Category Archives: My New Favorite Thing

This is how you do it: Building Movement survey

Posted on May 10, 2011 by | 1 Comment

My obsession with Building Movement has been well-documented.

They’re nice about it and keep sending me emails about their efforts, which mostly revolve around encouraging and then documenting the really phenomenal activities of nonprofit social service organizations to integrate direct practice and advocacy, in a way that empowers their clients and energizes their staff.

It’s really good stuff.

The last piece of theirs that I’ve been combing through is called Catalysts for Change (I even love the title), and it presents the major findings from a survey of more than 450 nonprofits in California, about their efforts to transcend mere service provision to become a real force for social change around the issues presented by their clients, along with case studies of the organizations doing this best, to provide inspiration to the rest of us.

They frame this work as helping clients become change agents and, indeed, recognize their inherent capacity to transform the systems that trap them, and I just kept nodding my head as I read. But not all of the report is good news–Building Movement discovered, not surprisingly, that nonprofits are, for the most part, missing opportunities to engage their clients in these revolutionary ways, for all kinds of predictable reasons about limited resources and limiting philosophies.

Some of the lessons I took from these nonprofits’ experiences, and the efforts of Building Movement to catalog them:

  • Many more organizations are engaged in externally-focused advocacy (more than 80%) than in grassroots organizing and capacity-building within their own client base (fewer than 50%). Board members are likely to participate in advocacy, but quite unlikely to interface with clients on this work. This strikes me, in many ways, as odd: why are we more willing to stick our necks out and expend our own energies than get our own houses in order, so to speak, by fully equipping and utilizing the considerable power our clients represent? How can we expect institutions of power to include our clients’ perspectives if our own organizations haven’t fully embraced this? It makes me wonder about how we’re shaping social workers’ views of the world, and of those we serve, and how we can work from the inside out to turn our organizations into forces for change.
  • Smaller organizations are, perhaps predictably, less likely to incorporate advocacy into their work, but, given the number of nonprofit service providers with fewer than 25 staff, it quickly becomes clear that we cannot afford to relegate social change work to only the big players.
  • The challenging (to use their rather euphemistic term) economic context seems to be encouraging, not discouraging, advocacy activity: desperation breeds courage sometimes, apparently, and, here, organizations are reaching out beyond direct service work as an extension of their survival mechanism. Here, too, though, there are some real missed opportunities: only 25% provide clients with the opportunity to register to vote, and only 10% connect clients to elected officials’ forums, when making the case to these power brokers is clearly in organizations’ own direct financial interest, in addition to critical for advancing the issues on which they work.
  • The organizations highlighted in the case studies all have that rather indefinable organizational culture that supports advocacy, and the leaders of those institutions point to that as a core feature that supports their work. About two-thirds have explicit structures (strategic plans, mission statements) that call for and provide accountability for these social change activities, and these organizations out-perform their peers on engagement, including on the more elusive client-empowerment measures (at a level of statistical significance, even!). That makes it obvious that cultivating organizational support for both an internal and external social change orientation needs to be a focus of leadership efforts.
  • Unlike several years ago, direct service providers reflected a familiarity with the terms “civic engagement” and “social change”, even if we as a field still lack common definitions or a universal commitment to these ideals. Building Movement suggests, and I agree, that this points to a real opening to institutionalize these ideas in nonprofit management. This advocacy is perhaps best viewed as a continuum, too; while very few organizations are engaged in collective activism, relatively many are comfortable with direct contact with elected officials. There are certainly roles for organizations along this spectrum, and finding these niches starts with conversations.

    I’m going to highlight some of the case studies later this week, but I’m interested in your reactions to these findings, too. Does anything surprise you? How does knowing what this really looks like, rather than what we might guess, matter? What questions need to be answered as part of this project of “field transformation”? How do these findings dovetail, or contradict, what you experience in your own organization?

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    Watching sausage being made

    Posted on March 22, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    I love teaching policy classes.

    And I love talking about policy.

    But I know that our policymaking processes, at different levels of government and across many topic areas and within the contests of opposing viewpoints, and often seemingly hidden behind closed doors, can seem arcane, muddled, and even completely baffling, including to students who desperately want to understand how the policies that affect their work, and their clients’ lives, are made.

    And, so, I’m always looking for tools that will help make policymaking real, for students and for social work practitioners in the field, to demystify what’s really not all that mysterious a process: the way that power collides with power to, more often than not, prevent anything really seismic from changing at all.

    Especially after feedback from my generous and kind and forgiving first class of students, I’ve incorporated more case studies, guest speakers from the field, interactive online content, and classroom debates, to try to peel back the layers and help students engage with the policies that so need their voices.

    And one of the things that I have to help students struggle with is their innate disgust, really, with some of the political realities. Social workers are mostly a pretty ethical bunch, and we pride ourselves on process, and so learning about how budget rules are broken and deals get made can tend to send social work students running as fast as they can in the opposite direction.

    And I understand that. I do.

    When I first taught U.S. history and government to new immigrant adolescents, more than 10 years ago, I was so caught up in my own disillusionment that I had a hard time even reading the Bill of Rights without rolling my eyes.

    But they reminded me then, and so I remind my students now, that no system of governance ever got better by people sitting on the sidelines. Our democracy has managed, perhaps almost in spite of itself, some pretty wonderful victories for justice, and there’s tremendous potential for more. Besides, if we’re going to throw up our hands in despair, we might as well be holding a protest sign.

    In other words: do not avert your eyes. We need witnesses.

    And that’s why I’m so excited about some of the new tools (and some that aren’t SO new, now, anymore) to help people understand policymaking, and the workings of our government, in meaningful ways.

    There’s Many Bills, which is a visualization of legislative content that organizes it into color-coded themes, making even really bad bills look pretty. You can compare different versions of bills related to the same problem topics, such as housing policy. You can also search by a member’s legislative activity, which is pretty stark sometimes.

    Another IBM lab tool is Many Eyes, which I’ve used to make maps for nonprofit organizations before, but which can also do text content analysis, so that you can see tag clouds, for example, of speeches made by prominent elected officials. The graphic above is a visualization of Obama’s Inaugural Address.

    Probably the single best online tool I’ve found for information about the activities of Congress is Open Congress, which has a blog, profiles of individual members, real-time status of the House and Senate, summaries of recent votes, overviews of bills in the news and bills recently filed, and lots of opportunities for comments and engagement with the content. One of the aspects I like most about it is the extensive set of tools to improve individuals’ access to the information: RSS feeds, email alerts, integration with your social media platforms…I use it not just as a go-to for information about Congress but also as a feed of current happenings, for the times when even I forget to look.

    There’s a lot more on the Presidency than members of Congress, and some states aren’t covered at all, but PolitiFact can be a good starting point in sorting out competing claims in the political arena. Of course, here, there’s an obvious element of subjective judgment (as always, in politics!), but the claims are pretty well cited and supported, and the ratings are clear and complete. My very favorite part? Their interest in researching the truth behind chain emails submitted by users. Social Security for Mexicans abroad, anyone?

    A similar site that’s unfortunately not very updated is Speechology, which, at least at one point, had a bit wider reach and a more interactive feel, analyzing candidates’ promises and assertions, not only in speeches, but also in campaign advertisements. I would hope and expect that it might be ‘reactivated’, a bit, for the 2012 cycle, at least, and it could be a model for what local media analysts could do regarding regional officials.

    What I find most helpful about these last two sites, really, isn’t even as much their content as their premise: we have a right to understand what our elected officials are doing, and we have the tools with which to do so.

    Then, when we don’t like what we see, we know what to do.

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    One year later: Health care and our “Reform Reality”

    Posted on March 21, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    On March 21, 2010, one year ago today, my husband and I stayed up late watching the debate on health care reform stream on his computer. Even though I’d read all of the analyses about the advance vote count, I think I still held my breath when the roll call was winding down.

    No, of course it’s not a perfect bill.

    There were several versions I preferred to what finally passed, and I’m not excited about how long some of the most significant pieces will take to be fully implemented, especially as the country continues to grapple with rising entitlement expenses, a lagging economy, and frustration with Congress.

    But still.

    My kids will be able to stay on our health insurance until they actually finish college. I don’t have to worry that my genetic blood disease will make us lose our insurance. SCHIP is protected. We’ll see increases in preventative care investments. We’re closing the “donut hole” gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage. We’re trimming cost excesses in Medicare Advantage. We will finally stop losing ground, at least, on the rising ranks of the uninsured.

    It’s better.

    And, in addition to the tangible improvements it makes in our health care “system” (what we have now can’t really accurately be called anything like ‘systematic’!), health care reform also represents a triumph of policymaking against tremendous ideological, fiscal, and political odds. I don’t believe in the “better than nothing” school of thought, much, because I’ve seen too many cases where settling for a little meant that we never saw a lot.

    But this is better.

    And, so, on the one-year anniversary, when the vast majority of health care reform’s provisions are but directives to be specified and analyzed and codified by regulators within the Department of Health and Human Services, between now and 2014, I’m spending some time checking out the Reform Reality site created by the Health Care Foundation of Kansas City (for which there are billboards all around my town!).

    It’s a fully interactive site, with options to click to see how health care reform’s provisions affect those with different current positions in the system today. The content is similar to other sites, but I think it’s easier to engage here. You can see some of the expected fiscal impact, check out how reform aims to improve our nation’s health status (which is, after all, the ultimate measure of the success of any health care system), and link to organizations locally and nationally working on the aftermath of that day last March.

    Check it out, and then I want to hear from you. What do you think about health care reform, one year out? Where do you hope we are one year from now? What about health care reform excites you the most, and what were your greatest disappointments?

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    Software code as regulatory advocacy

    Posted on March 15, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    Even with as much reading and thinking as I do about social work, social problems, and social change, there’s still something, every couple months or so, that completely blows my mind.

    I love it when I come across something that makes me think, “of course!”

    And, when it intersects with regulatory policy and advocacy…well, that’s just about perfect.

    An essay by Gene Koo in Rebooting America brought together just such a trifecta. He writes about the increasing ubiquity of software code as a controlling influence in the implementation of social policy, and of the associated technical and political challenges in ensuring that computers don’t literally take over human judgment in critical areas of social welfare.

    When you start to think about it, there are so many ways in which software is replacing the decision making even of powerful legislative and regulatory actors. Computer programs determine eligibility for public benefits, process appeals, and calculate compliance with program guidelines. Those functions are important for the overall functioning of a policy and, in the lives of an individual or family, they can be monumental.

    Koo’s points about the ways in which software code shapes policy implementation mirror discussions elsewhere about the significance of regulations as the place where a policy’s intentions are translated into actual operations.

    As with those rules, software code can reflect routine errors (the easiest thing to fix!) or, more perniciously, the development of what is called “codelaw” can, while not directly contradicting the law, reflect a particular implementation that isn’t the only way to construe the law. It’s in this case that software code essentially makes law, and it’s here that the same kinds of advocacy strategies we apply to the regulatory context–pointing out contradiction to legislative intent, illustrating pragmatic implementation hurdles, demonstrating the potential for inconsistent impact, and mobilizing key political and technical stakeholders–can make a real difference.

    Koo’s discussion parallels that on this blog and elsewhere about the proper place for discretion in social policy. While software code can eliminate dangerously capricious decisions, which can be good governance, it also takes away the ability for trained personnel to include compassion in their way of carrying out legal mandates. This is the same tradeoff we contemplate with debates about how precisely to draw regulatory guidelines, too. Here, though, even more than with bureaucratic regulators, we’re trusting the critical task of “filling in the gaps” not to trained government employees, mostly committed to the programs they oversee, but to software developers, who, while technically expert, often have no substantive knowledge of the law nor accountability to the general public.

    Kind of scary, really, especially since, while I can recognize a problematic regulation when I see it, I have no such dexterity when looking behind the curtain of a software program.

    The strategies that Koo suggests for working within this new reality of “codelaw” also parallel those that work within the regulatory context. We should have a sort of “notice and comment period” when people can submit potentially tricky cases and see how the software code handles them, and our campaigns should identify software experts who can lend their expertise at this phase (a perfect opportunity for crowdsourcing!). He also recommends resisting the “baby and bathwater” reaction; we must recognize the potential to use software to ameliorate failings such as racism and sexism, which have certainly been endemic results of human judgment and discretion within our welfare systems.

    Like so many of the new technological applications in the field of social work, then, the rise of codelaw is here to stay, so our challenge is to figure out how to make it work for us, and how to work within this framework to protect our legislative gains (and lessen the sting of our losses!), build relationships with those in power, and enhance the power of our constituencies.

    Even when that means a string of characters is our advocacy target.

    Where have you encountered “codelaw” in social policy? How have you worked, successfully or not, to advocate for kinder, gentler, software systems in these areas? What lessons have you learned in that advocacy?

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    Crowdsourcing our government?

    Posted on March 10, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    Of all of the essays from Rebooting America that captured my attention, it was probably the one from Beth Simone Noveck, about completely envisioning a new style of citizen participation in governance and decision-making, that most captured my imagination.

    She starts with an acknowledgement of a lament close to my own heart, that deliberative conversations seldom connect to action, which can mean that they’re even worse than non-participation, because they give people the feeling of having a stake, when they really do not. She calls them “one-off affairs, not tied to governmental practices of agenda-setting, policy-drafting and decision-making.”

    And she’s right.

    But we know that officials don’t need to be sole decision makers, that, in fact, we’d come up with better policy solutions, and better paths to implementation, if more voices were included, in meaningful ways, in that process.

    And that’s when Noveck’s essay gets really interesting. She lays out a practical framework for micro-participation, of sorts, that would allow the public, writ large, real involvement in government decisions, in such a commonsense, pragmatic way that it’s really hard to find much objection.

    Don’t think about other experiences in “participation” that you may have had–she’s not thinking roundtables with colored dots, or advisory councils galore. She points out that we don’t need large numbers of people to work on issues and that, in reality, relatively few government officials make many very important policy decisions today. And she’s not talking about some high-tech public comment or voting system on every piece of legislation, either. At least to begin, she focuses on regulatory action as policymaking, and envisions a mechanism of crowdsourcing in which a few dozen experts and enthusiasts would handle these regulatory issues by providing their consultation in the ‘action stage’ of governing.

    There’s certainly no reason to think that these lay experts couldn’t craft regulatory policy as well as the current bureaucrats do, and involving the 5 or 10 or 100 people who know best, a percentage of whom will want to contribute to solving community problems, would not be an insurmountable technical or logistical challenge, either, especially in light of today’s technology.

    She makes a compelling case, too, that such a system would be no more prone to corruption than current practice, and that the openness and transparency that would come more naturally to such a participatory model would, most likely, serve as a deterrent to corruption.

    I love this idea.

    I’ve met dozens of social work students and practitioners whose passion is something relatively obscure–rules about when foster care providers can also serve as foster families, for example, or restrictions on voting rights for those with mental illness, or reimbursable services for Medicaid recipients struggling with post-partum mood disorders.

    I WANT these individuals engaged in policymaking, directly, on these topics. They know them, and they care about them, and they would do a better job than I would, or than an elected official balancing hundreds of different policy issues, none of which dovetail very well with the above.

    But even more importantly than the substantive policies that could emanate from such a system are the skills and competencies that participants in such a crowd would develop, skills that would enable them to not only advocate more effectively in disparate topics, but also to leverage their voices and relationships in the legislative policy realm, too.

    I agree with Noveck that it’s time to move participation beyond talking. Our government would be better off, and so would our citizenry. If you’re intrigued, check out the Democracy Design Workshop, a “do tank” oriented around projects that seek to build such tools. There’s an awesome e-rulemaking interface to improve public participation in federal regulatory policymaking, a policy wiki for collaborative legislative drafting, and ‘clickable statutes’, which creates interactive diagrams to help lay people better understand legislation.

    Government by the people…maybe it really is possible?

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    Viva la Commons?

    Posted on February 22, 2011 by | 3 Comments

    One day last fall, I overheard my four-year-old lecturing another child on the idea of the public commons.

    Kind of.

    This other little boy tried to grab a truck away from Sam in the sandbox in our neighborhood park. “Mine!” he said.

    Sam looked a little baffled, glanced briefly at me, and replied, “It’s not yours. And it’s not mine. It’s just…everyone’s.” (The trucks are mostly left there by families that use the park, although a few are purchased by the city for park use.)

    Exactly.

    I think that the little boy started crying, because he just wanted the truck, but maybe I’ll imagine a different ending to the story today, one that involves communal understandings of property, and shared stewardship, and exaltation of the “we” above the “I”.

    One of the sites I’ve been spending some time on lately is On the Commons, described as “a citizens’ network that highlights the importance of the commons in our lives, and promotes innovative commons-based solutions to create a brighter future.”

    What’s not to like?

    There’s a lot of environmentally-related content, as you might imagine: our communal resources such as water, alternative energies, and green space. But there’s also material related to using wealth in ways that promote the common good, (three cheers for responsible tax policies!), discussions about the Internet as a public good rather than a corporate tool, and the forum organizing project, dedicated to talking together about our common spaces, physical and not, and how to not just preserve but enrich and enlarge them.

    I think about the public commons a lot more since I had kids, and not just because we spend a lot of time in that sandbox.

    It’s because our common resources, and, more importantly, the mentality to value and share them, are a big part of what we leave to our children, and far more secure than private inheritances we might hope to leave.

    And I’m not sure what kind of public commons we’ll have left by the time they’re engaged in debates over how to protect them, or whether the concept will even have real meaning by then. Even today, there are parents who seem confused, on their first visit to the park, that someone has left toys there for the community to use. And others who avoid the public park altogether, because they don’t like the unpredictability that comes with sharing an unmediated public space.

    But I believe very strongly in things public: public schools and public places and public utilities.

    I believe in them not just for what they provide, but for how they change how we think, about who belongs within the “we”, and where the limits of our personal ownership are drawn.

    And I want my kids to have those experiences, including the inevitable tussles when private desires clash with public good. I want them to be people comfortable with commons living, people who prefer public spaces.

    And, so, I’ll be On the Commons quite a bit, alongside my fellow citizens, around the world, who believe in public, too.

    Join us.

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    Get Organizing Training in your Pajamas!

    Posted on January 18, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    I think that this site was actually launched in mid-December, but, you know, I’ve been on vacation.

    Still, it’s a good way to kick off the new year, hitting all of the major resolutions: work smarter, connect with cool people, save money, and, of course, enhance your grassroots organizing skills (or are those just my resolutions?)

    The New Organizing Institute’s Toolbox isn’t a complete substitute for dynamic in-person training, where you get a chance to build relationships with organizers working on social justice issues that connect to yours. It’s not designed to be, I don’t think. What it does offer, that’s pretty awesome, is a completely free, very accessible, and quite high-quality training program that you can do totally online, as an introduction to grassroots organizing principles (tell your story, build a strong structure, plan and execute powerful actions), as a refresher, or (and this is the part I like the best) as a train-the-trainer model that you can then use to build the capacity of those with whom you’re working on the ground.

    It uses the best of current technology, with videos of trainers conducting presentations and interactive materials, and it’s in the fullest spirit of the exciting transparency movement: everything is downloadable and free and open for sharing.

    THAT’s empowering, and it’s welcome.

    I spent some time looking through the site and found several pieces valuable to me, even after years of organizing experience. They’re all time-tested and refined from work in the field, which is especially important to me (I cannot sit through another talk about power from people who’ve obviously never been close to it). And they’re still adding content (and accepting submissions, if there are examples from your work that you want to share).

    Check it out, and let me know what you think, please, or share your own resources for community organizing. And consider yourself on the way to your 2011 resolutions!

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    How should we spend our cognitive surplus?

    Posted on January 10, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    I read all the time.

    And, every once in a while, I read something that blows my mind, like the chart in Outliers that details how much of the achievement gap between rich and poorer kids accrues during summer vacation (and how well schools do at closing it, really, during the year).

    And this, from Cognitive Surplus:

    Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year (p. 10).

    This is not a TV-bashing post. I’m sure that there are some wonderful things on television. The point of the book, and my reflection on it, is simply to point out that watching television has been a default use of one of the greatest expanding resources of our age: free time. And that our use of time, when aggregated as technology now gives us the capability to do, may be key to changing how we approach the challenges that face us.

    One of the key pieces in the book comes early, on page 17, as Clay Shirky describes the lessons learned from projects such as Ushahidi (my paraphrases):

  • People want to make the world a better place.
  • They will help when they are invited.
  • Cheap, flexible tools remove many of the barriers to collective action.
  • We can harness this cognitive surplus–the time and brainpower freed up because most of us don’t have to labor all day just to eat–to dramatically improve our lives, and the lives of others.

    Shirky is careful to emphasize that such positive impacts will not automatically flow from the existence of tools that facilitate sharing, connect people to those of like mind, and allow people’s passions an outlet. After all, the same technology that gave us Ushahidi birthed ICanHasCheezburger (disclaimer: my husband’s all-time favorite site). What we need are civic applications of these tools, in order to create real value. Civic sharing, as Shirky defines it, is about really trying to transform society, not just generating a sense of community for participants or even adding some knowledge to the public sphere. We’re going to “get what we celebrate” (p. 176), and so those of us with civic ideas for how to direct this cognitive surplus need to register our desires now, no offense to my husband’s great affinity for ironic traffic signs and email pranks.

    So, picking up on this idea, that we should treat those 200 billion hours a year as a shared resource that can and should be put to work, I plan to use some of my own free time to create a sort of “to-do list” for my fellow Americans, a “honey-do” that might prompt us to turn away from the television and, in the process, realize some of the good life that was supposed to come in this age of leisure. I want to hear from you–what are the best ideas you’ve found for capitalizing on this surplus, and what would you like to see our society collectively tackle in our free time? And, really, 200 billion hours is a lot of time, so if we can carve out just a little bit of it, I agree with Shirky, we could make some really good things happen.

    I want to hear your ideas for how to harness the potential power of this tremendous resource–what are the tools, and the motives, and the opportunities that we need to be developing? How does our culture currently support such collective civic action, and how does it discourage it? On the issues on which you work most closely, how would you use some of your neighbors’ free time to make a real difference (be those your physical neighbors, or those around the world)?

    And, of course, the critical question: how do we make such actions compelling enough to lure people away from Shark Week?

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    Why ‘networked nonprofits’ are better advocates

    Posted on December 6, 2010 by | 2 Comments

    Who likes presents?

    First (drumroll, please!), the holidays have arrived at Classroom to Capitol!

    At the end of this week, everyone who has commented on one of The Networked Nonprofit posts will be entered, at random, in a drawing (chosen blindly by my wonderful husband) to win a free copy of the book. I’ll even pay to ship it to you!

    So, read away, leave your thoughts, and get ready for a present! You are all a gift to me!

    What I like best about The Networked Nonprofit, co-written by authors whose own blogs I read regularly, is their clear view of social media as a set of tools to help in our common quest for social change, rather than gadgets to be worshipped in their own right.

    They urge nonprofit practitioners to use social media to change the way we think, not just the way we communicate, and that has me thinking (see–it works!) about how organizations that embrace social media as part of their strategy are more likely to also possess some of the attributes (or, at least, be open to them) that make organizations successful at advocacy, too.

    Some of this is certainly “chicken and the egg”–are organizations already predisposed to hold these ways of looking at the world, and their work, or does engaging their communities via social media bring about these transformations? The answer, I think, is probably some of both, but I’m most interested in the idea that integrating social media into an organization’s repertoire could better position its Board of Directors, executive staff, and entire set of stakeholders to approach advocacy, too.

    There were several points in the book when Kanter and Fine describe, and even sort of define, ‘networked nonprofits’, and it sounds a lot like how I talk about organizations that are advocacy-oriented vs. those that are more in the “band-aid business”.

    Some examples:

  • Simplicity and transparency: I’ve often had nonprofits tell me that they could never take on advocacy because they’re too small, but, in my practice, those smaller, more nimble organizations have a much easier time taking bold stances (even if they don’t have too many resources to put into campaigns) than those with complex structures and complicated hierarchies.
  • Organizational culture that accepts the inevitability of failure and the utility of risk: I know that I have a lot more work to do with an executive when he/she talks to me about a fear that the organization might fail in its advocacy efforts. The reality, of course, is that they absolutely will fail, that advocacy fails much more often than not, and that organizations need to construct campaigns where there will be some victory (in constituents empowered or policymakers enlightened or reputations enhanced) in the midst of failure.
  • Real curiosity and commitment to listening: The best advocates I know are great listeners; they know what policymakers, in particular, are trying to tell them, and they convey a sense of really wanting to understand others’ perspectives, rather than only trying to broadcast their own message.
  • Integrity and reciprocity: Another concern that I hear sometimes, especially from Boards of Directors, is a fear that their organizations will be pulled into “other people’s issues”. Again, the answer is “of course”, but that’s not a bad thing. Kanter and Fine talk about the concept of “karma banking”, which we think of in advocacy as “coalition-building”–if I’m there to support your domestic violence legislation today, you’ll stand with me on restrictive proposals regarding immigrants’ eligibility for social services. And we can trust each other on that.

    Obviously, advocacy and social media don’t correlate 1:1 in the nonprofit world: there are organizations excelling at advocacy through “old-fashioned” grassroots organizing and time-consuming relationship-building with policymakers, and there are organizations that are using social media incredibly effectively, but only to raise money, recruit volunteers, or promote their own work, not to change the policy environment that impacts their constituents.

    Still, there’s enough overlap that it’s making me think a bit differently about how I approach nonprofits on both of these fronts, and about how tackling one could reduce the gap to be hurdled for the other.

    What about your organization? If you’re involved in advocacy but not using social media, what’s holding you back from using these tools? If you’re fully on the Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare bandwagons, but not doing advocacy, why not? And if you’re doing neither, what aspects of your organization do you see as the biggest obstacles?

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