While it was a very brief (3 question) non-scientific survey, it offers some insight into membership trends for the coming year. 

Survey Results:

Top 3 Priorities for Membership Organizations in 2012:

I don't think you'll be surprised by the #1 and #2 top priorities, but the third spot wasn't as clear - with two different priorities in a tie and another item on the priority list also ranking very high:

1. Increasing membership or supporters
2. Improving member or supporter engagement
3. Enhancing technological capabilities / Raising awareness or profile

"Finding new sources of revenue" also ranked very high as a priority.

In addition, the following were also noted as key priorities this year:

• Promoting/providing value to members
• Streamlining governance

Top 3 Challenges Facing Membership Organizations in 2012:

The top ranking challenges – understandably – mirror the top three priorities noted above:

1. Growing membership/donor base
2. Finding ways of increasing member/supporter engagement
3. Retaining members or supporters

One additional "key challenge" added by a respondent was:

• Shedding entrenched but non-productive programs and services

The Top 3 Most Exciting Trends for 2012:

It was interesting to see that the top two “most exciting trends” for the membership organizations who responded to the survey involved innovation around programs and services and new technology. And there was a tie in terms of the third trend:

1. Innovation – new programs & services
2. Taking advantage of new technologies
3. Increased member or supporter interaction via social media / Growth – expanded membership/supporters

 An additional exciting trend suggested by a survey respondent was:

• Service delivery expectations from younger, tech-savvy members

State of Membership for 2012:

When we asked respondents to “have their say” and offer a “general comment on the state of membership for 2012” here is what we heard:

• I see positive trends after some plateaus in our recent economic downtime
• Don’t focus on trivia such as social media. Focus on the changing expectations and priorities of the new member.  Social media is only a small part of an increased interactive communications program, a streamlined and efficient governance and a performance demand on organizations.
• The trend is away from traditional models (of governance, volunteer, membership and chapter/component structure) so I hope we can predict that 2012 will generate some worthy alternatives.

What are the key takeaways?

For most of us, the survey merely confirmed both the top priorities and challenges for membership organizations: increasing membership/support, growing engagement and raising awareness. But I think it is the #3 Priority (also echoed as the #2 most exciting trend) – enhancing technological capabilities – that is most illuminating. In order to increase membership, improve engagement and retain members or supporters, organizations are recognizing the need to find innovative ways of reaching, serving, representing their members and leading their sector. At the same time, or perhaps in concert, they need to embrace or take advantage of new technologies.

Even though we all accept that 2012 will continue to be an economically challenging year, it shouldn’t keep membership organizations from finding innovative solutions to help them thrive and grow. And as we noted in our Membership Dream post, finding innovative approaches and embracing new technologies doesn’t have to cost a lot, but both can stimulate exciting new trends for membership organizations.

In a recent Huffington Post piece – Looking Ahead: How We Can Make 2012 the Year of the Nonprofit,  Earl Martin Phalen suggests some ideas for making “this year different than the last few.” And his first suggestion is to “launch innovative projects” to engage and excite donors (or members). Phalen suggests that to make this year different, we “can’t rely on the standard approaches” but need to “think outside of the box,” citing an example of an idea that was the “brainchild of a 13-year-old Boston boy” which has been successful in moving and inspiring many and raising the organization’s profile.

What do you think?  Are these the top priorities, challenges and trends you are seeing at your membership organization for the coming year?  Let us know in the comments below.

This last blog in the Net2 2012 Look Ahead blog series focuses on the mobile world, and how it is revolutionizing the way we think about social change. I talked it through with Dale Zak, a mobile software developer passionate about helping people in need.

Over the past three years, Dale has contributed to Ushahidi's crowdsourced crisis mapping platform, helped The Extraordinaries build their micro-volunteer system as well as developed open source plugins for FrontlineSMS. He also coordinated several social good initiatives including organizing Mobile Tech 4 Social Change conference in Halifax, formed Apps4Good to bring together software developers to build apps for charity, established Repurposed Labs to re-purpose used computers into public internet terminals for low income communities, and deployed I Vote Because map to spark a pro-democracy movement why voting is important in Canada. This past December Dale travelled to Lusaka to teach Zambia’s first mobile development workshop at the BongoHive.

Dale’s interests and experience intersect with these of NetSquared on many levels -- the technology one, the social change one, as well as the international reach one. Dale has lived and traveled to different countries; he understands the diversity of social problems, and has worked his way through global projects. 

Read this short interview with Dale to learn more about how mobiles can change the world, and what they will be changing in the technology world in 2012. 

I also strongly encourage you to check out Dale’s blog, especially the articles on Building Technology vs. Solving Problems and Harnessing The Power Of Mobile, as well as the blog post from the iHub Nairobiin which he shares his thoughts on mobile design.

Q: What would be your favourite mobile “apps for good” examples?

To understand the true power of mobile, one must appreciate the full spectrum of device capabilities. Even low-end devices with basic SMS, MMS and USSD can be a powerful platform for collaboration. On the high-end side, smartphones with accelerators, touch screens, NFC, GPS capabilities can be an incredibly powerful suite of tools. My favorite mobile apps are the ones that combine these individual device features in an unique way to help solve a problem.

One of my favorites is Safety Siren, an iPhone and Blackberry app developed by YWCA Canada that turns your smartphone into an emergency SOS system. Shaking the device or touching the safety button activates a loud siren which automatically shares your location with an emergency contact. The brilliance behind the app comes by combining the touch-screen, accelerometer, audio, GPS and internet capabilities into an emergency SOS system helping protect the user in an unsafe situation.

M-Farm is another one of my favorites, SMS-based solution that helps empower farmers with accurate market information. The tool utilizes SMS as a platform allowing any SMS-capable phone to obtain accurate market prices. For example, a farmer in Kenya can simply send a text message ‘price tomatoes nairobi' to 3535 and receive the suggested market price. M-Farm is a great example of using an appropriate technology and that even the low-end devices can be a powerful tool for collaboration.

Another one of my favorites is Good Guide, a mobile app that helps empower consumers to buy safe, healthy, and green products. The app utilizes the devices camera as a barcode scanner to provide ratings and personal recommendations for over 120,000 products. Good Guide is a great example of mobile being used a decision making tool, providing valuable information on the demand.

Q: You have worked in many places and environments -- how would you say that social innovation in North American and Europe differ from the one developed Africa?

Last summer I spent four months living in Nairobi and working from the iHub. While there, I noticed a sharp contrast to North America where developers are ‘building technology’ rather than ‘solving problems’. At home, companies are focusing on creating another social network, building another photo sharing app or developing another groupon clone, none of which are solving real problems. In Nairobi, most developers were trying to solve local problems, and in the process finding creative ways to make money. A good example was Pivot25, a mobile development competition in Nairobi where every startup at the event pitched an innovation solution that was aiming at solving a local problem.

There was a great article in The Next Web on The Problem With Silicon Valley Is Itself which really highlighted this issue, “one of the reasons for lack of innovation in the Valley is that entrepreneurs are not exposed to enough real-world problems.” Innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines by identifying a real problem, defining a practical solution, finding an appropriate technology and targeting a local market. Software by itself isn’t very interesting, but applying that technology is where real innovation happens.

A good example is here in Saskatchewan where we have an agriculture based economy, one of the best agriculture colleges in the country and a strong tech community. My question is, why isn’t Saskatchewan a world leader in agriculture software? I believe, one of the reasons is that developers are not having a conversation with farmers about the challenges they are facing. We are missing a huge opportunity because we are focusing on building technology without asking what problem we are trying to solve.

Q: What do you think will 2012 bring into the mobile driven world of social efforts?

We are going to continue to see explosion in mobile driven by the ‘perfect storm’ of connectivity, availability, speed, power, features, and price. The processing power and capabilities of devices and network coverage and data transfer speeds to these devices is continuing to increase, while the overall cost of handsets is decreasing.

A good example is Huawei's IDEOS Android phone which sells for 8000KSH (~$80USD), saw massive adoption in Kenya this year. The upcoming release of the Datawind’s $35 tablet and OLPC $100 XO-3will lead to an explosion of tablet devices for the bottom of the pyramid. The trend of faster devices in the hands of more people with increased connectivity will also drive demand for more mobile apps. This creates new opportunities for developers to build innovative tools for this emerging market. We will also see more initiatives like Orange providing Wikipedia free in the Middle East and Africa. The smartphone and mobile apps will begin to challenge SMS as the appropriate technology for the bottom of the pyramid, many already predicting the decline of SMS as a result.

Q: What are the challenges that mobiles will have to face in order to solve even more social problems?

Accessibility is one challenge often overlooked, how can we develop solutions that are accessible to all groups of society? 

In December I had an opportunity to meet with Hendrik Knoche, a professor from EPFL in Lausanne specializing in accessible mobile interface design. Hendrik is developing a mobile application for illiterate farmers in India and also helped create EasySMS which empowers illiterate people to read, compose and send text messages through text-to-speech. The question he posed to me was, how do you design a mobile app for a person who can not read? Our conversation really challenged my notions on mobile design, and exposed a lot of misconceptions on design strategy. 

Multilingual is another aspect of accessibly often overlooked. So many mobile applications are English-only, making them useless for non-English speakers. Translating apps to other languages as well as local dialects will need to become the norm, rather than the exception. As mobile expands into more aspects of our lives, it is important that we strive to ensure the tools we develop are accessible to all, especially vulnerable populations whom can often benefit the most.

This morning I have the good fortune to be presenting to a sold-out crowd at the Social Media for Nonprofits Conference in NYC. I’m excited – I think it will be the largest audience I’ve presented to and the company I’m in is nothing shy of spectacular.

While I know we’d all love to be hanging out in NYC together, unfortunately it’s just not feasible. As what I hope is the next best thing, I’m sharing the content from a few of my slides for today and a some notes on them.

There’s a frequent misconception about social marketing that if you say something, anything, you are being proactive. Not so my friends! Celebrities, athletes, mere mortals like you and I say stuff on social networks all the time but that doesn’t mean it’s truly proactive. Did we think about it for more than 10 seconds before writing it? Probably not. We’re probably just posting about how delicious that QuickFire on Top Chef looks.

To be really and truly proactive with you social marketing, you need goals, a plan and the tools to do it.

• Goals: Are you trying to increase awareness? Or are you trying to engage new donors? Knowing your end goal, one that supports your overall business plan, is the first step to strategic proactive marketing. Bonus tip: Have a SMART goal.
• Plan: This goes hand-in-hand with your goal. Consider your timeframe and other channels that include complementary content. Create a comprehensive, integrated plan that includes all your channels, milestones and desired results. Remember to plan far enough in advance that web pages, graphics, print materials, etc can actually be produced to support your initiative.
• Tools: Just like direct mail requires paper and postage, good social marketing has its own requirements. Google Analytics, custom Facebook landing pages, updated Twitter and YouTube backgrounds and a social media management tool can all contribute to your success and ability to measure that success.

For more social media goodness, follow #sm4np on Twitter today, check out Convio's social media resource page or explore our social media related Connection Cafe posts.

hjc is pleased to announce a new media service for our clients: On the Move. We have partnered with The Hollywood Minute to provide charitable spots on Canada Coach’s twenty-minute on-board programming segments, on their 250+ buses. These segments are silent and are mostly filled by The Hollywood Minute’s content, and run once each hour.

Within the twenty-minute programs there is an opportunity for non-profits to have inventive, short programs that will encourage viewers to use mobile technologies to contact you for more information, to sign-up, or to give.

The service represents an opportunity to reach – via mobile advocacy & acquisition – the student and cost-conscious business traveler demographic.

The prospect of these pieces running on Canada Coach is appealing, since they reach some 900,000 passengers per month, on both the standard Canada Coach runs, as well as the inter-city Megabus routes between Toronto and Montreal.

For more information, send a note to us on our Contact Us page, or call the Toronto office at (416) 588-7780 ext. 0.

Remember last September when Facebook announced all those changes to individual profiles, including the timeline?    One of the changes  was that your friends and fans can do more than “Like” or “Comment”  on Facebook. Three new actions were announced at the time, including:  Read, Watch, Listen to  help people better understand what their friends are doing online.     Facebook called it the “Open Graph” and the pr people called “A revolution to the whole meaning of listening to music together or family T.V.”   You can read more about how it works from the Facebook developer notes.

You can install an app on your Facebook profile that shares an action and it goes out on your newsfeed and is shared with your friends.   In the example above, the cooking app lets a Facebook user share what they “cooked” with their friends.

Recently, some apps have been using the OpenGraph in innovate ways.   The one that caught my eye was the approach used by Ticketmaster.  They are mashing up apps,  figuring out what music you listen to on Spotify and offering up tickets that might be of interest. This is both interesting but a little scary to me.    I asked folks on my Facebook brand page what they thought.  My colleague, Devon Smith, pointed to a cool application called “Art Finder” that helps people discover their friends’ interests in fine arts.

The Open Graph and apps are becoming more and more critical for marketers given the Facebook changes.   Here’s a description from Social Media Examiner:

Last year, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, allowing brands to connect to a user’s Facebook social graph. This year, it rolled out significant changes, allowing app developers to create custom actions using any verb and object related to the activity taking place on the app.

These so-called “lightweight” activities can be defined by the app creator and pushed throughout the Facebook experience.

Here are the highlights, and how the actions affect Timeline:

• The Open Graph integrates with the News Feed, Ticker and Timeline, making the app a key part of users’ and their friends’ Facebook experiences.
• As users engage, the custom action appears on Facebook News Feed, and remains on the user’s Timeline; e.g., Jane cooked a recipe from Best Recipes app.

Changes to the structure of permissions allow a user to give permission one timefor an app to post about that user’s activity on the app thereafter.

This is how you’re seeing so many more postings about what your friends are listening to, for example, if they’re using a social sharing music app like Spotify. It even gets its own designated spot in the Timeline and displays a running list of what the user is listening to.

Debra Askanase has a post about Facebook Timeline Apps and profiles three fundraising vendors that have developed timeline apps.   Debra says the benefits to nonprofits are:

Timeline apps afford an opportunity for nonprofits to promote causes, activities and mission. I can envision apps that promote online campaigns, encourage people to interact with the organization in a certain way, encourage specific actions, track activity, and/or to raise brand awareness. A few ideas:

• Support the nonprofit: “Jerry supports the Canadian Red Cross”
• Activism: “Debra signed a petition to stop fracking” or “Eliana contacted a brand to ask about its slavery footprint via Slavery Footprint”
• Play a game: “Adam has donated 2,173 grains of rice to the UN to date via Free Rice”
• Donate: “Kylie has started a virtual food drive with Feeding America”
• Support a campaign: “David is growing a mustache for Movember”

In my opinion, I think the greatest Timeline app benefit is in the information the nonprofit will gain about app users, and how committed a supporter is to the cause. Installing an app is a deeper commitment than passively Liking a Page, or joining conversation on a Facebook Page. App users should be the organization’s most committed online supporters.

When an app is installed, the developer knows a supporters’ email address, other Likes, and how the user is engaging with the application. Ultimately, the app both gathers supporter information that isn’t available from people who Like a Page, and spreads awareness about the organization/campaign/cause through the ticker.

I caught up with Matt Mahan from Causes for a quick interview about Causes use of the new timeline apps based on the Facebook Open Graph:

1.     Can you explain “Open Graph” for non-geeks and why it isimportant?  How would someone at a nonprofit explain to their seniormanagement or board?

Open Graph is a way of connecting any website to Facebook so that people using that website can opt-in to automatically share what they are doing in real time—listening to music, reading articles, shopping, supporting nonprofits, etc.—with their Facebook friends. If this tool becomes standard across the Internet, which I think it will, it will dramatically increase peer-to-peer sharing of social information, making it easier for people to discover what their friends are doing. Nonprofits, especially smaller ones, stand to benefit from these changes because they will reap the equivalent of free advertising as people engage with them online. Because most nonprofits cannot afford significant marketing budgets, their online “mindshare” is low relative to the degree to which people care about them (vis-à-vis companies and other organizations with greater marketing heft). All in all, Open Graph should help nonprofits become a larger part of the mass scale conversation taking place on Facebook every day.

2.    How has Causes integrated the Open Graph on Facebook?

Causes.com has hooked into Facebook’s Open Graph with a number of action types that will allow people to publish their social good accomplishments to Timeline and their friends’ news feed. These action types include: join, pledge, answer, sign, give and a range of other actions people can take to help their favorite nonprofits. As people take these actions they will be translated into Timeline stories that expose their friends to great organizations and timely action campaigns.

3.    What is the value or benefit to nonprofit users of Causes?

Open Graph is particularly exciting for those of us in the social good space because awareness-raising and advocacy are often core to the work we do. You can listen to a song and enjoy it all by yourself, but social change always requires collective action. Nonprofits and their supporters now have a much more powerful tool for spreading a message, via what is essentially digital-word-of-mouth, quickly and cheaply.

4.    What does this look like to potential users?

For potential users the change is minimal. We’ll ask our users to opt in to share the action they are taking on Causes.com with their Facebook friends. We believe that altruism is social and social change requires collective action, but we also respect that not everyone wants to share their cause with others.

5.    What do nonprofits need to do in terms of strategy and tactics to make it work for them?

The short answer is, invest in your grassroots organizing capacity. Over the next couple of weeks Causes.com is releasing a number of new “action campaigns”, including pledges, polls, quizzes, petitions and so forth, that will make it easy and free for even the smallest nonprofits and independent activists to publish great action campaigns, track action-taking, and translate loose online support into coordinated action. I think this is a particularly exciting opportunity for organizations that see awareness-raising and advocacy as core objectives in the coming year. We’re one of the only websites in the world to have fully integrated with Open Graph, so we recommend using Causes.com as a campaign hub for engaging various online audiences (Facebook, Twitter, website, email list, Causes) in deeper action-taking.

6.    How should they think about measurement of successful strategy?

Overall, the measure of success is how many people you can move to take action and how valuable that action ultimately ends up being for your organization or the population you serve. On Causes.com, our top-level metric of success is the amount of action we help our nonprofit partners generate from their supporters. We trust that those nonprofits are in the best position to determine how to best direct action-taking for real-world impact, whether it’s fundraising, awareness-raising, or advocacy action they are generating. Our goal is to build the world’s best platform for collection action-taking, so we measure (and will soon be able to share with our partners right on their causes) conversion rates from top-down promotion of campaigns via email and Facebook, on-site action-taking, and post-action peer-to-peer sharing, or what is often called “virality”. In a few months, nonprofits will be able to do this kind of measurement right on Causes.com at no cost, and those with larger tech teams will be able to do similar tracking on their own websites. Eventually we plan to power this kind of measurement and data analysis no matter where you run your campaigns.

7.    What are the best how-tos, resources for nonprofits to get started on this?

Definitive best practices are still emerging. We put together a quick overview on the Causes blog for our users, focused on what Open Graph means for their Facebook experience: . Our support team here at Causes is happy to answer questions related to our integration with Open Graph

Is your nonprofit or have you seen a nonprofit using the Facebook’s Open Graph in a creative and effective way?     What are your questions about leveraging Facebook’s Open Graph?

For example: Looking to sign up for more information about your favorite nonprofit? You need to provide an email address to sign up for their enewsletter. Looking to purchase an item on the web? You usually need an email address to check out and buy the item. Looking to make a donation? You need to provide an email address. Want to send a document to a colleague; chances are you are going to email it at some point unless everyone who you do business with is on Dropbox or Google Docs (which by the way you also need an email address to sign up for).

Email continues to grow and to be the dominant communications tool. And despite what Zuckerberg and some others think, email is not dying because social media is taking over. Both channels are important and should be a part an integrated communications strategy to reach activists and donors.

"Social media is a great additional engagement channel, but we find the level of commitment and responsiveness much stronger in email.  Email is still king in the demographic groups that are most likely to become donors," said Joe Baker, Vice President of Causes and Advocacy for Care2, a social action network which serves more than 700 nonprofit clients, across the spectrum of cause verticals.

Check out these email stats:

There are an estimated 2.9 billion email addresses.  In comparison there are 750 million Facebook accounts and 300 million Twitter accounts.

By 2014 there will be over 3.8 billion email accounts.

188 billion emails are sent daily, though granted a portion of those are spam. Over on Facebook, 60 million Facebook updates are made and 140 million tweets are sent through Twitter (and many of those could be considered spam too!).

**Learn more about improving your emails by downloading our free white paper, 12 Best Practices for Email Marketing.

Any conversation about the future of web design has to come to terms with a fundamental and rapid shift in the way we view the web. By 2014, mobile Internet usage will surpass desktop usage. And from desktops and laptops to smart phones and tablets of differing sizes and resolutions, viewing device options are also growing at an increasingly steady rate.

For web designers and developers, it simply won’t work to build websites for just one or two types of devices, and the days of checking your site in a few web browsers and launching are long gone.

So how are web designers, developers, and content strategists addressing this fundamental shift? Well, some pretty cool things are happening in the world of responsive web design that provide answers.

Responsive Web Design is the use of CSS techniques, design principles such as fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to deliver the best possible viewing experience (without compromising the quality of content) to users no matter how large (or small) their display.

(Image source: Brain Traffic blog)

Certainly read Ethan Mariotte’s seminal article and book on responsive design to learn more about these techniques and principles … or if you are like me, start by checking out some web eye candy first!

WARNING: I have yet to tire of finding and playing with new responsive design websites.

Here are a few of my favorites. Re-size your browser to see responsive design in action:

• Responsive Design, Responsively Illustrated - Interactive illustration using the same basic HTML which adapts its appearance to the changing viewport size, representing different devices accordingly.
• The Seminal Responsive Design Example - Related to his article mentioned above, Ethan Mariotte created this web page as an example to show how responsive design can optimize presentation across a range of displays.
• The Boston Globe - Great example for those who have a lot of content and news article type content on their website.
• CONFAB - The Content Strategy Conference website designed by Sean Turbidy using responsive design principles, while keeping content consumption in mind.
• Mr. Simon Collision - I love this website’s clean, responsive design and the use of simple graphics to spruce up otherwise mundane links.
• Responsive Design Test - Curious how your own website responds to different devices? Check out this nifty little tool by Matt Kersley.

Want more? Don’t say I didn’t warn you! Here is the full list of responsive design examples over at Media Query. Check them out and rate your favorites.

Design is Key, Content is King

The shift we are seeing is not JUST about web design and development. People visit websites for content, not for design, although the design is key in how it facilitates (or doesn’t) content consumption. The future of web design and the future of content curation and consumption cannot be “viewed” separately.

As the web evolves, designers and content experts will need to work closely together so that designers are not making decisions about content strategy and content experts move towards producing the type of content that truly takes advantage of the web’s universality and ever-increasing speed. Read more on content strategy and responsive web design.

Looking Ahead

While contemporary web design may have overcome some of the legacy limitations of its static print design roots, embracing the web as its own medium is still a new and exciting area and one to keep a close eye on in 2012 and beyond. And if the web is to truly shine as it’s own medium, responsive design is a great candidate to take it to its next destination.

How will your website fare in the future of the web? Will it respond gracefully to different resolutions and according to the device the user is viewing it in? Will it easily give the visitor the content they want from wherever they want it?

Additional Resources and Links:

• Responsive Web Design (Book)
• Multi-Device Web Design: An Evolution

The TechSoup Digital Storytelling Challenge, powered by Lights. Camera. Help., provides training, resources, and inspiration to create and tell a compelling story. During the one-month challenge TechSoup will host a series of interactive trainings designed to help nonprofits produce a one-minute video or five-picture Flickr slideshow.

Don't Miss Our First Two Learning Sessions!

Tuesday, January 31, 11:00 a.m. Pacific time
Join us for a tweet chat on the topic of mobile storytelling

Mobile Storytelling Tweet Chat - Learn More!

Thursday, February 2, 11:00 a.m. Pacific time
Join us for a webinar on the topic of pre-production

Before You Push Record Webinar - Sign Up Now!

Read all about the challenge, see the full schedule of events, and check out all the terrific prizes!

Image: dancetechtv