GivePulse

SnapKind

What do you think? Have you explored any of the questions we are exploring in your community?

I recently took an amazing course on Gamification from the Wharton School. As part of that I learned a lot about transmedia and gamification. I’m seeing more and more transmedia projects exploring issues from a multitude of angles, but the addition of @home’s mobile app — which you can play tailored to your own city — is particularly exciting. As you follow the game’s neighborhood map, you watch video interviews with homeless individuals, and by solve location-based puzzles (like deciding whether a person qualifies for supportive housing). And, as you progress through the game, you’ll raise funds for real home move-in kits for homeless individuals in your community.

The @home team created a prototype of the game at POV’s Hackathon last month, and produced a video documenting the experience. Watch to see a walkthrough of this innovative smartphone game: http://bit.ly/13mTuWa

And support this project’s current crowdfunding campaign here: http://igg.me/at/athome

• ·         Hear how board service helps you develop leadership skills.
• ·         Learn what to ask before joining a board of directors.
• ·         Find tools to help you excel at board service.
• ·         Mingle with hundreds of business and community leaders.

When: Thursday, June 6, 2013, 6-8:45 PM
Where: Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in downtown Austin
Register: $35, includes a catered reception. http://greenlights.org/training-events/board-summit

You coming?

1. Compensation is more important than ever.

A Greenlights survey found that among Central Texas nonprofit employees, a third of respondents were unsatisfied with salary and 77% indicated a higher salary would increase their likelihood of remaining in the sector.  A major factor driving the importance of compensation is the professionalization of the sector.  Many young professionals view nonprofit work as a career path and have pursued advanced degrees to develop their skills.  They expect to be compensated fairly and also have student loans to pay off.

2. Competition for talent will only increase.

Greenlights’ found that 80% of young professionals age 35 and under anticipate staying in their current job for no more than four years.  In addition, the majority of Central Texas nonprofit professionals in almost every age group have been in their current position less than 2 years.  All of this job hopping means nonprofits will have to think creatively about how to retain quality staff.  Survey respondents identified factors that will increase the likelihood of a longer career in the sector including increased compensation (see trend #1), increased benefits, professional development opportunities, manageable workloads, and schedule flexibility.

3. Technology is a major factor in blurring the boundaries between personal and professional life.

The youngest generation in the workforce today, the Millennials, have grown up in an age of instant access to information.  Because of this, they often view work and leisure as one and the same and are more likely than Baby Boomers and Gen Xers to be “hyperconnected,” always attached to their jobs and the web regardless of location.   Technology has also made it possible for employees of all generations to shift where they work.  As a result, more organizations are establishing flexplace policies which give staff greater autonomy in where they work, whether that’s from home, at a coffee shop, or other public meeting space.

Thanks for their help in pulling together the top three trend. So what do you think? Sound off in the comments. And for more trends and recommendations for how nonprofit organizations and employees can respond to these sector-wide changes, check out the full report from Greenlights as a PDF.

This post summarizes the workshop/session I participated on at SXSW including the panel “Measuring Social Change and Media: Beyond BS.”

I had the honor of helping to design and participating on a two and half hour workshop on Digital and Social Media Measurement with Beth Kanter, her co-author KD Paine and social media nonprofit rock star Carie Lewis of the HSUS.  KD and Beth took frameworks from their book – the Data-Informed Nonprofit (Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly Assessment)  and 7 Steps of Measurement and then had Carie and I share how they have applied these to their organization’s measurement of digital and social media.  We had a range of participants at different levels (govt, for profit and nonprofit) and a room at SXSW with fixed seats or what Beth likes to call “University Lecture” style.  While this was a little at odds with an interactive format (people were often trapped in the middle of rows) we made it work.

If you are hungry for the content, check Slideshare from your house : ) Or check out these two curated collections of Tweets – one from me on Storify and the other from Beth Kanter.

What follows below are what Beth identified from our presentations as the “ah ha” moments of insight.

1.   Know What Success Is

This something that every panelist said multiple times. David J. Neff said that even small nonprofits can do this and recommended framework called OGST.   The conversation thread made me think of this excellent blog post by my two favorite nonprofit data geeks from DoSomething.  They shared the story of one of their YouTube videos getting 1.5 million views and asking was that success?  Well, the purpose of the video was to get teens to donate used sports equipment.  But then looked at the conversion rate for the video it was a zero!  KD Paine reminded us again that we become what we measure so choose wisely.

2.    Don’t Be A Zoombie Repeating the Mistakes of the Past

During the CWRF Assessment,   David J. Neff reflected on his nonprofit organization’s approach to sense-making of the data.   One of the challenges they have is that while they collect data, they don’t always look at it and as a result they repeat mistakes. He pointed out that this happens with his organizations because it is a very small organization, grassroots with just a few volunteers running it.  They have now made a focused effort to divide being charge of certain areas and to regularly communicate and look at their data.

3. Getting All Departments To Become Data Informed – Make It Fun

Carie Lewis shared a story about how having source codes for all their campaigns was essential to measuring all their campaigns, but it was hard to get the web team to buy into source coding. It was a change in their daily routines of publishing content: now they had to get a source code for each hyperlink they inserted. They did it for one campaign and when they saw the results, they were really excited. They felt accomplished. That was what it took to get them to accept. They created a “source jar” where if someone did the sourcing convention wrong (lazy) you had to put a quarter in the source jar. When they got enough money, they would all go out for ice cream. They haven’t gotten enough money yet!

4. Some Ways To Visual Your Data

KD Paine shared many, many insights . Including you have your data and you are looking at it, what are some ways to visualize it to get insights? KD says don’t use pie charts, plot your data over time. She also said that sorting and organizing your data in different ways can lead to seeing patterns. “Look across rows versus columns, for example.”   She also advised us to use manual tracking for sentiment analysis because computers do not do nuance very well. At least not yet.

1) Number of Nonprofits
Austin’s unusually high number of nonprofits increases competition for the limited amount of available funding and resources. Also, many organizations are duplicating existing services, exacerbating competition and weakening collaboration. The sheer number of organizations is overwhelming for citizens who utilize services and potential volunteers, making it difficult to identify the missions and services offered by each nonprofit.

2) Funding
Many nonprofits feel that the current structure of grant funding is not sustainable and biased to new and small nonprofits. Such bias creates additional struggle for established organizations to maintain services. As previously mentioned, this perpetuates the creation of nonprofits, competition, and inefficiency. Additionally, Austin’s individual and corporate giving falls short of what is expected, and engaging large donors and corporations may fill significant portions of the funding gap.

3) Poverty
Austin’s increasing poverty rate and the growing physical gap between rich and poor are crucial problems. The lack of affordable housing in central Austin pushes those living in poverty further into more suburban and rural areas with less access to services. Wealth disparity in the city is vast and a lack of awareness of, even apathy toward, the economic gap is common. These conditions show that systemic inequality and discrimination continue to create barriers to economic mobility and reinforce poverty.

Those should be pretty easy for us to solve, right? More to come as we tackle some of the strategies and tactics below those issues in upcoming meetings.

To amplify the in-person conversations that will happen at the Lounge, they are pushing the #sxgood hashtag as the central source for social good tech news coming out of SXSWi. The Beacon Lounge is the obvious home for such a “social good stream” of curated thoughts, tools, tips, and campaigns happening online that can make a difference offline. We hope you’ll participate by using #sxgood on Twitter, but the #sxgood hashtag should also work well to aggregate content on Instagram, Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest.

Questions? Suggestions? You smarties surely have some good ideas to contribute. Talk to me, or ping Lawrence Grodeska (lawrence@change.org) or Eve Simon (eve.simon@beaconfire.com) and let us know!