First reflections on #askaconductor

December 9, 2010 By

Wow. That was a whirlwind.

Last night, we finished up the more than 30-hour marathon of #askaconductor. It kicked off at 8:30 am Australian Eastern Standard Time with conductor Warwick Potter answering questions for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in Brisbane and it more or less ended shortly after midnight Eastern Standard Time in the United States. Between those hours, there were 3,458 tweets with the hashtag #askaconductor (see the transcript – PDF).

More than 60 conductors around the world participated—including former New York Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel, Vancouver Opera and Duisburg Philharmonic music director Jonathan Darlington, San Francisco Symphony resident conductor Donato Cabrera, and Sydney Symphony Orchestra principal conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy. See the full list of participating conductors here.

Promotion leading up to #askaconductor

Facebook

Although it was a Twitter event, Facebook just edged out Twitter in referring visitors to the askthemusicians.com site. Facebook brought in 15.73% of the traffic (373 visits). Facebook tells me in the search function that 118 people shared a link to the site and a Google search on the facebook.com domain for the term results in a fairly comprehensive list of public Pages that shared the link to their fans (in alphabetical order; fan numbers indicated in parenthesis):

Association of California Symphony Orchestras (221)
Bellevue Philharmonic Orchestra (276)
Beth Kanter (7,178)
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (6,309)
Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (599)
California Arts Council (3,314)
CIM Robinson Music Library (80)
Donato Cabrera (700)
Dutch Perspective (95)
Friends of the Jacksonville Symphony (242)
Georgia Made Georgia Grown (3,018)
League of American Orchestra (2,256)
Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (830)
Maryland Classics Youth Orchestra (265)
netzwerk junge ohren (322)
Queensland Symphony Orchestra (871)
Sydney Symphony Orchestra (2,801)
Symphony Services International (109)
Technology in the Arts (1,774)
The Cleveland Orchestra (1,984)
The Hub (LAO) (180)
University Musical Society (2,557)
Vancouver Opera (2,135)
Verband Münchener Tonkünstler e.V (107)
Virginia Symphony Orchestra (1,464)
West Australian Symphony Orchestra (1,941)
WOSU Classical Music (127)
Zenph Sound Innovations, Inc. (304)

Twitter

Twitter came in just below Facebook with 14.64% of the traffic (347 visits). I set up a Twilert for the hashtag. According to those tallies, from November 16 through December 6, the hashtag was tweeted 331 times. In addition, I kept track of links from Twitter via backtweets.com. Up to December 8, there were nearly 300 tweets with links back to askthemusicians.com.

Banners

Several sites carried banners that were specifically created for participants. Sites include: Donato Cabrera, American Philharmonic, Stephen P. Brown, Alessandro Crudele. Those brought in 3.92% of the traffic to askthemusicians.com (93 visits).

Newsletters

The largest referrer to askthemusicians.com was the very nondescript “direct traffic.” This includes newsletters from organizations and people e-mailing links to the site to each other (each link opens a new browser window or tab). Newsletters that I have been able to track include:

Association of California Symphony Orchestras
Chorus America
Conductors Guild
League of American Orchestras
Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra
You’ve Cott Mail

Blog posts

More than twenty bloggers posted an item about #askaconductor. Here are the blogs I could track down (in no particular order):

Stephen P. Brown
Art Voice
Ceci Creative
Kultur 2.0
Dutch Perspective
Dutch Perspective
Tucson Symphony
Vancouver Opera
Performing Arts Convention
Adaptistration
Arts Management
Beth Kanter
The Cleveland Orchestra
Duisburg Philharmoniker
Jonathan Darlington
Kitchen and Residential Design
Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra
NPR: Deceptive Cadence
Season Tickets
Sequenza21
Smarts & Culture

Review of the event at Opern Haus

Others

Other mentions of #askaconductor appeared in forums, including Trumpet Herald and Double Reed, as well as news sites, including Buffalo News and xtranews.

#askaconductor on December 8

As mentioned above, the retroactive official start time was 8:30 am Australian Eastern Standard Time. Up until 12 midnight Eastern Standard Time in the United States (that is 30.5 hours later), #askaconductor garnered 3,458 tweets.

You can read the entire transcript of the #askaconductor chat here (PDF).

The site wthashtag.com is a good source of collecting those tweets. It looks back seven days. There are still some #askaconductor tweets trickling in here and there, but in the past seven days we saw 3,797 tweets from 488 contributors. Of those tweets, 31.8% come from the top 10 contributors; 22.7% are retweets; 82.8% are mentions; and 4.0% have multiple hashtags.

The top 10 contributors in the past seven days were:

1. @sashamakila – 357
2. @fergusmacleod – 196
3. @MaestroDSCH – 109
4. @Stephen_P_Brown – 91
5. @marisagreen – 89
6. @batonflipper – 80
7. @askthemusicians – 79
8. @AudienceDevSpec – 70
9. @klassikakzente – 70
10. @Gigmag – 67

Some observations

Although this event was modeled after #askacurator, it seemed to have a little bit of a life of its own. Of course, it was slightly smaller in scale, but the conversations seemed to differ from those I saw in #askacurator as well. At first look, there seemed to be a narrower (even relatively) base of questioners (488 contributors), but they asked more questions. I suppose, with the few exceptions, it seemed more like a #conversewithaconductor than an #askaconductor event. Conductors would also chat amongst themselves.

This was likely partly a result of our guidelines that instructed people to ask general questions to all conductors with the hashtag and optionally direct specific inquiries to their conductor of choice. By allowing these general questions, the event was very inclusive for lesser known conductors, as we saw the specific inquiries go toward the better known conductors, such as Lorin Maazel.

Another difference between #askacurator and #askaconductor was that the latter event focused more on individuals than institutions. Many conductors, more than I had expected, tweeted from their own accounts, rather than an affiliated orchestra or institution. I think this changed the dynamic as well.

It was a different dynamic, not better, not worse. I did very much like the conversational aspect of the event, rather than purely question-and-answer. But if I were to change anything, perhaps for a next event, I would love to find ways to broaden the base just a little bit. To go outside of the classical music scene just a little bit more and include those who might only have a marginal interest in classical music. Busting myths about classical music was one of the things we set out to achieve and we don’t want to be preaching to the choir.

All that said, I cannot forget to write that the event was just plain fun. The reactions from Twitter users, as well as participating conductors, we outstandingly positive. Here are just a few of them:

Trending Topics

It wasn’t an objective. But I admit, it would have been neat to have seen #askaconductor become a trending topic. On the other hand, seeing the spam problems that plagued #askacurator when it became a trending topic, I was glad we stayed clear from those issues.

Looking at the sheer volume, #askaconductor was close to par with some of the trending topics. But in a feat of perfect timing, Twitter offered a little glimpse into the algorithm that determines what topics are trending:

We track the volume of terms mentioned on Twitter on an ongoing basis. Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases.

Sometimes a topic doesn’t break into the Trends list because its popularity isn’t as widespread as people believe. And, sometimes, popular terms don’t make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn’t increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day.

Our #askaconductor effort didn’t see this dramatic increase in number of tweets; it was a regular, sustained amount throughout the day. Of course, trending topics also typically see a broader base with less than 10% of the tweets stemming from the top 10 users, whereas #askaconductor saw a fairly narrow base with more than 30% of the tweets stemming from the top 10 users.

What’s next?

Lacey and I will be planning a next #askthemusicians event soon. We’re thinking of putting the subject of the next event up for a vote. Will it be #askacomposer, #askacellist, or something different altogether? Stay tuned!

These were just some initial thoughts and reflections. I will be gathering a full report on the #askaconductor event as things wind down a little bit. More analytics, more analysis! Do you have any questions, suggestions or comments? Let us know! Leave a comment, send an e-mail (info (at) askthemusicians.com), or, of course, send a tweet (@askthemusicians, or @laceyh and @mcmvanbree)!

Edit: You can now vote until 12/17 on what #askthemusicians topic we should be doing next. Click here to vote on askthemusicians.com.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Abundance, eager hands and #askaconductor

December 6, 2010 By

In less than two days, #askaconductor will officially kick off. Australians will be the first to the scene, as their December 8 starts 16 hours ahead of New York. The current participant count stands at 43 conductors, including former New York Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel!

I’m pretty stoked.

This morning, Beth Kanter graciously published a guest post I wrote on #askaconductor and its source of inspiration #askacurator. I did a short interview with Jim Richardson, brainchild of #followamuseum and #askacurator for the article.

Beth’s book The Networked Nonprofit and her concept of “free agents” inspired the earlier #floodofsupport project. That was just one example of a free agent at work. Marcia Adair’s #operaplot is another. Of course, #askaconductor and #askacurator are yet other examples.

Beth places my guest post in the context of abundance. Rather than thinking in terms of scarcity (a trait common to most nonprofits), you should choose abundance; the abundance of goodwill, energy, and eager hands that are out there. “If you want to be an organization that chooses abundance,” writes Marnie Webb, “you have to really be able to support good work that’s happening somewhere else.”

And #askaconductor is an example of abundance in the arts. These free agents represent the abundance of goodwill, energy, and eager hands (yes, quite a few hours went into #askaconductor!) and smart, social-media-ready organizations are tapping into this.

I will be very curious to see how #askaconductor is going to play out. So far, it has been exhilarating to see it come together. I am keeping track of the conversation: the hash tag has been used more than 250 times over the past two weeks; more than 100 tweets have included links to askthemusicians.com; and the event has appeared in several blogs and newsletters and on dozens of Facebook pages. I hope to thoroughly evaluate the event after December 8 and see if we achieved what we set out to do and reached the people we set out to reach.

What lessons are we learning and what do they mean for arts organizations?

But for now, you better have started thinking up some questions to ask. December 8 is only two days away. Follow @askthemusicians.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

Imagined, online communities

August 23, 2010 By

One of the key elements of social media is “the community.” Without a community, there wouldn’t be a social in social media. But what exactly is this community?

In my post on a fictional online community manager position on the Orchestra Revolution blog, Jean Shirk, public relations manager at the San Francisco Symphony, posed some important questions:

Do people actually want to meet and interact with one another online or in person, or do they want to read, watch, and listen online? Do they want to meet new people in person, or are they content with going with friends they already know to the concert hall?

Regardless of these questions, we still tend to define classical music goers in Chicago or San Francisco as a community within the respective cities, and we still define classical music fans gathering on various social networks as communities.

Benedict Anderson, author of Imagined Communities, a seminal theory on nationalism, argues that a nation is just that: imagined. It is imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

Classical music communities and online communities in today’s social media environment are not so different. At any given concert, how many patrons know each other? In any online community, how many participants have met other participants face-to-face? Yet a patron feels a bond with his fellow concertgoers, and a Facebook fan of the London Symphony Orchestra feels a bond, however small, with other fans.

When I was in my late teens, I was a member on an R.E.M. fan Web site. This was before the term social media was ever even coined, yet the site was more social than most sites today. While members never really knew most of their fellow-members, let alone met their fellow-members, in the minds of each lived an image of a community, centered on a common interest in the music of a particular band.

Anderson argues that imagining the idea of a nation arose historically after social and scientific discoveries—most notably the emergence of the printing press under a system of capitalism—reduced privileged access to knowledge and paved the way to the vernacularizing of religious communication, which led to democratization, liberalization, and the increasing difficulty of justifying divine and dynastic power. In short, a history-altering change in information dissemination and communication fueled the Reformation and Enlightenment, which “made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to others, in profoundly new ways.”

The origins of online communities have a similar, although less profound, story. And that’s to be expected; we cannot start to compare the imagining of nations with online communities in terms of impact and stakes. And whereas imagining the nation forever changed worldly, political power, perhaps our current story of online communities is best showcased by the impact it has on business; the increasing difficulty of justifying modern day divine and dynastic power: corporations and institutions.

The discoveries of the computer age paved the way. The Internet greatly reduced privileged access to knowledge and social media vernacularized our communication. Where local languages replaced Latin in religious communication in Anderson’s outlook; authentic conversations, text speak and colloquialism replaces corporate and institutional language in the social media age. The Cluetrain Manifesto speaks of the current homogenized “voice” of business that will “seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.”

This change in communication liberalized the masses and democratized the playing field. In Anderson’s outlook, kings and emperors were replaced by republics and democracies; in today’s world we see, as the Cluetrain Manifesto once again puts it, networked markets that “are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them.”

This self-organization is described in Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s new book The Networked Nonprofit. The authors talk about the rise of Millennials, or digital natives, those who have grown up in today’s vernacularized, social media world. These Millennials no longer owe allegiance to any particular company or organization; they self-organize as “free agents.”

The R.E.M. fan Web site mentioned earlier was just such as thing. It wasn’t started by the band or the record label. It was started by a devoted, free agent fan. The site and particularly the community weren’t built overnight. It took many people in this imagined community.

And to answer Jean Shirk’s question: did people actually want to meet and interact? Yes! Despite the virtual nature and the scattered geography of its member base, among the very active participants there were meet ups at concerts, offline friendships, and if I remember correctly, even a marriage or two. Not so different from the non-virtual world that also sees varying degrees of involvement in the community.

And through social media, these online imagined communities have real power and they know it. “If [companies] don’t quite see the light,” warn the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, “some other outfit will come along that’s more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.” Kanter and Fine urge the modern, networked organization to engage these free agents and leverage their social networks.

R.E.M. saw the light and engaged with its free agents and fans online. It is perhaps not entirely coincidentally that the guy who started up the fan site now heads up the emerging technology department at the record label.

So perhaps this is a warning to the big dynastic powers in classical music: the big orchestras and the major opera houses. Extraordinary changes in communication brought down kings and emperors in the past. Another noted historian, Eric Hobsbawm, paraphrases Pierre Vilar in his book Nations and Nationalism since 1780: “what characterized the nation-people as seen from below was precisely that it represented the common interest against particular interests, the common good against privilege.”

You want to be a part of the common interest, the common good and not be defined as a particular interest or a privilege. Does anything indicate more clearly the need to engage with your people, rather than dictating to your people?

Ignore at your own peril. We all know what happened to Marie Antoinette after she uttered the words “Let them eat cake.” *

* Words she in fact never uttered. But she was executed nonetheless.

Filed Under: Communications, Culture, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

A Twitter follower is worth $0.24

August 10, 2010 By

The title of this blog post is of course a wildly inaccurate claim. How did I get to the number? In my small-scale “free agent” crowdfunding experiment for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, I ended up with $235 from 1,000 followers by the deadline. That translates to $0.24 per follower.

The goal was $1,000, or one dollar per follower. It was a fairly arbitrary goal and I had no expectations. However, I’m still slightly disappointed I didn’t make the goal. But consider the following:

Networking

  • All communications were strictly limited to my blog, Twitter and Facebook. Since this was an experiment to test social networking, I did not send an appeal to friends and family in the way people do when they raise funds for a run or walk, or want you to vote for a particular contest.

    Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, the authors of The Networked Nonprofit that inspired this experiment, wrote an Assessment and Reflection Report on America’s Giving Challenge 2009. They found that: “Personal solicitations to pre-existing networks of donors and friends through multiple channels were rated as the most effective methods for fundraising. Thirty-five percent of contest participants rated messaging to friends through Facebook as most effective; 32 percent rated personal email to friends, family and colleagues as effective or most effective; and 25 percent rated email to an existing organizational donor base as effective or most effective.” I did not use any of these methods.

  • In light of that, I personally met only 4 of the 12 donors (excluding myself). Two donors were former colleagues who also have Twitter accounts. However, most of the donors were definitely social media contacts with whom I have had more in-depth conversations. One donor was a friend of a friend.

Sharing

  • Kicking off the effort was paired with an e-mail to a list of about 30 classical music bloggers. In addition, I created Web banners for those bloggers to use. Four bloggers wrote a post; one blogger used the banner. (Other bloggers, not on the initial list, also wrote a post. All are captured here).

    In the Assessment and Reflection Report, the authors bring other good lessons and note that “Some like Atlas Corps recruited 150 ‘Campaign Captains’ before the contest started. Other organizations broke their efforts down into bite-size pieces for their volunteers by creating templates to use to send messages to their friends, post and comment on blogs, and create their own videos.” Perhaps I should have recruited similar “captains” and created more multimedia in a shareable format.

  • I counted most on Twitter followers to spread the word. There were 44 followers that used the #floodofsupport hash tag or linked to the Crowdrise page or blog post.
  • Spreading the word was not a case of “build it and they will come.” The hash tag spread fairly well in the first couple of days, after which it dropped significantly. Even after I created an incentive to use the hash tag (a ¢5 donation for each mention), it did not pick back up.

Technology

  • The donation process needs to be as simple as possible. I would have preferred to go straight to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s Web site, but after checking in, I decided it would cost them too much in administrative fees and human resources. Remember, I did know how the donations would start coming in; I anticipated more donations, but smaller amounts.
  • Crowdrise was a good tool, but certainly not perfect: it didn’t allow for $1 donations, as I had wished. The payment process went through Amazon, which created an extra step. In addition, seeing that donations came from different countries, there were questions surrounding paying with credit cards and with foreign currency.

The positives

  • Sure, I did not reach my goal. But I would be willing to bet that the particular donors would not have given a gift if it wasn’t for this effort. Nothing is lost and my “free agent” effort didn’t cannibalize the Nashville Symphony’s efforts.
  • The Nashville Symphony Orchestra fulfills a, albeit large, regional function. But don’t let this geographic boundary limit your campaign. I started this campaign in Chicago, having never been to Nashville, and received donations from different countries and states (England, Germany, and several states within the U.S.).
  • This also tells us something about telling stories and increasing awareness of your issue or organization in general.

The lessons for arts organizations

  • Don’t think of social media as a quick fix to raise funds. This was already obvious before the experiment, perhaps, but even though I felt I had a great cause to support, in the end it was the personal connections and more in-depth relationships that resulted in donations.
  • Beyond using and counting on your social network for donations and spreading the word, find ways to activate your network more concretely: create those “campaign captains.” Going about the effort alone is much tougher.
  • Momentum is tremendously important. Even after a monetary incentive to simply retweet a hash tag, I could not retrieve the momentum. Kanter and Fine identified immersion in the effort and the ability to react on the fly as key aspects in fund raising success.
  • Technology and ease of process is very important. That’s why the Red Cross was so successful with their text message donation campaign during the Haiti crisis. It was easy to explain and simple to execute. Make sure your organization’s Web site and your staff can handle a wave of many small donations, and make it a one-click process.
  • Your key performance indicator is of course the money you raised. But it doesn’t stop there. You will likely have gained more relationships, deeper relationships, behavioral information, and increased the organization’s overall awareness and created opportunities to tell your story. Measure those elements as well.

In the end, this entire experiment was all about just that: experimenting. I wasn’t able to fully engage and immerse myself in the project; life on the outside took over. But remember that the experiment was about creating a low-effort, easy to set up campaign, and seeing where 1,000 Twitter followers would lead. Could I have raised more money? Definitely. But that wasn’t the point.

I am still proud of raising $235 for the Nashville Symphony’s flood recovery effort. It’s a $235 they wouldn’t have had without this little experiment.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Notes from the #acso2010 conference

July 26, 2010 By

I just returned from San Francisco, where I presented in a seminar on social media at the annual conference of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras. I was invited by seminar moderator Oliver Theil, public relations director at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. My co-presenter was–and I still get goose bumps saying this–the venerable Beth Kanter.

Beth’s new book The Networked Nonprofit provided a framework for the presentation. I tried to provide concrete examples from my Orchestras and Social Media Survey and case studies from the field. I also touched on the orchestra “churn” study in connection to the book Flip the Funnel, which I have written about during the TAFTO month.

Below the embedded presentation follow some of the topics in more detail:

ACSO 2010 conference – Social Media For Orchestras Preso Final
View more presentations from Jean Shirk.

Classical music organizations and free agents

  • Beth’s book explains free agents as people who work outside the organization and are enthused by a cause rather than an institution. The job of the organization then becomes to make it “easy for outsiders to come in.” Marcia Adair’s #operaplot is the perfect example of an outsider, a free agent, coming up with a great idea and involving arts organizations in a way that is simple, effortless and risk-free. Read my interview with Marcia here.
  • Naturally, I briefly mentioned my very own free agent experiment #floodofsupport. There’s still time to get involved.

Integrated campaign around a viral video

  • Perhaps you’ve seen the video: a flashmob (or is it guerilla marketing) opera performance at a market in Valencia, Spain. The video received more than 4 million views. But that wasn’t it. The creative agency behind the video produced several complementing elements: a micro-site; Twitter, Facebook and other social networking profiles; and a print brochure. All for their client Palau de les Arts. The reason why people might not have known about that side of the effort, though, became painfully obvious when I contacted someone at the creative agency. He told me the powers that be at the Palau didn’t believe in the campaign and nixed it, including editing out any branding in the viral video. What a missed opportunity!

Saint Louis Symphony: cross-platform integration

  • The Saint Louis Symphony is an example of well-designed cross-platform integration of social media tools. Highlighting their connectedness on the front page with prominent links to Facebook and the orchestra’s blog. A page on the Web site lists all their social media efforts. Facebook or Twitter are not silos of interaction; social media tools work best across platforms and they work best when an organization’s Web site complements the tools, as well as offline complementing online.

Landing pages

  • Another page from Saint Louis Symphony’s book. They do a good job with a custom page on student efforts on their Facebook page. That led me to talk about landing pages and welcome tabs, items specifically designed to welcome new fans and call for a specific action. I saw a recent study where having a landing page/welcome tab on your Facebook page increases the “like” conversion from 23% to 47%. I have not yet seen an orchestra with a custom welcome tab.
  • Not to mention Twitter landing pages. Why not welcome people from Twitter to your site with a specific message to them? Moreover, if you set up a Twitter landing page on your site with a specific call to action that takes them through a specific path on your web site, you can measure conversion rates through Google Analytics with funnels. You can see where people dropped off, how many and where they went. Keep this in mind, not for just ticket sales, but for newsletter sign ups or other actionable items.

Measuring results

  • Due to time shortage, the only point I really wanted to make was that you should look at a social media effort as part of an integrated marketing communications effort, where communications result in behavior change and marketing is the financial value of this behavior. So if you’re measuring, you first have to know what this behavior change is. What are you looking to achieve in the next 5 to 10 years? Those sometimes 150-year-old mission statements can still be a guiding light. The principles don’t change much, the environment does, and that’s what is reflected in the last sentence of the New York Philharmonic’s mission statement, to bring classical music to the community “in any other manner now known or hereafter to be…” Read my series on Evaluating Social Media for Classical Music Organizations.
Filed Under: Communications, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

1,000 followers on Twitter: from slacktivism to activism (#floodofsupport)

July 14, 2010 By

We all know that Nashville got hit with a terrible flood a few months ago. This terrible flood didn’t spare the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO). The orchestra’s damages were approximately $42 million and after insurance and support from FEMA, the remaining financial gap could be as much as $10 million.

A flood is no fun. I know. In 2008, my neighborhood was hit with flooding from the Chicago River. I saw the whole community suffering, and many still are.

I’m sure, scratch that, I’m hopeful, some wonderful major donors will step up the plate and help rescue the NSO from this disaster. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, for example, graciously donated $25,000 toward the symphony’s recovery.

But why shouldn’t we all try to contribute our own little bit as a classical music community online? Here’s my idea: leverage this network with #floodofsupport

I recently passed the 1,000-follower mark on Twitter. I was curious what that exactly meant, so I asked if people could respond with a simple “hi.” I got 16 responses. I pondered what that means for organizations trying to get more out of people than simply saying hello. I was pointed to the term “slacktivism” by Maura Lafferty.

Now, to properly commemorate these 1,000 followers, I wanted to see if we can get past this slacktivism and get some real activism.

I just finished Beth Kanter and Alison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit. In this wonderful book, the authors talk about “free agents.” People who care about a cause, but do not work for, or perhaps more importantly, with an organization.

In that spirit, as a free agent, I want to raise a modest $1,000 for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s flood recovery effort. That translates to just one dollar for each of my Twitter followers.

Here’s all the important stuff:

How to support

* #floodofsupport runs until August 1, 2010
* Donate here: http://www.crowdrise.com/floodofsupport/

About Crowdrise
* Crowdrise charges 5% + $1 for donations below $25; and 5% + $2.50 for donations $25 and up.
* If someone donates $1, $0 will go to the NSO
* I checked with the NSO, and for them there are costs (credit card fees, administrative) and valuable human resources associated with many small donations as well. The point is to help them, not to make their lives harder. Crowdrise seemed the best option. If you have questions about your donation, check here: http://www.crowdrise.com/about/faq.

Marc’s mini-matching grant
* The first five donors who leave a comment underneath this post, will see their donation matched up to $5.

How to support even more
* Spread the message to your friends and ask them to donate and spread the message as well
* Start your own mini-matching grant on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, my blog…

Sharing and networking
* I’m relying on my network to donate, but as importantly, to share the message. When you share on Twitter, please use the hash tag #floodofsupport so we can track the spread!
* I have e-mailed many classical music bloggers to ask their support. Please let your favorite bloggers know about this campaign!
* If you have a Web site or a blog, please use the banners I have created below with a link to this blog post (so that they get all the instructions).

Free Agent
* I have no connection to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. In fact, I’ve never even been in Nashville. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care! It’s all about the classical music community on the Internet helping out an organization in need.
* The only contact I have had with the NSO is to ask about any costs associated to donating online. There were, hence the Crowdrise option. Let’s surprise them with a nice big check!

Banners

Link these banners either to http://mcmvanbree.com/dutchperspective/floodofsupport or http://www.crowdrise.com/floodofsupport/

Flood of Support (120 x 240)

Flood of Support (125X125)

Flood of Support (300 x 250)

Flood of Support (468 x 60)

Filed Under: Culture, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

A review of The Networked Nonprofit

July 13, 2010 By

I’ve been an avid fan of Beth Kanter’s blog for the past few years. It might come as no surprise that I pre-ordered her, and co-author Allison Fine’s, book The Networked Nonprofit. And if you’re a reader of their blogs, it might also come as no surprise that the book fully lived up to its great expectations.

My first reaction, on Twitter no less, was telling Beth that I liked the tone of the book. It doesn’t have the common “social media hippie” talk. You know, the long-haired, world-peace-wishing, tree-hugging, social-media-is-going-to-solve-all-your-problems-and-here-are-the-tools-to-do-it talk.

Good social media books talk less about the tools and more about the concepts and frameworks. That’s what I loved about Flip the Funnel, and that’s what I loved about The Networked Nonprofit. Both define and lay out a framework in which you can apply your own strategy. We all know I’m a big fan of such frameworks.

Sometimes it looks as if the authors are treading the hippie-talk territory. I think this is unavoidable. It’s because nonprofits have been used to doing things in a particular way and a different approach might seem like a fairy tale at times. But the authors never end up actually sounding like our long-haired friends. Many positive, world-peace-wishing, elements are backed up with organizational structure research outside, and predating, the social media realm, and they are often balanced with real-world pitfalls to look out for.

Although the authors provide a core framework, the book is chock full of examples and practical, how-to information. Reading the book will help you answer all those “I’m scared of social media” questions. The reflection questions at the end of each chapter are particularly helpful for a nonprofit manager building a social media strategy.

As the authors write, the book is built on a simple equation: “Social Media Powers Social Networks for Social Change.” The book sets the stage with the rise of Millennials who no longer owe allegiance to any particular organizations, but rather pick out particular causes. Thus, the Networked Nonprofit will engage these “free agents” and leverage their social networks.

As we move through microplanning, crowdsourcing cautions, creating social culture, and making nonprofits simpler, we end up in the final chapter, one of the strongest chapters of the book: Governing Through Networks. It takes a critical look at governance at nonprofits. Again, the directive here is not “they should use social media and all will change for the better,” the concept is working as a Networked Nonprofit in a broad, on as well as offline, sense.

The book is a fast read, but you’ll keep it as source to reference. In that sense, it’s a perfect (hand)book for nonprofit managers that are looking to increase the impact of their organization’s mission statement in a connected world. I am going to be rereading it, and using it, in the months ahead.

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