If it had worked out for me to attend last year I would have been overwhelmed and a bit lost. I’m sure I’ll still be overwhelmed this week (there are 1,400 folks coming to this shindig!), but this year I have the advantage of going with the anticipation of meeting up with friends and many people I’ve spoken and collaborated with via phone, email, and twitter.

This year 09NTC for me is a reunion. I feel like I belong and that I have ideas to contribute to the discussions. If you’d like to get a taste of the conference, but won’t be attending, you can be there virtually with me since I’ll be liveblogging! I’m flattered that Holly Ross asked me to help in this way and excited to be joining such a great team of bloggers in this effort. There are apparently some neat features in the liveblogging tool that I’ll get to play with like polling the audience, twitter integration that will pull my tweets while sessions are going. You can visit my ntc liveblog directly from here.

My session picks

There are so many great sessions, and I’m still undecided about some time slots so these may change, but here are my picks for now.

On Monday

10:30 I’ll be at “Online Outreach – The Seven Things Everyone Wants”
1:30 I’m at “You Made a Video, Now What?” with See3’s Michael Hoffman
3:30 at “Email Segmentation – Targeting works”.

Tuesday

10:30 I’m at “Old School Best Practices Applied to Social Media – Is social media for me?”
1:30 at “Community Management – Evolution of Online Communities”
3:30 at either “No Country for Old Media – SM Flash Causes, Twestival, etc.” or “Learning From the Presidential Campaigns”.

Day of Service

Sunday morning I got to participate in NTC’s Day of Service. Britt Bravo and I met with Albert Bricker from the St. James’ School which is a Bay Area Catholic school. We talked about blogging strategy, focus, and tools. It was a lot of fun and Albert’s actually already up.

Some Show notes:

Social Media Breakfast DC 2/5/09 with Jeff Pulver

Tweetsgiving

Happy Birthday Is, Risa Herbstman, and Jocelyn Harmon

Q: What would you like organizations you care about to ask of you aside from giving money?

Help – I Lost My Job! – a collection of 27 articles from the Wise Bread Blog for people who have just been laid off though there is a lot for anyone starting a job search in there as well.

CAREER TOOLBOX: 100+ Places to Find Jobs is a list of resources from Mashable with useful categories for recent grads, blogging jobs, and industry specific areas.

33 Ways To Find A Job Online – a bit to extensive for me, though worth looking through. Keep in mind though that 80% of jobs are found through offline networking efforts.

35+ Job Fair Success Do’s and Don’ts – I found Job Fairs to be motivating more than anything else. Even if you don’t come away with a job you want to apply for, you get a sense for what’s out there and a lot of practice presenting yourself.

You May Not Like It, but Learn to Network – New York Times piece on the cold necessity of networking.

10 Easy Ways to Find a Job During Winter Break – This piece from the new column of one of my favorite job search authors, Lindsey Pollack, will make sure you put the time off from school to good use.

Social Networking Resources

Free eBook- Using the Social Web to Find Work – Chris Brogan shares salient thoughts for job searches from his blog. Nice free download.

Leverage Twitter for Your Job Search – Darren Rowse focuses on job searchers on his new blog Twitip. Be sure to check this one out if you’re new to Twitter as his blog is full of great Twitter resources.

How to Use LinkedIn When You’re Unemployed – Alison Doyle shares the goods on this essential social network for job searchers and really everyone in today’s transient workforce.

Fish Where The Fish Are – Use LinkedIn To Job Search

What Happened?

Once Stacey and I realized we were on to something we got Matt and Vince to work immediately on a site and logo without knowing exact details on what actions we would be asking people to take or the exact shape the campaign would take. I reached out to Carrie and Dave and they were psyched and really helpful in getting the exact structure of the campaign crystallized and getting that focus reflected in the site content. The whole team did a lot of reaching out to spead the word a bit in advance. I spoke with Beth, Deborah, Joe, Tom, and Tamar who each had some ideas and agreed to tweet about it. On Tuesday we set the ChipIn Widget live for donations and settled in to wait until noon to ping our networks and release our idea to the wild.

Then a funny thing happened. Chris Brogan tweeted a link to the site. He likely found it in his ego feed since his name is on the site in the story section because of the inspiration we got from his TrickOrTweet Halloween campaign. I was on the phone with Dave when he saw Chris’s tweet and we all got really excited. “Everybody go now!”

Just like that Tweetsgiving was on. Tweets, donations, and blog posts came rolling in. We hit $1,500 in the first 2 hours. It was tough for the 4 of us to stay responsive between twitter, the gmail account we had set up, and keeping the site up to date with new Top Turkeys and blog posts. From the numbers alone we felt it was a resounding success and we’ve come away energized and grateful to the twitter community.

Factors Contributing to Tweetsgiving’s Success

Simplicity
Clarity and simplicity were key to this. We were asking for something very simple – share your gratitude and give a brick ($10). This nugget was easily remashed and retweeted making it attractive for people to express themselves creatively and feel like they were part of something larger. Tweets like “have you given your brick yet?” “just donated X dollars to #tweetsgiving” became pretty common and we started to retweet some of the inspiring and unique ones from the account.

Timeliness
The tie in of gratitude and giving to the Thanksgiving holiday was a natural sell. In the days leading up to the holiday and our campaign we noticed that people were already using twitter to reflect outloud about the blessings in their lives. Gratitude was already at the forefront and themes like health, education, wealth, jobs, and family were prompting people to share. Tweetsgiving tapped into that, encouraged it further by making that reflection a communal activity, and presented donation to a worthy cause as a relevant action.

Having read Nancy Schwartz’s nonprofit tagline report (so worthwhile- thanks Nancy!) I insisted that we be super thoughtful about our tagline to cement the connection further and we came up with “Put the giving back in Thanksgiving.”

Our timing also helped us to avoid the issue of Donor fatigue which is always something to be concerned about in social giving campaigns. I think we stayed on the right side of this for a few reasons.

• it was only 2 days and people had that expectation we’d quiet down soon
• it was during a time that I suspect is quieter on twitter generally since a lot of people who normally tweet from work are traveling already

Integration with Twitter
Tweetsgiving was very rooted within twitter itself and I think that definitely was important to the campaign’s success.

In all there were 9,456 visits from 7,563 unique visitors resulting in 15,830 total pageviews. Here’s a basic breakdown of where that traffic came from including the five biggest traffic sources to the site.

twitter.com (referral) 3,700     39.13%
(direct) ((none)) 2,993     31.65%
search (organic) 608     6.43%
facebook.com (referral) 378     4.00%
google.com (referral) 172     1.82%

StumbleUpon only got us 169 visits and the combined traffic from Facebook and StumbleUpon accounted for less than 6% of total traffic. That surprises me and I think it’s worth considering whether including those social buttons on the site actually detracted from the twitter focus of the site and diluted our main calls to action (share gratitude and give).

In rough terms our traffic was
40% from twitter + 30% direct visits + 9% search + 6% Facebook and StumbleUpon = 85% of all visits

This means that only 15% of visits came from blog posts and articles. The press we received was so valuable to Epic Change and continues to benefit the organization, but in terms of raw traffic, it looks like word of mouth and twitter mentions were the main drivers. I also suspect that a large percentage of direct visits were from repeat visitors checking up on the site again, though I have to look into the analytics further to confirm that.

Evangelists
Individuals tweeting gratitude, sharing the link, and talking about our progress played a huge role. We did some outreach in advance, but largely I found that the individuals who went all out to champion the campaign emerged from the crowd organically.  We recognized some of them as Top Tweeters, but eventually we fell behind in listing them there. Mari Smith, Tori, and Brian Colman stand out in my mind. We considered giving some of them the password to the tweetsgiving twitter account itself, but decided that it was more authentic for people to share their enthusiasm as their own non-turkey selves.

Ego
Another aspect that played into the financial success of the campaign was the recognition we gave to our Top Turkeys who donated $100. Peter Kim has some thoughts on the value of ego traps like this and we had considered that thinking in advance. The On The Wires section showcasing blog press also incentivized people to share the story with audiences in other forums.

Wish List for the Future and Things to Consider and Improve

Disclaimer
I am very pleased with the way Tweetsgiving turned out. Though we set the goal for $10,000, it was an experiment that Stacey and I would have been proud of and considered a success even if we raised less money. We also felt strongly that the amount of reflection and gratitude we inspired people to share would be central to success as well, though we didn’t set a specific target for a number of gratitude tweets.

If we had thought of the idea a month before the holiday I am positive there are things we would have done differently and better. But with only six days, many ideas didn’t get implemented in time.

Aggregation
I would have liked to have a live aggregation of gratitude tweets on the site similar to the implementation on votereport (Alison Fine and Andy Carvin I’m looking at you! How did you do that and can we talk?) We did link to the twitter search results on the site, but I strongly suspect that if people knew their tweets would be displayed immediately on the sight it would encourage even more people to share thoughtful gratitude tweets and retweet. It’s already in the works, though Matt and I would love to talk to anyone who has suggestions on this implementation for the future.

Automation
We did have the Tweetsgiving account set up with Tweetlater to autofollow those who followed us. Interestingly we did get one complaint from someone who followed us and didn’t like being auto-followed back. I also wonder if there was more potential there. For example, I used the Tweetsgiving twitter account to follow people speaking about thanksgiving who I found with twitter search. I noticed many of these people tweeting that they had donated and some direct messaged us to thank us for connecting with them. These people were easily convinced to explore the site and learn more. I did try to set up Twollow to automate this process, but found that it didn’t function properly.

There is definitely the potential to use search keywords to identify twitter users to whom your campaign is relevant. Since manual twitter search isn’t easily scalable, I expect this kind of automation to be taken further in future campaigns. What are your thoughts on automation? I wonder if auto following with keywords the way twollow is intended to work removes the connection from the human level too much in a large campaign. I’d love your feedback on that. Good idea, or creepy?

Recognition
Especially after seeing the effect of the Top Turkeys, in the future I’d like to recognize all donors by name, twitter name, and amount given. There could be an opt-out option in the donation form for people who want to give anonymously. I’m curious to see the effect that would have on the size and number of donations as people identify a social norm in the level of giving and possibly try to one up each other.

Recognition for all donors has the advantage of enabling enthusiasts to tweet thanks to all recent donors not just Top Turkeys since they’d be able to see all donations coming in. Inspired by the recognition Peter Deitz is giving donors to his $20,09 campaign for Social Actions (Help them out! – they are seriously awesome over there) Stacey has added a donors page to the site recognizing everyone who gave. We’re happy to take your name down if you’d rather not be listed. I would have liked that information to be automated for immediate display upon donation and possibly a few different giving levels with explanation of what change you will be making possible with each new level of giving.

Data Collection
While Epic Change did get a lot of new donors through the campaign in hindsight I realize that we should have collected more information about them while we had their attention at the donation stage. The advantage of the ChipIn widget was the graphical display of progress and the fact that it was fast to implement. Similar campaigns should definitely invest time to thinking carefully on this. Craft a clear well flowing form that collects essential information, but isn’t so long people tune out.

For Tweetsgiving I’d have liked to collect name, twitter username, url, email, address, recopied gratitude tweet if the donation was $10 or more, what you want displayed in the Top Turkey section as your name if you are giving $100 or more, and a checkbox for Epic Change newsletter subscription.

Team Building
In the future in a campaign like this I would gather a swarm of committed people to organize and brainstorm together in advance. This group could reflect together on who they each knew individually to ask directly to donate, share gratitude, retweet, blog and offer feedback. I’d set up a google doc where this group could share ideas and a list of people to reach out to. I’d have a conference call to build team rapport and plan a second call in advance for the first night of the campaign that would be open to the public.
Connecting voices to twitter names and avatars goes a long way to building teamwork and can lend a valuable grassroots feeling to any social campaign.

Measurement

One issue I’ve found trying to analyze the way the word spread is that search.twitter.com only lets you go back 100 pages (anyone know a way to dig further there?) I have an RSS feed from the whole campaign of “#tweetsgiving” but I know many tweets didn’t include the # and that doesn’t encompass all the ways the message changed- alternate links people used and phrases that caught on and were retweeted.

Stacey has a post up with her reflections and some details about donations. Most notable is the fact that all but six gifts to Tweetsgiving were new donors. The median gift size was $10 and over half the money came from Top Turkeys who gave $100 or more. Be sure to check out her more detailed breakdown.

What’s Your Take?

For me this thinking raised more questions than closure. I think this is just the start and we can all expect to see twitter and other social networks used for social causes more frequently and on a larger scale in the future. Several people have already reached out to us to collaborate and brainstorm with them about their plans. That’s great!

What does this all jar for you? What’s the biggest question in your mind now? What else was central in your mind to Tweetsgiving’s success and what avenues remain to be explored to take things further and improve? Please share and dissect with us so we can learn together!

Chris Brogan and others have stressed the importance of having a blog editorial calendar. I’m finding it hard to plan ahead in that structure so that things are still relevant when I share them and so I also don’t feel stifled. When I’m having thoughts like, “no you already have X number of posts ready for next week. Publish that thought later!” it’s time to cut loose.

If this blog is really going to be about me exploring and sharing as opposed to being about me obsessing and responding to traffic data then I need to be more liberal with the publish button. I generally reflect in a working notepad file, but I’m going to experiment with doing that thinking right inside the blog text area. It may get bumpy, or less polished here while I play, but I expect that this freedom I’m granting myself will have me sharing more which I’ll enjoy! I hope you’ll keep questioning, posing ideas in different ways, sharing your experience, and reflecting right along with me in the comments or elsewhere.

• ~3,000 gratitude tweets were posted including the tweetsgiving tag. search.twitter.com only lets you go back 100 pages so that’s an estimate, but check out the awesome wordle visualization of these gratitude tweets below.

• TweetsGiving was one of the top trending terms over the 48 hours of the campaign. The screenshot below from twitscoop gives a sense of the campaign as it spread in real time. Note the rise in activity in the first and last hours as word initially got out and as urgency built to help us reach the goal by the deadline.

• $11,021 were raised in 364 donations

• The TweetsGiving site had 15,830 Total Pageviews from 7,563 Unique Visitors in 101 different countries.

• TweetsGiving received over 100 press and blogger mentions (currently 107).

I had an amazing time putting together the TweetsGiving campaign with Stacey and the rest of our team. Thank you Stacey, Dave and Carrie, Matt, Vince, and Sarah. Thanks to Tori, Brian, and Mari for tweeting up a storm with us and feeling empowered to make this event their own. I can’t express my appreciation enough for everyone who tweeted thanks, donated, blogged, shared, or reflected with us to help make this Thanksgiving truly amazing.

First of all, if you haven’t yet been to http://tweetsgiving.org, go now, I’ll wait.

The Scoop

So, Stacey called me on Wednesday night, with the name and twitter account for TweetsGiving, asking for ideas.  We settled on the idea of getting people to tweet their gratitude, and immediately began thinking about who we could bring on board to help make it happen. Today, after a lot of brainstorming and hard work by many amazing people, #TweetsGiving was a top trending term in twitter and our campaign is well underway to building a new classroom in Tanzania for Gideon and his classmates.

So many twitterers tweeted gratitude throughout the Twitterverse, demonstrating that social media can mobilize an outpouring of Thanksgiving. If you’re not on twitter you can still participate and donate to a worthy cause. Also consider sharing your gratitude in your Facebook status instead.

Here’s the graph of our presence throughout the day on twitter.

Wow. I’m feeling wow.

Yesterday I was pumped and today I am so inspired and happy that this project came together from a mere inkling of an idea six days ago. It has grown into such an amazing campaign.

I’ve been overwhelmed all day by the willingness of the twitter community to step up and get involved in this project. A search for the #TweetsGiving tag really demonstrates how deeply we’ve threaded twitter with gratitude. So far, we have raised over $4,000 (and counting!) towards our goal of $10,000. In just 12 of 48 hours!

This screenshot from this afternoon shows #TweetsGiving as the third most popular term (And there are over 4 million twitter users!).

Thanks!

Since TweetsGiving is about gratitude, I will say that I am so grateful to all those working on the project, especially my partner in crime Stacey and countless others who have reached out to me throughout the day. You rock! I am also grateful to the gazillions of tweeters and the 150+ people who have so far generously donated to TweetsGiving.

On a personal note, I am so grateful to have my mom and sister and so thankful to have all four of my grandparents active in my life. Since the election, I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the blessings that come with being an American. I will have more to say on that and about what I’ve learned from this project after Thanksgiving. I will definitely have more to say once the frenzy winds down. (But not yet! Keep it coming!)

Gary’s tone and energy match the way I’m feeling now. I’m working on something big and I am pumped. Every conversation about this project has me energized and I’ve taken to saying “Kill It!” as the pieces fall into place. Hopefully I’ll have more to report early next week. In the meantime enjoy Gary.

Note: There’s some not so office friendly language in there.

There are so many gems here including the quote Todd shared that I also liked.

“If you’re pumping out good shit, people will follow. But if you for a second – for a 1/2 second – don’t believe in what you are doing … you need to get out, now.”

Some of my other favorites -

“Hustle is the most important word. Ever.”
“Your great great great grandchildren are going to watch and see everything you’ve ever done.”
“There is never a bad time when you believe, when you work hard, and when you know what you’re doing.”
“The only way to succeed now is to be completely transparent.”

How does this resonate with you?

If you’re anything like me, getting to inbox zero is a pipe-dream. Joe, this post I won’t stop the email from coming in, but it will trick your inbox out and maybe make it prettier as well.

Google settings

Gmail’s normal settings already allows a surpring number of options for tricking out your Gmail. I like that you can cull together your other email accounts in one inbox and respond from whatever address you prefer. You can also compose a signature to go out with all your sent messages and include html if you want to.

The next source of Gmail customization comes from the google labs section of Gmail settings. Here are some of my favorites.

Superstars – If the default yellow stars don’t seem like enough for you, enable superstars and you can have even more icon options that starring an item will let you rotate through. If that’s still not enough you can add the Superstars Turbo script.
Keyboard Shortcuts – If you hate using a mouse in your inbox, or miss the old days when you used to se pine, enable shortcuts in labs and you can set a ton of actions to simple keystrokes.

Pictures in Chat – see your friends’ pictures when you chat with them in gchat – makes it that much closer to a normal chat client.

Forgotten Attachment Detector -With this activated, Gmail will prompt you if you fail to attach a file while your message contains phrases like “check out the attached Godzilla cartoon,” or my favorite, “my resume is attached.”

Custom Label Colors – Now we’re getting to the money stuff. I’ve actually had people make me show them on the spot why my inbox was so colorful when they noticed the effects of this feature. Not for everyone, but if you label often it can help things stand out.

Gadgets – These can really move your Gmail window towards being a one stop shop. Gadgets appear in your Gmail sidebar ad Google calendar and google docs are built in options, but you can add any gadget you enjoy on your iGoogle homepage to your Gmail sidebar, like the weather, a calculator, your favorite news site or the remember the milk task manager.

Greasemonkey

The key to a lot of the deeper Gmail customizations is the GreaseMonkey Firefox Addon. If you don’t have that installed yet, now’s the time. That said, the remainder of the customizations will only work in FireFox because they depend on Greasemonkey.

Better Gmail 2

The Better Gmail 2 add on is a collection of a ton of Gmail Greasemonkey scripts into one FireFox addon. Here are my favorite features from the options menu.

Force encrypted connection – You can force Gmail to engage the google server using the more secure https protocol. Nice added security for working at coffee shops and in public.

Macros ? shortcuts – Enables a ton of shortcuts and you can always hit ? to bring them up if you forget.

Show CC Automatically – You can have the BCC box display as well if you like, but I find I use that one less frequently. There are other composition defaults you can change as well.

Collapsible Calendar and Reader – With this option these applications will appear in panes just below your inbox within the main Gmail window. Useful so you don’t have to open another tab each time you want to add an event to your calendar or find something quickly in your feed reader.

Attachment Icons – pretty!

Skins! – I use the Gmail blue skin. Skins are essentially custom theming for your Gmail display – It’s really like night and day when you first see your inbox using a skin. I use the Gmail Blue skin, but check out Gmail Redesigned if you want something more radical.

update: gmail has just released a themes tab within settings that will be rolling out to all users in the next weeks.

Those are all the changes I have made using Better Gmail 2 though there are more options to explore. After you’re done configuring the addon just refresh the page to see the changes.

Phew! That’s a lot of customization. Which of these do you use and find helpful and what have I left out? Also feel free to share general email management tips and link

Stacey runs an organization called Epic Change that seeks to support community change by helping people to use the power of their stories to obtain the resources they need to improve their communities. In its first project, Epic Change is partnering with Mama Lucy Kamptoni expand Shepherds Junior a school in Arusha, Tanzania that now has over 200 students.

I first met Stacey this past May on twitter. She had just posted about a Miracle on her birthday when she guest posted on Sam Lawrence’s blog. As I have gotten more involved with Epic Change, I have learned so much from Stacey and I am thankful to have her as a mentor. Her passion is an inspiration and she works tirelessly to help the people she works with. Stacey is deeply connected to world around her and acutely aware that distance doesn’t make problems any less significant.

This week Epic Change is issuing holiday cards with the proceeds going to support Shepherds Junior. She’s posted about her excitement about the holiday cards on her blog. They’ll hopefully be available on her site this week.

Stacey is very good at saying thank you. Back in August she entered a competition to win funding for her cause by creating a video of Shepherds Junior students using post it notes to thank Epic Change’s supporters. The video didn’t win the money, but I felt like a million bucks. (See if you can spot my name in there)

Stacey, you’ve taught me so much about gratitude, having a can do spirit, and leading by example. Thank you!

What about you folks? What, or who are you thankful for as Thanksgiving approaches?

This post is a submission to the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, be sure to check out the other submissions this week on SocialButterfly.

Update: The holiday cards are now live and smokin’ on the Epic Change site.