. Tags and blogs are great places to start. Let us know if you need any help!
Holly beautifully summed up social media tools in a way I've never found available before--and at our organization we've been looking for this for some time. She also avoided advocating use of particular tools, which gave me room to think about how any of the tools might move our mission forward. My "a-ha" moment was seeing how much RSS feeds could help our staff members--and our audience--keep up with the tide of publications that can seem so overwhelming. And I think there must be a nugget of social networking software we can use as an organization; I can't wait to catch up on my work so I can do some exploring! Thanks again, and I'll definitely be looking through the NTEN site regularly...
First, let me say that I really enjoyed your presentation at the Kellogg Action Lab grantee convening. I look forward to learning from you again soon. Any exchange with you is valuable–in the lunch line, through e-mail, however it takes place–thank you.
Also, I've been thinking about how helpful it could be if we worked together to institute a kind of ‘pairing’ concept in the nonprofit sector (any sector for that matter) focused generally on trading social media skills for access. In such a system, youngish practiced social media users, I’ll use the word ambassadors for now, would be paired with more mature, less practiced, managers and executives. The future leader would bring various social media skills to the process (social media mentoring). The older participant would increase access for the younger (organizational mentoring). In short, they would both bring value to the process, but from different angles. There are a dozen ways we could move toward this idea. Maybe others will comment. Either way, if you have a moment, let's talk.
Thanks again for your valuable contribution to the sector.
I agree - aarp (I'm a member) has an interesting integrated social media strategy - a white label network and blogs targeted at boomers
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/06/social-network.html
It gets back to really knowing what your audience is doing online and also having a good knowledge of the secondary demographic and technographic information available.
Great post! I'm going to link in Module 2 - about social media strategy.
BTW, is your presentation online? Would also be good to include as well.
What wonderful presentations! I had so many "aha moments" throughout the training. The best, however, is how everything can mesh. I knew I was on the right path, but it took KAL training to put the pieces together. Thanks so much Holly for the training and the resources.
Carmen Garcia
Nonprofit Services Center, St. Louis
Holly, I'm tempted to say my "Aha!" moment was when you showed us how to fly in Second Life, but really it was the opening session about segmenting your audiences. (How boring does THAT sound?) I only today realized that KAL walked their talk by segmenting their own audiences for the Convenings--all the folks in the room were nonprofit communications/marketing people, so they could tailor the content to our desires (which, of course, trump needs, as Rebecca told us). I think that was a big part of what made the Convening so amazing for me: unadulterated relevance.
But flying in Second Life was fun too.
Thanks for your awesome insights!
-Elizabeth
Some of the pearls that I pulled away from the 2 days were:
--really thinking about audience desire instead of their need (desire trumps need).
--your breakdown of successful internet strategy: does it help you listen; start conversations; let users share; integrate online and nonline strategies.
I also made some good connections with attendees!
I do have a question: do you have any knowledge/experience with salesforce.com? If not, do you know where I can get some objective thoughts on salesforce?
Thanks!
Thanks again, Holly, for the great talk last week!
On a personal level, my a-ha moment was realizing that I wasn't nearly as competent as I thought I was at knowing about the newer social media technology. I had thought I was pretty with-it. I now recognize that I'm actually a Luddite without so much as a Twitter account. :-)
On a more important organizational level, I recognize that I need to better explore how we can be serving our constituencies. Our organization has long viewed itself as a source of information on what is happening in our field. We maintain several listservs and publish a regular newsletter that includes summaries of news and research in our field. I'm wondering if our consituencies and our goals would be better served by placing some of this information in a blog format and if we could use tagging to better organize and sort the information.
Thanks again for the talk!
Holly, I can't say that I only had one AHA moment! I had them over and over and over again! Your presentation was inspiring and left me itching to get back to work and start learning and exploring! I'm fairly familiar with some (definitely not all!) of the social media tools you explored, but your presentation put a lot of it in perspective... how to use those tools to reach our audience. One of first points you made really resonated with me: making sure our online tools help us listen, start conversations and allow/encourage our audience to interact with one another.
Thank you so much!
And Tim, I love your idea of the pairing/mentoring! Please let us know what develops from this!