Tag Archives: reviews

Execution Matters: Evaluation and Getting Advocacy Right

Posted on December 8, 2011 by | Leave a comment

In this final post on The Future of Nonprofits, I want to focus on a key point from early in the book, about how many (perhaps most) nonprofit organizations and their leaders are far better at coming up with creative approaches to solving problems (and accomplishing their core missions) than executing those ideas consistently and effectively.

It’s not meant to be a total bash on nonprofits and their employees; really, given how under-resourced most nonprofits are (related to our pathological aversion to investing in “overhead”–those important functions that, in fact, enable our programs and services to succeed) and how much of our working hours we spend trying to sort of keep our heads above water and look effective (whether or not we really know what “effective” would look like in our specific context), it’s not surprising that we seldom have the chance to step back and think about the kinds of processes and structures within our organizations (and our own workdays) that would raise our execution ability to a standard of excellence.

Instead, we’re always trying to do more with less (except when we’re admittedly doing less with our less, and busy making excuses for that). We stop doing some of what we should be doing, and close ourselves off to the possibilities of what we could be doing, in ways that mean, somewhat paradoxically, that we have to keep coming up with new inventions to increase our creativity, in order to compensate for how poorly we’re managing to pull off what it is that we do.

Exhausted yet?

In the advocacy context specifically, I see this when we develop campaigns that drift towards a new gimmick, or rely excessively on a particular technology, as though those are the tricks that will deliver the outcome we seek. We’re continually trying to one-up ourselves in terms of a slogan or a media event or a high-profile endorser, when what we should really focus on is hiring really good organizers, or investing in our relationships with our constituents, or personally connecting with every target policymaker (or all of the above). Or, we jump from issue to issue, diluting our potency and confusing our targets, lulling ourselves with the truth that “there are so many important causes out there.”

The Future of Nonprofits has a chart that shows how we can increase our aggregate impact either by raising our execution ability, even rather modestly, or by dramatically expanding our pool of creative ideas. There’s arguably a need for both. Given limited resources, though, it’s much more efficient to focus on marginally improving our delivery, especially because it can ripple into other areas of our organizational functioning, in terms of relationships built and skills enhanced.

And, so, what would it take to improve our execution in the advocacy arena?

First, we have to rigorously evaluate what it is that we’re doing: what isn’t working, and what is, and what really tips the balance. We have to identify our organizational and individual advocacy capacities, build up the areas where we are weakest, and develop benchmarks for what we should be delivering. We need to fully investigate where our own efforts have fallen short before assuming that our advocacy failures are to be blamed on adverse political or economic conditions. We need transparency and accountability for what our campaigns set out to do, just as we do in the fundraising and direct services arenas.

And we need organizational cultures committed not just to innovation, and not just to advocacy, but to excellence, and to intellectual honesty about how well we’re executing our most core programmatic functions, too.

A few weeks ago, I was reading an article about advocacy evaluation when a Board member for one of the organizations for which I do consulting (we were volunteering at the same event, and I’m never without reading material) looked over my shoulder. She shook her head at the article’s premise that the field of advocac evaluation is far behind that of traditional programmatic assessment, and I think that her critique is largely valid: too often, our obvious good works, in the nonprofit sector, excuse the fact that they’re not always done well.

In advocacy as in the rest of our endeavors, that’s an oversight we cannot afford.

In the new year, we may find that we don’t need to continually come up with as many new strategies or “innovative” approaches, if we are consistently doing what we do very, very well. And implementing evaluation systems that allow us–no, require us–to know when that is the case.

We won’t have to take as many shots, in other words, if we can hit them when we need to.

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Futurecasting, My Students, and Our Sector

Posted on December 6, 2011 by | Leave a comment

In this second post during “Future Week”, here at Classroom to Capitol, I’m sharing an assignment that I created for my two policy classes this semester and how it fits with our critical challenge, as a nonprofit sector, to move beyond strategic plans that assume the world will stay mostly as it is (because it won’t), to instead prepare ourselves (and our future colleagues) to prepare to thrive in a nearly unimaginable (right now) future.

In both my first-year MSW and Advanced Policy courses, students are required to investigate, analyze, and then comment on at least one macro trend expected to influence their current and future organizations, the realm of public policy in which they work, and their own practices. It’s not a research project, as such, in that no one can definitively predict these impacts, and students’ interpretations of the likely meaning of these trends are taken as valid and worthy of consideration, provided that the are based on sound reasoning and a firm grasp of the current state of their respective fields. They have some leeway to identify the trend(s) they want to study, but some that are suggested include:

  • Increasing representation of people of color in the population and among social work clients
  • Rise of mobile technologies and its impact on the digital divide
  • Declining federal financial aid for higher education and accompanying increasing tuition prices
  • Growth of nonprofit administration degrees outside of social work
  • Climate change (disaggregated in the developing and more developed economies)
  • Growth in the older adult population in the U.S., especially as compared to the working-age population
  • Demographic shifts towards the Southeast and Southwest, and away from traditional population centers in the Northeast

    The Future of Nonprofits stresses the importance of “futuring” for nonprofit organizations, as a way to outline some of the potential scenarios in which the organizations may operate, to identify opportunities and challenges embedded within them. As someone whose feelings about more traditional strategic planning are well-known (!), I really appreciated how the authors distinguish between those rather static exercises and this more freeform thinking about what could be, and what that could mean.

    For my students, once they are freed from the anxiety associated with fearing that they need to have some sort of crystal ball, the opportunity to talk with their peers and brainstorm about what could be coming (and how it might affect them) is pretty rewarding. I’m consistently impressed (and pleased!) with how often they identify the potential in these trends, not just the threats–I don’t know if it’s their youth or their innate optimism or what, but they tend to gravitate, even, towards the hidden good, while retaining a focus on vulnerable populations that could be adversely impacted in various future environments.

    I hope that, as part of our work together, my students develop and maintain a true curiosity about what the world holds, how it got this way, and where it might be headed.

    Knowing where to go, with whom to talk, what to read, and what questions to ask in order to figure out what’s going on with the people we serve, the organizations where we work, and the field in which we operate is integral to questioning the world as it is, and to imagining the world as it could be. It requires approaching life a bit more like my oldest son does–absolutely everything is questioned with a “why?” and a “why not?”–and casting a net wide enough to bring in diverse perspectives that can help us answer those most important questions.

    I think it’s more valuable, for them as professionals and for our profession as a whole, than the concrete knowledge (which will soon be outdated) or even the discrete skills I hope to pass along.

    Because, ultimately, I want my students to not just think about what the future might look like.

    I want them to help shape it, for the better. For all of us.

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    The Future of Nonprofits, Part I: Innovating for Advocacy

    Posted on December 5, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    This week, in the spirit of the season of giving, I’m writing three posts related to my thinking on some of the ideas raised in The Future of Nonprofits, and then giving away a copy of the book to a randomly-selected commenter at the end of the week. Today’s post tackles the core of the book–building an orientation to innovation within nonprofit organizations–specifically regarding what I think this means for transforming organizational cultures to embrace advocacy as a central mission imperative. Much of what I’ve written about here before (accepting risk, seeking mission fit, rigorously evaluating advocacy efforts) complements the authors’ insights on what innovation can look like, and can mean, for nonprofits, although I’ve never thought about it as explicitly “innovating” until reading this book.

    I look forward to your comments, from those who have read The Future of Nonprofits and those who would like to, and especially your ideas on what the future can look like for our field, and more importantly, for the causes to which we dedicate ourselves, if we commit to building it together.

    There’s an analogy in the opening of The Future of Nonprofits about how we respond to a moth in the room–taking the time to usher it carefully outside v. swatting at it with the back of our hands–that the authors use to illustrate how we often deal with new ideas in a nonprofit organization (hint: many of us are swatters). Honestly, I’m not totally enamored with the analogy, because what we often need to do is embrace the “moth” and shower it with the attention it deserves as it grows, rather than even kindly sending it on its way, but it did get me thinking about one of the greatest challenges we face in integrating an advocacy orientation into our primarily service-focused organizations:

    We are very anxious about distractions.

    Some of this preoccupation with focus is good, of course: none of us would want to work in (or be served by!) organizations without a clear sense of mission and how its activities advance those goals. We owe our clients, especially, accountability, and we need to avoid the temptation to do a little bit of good wherever we can, instead of developing real excellence that can revolutionize our world.

    But.

    Advocacy is not a distraction.

    Nor is it the kind of small side initiative (like the office recycling program that the authors use to illustrate inventions v. innovations) that we can tack onto what we’re already doing, in the hopes that either (a) it will magically make our lives better and our work more effective or (b) it will satisfy our guilt, at least, about what we should be doing, and get people off our backs for awhile.

    It requires infusing a commitment to social justice, a willingness to engage even our adversaries, a recognition that standing with our clients requires (at least sometimes) standing in harm’s way, and a passion for mission that becomes a calling.

    And that makes it an innovation, in the clearest sense of that word–something that contributes creatively and powerfully to what our organizations should be doing: “creating ways to deliver on their mission through products and services that are insanely great” (p. 23).

    But how do we get there? How do we get past this fear that stepping up to the advocacy challenges that so demand our attention won’t, somehow, turn us into these political monsters embroiled in every nasty fight we read about in the papers, or, conversely, detract from our services so much that we cease to be relevant to the causes to which we are committed?

    The Future of Nonprofits suggests that what our organizations need, in fact, is more waste. Translating this concept to advocacy, it means time spent contemplating the roots of the problems faced by those we serve, and thinking collaboratively and very intently about the policy approaches that could eradicate them. It means building this time, and respect for it, into our employees’ job descriptions, and into our organizations’ priorities. It means structuring our organizations so that there is room to explore, so that we can be deliberate about our advocacy AND still extremely competent in our services.

    Because, really, we can do more than one thing at a time. Even well.

    It means that advocacy shouldn’t be the prerogative of just the “policy person” in an organization. Everyone who works at a particular organization should be assumed to be passionately committed to its mission (or they shouldn’t be there), and there should be an intentional effort to weave advocacy responsibilities into their regular work, both so that advocacy initiatives have the benefit of multiple perspectives and so that individuals can be a part of something larger, even, than they own specialized functions. I’ve seen this in practice, with childcare workers allowed to travel for legislative visits on work time, and case managers whose advocacy efforts alongside clients emerge as their most treasured victories, sustaining them during draining periods of direct practice.

    It also means that seeing advocacy as an innovation within an organization–a fundamentally new and very potent way to attack the problems that plague us–frames it as an endeavor to be approached with an eye towards evaluation and an acceptance of the risks that inevitably accompany it. That’s a healthy and sustainable way for organizations to embrace advocacy as a core part of their work, rather than that “stuck onto the side” distraction.

    Because it’s not.

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    The Shame of a Nation, and of this Mommy

    Posted on August 16, 2011 by | 5 Comments

    *My oldest son starts Kindergarten tomorrow, so it seemed like a good time to confess that I’m still conflicted. I’m still outraged that the debates in our community mostly revolve around why our tax dollars have to be shared with “those schools” (um, what part of “public” do you not understand?). I’m still looking around the room at the back-to-school ice cream social, and still dismayed by all of the faces that look like mine. And I’m still glad that my son has a great teacher and a clean school and a well-stocked library and a chance to learn Spanish and use a science lab. I just think every kid should have those things, too.

    I have a crush on Jonathan Kozol. It’s OK; my husband knows all about it, and he’s fine with it. Seriously, any man who can say to conservative members of Congress, who challenge him that “throwing money at our failing schools isn’t going to solve the problem”: “Just try! Drop it from helicopters! Throw it at them! Let’s see what happens! It works for Harvard!” is a rock star in my book.

    I’ve read all of his books, and they all made me mad. Most also made me write checks. All have made me ask hard questions about my own life and how I am, in many ways conscious and unconscious, contributing to the perpetuation of our nation’s greatest injustices.

    But perhaps none hit as close to home as Shame of a Nation: The Restoring of Apartheid Schooling in America.

    See, I just looked up the statistics, and, while I knew that the elementary school our kids will go to is mostly white, I didn’t know it was 94% white. I feel like writing that in huge letters, because it’s shocking. Even worse, the high school, with a much larger catchment area, that we really thought was fairly diverse, is 91% white. As in NINETY-ONE PERCENT WHITE. And how, exactly, do I expect my kids to receive a truly great education–not just with chess club and Spanish classes and an elementary science lab, which they will have, but with classmates who look like the United States of America–when more than 9/10 of those classmates are white? But more importantly, how do I expect other people’s children, children of color, to receive a truly great education when there are, by demographic eventuality, so few white kids left to go to their schools with them?

    Kozol’s book starts with the assertion that we must name the problem ‘segregation’ in order to solve it, and 317 pages later, he really leaves no doubt. Our schools are systematically, almost intentionally, failing students of color, preparing them only for employment, not for democracy, and oftentimes not even preparing them well for employment. We’re teaching to the test, suppressing dissent, pretending that the civil rights movement is over, and thanking our ‘lucky stars’ that our kids go to the good (read: white) schools. We’re spending the few tax dollars that legislatures are willing to appropriate to buy highly regimented, patented curricula that actually reflect very low expectations for our children of color, and that drive the best teachers farther away from those struggling schools.

    And then parents, not unlike me, move to places that have ‘good’ schools, where teachers can encourage kids to ask questions, where everyone gets a textbook, where it’s safe to go out to recess…and we take our tax dollars with us. We (okay, this part is not actually me) contribute to private foundations that funnel even more money to our kids’ schools, and then we act like they’re inherently smarter, more ambitious, more ‘scholarly’ than the kids who have been taught, from a young age, that they don’t matter. We know that our housing values are artificially high, in part, because inner-city schools are struggling; we see that we could get a lot more house on the other side of the state line, and that feels yucky. We hope that our kids won’t stare when we see black people, that they’ll know how to exist in a multicultural society, that they’ll somehow learn what we say and not what we do, and we feel pretty horrible about it.

    And it looks a whole lot like 1953. And now I have to figure out what to do about it, not just as a Board member of an organization that fights for equity and excellence in Kansas schools and an advocate for social justice, but also as a mom.

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    A Political Action Committee for the poor?

    Posted on April 11, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    Even though I’m from Kansas, it’s not often that I find myself inspired by a quote from Bob Dole.

    But, on page 148 of the really fascinating book So Damn Much Money, about the role of money in the distortion of the political process, Dole is quoted decrying the ways in which Political Action Committees (in 1982, a relatively new innovation) were influencing policy decisions:

    “Poor people don’t make campaign contributions.”

    Now, I grant that that’s a rather obvious statement by then-Senator Dole.

    But it makes me wonder:

    Should they?

    What I mean is, at the same time that advocates for social justice take on the current judicial and regulatory structures that allow for such a significant infusion of money into the political process (which, of course, should absolutely be a critical advocacy issue for those who are committed to legislation that reflects the needs of now-marginalized communities), should we find a way to work within the “world as it is”, and start a “Poor People PAC”?

    I know…it’s immoral to think about diverting money that could be spent on direct assistance for low-income people to campaigning for policymakers sympathetic to their needs.

    Except we do it all the time when we hire fundraisers or organize special events–there we think of it as investing, spending money so we can make money.

    And most of us social workers don’t object to the organization of a PAC by the National Association of Social Workers (except that it focuses more on issues of social work professional licensure and reimbursement, although there is arguably considerable overlap between those sympathetic to our profession and those committed to the issues we address).

    So why not?

    It doesn’t require denying the inherent problems in the system as it’s organized today, any more than registering as a lobbyist requires pretending that all lobbyists are committed to the public good.

    It just says that, while the system works this way, we want it to work for the very people who need it most.

    It wouldn’t take that much money, I don’t think, to begin to change the way that elected officials viewed the concerns of people in poverty and those who work with them: a few fundraisers, some well-placed $1,000 contributions, and a focus on accountability to the constituencies and the issues of those in need.

    It might reinvigorate the democratic process for those who are understandably disenamored of its exclusion of those without the money to pay the “access fee”–if people in poverty interviewed candidates to decide who would get their endorsement (and their contributions), they might see themselves more legitimately as stakeholders in the process who deserve authentic representation.

    What do you think? Is this an area where nonparticipation is the only ethical option? Or is a PAC for the poor an idea worth exploring?

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    Why Advocates Make the Best Fundraisers

    Posted on March 31, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    One of those books that I’ve had on my nightstand for months (thank goodness for really long checkouts from the university library) is Fundraising for Social Change.

    Once I finally opened it up, I found not only some still-relevant and very applicable (although my edition is somewhat outdated, technology-wise) fundraising strategies, especially for grassroots social change organizations, but also even more parallels between advocacy and fundraising than I had contemplated before. This has me thinking about how fundraisers are advocates for their causes, and how advocates should spend more time asking for money, and I want to hear from those who are fundraisers and those who are advocates (and those who consider themselves both!) about your reactions to these areas of overlap. In the weeks to come, I’ll sprinkle in some posts with some specific ideas about how some of the strategies suggested in Fundraising for Social Change might be applied in an advocacy context, but, here, I’m more interested in the big picture, a sort of “Venn Diagram” of how the worlds of asking for money and asking for policy change collide.

  • Organizations that ask most frequently get the best response: This is true in fundraising, and explains part of why people give so many of their charitable dollars to religious institutions, and it’s true for advocates, too. I’ve won at least one legislative battle, in particular, because I refused to go away, and I’ve garnered more than a couple of votes by having the audacity to just ask.
  • You need strategies to acquire, retain, and upgrade: We can’t use the same messages to bring in new people, keep those we have, and move people from peripheral to central involvement, and that’s true for fundraising and for the realms of organizing and advocacy. We lose people when it’s obvious we’re not exactly talking to them, and we can miss out on valuable opportunities to help people take the next step, too.
  • Nonprofit Boards matter…a lot: I’ve never seen a successful advocacy program, over the long term, in an organization without a supportive Board of Directors, and without the active participation of those core community leaders, fundraising efforts stagnate, too.
  • Emphasize your passion, but don’t forget to close the deal: I’ve debriefed with advocates often, only to find that they can’t tell me whether they have the support of the person they just lobbied. They didn’t directly ask. We get the most sympathetic attention when we stress our connection to the cause and the reasons it matters, but we have to stop talking at least long enough to listen to the other’s response.
  • Don’t apologize: I never felt bad about asking an elected official to do something morally correct but politically unpopular. I was giving them the valuable chance to do the right thing. Asking for money is the same way. People give because they want to invest in a collective response to a social problem, which is why people decide to support certain courses of policy action, too. They’re grateful for those opportunities, and we provide a valuable public service by providing them.
  • There’s no substitute for preparation: Fundraising for Social Change emphasizes the importance of understanding your donors, and your prospects, and of entering the conversation with the data and the practice you need to succeed. Obviously, that’s true in many life and professional endeavors, but especially in advocacy, where (as in fundraising) you may only have 5 minutes or so to make your case. You need to maximize every moment.

    I don’t love asking people for money. Just as I don’t naturally love confrontations with elected officials or media representatives, or policy debates with my neighbors. But I know that I can do it, and I have, and I will, because I know that winning advocacy campaigns requires money, and that money which is raised from our constituency is money that is more secure and more empowering than that which is begged from distant benefactors. I see raising the money to fund social change as an extension of my belief in it, and so it must be part of the equation.

    And you, advocates, can fundraise too.

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    Going Public, and Being a “whole” mom

    Posted on March 24, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    The reasons I go, and the reasons I come back

    Recently, I left a protest rally a little bit early, handing my sign to my new friend next to me, and saying goodbye to compatriots along the line. I gave a quick Spanish radio interview on my way to the parking lot, but cut it short, because I really had to leave.

    I had promised my older son that, after a day of work and an evening of activism, I’d be home in time to read his Boxcar Children bedtime stories.

    And I made it, just in time.

    I’d never claim to be an expert on this whole “balance” thing. In fact, I tend to swing from one extreme to another.

    When my oldest son was first born, I was still deeply immersed in the immigrant rights struggle, and I worked through my entire maternity leave and then spent much of the next months of his life in D.C. It wasn’t the kind of mother I wanted to be, so I quit.

    And then, I retreated, into our private lives and my private concerns. And I felt better about how I was parenting, for a while, but, really, that wasn’t the kind of mother I wanted to be, either–so focused on my child and his needs that I gave him, and others, the message that he was my only concern.

    And, so, I’m trying.

    In the process, I’m learning a lot about how maintaining an ethic of responsibility to the common good makes me a better mom, and how my perspective as a mother makes me a better activist, too.

    I know now that I can’t possibly protect my kids from the outside world, and that trying to do so brings only alienation and anxiety. I see this in other parents who spend so much energy looking for the best schools (or preschools, or enrichment programs), in the hopes that this will be the difference for their kids. I talk with moms at the park who don’t know that we just had an election, but express so much fear about what their kids’ lives will look like as they grow. As stated eloquently in The Soul of a Citizen, the dream of a private sanctuary is an illusion, and I don’t pretend to search for one anymore.

    So becoming a “public” mom makes me a less nervous one. Soul of a Citizen describes this phenomenon as, “if we focus solely on our own experiences, we will hear nothing but the echoes of our obsessions” (p. 148).

    And I also think it makes my kids (okay, at least Sam) respect me more. My children, after all, deserve a complete person as a mom, which makes me think about the meaning of the word integrity, as having to do with the wholeness and interconnectedness of the world, and how essential it is to being human. That’s a lot of what compels me to action, really, this recognition that caring about social justice is just a core part of what and who I am. Soul of a Citizen says this, “It is the determination to protect our sense of who we are that leads us to risk criticism, alienation, and serious loss” (p. 23).

    And, certainly, trying to be this kind of mom does carry risk (sometimes Sam is inconsolably upset when I leave, or I feel guilty when I’m on the phone or checking email instead of snuggled up reading on the couch) and it does involve loss (I wish my kids always ate home-cooked, organic foods instead of the chocolate pudding I let the babysitter give them!).

    But it’s who I am, and, more importantly, it’s who I hope fervently my children will become, too.

    And, so, maintaining ties to a community of activists, and commitments to causes that matter for our world, is also about giving my kids a place to go with their own worries–so that injustice doesn’t become something that we ignore, and so that my silence doesn’t send a message of complacency or acceptance, which would be confusing at best, and demoralizing at worst, to children who I hope will grow up outraged at what they see around them.

    There are certainly many days when I fail, when I’m half an activist and half a mom, and feel like a failure at everything.

    But, the morning after we finished the mystery of what happened to the stolen jewels in New York, when I showed Sam the pictures of the protest and explained what it was about, wasn’t one of them.

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    The WHY: Tapping into intrinsic motivations

    Posted on January 11, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    A section of Cognitive Surplus is dedicated to the concept of motive: why do people give of themselves in some pretty extraordinary ways, and how can understanding those motivations help us to increase the kind of behavior we desire (and on which our future depends)?

    He identifies two aspects of motive that should be part of every community organizer’s way of seeing the world and, indeed, part of how every nonprofit organization views its volunteers, clients, donors, and patrons.

    He’s talking about intrinsic motivation (that which comes from within, then, not responses to external incentives), and he divides it into two elements:

    autonomy (control over what we do and how we do it)
    competence (desire to be good at what we do)

    And, reading that analysis, and a terrific example of how groups of Josh Groban fans have illustrated those principles with their charitable giving, I was struck by how often we create institutions, and interventions, that destroy those two powerful impulses.

    How often do we really give our grassroots leaders, volunteers, or clients autonomy, even over the decisions that govern their own lives? How often are they designing strategy, choosing tactics, planning their own treatments?

    How often do we give people an opportunity to develop skills in areas that are new to them? How willing are we to let someone learn something new, especially when we consider ourselves experts? How good are we at designing campaigns that create roles in which people can accumulate and be celebrated for their acquired competence, even in relatively small ways?

    Conversely, how often do we expect people to “sign up” for our preconceived formulation of what their contribution should be, and then express disappointment/surprise/disgust when they are less than enthusiastic? How often do we witness what Shirky warns against–the dangers of creating what look like opportunities for autonomy but are really attempts to fit people into our mold? How frequently do we forget that “amateur” reflects an authentic love, and that love is something we definitely don’t want sucked out of our causes? How often do we cringe when a grassroots leader, or a volunteer, or a client performs a task less expertly than we would, even after expending considerably more effort, and miss noticing the transformation that occurs from giving people room in which to be autonomous, and to develop a sense of competence that can only come with freedom to try?

    Let’s start this year with a resolve to spend less time asking “why won’t people ____________?” and more time asking ourselves if we’re doing enough to tap into the powerful reasons why people do things at all. And let’s see what happens then.

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    I call it organizing: “network weaving” and your nonprofit

    Posted on December 7, 2010 by | 2 Comments

    Remember, all comments on this week’s posts about The Networked Nonprofit will enter you in the running to win a free copy of the book!

    Yesterday, I wrote about some of the attributes that drive organizations towards social media parallel those that create the conditions for effective advocacy. Today, I’m thinking more about those overlaps, here in the context of “old-fashioned organizing” as compared to what Kanter and Fine refer to as “network weaving”.

    Both concepts have the same fundamental goals:

  • Identifying key individuals who you can connect to your cause
  • Connecting those individuals, also, to each other, in the recognition that collections of people are always more powerful than people in isolation
  • Building strong relationships that, while not “personal” in the classic sense, have a degree of intimacy, forged through both conflict and collaboration, that energizes a movement and transforms people’s lives
  • Finding ways to move people towards increasing levels of involvement, always with a dual focus on how the organizing effort can meet their own needs as well as those of the cause (Beth Kanter refers to this as “The Ladder of Engagement”)
  • Creating structures that give people, who would be relatively powerless alone, voice and power, and a mechanism through which to change their own lives, and the lives of others

    I share with the authors, as do almost all of the (many) grassroots organizers I know or have known in my career, a belief that organizations are stronger when they have a solid connection to those they serve, and that individuals’ lives are enriched by participation in something larger than themselves.

    And I don’t really care whether they call that network weaving, in language that perhaps feels more familiar to those figuring out social media will add to their nonprofit organization’s quest for justice, however they define it, or organizing, which, albeit in online form, it really is.

    But it does, for me, raise some real questions about where the points of divergence are. In other words, if networking weaving, as described here, is so much like community organizing, how is it different, not in technical ways (like the media used) but fundamental ones? Are online social networks, for example, more likely to be composed on homogenous groups, thus denying people one of the most enriching parts of organizing: joining forces with those different than ourselves? Are the relationships forged online significantly different (more shallow? more lasting?) than those built face-to-face? Is the role played by a network weaver substantially different than that of an organizer? Do the boundaries of expertise fade away more fluidly online?

    I don’t know the answers to these questions, and they are most likely only answerable by work with a relatively small number of individuals–those engaged in authentic online AND in-person networking weaving/grassroots organizing efforts. Because so many of the former organizations have little to no experience in grassroots organizing campaigns (having adopted the strategies specifically to advance their online efforts) and so many of the latter are working with populations that (correctly or not) they assume to prefer face-to-face work, definitive answers may elude us, at least for awhile.

    But, maybe, that’s okay. Maybe, for now, our challenge is to really contemplate the questions: to think about how (and when) network weaving complements how we engage people “offline”, and vice versa, and to prompt conversations with our constituents about the multiple ways in which they want to connect to each other, and to our shared work.

    Those of you who organize online and/or in-person, where do you see overlap and where do you see significant differences? How can practitioners committed to empowering participation use both strategies? What cross-learning do we need to advance these fields? And does language, how we talk about what we do, matter?

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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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    Posted in My New Favorite Thing

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