I’m in the session at SXSW Interactive “Will Kiva Kill Your Nonprofit? Donations 2.0″ panel discussion, moderated by Michael Cervino of Beaconfire Consulting, capturing the discussion through live blogging.  In this discussion, each panelist offered his/her definition of “donation 2.0,” which I’ve highlighted in orange. The discussion centered around each nonprofit explaining how they have incorporated the “donations 2.0″ model into their platform, and the best type of design architecture. I’ve summarized my thoughts about the panel, and the backdoor twitter discussion at the end of this post.

Panelist Milo Sybrant (@milosybrant) is the online fundraising manager for Amnesty International. My definition of donations 2.0 =  the tactics and strategies NGOs are using in response to changing environment, especially these three trends: 1. Nonprofits don’t have the institutional monopoly on doing good. 2. Donors are more than ever shopping for impact. 3. Online donors have rising expectations about organizations’ transparency.

Amnesty International’s “America I Believe In” campaign highlighted our concerns about human rights to members of Congress. We put ads up in bus shelters around Capital Hill, and said we’d send the physical ads to all sponsors. Several people who sponsored the ads were actually student groups, who then sent us photos of them posing with the ads. What made it donations 2.0? Knowing that contributions would make a direct difference, the initial outcome was really tangible, we were really transparent, direct sponsors had a real relationship with it, and sending physical ads to sponsors incentivized the sponsors.

Panelist Katie Bisbee (@katiebisbee and @donorschoose) from DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose has about 15,000 classroom projects in schools that donors can choose from, and each project has a cost report and shows what actions that have been taken. The impact to date of donations, in total, is $49 million. My definition of donations 2.0 is from our model’s perspective: using the web as choice, accountability, and transparency. Why it’s donations 2.0: There is a direct connection between the donor and the individual or group that the are supporting. This is really “true philanthropy,” as there is a direct connection between the donor and the recipient (peer to peer) and there is a feedback loop that goes back to the donor.

Panelist Ruth-Anne Renaud, Vice President of Philanthropy at OptINnow.org (@rarenaud and @optinnow). Opportunity International has been in microfinance, internationally, for almost 40 years. We provide loans to entrepreneurs, but also savings, insurance and insurance programs. It is an end-to-end full-service microfinance provider.

OptINnow was launched over a year ago to help people contribute directly. Our definition of donations 2.0: Providing a connection for donors to beneficiaries through timely stories, photos and video in order to create a more relevant and tangible giving experience. Why it’s donations 2.0: OptINnow gives donors the ability to choose an individual (by country, by industry) to be be able to fuel their business’ growth. Through the website, you can see how the donation impacts the entrepreneur specifically. OptINnow platform also shows the entire range of impact on lives. OptINnow also allows donors to pass on a gift card to empower an entrepreneur. There is a new (as of this week) OptINnow feature: the individual platform for individual pages to track individual fundraising.

Panelist Skylar Woodward (@skylar and @kiva): in charge of launching Kiva’s API. (The API application programming interface allows two computers to talk.) The Kiva API allows Kiva to talk to other computers and apps. Our definition of donations 2.0: Decentralizing from a donor-charity system to a person-need model. It is facilitated by technology and a general cultural shift to interact in social communities (digital or physical) It prioritizes the needs of the community.

Why it’s donations 2.0: Kiva.org puts all of the donation needs out there and donors choose. It prioritizes the community needs, and is extremely transparent. You loan the money, the loan goes out into your profile, and you see the progress of the loans being paid back monthly. You can then relend the money again.

Michael: How do you manage the quality of the applicants to make sure the needs are valid?

Katie: We verify that the teacher is a public school teacher before they can post. Once a project has been posted, we screen it and verify it to make sure that what is in the shopping cart is what they are asking for. Our staff reads every classroom project to make sure it is compelling and gives feedback to the teachers as to how to make it more compelling.

Skylar: Kiva works with a microfinance institution and we spend a lot of time vetting our microfinance institutional partners to make sure we can trust them. This includes a 2-month evaluation pilot period, and then we look at how they respond to posts, etc. There is a growing phase of trust. we work with 110 partners right now. After the partners have gained our trust, we are more hands-off.

Ruth-Anne: We are a fundraising organization and we deliver funds to our partners in-country. We are end-to-end. We have staff in other countries as well. Our loan officers are responsible for building relationships, gathering reports, and feeding that back into the banking system and reporting. Kiva is an aggregator, and we are end-to-end and within our own organization. Complimentary models are a good thing.

Michael: User experience – tell me about it and how you built the system.

Ruth-Anne: Our system is completely custom-built. We were the first to use Facebook Connect to make it as easy as possible for people to use the platform. Katie: Our system was entirely custom-built, also. And for improvements, we have an email distribution list on donorschoose.org called “new feature list” and ask people to just send a new feature idea to us. Skylar: We built our system entirely from scratch. We are very tech-centric. The CEO wanted to built a new social network within two weeks and made it happen within 48 hours and created “Kiva social networking.” Now, this defines us, and loans are public and people are social. With the Kiva API, we have a whole other codeland that is exterior to us for anyone to play with.

Michael: Is it possible to build a donation system with a classic donation system that can be modified?

DonorsChoose (answered by the systems architect): I don’t think you can do this without building a custom system. We put a lot of effort into thinking about the donation relationship and the whole life cycle first and then build the technology to support that. Skylar: By using a framework with an existing code, you’re locked into the code that is already out there. I don’t advise choosing an existing content management system and building a product off of it because it’s not the experience that you want – you want to really include the user experience and customize. Ruth Ann: There is a lot of value in having coding expertise in-house to gain efficiency as you scale, become more responsive to user-feedback, etc.

Michael: Whatever you do needs to be transparent, authentic, and focused on the culture of your stakeholders with messaging. You have to be authentic so you won’t lose numbers.

Editorial summary:

There seems to be general agreement that “Donations 2.0″ means direct connection between the donor (and donor’s needs) and the funder. Each platform enables choice, transparency, efficacy, and authenticity, and prioritizes the needs of the community. System architecture of the donation platform has to be unique and custom-built to meet the needs of the donors, the recipients, and the organization and pre-fab platforms won’t serve these needs.

The back-channel hashtag on twitter, #donate2, generated a secondary discussion about whether these platforms are controlling the clients’ stories for the organizations’ benefits (asked by @aspenbaker) and how do we allow clients to have more voice (credit to @skylar for asking that last part). Myself and @nolandhoshino think donations 2.0 is more about mobile-based fundrasing and widgets as secondary platforms. @skylar says “disagree! ‘2.0′ model will evolve to mobile. One day, Bump-a-Loan via @kiva to an entrep in your ‘hood.”

I think Kiva’s API is the future and really embraces donations 2.0 in philosophy: it gives donors more control and choice (you don’t like something about the platform, add to it!) and crowdsources the best innovations for the platforms that will provide the best services to funders and recipients (you want a new feature, then create it and see which add-ons the stakeholders most utilize). The API also gives a feedback loop to Kiva – pointing out where the stakeholders want added features. I also give kudos to Kiva for relinquishing control over the platform and allowing users to own more of it through the API.

Further resources and discussion:

Skylar Woodward’s blog post: Panel-Picking Killer Tweet of Your Fundraising Can Haz Non-Profit Electrodance

Twitter hashtage: #donate2

I’m live blogging as Mark Horvath (better known on Twitter as @hardlynormal) interviews Beth Kanter for the Hardly Normal Cup of Coffee What Gives interview series at The Beacon Lounge. WhatGives is sponsoring the Hardly Normal interview series. I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting in orange what I think are the important concepts (and great quotes) of the interview. Here is the interview, live blogged:

Mark: Beth, you talked about crowdsourcing yesterday at your panel. Then, you mentioned that you raised money for Cambodia through crowdsourcing. Tell me more about this.

Beth: In fundraising, it’s all about people. People don’t write checks to buildings or programs, they give to other people. Alongside any kind of online fundraising, I went and solicited people at the party last night for the refresh Pepsi challenge as well. Three years ago there was a Boston meetup and I was raising money to send a kid to college in Cambodia, so I copied off some cards about the cause and handed them out. I met Chris Brogan, and he then tweeted the cause and the idea of giving $10 to help. Influence marketing is also important.

Mark: In the nonprofit world, we forget that one on one interactions really count. Every moment is really a VIP moment.

Beth: Your donors are not ATM machines (credit to Peter Dietz, who said that first). This is about long-term relationships. Your first interaction should be to get to know people.

Tweeted at 11:19 CMT March 16

Mark: I usually ask people – “how can I help you?”

Beth: Exactly! When I met you first, I was on a trip down the California coast and met you for coffee. My family wanted to go to Disneyland, but we hadn’t bought the tickets and were figuring that out. You offered us two complimentary tickets. I was really touched by that gesture.

Mark: In the spirit, Beth sent a package of target gift cards in $25 increments to help families transitioning from shelters to housing. (Ed. note: Mark handed these out to the families.)

Mark: A lot of nonprofits want to keep control. But a lot of nonprofits want to keep control and crowdsourcing is hard for those types of nonprofits.What are your “dos, don’ts, and recommendations” for nonprofits and crowdsourcing?

Beth: It’s about relationships. People will respond back because of the relationship. We are talking abou crowdsouring people’s knowledge to get the information and give it back out. You have to build the relationships first in order to make it work.

Mark: You give great tips for social media, such as: start small, have goals, measure. How can I measure? How much time will it take?

Beth: Yes, social media takes time, but it doesn’t take all day. Yes, I could stay on twitter all day, but I don’t. Social media is unbounded, so you have to time-box it. I borrow my kids’ “time out” timer and put it near the computer for when I get on Twitter. I set the timer for 10 minutes and then I’m off Twitter.

First, you have to understand the workflow, then know what you want to do and how you want to use the medium. At certain points of the day, I’m better suited to doing tasks and I know when to do what types of tasks. I block out time blocks for different tasks, and when I can do them best during the day.

Mark: You have to discipline yourself, figure out when you work best.

Beth: I had the Covey Planner before the iPhone and it helped me to think about what’s urgent, not important but urgent, etc. Also keep in mind the “Big Rocks” of the week – what has to get done in terms of big tasks. I plan work in blocks of 1 to 1.5 hours in order to get things achieved. The things that make me a “Tasmanian Devil,” (Mark’s term, originally) I keep to small time frames.

Mark: I feel like I have to return emails right away, respond right away, etc.

Beth: When you feel that you’re having this urge, jot it down on a piece of paper first. I’ve set up buckets of things where I put those pieces of paper and retrieve them later. I get such a volume of email, that if I let it stay in email, then I will feel crazy. I block out time to triage and process email. Stuff around projects, I cut and paste into Google sites for each project. So, when it’s time to open up a Google Site and work on a project, it’s all on the Google doc. I prefer to go out of email to Google Docs or Wikis quickly.

Mark: This is the conversation we’ve been trying to have forever! Thanks so much, Beth!

I had the pleasure of presenting to the Israel Venture Network Fellows today about social media strategy, campaigns, and fundraising. I am really struck me how much of online fundraising comes down to a combination of social media basics plus community organizing principles. The slide show (below) captures why online campaigns are the social proof of these concepts.

Amy Sample Ward, Ivan Boothe, and myself created a slide show for the workshop that we’ll be giving at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. As part of the workshop Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns, we debated the essential elements of a good online campaign (fundraising or otherwise), the basic tenets of community organizing, and the nature of community organizing. We came up with five basic community organizing concepts. These concepts apply perfectly to any fundraising campaign. They are:

• movement-building
• power analysis
• community accountability (transparency)
• being where the stakeholders are
• leadership development

With any online fundraising campaign, your organization will be speaking about the project and asking others to influence their online ties to do the same. Take the basic principles of social media and continue to use them to raise funds: have shareable content and share utility, utilize the power of influence marketing and the power of weak ties, offer a great product/content, recognize people who give, and thank them profusely. Allow others to have the conversation about you publicly. (And use this opportunity to recruit new stakeholders to your social spaces.) Now mix that with community organizing and this is what you get:

• Link your fundraising project to the larger cause movement to give it emphasis and compelling context
• Power mapping: ID influencers, key donors, and how the donors will share and influence
  
• Develop online influencers and key online donors into organizational leaders
• Be where the people are: make sure that online activity within the campaign occurs where your stakeholders are
• Transparency means: broadcast as much about the campaign, on the campaign site and social media, as it happens

I think of this presentation as a starting point: what else would you consider the “fundamental principles” of social network fundraising? What have I missed? What have I mentioned that’s essential?

(Thanks to Amy Sample Ward for providing the screen shots of the Tweetsgiving campaign example in the slide show, below.)

Resources:

Epic Change (the folks who bring you Tweetsgiving)

How Social Media Can Engage New Donors – slideshare presentation by Steve Drake

Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns – presentation developed for the upcoming NTC workshop April 9, 2010

I’m live blogging a reputation management session at SphinnCon Israel. The moderator is Vannesa Fox (ninebyblue). The speakers are Shira Abel (Abel Communications), Sam Michaelson (Fiveblocks), Dan Gerstenfeld (Interteam), and Gil Reich (Answers.com).

Shira Abel: How to Control the Noise (and deal with a management reputation problem)

Look at rep management issue as an opportunity. Companies and individuals are often judged by how they handle the issue and control the noise. The Lower Merion school system installed webcams in the laptops of students, and people found out about it, and the news media went crazy.  What should they have done? Think about breaking the story themselves. Do something immediately after the story breaks – silence costs reputation and trust. They should have given out as much info as possible…but they didn’t. If there is more information and noise coming from one side, then that side will win in reputation.

Gil Reich: How to use Q and A sites to build your reputation

Engage others. Create value. Be memorable. Bring friends.

Example: Best Buy Metals. Owner joins Yahoo! Answers and give out useful info, then talks about himself, then gives more useful info. As long as you are contributing value, you can get some self-promotion out of it. Other Yahoo! Answers searchers will see the answer and get value from it. Yahoo! Answers are also searched by Google – turns out that his answer is ranked #2 for this specific question.

Another example: give a lot of good quality, targeted answers to build up reputation in a competitive market. One guy’s answers are ranked very high in shopping because he answered a lot of questions about a specific product niche.

Answers sites: Yahoo! Answers is largest ranked (43 mil), WikiAnswers, then Linkedin Answers (for whole site).

Q & A Sites: Community Q & A sites get about 100 million unique visitors/month from the US alone.There are both consumer and B2B sites, many sites allow multiple answers, some are wiki sites, some have questions open for days and best answers are selected (opportunity for more traffic if your answer is selected), and consider horizonal vs. niche answers sites. Niche sites are stackoverflow, wikianswers. Aardvark is another one. Yedda is an Israeli site.

How to become an answer god: Ask questions, answer questions with useful questions, interact and follow-up when you’ve answered or asked, don’t lose control and remember everything is listed by google…forever.

Quick ROI Analysis – answering questions at 7 mins per answer is a lower cost/conversion than cost/conversion on a successful PPC campaign. Over 90% of people who use business Q & A find it useful for business-survey results. (This is my favorite quote: “if there are A-listers in the industry you are stalking, then you can use Q & A to attract their attention.”)

Dan Gerstenfeld: 67% of top executives regard their company’s online reputation as vulnerable. How would you want your company to be presented in a crisis situation? Take control of the situation by putting info on it on your website: answer questions, give information (positive and negative), and the SERP results will reflect how you are proactively handling the issue.

How to be proactive? Define an overall PR and social media marketing strategy. Adopt a hands-on approach with good listening tools and handle all responses yourself. Be proactive. Network with others online. Create a place online that people know about, that people will know where to go to if a crisis breaks out. Optimize your content online.

Sam Michaelson: Reputation Management Pitfalls for the client and the service provider

Client pitfalls: biggest thing that clients do wrong is not being prepared in advance. Look at the names of people in the company  – and buy the domains of their names as well as the defensive use of the names (such as thispersonsucks.com). Own your own name! Make sure you own your own keywords and properties related to the top ten search results.

Another pitfall: Clients forget to use simple means when they are available, such as calling someone to take down the bad info if you know the person. Sometimes it’s that easy!

Service Provider Pitfalls: Really bad to optimize pages that have comments on them because you never know what the next comment will say. Optimizing pages that might change (news sites, wikipedia). Don’t forget to take control of the top ten sites…bad things may be coming.  Not setting clear expectations may be a problem – you will always get a client coming back after months thinking you’re giving them poor results. Not optimizing sites you build into top spots. Missing what the client really wants. Misunderstanding the perception of your role.

A few conclusions:

1. Have a reputation management plan and be proactive.

2. How you handle a reputation management issue affects how people see you in search engine results.

3. Think about a Q & A answers strategy to build your reputation AND rank for search engine results.

4. There are a lot of missed opportunities and pitfalls in brand management – avoid the big pitfalls.

I’m a SphinnCon Israel, a conference about SEO and search marketing, and live blogging the sessions. The first session is a moderated panel entitled SEO Fundamentals. The panelists are Eli Feldman (RankAbove), Menachem Rosenbaum (TENS Technology), Uri  Breitman (TBWA Digital), Itay Paz (Itaypaz.net), and moderated by Barry Schwartz (SearchEngineLand.com and RustyBrick). OK folks, this session may be a bit techy, but hopefully by capturing this information for you, you’ll gain some information about how to use search engine optimization to help your blog, website, cause and brand! Let the live blogging begin:

Eli Feldman: The old way of thinking about search engine results = above the fold on Google search results, and everyone will look “above the fold.” Now: there is “fully integrated universal results” and it takes up spot from the SERP. Live results are added. Videos are groups on first page. The big changes – get all types of results on the first page, options to search by types of search, and lots of different kinds of search options.

Major change for video is coming: Google has started grouping video results in the regular search results. You see them in packs of two or four on the page. If the video makes it to the front page, you’ll get better rank all the sudden because of this. It doesn’t matter if your video was ranked 89, because if Google shows it with a high-ranking video on the Google search page, your lower video’s rank is pulled up.

How to get video to come into the Google results and take advantage of the “packs:” utilize the video sitemap (like an XML sitemap), liste in sitemap index, include new tags (content, player, thumbnail location, categories, if family-friendly). If your URL is too long, it won’t show up in Google search – it must be less than 60 characters. Will only show up if it is family-friendly.

We are seeing Google show live results, latest news results, on search returns. You can go to trends.google.com and see the latest news trends/news results. If you are in a newsworthy area, your company may come up on the trends results.

Add content into this media, or around this media, as much as you can. Example: put up an image, add text to it with context and captions, tags, comments, translation. In YouTube video, you can add transcripts. For Flickr, you can add info about the type of camera used, and other meta data.

Rules for Video SEO: optimize every aspect of the video (title, description, tag), look at internal backlinks from you tube (comments/groups), external backlinks.

Itay Paz: SEO tips, tricks and fundamentals

Important to have good tags, of course. However, it’s all about content nowadays. Valuable content = traffic generation. Hard to trick search engines with lots of mediocre content. Site maps are critical: build as many site maps as you can – Google likes it. Write about trending topics and “hot” news, which will help bring traffic to your site and help you with rank. Google likes Wordpress – a lot, indexes it almost immediately. Use the SEO plugs inside WordPress for SEO – there are a lot of ones to choose from. Incoming links: have to have valuable links pointing to your website. Friendly URLs – keywords inside a URL is a good idea. Control outgoing links – think about the number of outgoing links and not having too many outgoing links. Be SOCIAL – if you put out a lot of content on networks, you’ll gather incoming links and traffic. Blogs give great traffic and links into the website.

Uri Breitman: Talking about keyword research – it’s important to do keyword research for everything, even to prepare to meet with an SEO team. Use the Google Keyword Tool and use it every day – it’s amazing. Then, go back and research using the keywords you found. Find new keywords in the search, then go back to the Keyword Tool, and it involves re-thinking and re-researching. Check the guys who are ranked above you because they know what they’re doing. Prioritize with what you should do with main keywords.

In order to figure out keywords, think about this: Who am I? What is my core business? What would I search for if I were going to search for my company? What would a client look for? Call clients! Ask clients how they found you, and how they found your competitors.

Google Keyword Tool is great. Using that, check the “broad match,” the “phrase match,” and the “exact match.” ALWAYS check the exact. Look at what the competition is doing, and the prices for top keywords in AdWords. Can be a good indication of what’s going on in the organic search field. Beware of keywords that attract a lot of competition, but don’t generate SALES.

Prioritize: most popular keywords, most suitable keywords. Go for regional keywords which may have best conversion. First-step keywords (the ones you thought about at the very first of your keyword search) may not have been the best keywords.

Finalize your list:  make a short list, have modest objectives, (don’t get into street fights over keywords!), it will take time to move your site up, prepare to make changes, and use web analytics for keyword traffic data so that you can monitor every small change, check rankings using 3rd party tool (not your own computer which will give you the wrong results!)

Menachem Rosenbaum: How to judge link building success? What happens if you are building links and you don’t see results? How to judge results quickly? Google webmaster tools is how Google sees your website on the internet. Look at the diagnostics crawl stats in webmaster tools for crawl information. If we want Google to crawl as many pages as possible. Each website has a www.yourwebsite.com and a yourwebsite.com URL. Make sure that you have a www.yourwebsite.com that redirects to the one with the www. in the beginning to get the most crawling of the site from Google. Bottom line: the more often Google comes back, the more authority you have. Lower crawl stats, or crawl stats not improving, it reflects in your ranking.

Takeaways:

1. Video search returns in Google can be a huge boost for your video. Optimize for a higher chance that will happen.

2. Social search within Google is huge, and will continue to grow.

3. Google Keyword Tool is great, and critical for your site. Use it as a guide.

4. Content is still king. Good incoming links are also incredibly valuable.

Two new data sets about the value of social media came across my laptop recently: Idealware’s “Using Social Media to Meet Nonprofit Goals” survey of nonprofit staffers using social media, and the State of Small Business report from Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service.

The results are so similar to the nonprofit survey results that the conclusion is hard to ignore: social media actually is an effective tool for customer retention and attraction.

Social media is actually perceived by those doing it to work! In particular, the top benefits are seen as reaching new audiences and enhancing existing customer/audience relationships.

Here are some highlights from the Idealware survey of 459 nonprofit staffers using social media:

1. Nonprofits believe that social media is helping them to enhance relations with their existing audience and reach new audiences through the top platforms.

Most organizations feel that most social media channels are effective for enhancing existing relationships and reaching new supporters. The least effective platforms are MySpace and Linkedin. Blogs, video-sharing, Twitter, and Facebook are felt to be the most effective tools.  The surprise to me is that video-sharing is perceived as highly effective for enhancing relationships.

2. Most nonprofits are using a combination of Facebook, Twitter, video-sharing and blogs to reach out and enrich relationships online. The data shows that there isn’t a relationship between the size of the organization and the number of channels it is using. The responses show that, in general, nonprofits are using and regularly updating one to three social media channels.

I’m not surprised that Facebook is the most popular channel used, but I am surprised that 56% of nonprofits are using Twitter and 80% of them  update Twitter regularly. Two other points to consider: the blog is not dead (45% of nonprofits have one) and video sharing sites once again prove to be popular (49% have them).

Conclusions: Nonprofits are finding value in Twitter, Facebook is widely adopted and “known to work.”  These platforms must be seen as engagement tools to be taken seriously at this point. The blog, though time consuming, is the long form to express your message and enhance relationships with existing supporters. Video-sharing is the crouching tiger. Regularly maintaining one to three platforms is an industry standard.

3. Nonprofits are not yet satisfied with the results of social network fundraising. I don’t think this is any big surprise, as both social network donors and donation strategies are still in their infancy. The survey reveals that, of all the social networks, 41% of respondants believe that Facebook is most effective for raising money. (And that is the highest percentage of approval of any network channel.)  I suspect respondents mention Facebook because it has an affiliated fundraising platform, Causes, that is simple to use and easily accessible. Let’s see what next year’s survey results bring: I’m guessing that they will bring higher satisfaction and a stronger sense of nonprofit social network fundraising effectiveness.

This is also the only platform where Linkedin is rated on par with Twitter, video-sharing, and blogging, at 30% effeciveness. The Idealware study remarks that this is surprising, but I don’t find it surprising at all: Linkedin is an incredibly effective channel for targeted donor research and deeper interaction with potential donors and foundations within Linkedin Groups.

Here’s one more set of similar survey results: the performance of social media tactics for US small businesses in December 2009.

According to “The State of Small Business” report, small businesses are also using social media to successfully attract new customers, increase awareness, and stay engaged with existing customers.

Two data sets, two different user groups, same results: social media is effective for reaching new customers and strengthening existing relationships. Irrefutable evidence of the power of engagement.

This is a guest post by Hannah Katsman. Hannah and Hadassah Levy gave a fabulous presentation at the Kishor social media conference on Tips and Tricks for Social Media Time Management, and I asked if she would write a guest piece for this blog.

In our talk to Jewish professional women on time management and social media, we wanted to address two contradictory concerns: when it comes to social media some people don’t know where to start, while others can’t seem to stop! The concept of social media, or just learning one new platform, can be overwhelming on top of an already hectic schedule. But once you do get the hang of it, social media may eat up time needed for other important work.

No one is an expert at every platform, and it’s essential to allow a generous amount of time for learning. But once you become comfortable, you can set aside time to update status and respond to contacts. Time spent on social media should be devoted to building relationships, making connections, and answering questions.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter can be compelling and even addictive. One attraction is anticipating a response to an email, comment or status message. This anticipation keeps our adrenalin up and prevents us from focusing on more productive work. While some important discussions take place in real time, when we sense the adrenalin going up it may be a signal that it’s time to turn off the software or website. The response will wait until we get back.

Tools are important.

If you find yourself repeating a particular task, chances are that someone has invented a way of automating it.

Women, especially mothers, are used to multi-tasking. Writing a grocery list while waiting for a doctor’s appointment is an effective use of time. But when we switch between windows and tasks on the computer, our minds take time to adjust. Answering an important email makes us feel like we accomplished something, but it costs us our concentration. Frequent responses to email and status messages makes us less productive, not more.

To minimize distractions and multi-tasking, I suggested a technique called Pomodoro. Spanish for tomato, the name recalls a standard kitchen timer. Pomodoros are uninterrupted 25-minute blocks of  time. Large tasks are broken down into a number of pomodoros. For a lengthy blog article you might need four. Smaller tasks, like replying to emails or updating Facebook, can be combined into one. Tasks that come up in the middle of a pomodoro get noted and added to a future one. At the end of the day, you have a written record to analyze how you spent your time.

Other speakers emphasized a point often mentioned by Debra: To get results from social media, you need a strategy. This is the best time-management tool of all. When you sit down at the computer, keep your goals in mind. Use the tactics and platforms that generate results for your business or non-profit, and drop the rest.

Hannah Katsman (pictured) was born in the US and moved to Israel nearly 20 years ago. She writes on parenting and life in Israel at A Mother in Israel. In her newest project, Cooking Manager, she helps home cooks save time and money in the kitchen. You can find her on Twitter at @mominisrael and her fan page, Facebook.com/CookingManager.

Hadassah Levy of Jewish Ideas Daily helped prepare the talk, and designed the Powerpoint presentation.

I had the lovely experience of presenting the keynote overview of social media at the Kishor Social Media Conference in Jerusalem, along with my colleague Talia Klein of Sparkeo.com. For the address, we were asked to create a presentation that would be appropriate for an audience unfamiliar with social media. However, we were told that half of the attendees would have a moderate level of familiarity with social media. In other words, make it for everyone. That’s pretty daunting. When you work in social media day in, day out, it’s hard to remember what you know that others don’t know. It’s even harder to figure out how to convey all that information through a graphically compelling presentation.

To prepare for the presentation, I asked friends and social media practitioners what they would want to know about social media. I also wanted to know what would help them to understand social media. Talia and I reviewed a few of the best social media presentations on slideshare.net, and considered what they hold in common. In the end, the presentation that Talia and I crafted embodied these basic principles of presenting social media to the public:

Presenting Social Media Publicly: A Few Ideas

1. Put it in historical perspective

It’s crazy to think about, but five years ago, how many of us had social media profiles? Or more than one profile? And how often did we use social media? How much time did we spend? Graphs or charts about the explosion of social media and current demographics relevant to the topic of the presentation convey powerful messages.  Final word on this from a colleague: “people love graphs and charts. You have to have those in any presentation. It’s a pretty picture.”

2. Talk about the future, too

Historical trends help your audience understand the big picture, sure, but what’s coming up in social media is even more important. Extend your graphs with informed thoughts about forthcoming trends and changes in your sector.

3.  ROI

You talk about social media without talking about the return nowadays. Whether it’s Return on Influence, Interest, or Engagement, people want to know “why.” Look at other campaigns, ROI case studies, and your own data. ROI depends on goals, and picking the right goals and the right metrics is critical to understanding ROI.

4. Tell it like a story

This isn’t unique to presentations about social media. Presentations should tell stories – and answer the question: why should I care? The very best presentations decks on slide share pull you in with great storytelling, and keep you interested until the end. Social media is a complex subject. Storytelling breaks it down and makes it accessible.

5. Offer case studies

Case studies make it real and bring it all together. If you’re talking about social network fundraising, walk your audience through a case study. If you’re talking about creating online communities, then look at a few niche online communities and what makes them successful. If you’re talking about engagement ROI, look at actions fans have taken for an organization.

Are there any other principles of presenting social media to the public that you think are critical to include in the list above?

Here’s the Kishor Social Media Overview – enjoy!

For reference, some great social media slide decks:

Social Media for Nonprofits

What the —- Is Social Media

Yes, I DO Mind the Gap

How To Think Like a Nonprofit Social Media Genius

Olivier Blanchard Basics of Social Media ROI

50 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits

In the digital age, no one is interested in only your services and products. We’ve grown up in a competitive world. But now it’s a cooperative world: coopetition is becoming the means to success.  We are no longer isolated geographically, culturally, or demographically. Nonprofits may serve local clientele, but their online presence is global. I know that it’s counter-intuitive to recommend your competitors. But in the Web 2.0 world, it’s exactly what the culture demands. I contend that nonprofits must, and should, be ready to retweet, repost, and support competitors online.  Why?

Collaboration doesn’t mean you’re fighting over scarcity of resources. It means you’re making the resource pie bigger.

I’ll go ahead and write the objection that I hear you saying out loud, right now: We’re all competing for limited pools of resources.

Answer: That’s been true for a long time, and it will always be the case. However, through collaborative efforts, you have the potential to bring in even more traffic, clients, and funding sources.

Joe Waters, of Six Figure Cause Marketing, says that he is trying to convince nonprofits to collaborate with cause marketing. He tells me via twitter: “Trying to do that w/cause marketing. Working w/other npos for mutual benefit. 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.” Right on.

Two great examples:

John Haydon, a social media consultant, works with nonprofits to help them get more customers, build communities, and increase awareness. Not only that, but he sends out an auto-DM to his twitter followers recommending other consultants. He’s even recommended me, and I’m in the same consulting space as him.

Here’s the beauty of what John Haydon has done – he’s expanded the pie, not cut it into smaller pieces. Every one of the consultants he recommends can potentially collaborate with him on a project, refer projects to him. etc. I’m sure he’s also gotten leads and traffic from those he’s recommended as well. Can your nonprofit create an auto-DM recommending other great local nonprofits to follow?

28 Days, 28 Ideas is an effort of 31 Days, 31 Ideas, eJewish Philanthropy, the JTA, Jewcy, Jewschool, Sisterhood@the Forward and the Jewish Federations of North America. They have banded together this February to create a platform to share one great idea a day for helping the Jewish world. 28 Days, 28 Ideas is also intended to expose media outlets to each others’ readership.  Each organization is posting its ideas, and contributing to the 28 Days, 28 Ideas blog (which the twitter stream promotes). By doing so, they are reaching new audiences, and gathering ideas that could benefit everyone. The participatory organizations are actually making a new pie – Jewish social ventures – that they are now associated with creating!

An award-winning offline example:

EmployAlliance is a collaborative project that won the US Secretary of Labor’s 5th Anniversary New Freedom Initiative Award. It is a collaboration among six nonprofits that find employment leads for their disabled clients. As Dave Stevens, a career counselor at the Chicago Lighthouse mentions, “I now work with people who are blind, so when I get a job requiring sight, instead of letting it go fallow, I pass it along to other local agencies for people with disabilities via EmployAlliance, which in Chicago is under the Chamber of Commerce.”

I’m sure each of these organizations demonstrates success through the number of clients successfully placed. They probably also compete for similar funds. However, together, they are a stronger recruiting team than apart. Make the pie as big as it can get!

Remember that social media is about sharing and giving. Mention great blog posts that your competitors write on your nonprofit’s blog. Share good posts to your nonprofit’s Facebook Page. Tweet about the great work other nonprofits in your town are doing. Support each other’s Linkedin groups.

Get rid of the idea of competition, and embrace the idea of coopetition. Mmmm, more pie.

I read a fascinating blog post at The Community Roundtable entitled The Value of Community Management. The blog post considers the value, specifically the financial benefit, that community managers provide to managed social communities. Several readers who manage online communities wrote in to offer their data about the difference community managers make. Reading the discussion, I realize there are a number of points that are fully applicable to social networks such as Facebook Pages and Groups, Linkedin Groups, Google Groups, and others. They apply equally to for-profit and nonprofit-sponsored communities.

1. Active management of an online community creates real value for the organization

Tom Humbarger was the paid, active community manager until his position was eliminated. From that time forward, his company chose to manage the online community passively. Tom wrote a blog post about what the effects of active vs. passive community management. His data shows that growth, number of visits, number of page views, and time on site decreased dramatically during the absence of a community manager. The full article is well worth reading here.

As an example, this graph illustrates the dramatic drop-off in the number of site visits once active community management ceased.

2. Similarly, active management of a Facebook Page creates real value for the organization

I was the active manager of a corporate Facebook Page for a period of three months in 2009, until the company decided to eliminate all managed social media. From that time forward, the company decided to auto-fed blog posts to the Facebook Page, with no added interactions. During the time of active Facebook Page management, the Page grew at a rate of about 8 fans a week, had a post quality of 21, drove about 8 visits a day to the site,  but had a conversion rate from Facebook Page to website registration of almost 25%. Since the Page became inactive, the number of new fans/week has dropped to less than one, there are almost no website visits, zero conversions, and the post quality is zero.

Community Roundtable blog reader Maggie McGary also saw similar stats in her nonprofit’s Facebook Page: she writes in the comments that the number of visits from Facebook to her nonprofit organization’s website plunged during a one-month absence from active Facebook community management.

Community management, whether you define it as managing a private community, or a community on a social media platform, is critical to community growth and moving people from the managed community  towards organizational goals.

3. Active management also encourages relationship-building, which leads to loyalty and community growth

When I was a community organizer, we used to call this “relationship organizing.” Simply put, friends bring friends to organizations, and remain involved because of them. I used to try and map friendships, recruit influencers, and ask them to bring friends into the cause. In online communities, we develop cyber friends that influence us to participate and keep us active. I have started participating more actively in certain online groups because I have developed friendships with other members over time. I also recommend these groups to my friends, and feel increased loyalty to the sponsoring organization. I would never have created these online ties if the group wasn’t active and well-managed.

I asked Hildy Gottlieb, who managed the monthly twitter chat for consultants to community benefits organizations, if there are online ties between the participants of the monthly #npcons chat, and if these ties arose from the chats. She responded emphatically: “Oh goodness yes. There are many people who have met through these chats, who are now having some pretty engaged and higher level conversations throughout the month because they feel they know each other from that involvement.  It’s just like any other involvement or community- the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.”

Simply put, a well-manged online community leads to real value for both the members and the community sponsors. That’s a win-win situation.

Have you managed a social network? Can you add your data to this conversation?

Have you seen the effects of passive management on a social  community?