Communicable

Hi and thank you for visiting my blog. As a new mom, I decided to take some time off blogging, but I will be back! Stay tuned.

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How to use Facebook questions for your nonprofit:

http://nonprofitorgs.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/how-to-use-facebook-questions-for-your-nonprofit/

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So the social media and other interesting trends for 2011 are now coming in.  I’m going to collect a few here, so that I have them all in one place – please feel free to add more in the comments.

• Six Social Media Trends For 2011 - David Armano
• Actual Interactive Marketer Predictions For 2011 - Forrester
• Johanna Blakley: Social media and the end of gender – TED Talks
• 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer and Social Media and Trust (by Dave Fleet)

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Here’s something that warms my heart every year for the last three years: seeing an incredibly generous and kind community come together to celebrate the holidays and feed the hungry.

My dear Toronto techies and twitterers, my inbox is once again exploding with all the hohoto emails, and I love it.

See www.hohoto.ca for more details and please get a ticket, sponsor, or consider a donation if you can’t attend! And read this blogpost from Stafflink Solutions, one of the HoHoTO sponsors, while you are at it – if you still crave more info on why we do this.

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“We need  time! More time,” I often hear people say. Magnitude of the long ‘to-do’ lists paralyzes, and the society presses all of us to be on, all the time. To be plugged in, be involved, do the work, get things done. But we need to make a conscious effort to free ourselves from that paralysis and re-adjust. Ask yourself these questions and see if you need to hunker down and re-examine  the roadmap for yourself or your organization:

• Do you know where you are going? What’s your vision?
• Do your goals still feel right? What do you want to achieve, when, and why?
• Make a list of all things you care about: personal, professional, various projects, hobbies, issues
• Make a list of what you want to do ‘when you grow up’ and what kind of person would you like to be
• Will what you are doing now take you there? How?
• What motivates and drives you?

I could put up a few more questions, but you get the idea. Think how many people just live on auto-pilot, and how many days slip through their fingers, all the same shade of grey. Don’t let the auto-pilot get to you.

What does this all have to do with social media?

Schedule a brain spa session, your precious downtime. Unplug and enjoy the silence. Then evaluate what’s working for you and what doesn’t, and invest your time and resources appropriately. No need to chase all trains at once! Whatever you do and however you use social media in your work, keep your head above the ground so you can see the traffic lights and turns on the road ahead. Social media is now officially old news enough, so that people can get stuck in the approaches that once worked. Maybe those approaches and attitudes don’t quite cut  it anymore, but those people on auto-pilot are not alarmed just yet. Be alarmed – and you shall be armed.

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It’s hard to keep track of them all, but these PR and social media events – many of them are free, by the way, – present a great learning opportunity. If social media interests you, stay on top of all the newest developments by going to at least some of these events in the upcoming months.
http://toprsocialmediaevents.pbworks.com/
Great resource!

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Mesh conference starts tomorrow! If you go, I hope to see you there, and I hope to meet more people whose work I follow through the *interwebs*, and see some new faces. If you can’t make it this year, the least you can do is keep an eye on the twitter stream for #Mesh10, already in full swing. I bet you’ll find great info there during the next couple of days.

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Make MyCharityConnects on June 7 & 8 your Event of the Year. This is a two-day conference that “aims to build the capacity of the Canadian charitable sector by connecting charities to the technology they need to succeed.” Bring it on! Does your charity want to succeed?

Just take a look at MyCharityConnects conference agenda – if those names you see don’t convince you, there is a chance you might need this conference more than you know. It’s going to be amazing two days filled with conversations, connections, questions, and first-hand accounts from passionate people whose work combines the best of both worlds, nonprofit and tech.

I hope to see you there! Register now before it’s sold out, there’s only about 60 tickets left as of today. Meanwhile, here’s the new CanadaHelps “Did You Know?” video with great info on how online technology and social media are changing the ways charities fundraise and gather support.

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Watch this! Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Montage from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo.

It’s hard to count all the fundraisers, donations, and silent auctions that went on and are still going on to help Haiti in its earthquake aftermath. As we analyze our collective response, I suggest we also take some time to reflect on the future of fundraising. Haiti gave us a glimpse of what it takes: open heart, creativity, skills, social networks, and desire to do more, do something.

In troubled times, our true colours are shining through, and they are beautiful. Here are just some of the ways I have seen people step up and offer a helping hand; there are no doubt many other efforts worth mentioning.

I put together a subjective list of activities that made my eyes sparkle, and think of the changes in the ways we donate and fundraise. Please feel free to add to the list!

• People still love to get together: I call it the Events rule. HaiHaiTO: Toronto for Haiti has to be a number one event in my list, because I helped organize it and it’s so close to my heart. This was a social media fundraiser for Haiti, organized on twitter by a bunch of rogue grass-roots social misfits that never met, but still “wanted to do more”, and with help of hundreds of people who cared. HaiHaiTO raised just over $11,000, which was matched by the Federal government, totaling more than $22,000 for the Canadian Red Cross’s Haiti relief efforts. HaiHaiTO was just one of many events that took over the city; there were events-fundraisers every single night.

• Professional services in exchange for donations make us stronger and more responsible. Toronto Works for Haiti blew my mind. The concept is simple: a multi-talented group of volunteers offered their professional services in exchange for donations to Haiti. I like the creativity of this approach, and the total win-win situation it created. People need photographers, translators, social media help and tutoring anyway, and now they had a chance of getting the services they needed and making a charitable donation all at the same time. And it gets better: the organizers ended up auctioning 30 artworks and 20 service packages offered by their network of businesses and volunteers, with the proceeds going toward Haitian rebuilding efforts. They raised over $5,000. I have also seen the idea of “professional services in exchange for donations” in action with Hairdressers for Haiti, a network of great hair salons in Toronto offering free haircuts in exchange for donations. Yoga and fitness studios followed suit by offering free classes and 2-3 hour “marathons” – Toronto Fitness for Haiti (a simple Facebook page) quickly became the centre of action for the Toronto’s fitness community, raising many thousands of dollars. Crisis Camp came to the rescue by bringing together IT professionals, software developers, and computer programmers to Haiti’s aid. There were more examples of this, and, honestly, for a while it seemed you could literally live your life for Haiti by just going on with your life, paying with donations for every shopping trip, workout, night out, and haircut, or working for Haiti with whatever skill you happened to have. Except you had an extra incentive to be smart and responsible, making the choices that hopefully foster a positive change. I just love the true involvement, commitment, and community networks this kind of action creates. We are all better for it.

• Donations via text messaging went mainstream. I have never seen so many ways to text and donate, here’s just a few that come to mind. You could text “Haiti” to 90999 to make a $10 donation to the Red Cross; text “Yele” to 501501 to donate $5 or $10 to Yéle Haiti; text ”Haiti” to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army, or text “Haiti” to 25383 to donate $5 to the International Rescue Committee; text “Give” to 20222 and donate $10 or more to World Vision. I’m sure there’s more. Text messaging as means of giving and raising funds has officially come of age and went mainstream.

• Images still worth a thousand words. However grim and controversial was the media coverage of the disaster, and especially visual coverage, I would argue it helped to convey the magnitude of what happened, and  inspired people to act. You just couldn’t sit there, see it all, and do nothing. Seeing is believing.

• Social networks are useful for disseminating information. I have heard many arguments whether Facebook, twitter, and other social networks can be used for fundraising, and even wrote about some of the successful examples of this. Primarily, I think it’s more and more important to view social networks as information disseminators. Yes you can establish real relationships and create or formalize your following in some way, but the ultimate value of belonging and being active on social networks, from fundraising point of view, is in sharing information. And, in doing so, facilitating action.

• Arts for Haiti. In difficult times,we turn to the arts for help. I have seen numerous artists step up and do what they do best – transform our collective feelings, hopes and fears into art. Arts were literally everywhere; from the big concerts to small concerts, from paintings, posters, and t-shirts, from songs to theatre to dance to storytelling and spoken word. Ask yourself: Would we really know each other in the slightest without the arts? Would we help each other still? Would we survive?

Haiti taught us all incredible lessons in humanity and fundraising. It is my opinion that this disaster, and our collective response to the disaster, map a way into the future of fundraising. If there is anything to learn, anything at all, about the future of fundraising, whether short-term or long-term, local or international, Haiti is it.

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You can catch me at the upcoming unconference at Centennial College with a cool and clever name: Talk is Cheap. Please come by, say hi, and go to as many sessions as you can. Take this great opportunity to learn about how social media makes waves in the real world.

I will be joining the panel to talk about the role social media played in raising awareness about the disaster in Haiti and raising funds for Haiti relief efforts. I hope to see you there at 6 p.m.!

6 p.m. – Plenary Session: Social Media & Haiti – How Social Media Made a Difference – Kim Fox, CBC.ca; Jennifer Mayville, Canadian Red Cross; Kristy Woudstra, World Vision Canada; and Elena Yunusov, Communicable – moderated by Maggie Fox, Social Media Group

Many great sessions run shortly after the panel talk, so get your ticket, because free cheese doesn’t last (yes, this unconference is free):
http://talkischeap.ccpr.ca/registration

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