Social Media for Nonprofits and Coalitions | By Amy Delamaide

CCSR presented a Compassion Kansas workshop yesterday for nonprofits and coalitions interested in learning more about optimizing their organizations' use of social media.

We had one handout detailing our assumptions going into the workshop:

Our Assumptions

1. We like social media and think it is useful.
2. We believe that it is no longer on the cutting edge, but that it is mainstream.
3. We believe that social media is most useful for nonprofits when it is used with targeted purpose, rather than as a diffuse, shotgun approach. Nonprofits rarely have the time or resources for anything other than acting with purpose.
4. We believe that when it comes to social media, participating and consuming information is just as important as broadcasting information.
5. We are users of social media, not experts.
6. We can’t teach you everything about every social media website.
7. For a nonprofit organization, your online presence must be consistent with your stated charitable purpose. We assume you will use social media as one method for carrying out your mission and strategies.

We had three presenters from local nonprofits using social media well. They described their roles and responsibilities for social media in their organizations, what they do well in social media, and some of the decisions their organizations have made about why and how to use social media.

• Thomas Stanley, Kansas Leadership Center
• Chandra Stauffer, KMUW 89.1
• Olivia Fletcher, Numana, Inc.

Then we presented a case study from a national nonprofit: "The Case of the Rogue Tweet." Sources for that case study included:

• American Red Cross
• CNN Money
• Tactical Philanthropy
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy
• Dogfish Head Brewery

It was great to have about 30 people thinking about social media and how to use it as one method for carrying an organization's mission and strategies.

Web-based Work Platforms Support Community Collaboration | By Kevin Bomhoff

I remember when community members gathered together to collaborate--flipcharts flowing in the ventilated air, the sweet scent of permanent markers in the air. Those were the days. We distributed handouts and meeting notes on paper or by email. Everyone was then free to lose the documents or, even better, claim they were never received in the first place. Participants could miss important sessions and announce that they were not notified of the meeting location or date. We could leave people out because they were not on our distribution list.      

Wait a minute, that’s no way to collaborate! Especially as community challenges become more technical (requiring expertise and shared data) and adaptive (requiring stakeholder input and learning). We need a real place to meet and a virtual space to organize our work.

More and more often, this virtual space is a web based platform with ready access by community partners. These platforms come in many formats but most have the following components in common:

• A place to store historical and updated documents
• A calendar of past and upcoming meetings
• Planning timelines
• Announcements
• Discussion groups
• Meeting minutes and agendas
• Contacts
• Important links

This is a virtual shared drive for those participating in your community project. Participants are responsible for setting their own “alerts” so they can be notified of changes or participate in discussions as they wish.   

Christina Holt, Associate Director for Community Tool Box Services with the KU Work Group for Community Health and Development, develops tailored online WorkStation websites for local and national initiatives. These WorkStations are based upon out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities plus custom-developed tools to help groups meet their needs for online community collaboration.

Christina points out that “WorkStations enable users to easily share materials, make announcements, access tools, learn from others' success stories, access guidance from peer discussions, and solve needs for online collaboration. Ultimately, customized WorkStations help communities work together to meet their shared goals.”

Don’t throw your flip charts and markers away just yet. WSU Center for Community Support and Research encourages community partners to establish both real place and virtual space opportunities for organizing. We need to carefully build relationships in order to make progress on issues we care deeply about. More often than not, those relationships will be nurtured by effectively facilitated discussions and efficient ways to store and share critical information. 

Listening as Ministry | By Seth Bate

Kansas Windfarm by Eye of the Storm Photography

I read Lael’s post on the heels of reading The Missional Leader, by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, which views storytelling as a leadership skill. The authors propose--and I’m inclined to agree--that people must be able to articulate their own narrative but also the narrative of the community around them.

Listening to and then telling the story of the community may be the hard work, but it is critical. People and communities who cannot name the way their worlds are changing have less power with which to engage, understand or confront the change. The authors suggest that those who cannot name the deeper sources of their anxiety focus on the symbols of the change rather than what’s beneath those symbols. An example in the book is Christian parents who focus on getting Harry Potter books out of a school library when they are really worried about a much broader question: how “do we form a cohesive community of identity and belonging that shapes our children within the narrative of Christian life?” Deep attentiveness may be a way to draw out and shape these stories.

For Christians, there is also much to be learned from viewing our stories and the stories of our community through the story of Scripture. The Missional Leader makes this sound like the most natural thing in the world. After all, the Bible takes great pains to describe the ordinariness of the people chosen to God’s work.

I see this attentiveness modeled in the life of Jesus, who began with the lived experience of the people he encountered. He started where they were. As The Missional Leader puts it, “he enters those experiences weaving God’s story through their lived stories.”

After reading Lael’s post and this book, it seems to me that storytelling (and listening) may be an act of peer support. It may be an act of leadership. And it may be an act of ministry.

If you would like to explore the impact of missional leadership on your faith-based organization, join us for a free Compassion Kansas workshop  "The Missional Faith-Based Organization" on September 20, 2011. Call 316-978-3843 to register.

On “Deep Attentiveness” and Narrative Power

Dan Beard telling a story to a group of boys and girls in the Flatbush Library in 1913

by Lael Ewy

I probably flub a lot of job interviews because of my propensity to tell stories. Instead of giving straight answers I’ll tell a story that (to me anyway) illustrates the answer to an interview question. I recall being asked, in an interview for a teaching position, whether or not I would ever “give up on a kid.” This prompted a 20-minute tale about a student who I had encouraged to drop out of the small college where I worked, knowing that a little time off was what he needed to get back on track educationally. (He did come back--and finished!)

There’s a perception running around out there that nobody has the time for such things. This is despite the fact that stories are ubiquitous in our culture: TV shows, movies, newspaper articles—even video games and ads—follow a narrative arc. Why is narrative so common? Because it is actually an extremely efficient and effective form of communication.

Narrative can encapsulate a lot of different, and sometimes contradictory, ideas into a single form, sometimes even into a single character. We find Hamlet fascinating because he’s witty and engaging, thoughtful and immobilized, romantic and cold, wrathful and uncertain, and he’s all these things all at once. Instead of analyzing, narrative embodies.

But we’re also drawn to stories because they’re deeply personal: these complex characters are like people we know, people we are, people we’d like to be. We worry about how they’re going to resolve their problems so we can emulate that or avoid it, so we can consider it and modify it in our own lives. Stories connect because they’re about people, whether or not those people are real. Spreadsheets have their uses, but it’s hard to form a deep connection with them. 

If we tell stories that involve ourselves, and if we take the time to listen, we set up a situation in which the deep truth of one’s experience can come forth. The storytelling situation also allows for what Parker Palmer calls creating responses from a place of “deep attentiveness,” a place where our usual guardedness can fall away and genuine connections can be made. 

From this, you can see why we use storytelling as an integral part of training peer support workers in the mental health field, but taking the time to tell stories and to listen to them can create mutual, helping relationships wherever you are.         

Photo credit: New York Public Library

Social Media for Nonprofits and Coalitions | By Amy Delamaide

Coming up in about three and a half weeks is our next Compassion Kansas workshop--Social Media for Nonprofits and Coalitions. Seth Bate and Amy Delamaide will moderate a panel of three people using social media effectively in their organizations. Each panelist will share a little bit about what works well for them and how they integrate social media into their existing strategies. Participants will have opportunities to ask them questions. We'll also consider a national case study of a "tweet gone wrong" and what the organization did in response.

The workshop is on June 28, 2011, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. in Wichita, Kansas.

If you're interested in attending this workshop, call CCSR at 316-978-3843 or email angela.gaughan@wichita.edu to register.