Chapter Seven

Equipping Your Organization for Anytime Everywhere

Operating in an anytime, everywhere world requires more than a suite of profiles on social networks and exciting calls to action. Behind the strategies and tactics is the real backbone of your success: your staff and your leadership. So far we have discussed the guiding principles to create social change anytime, everywhere and how to build community and plan and launch advocacy and fundraising campaigns across multiple channels—and we have provided examples of how other organizations have done it successfully.

In our experience, organizations excel when they invest in multidisciplinary teams with staff that collaboratively manage campaigns, web, email, social, and mobile communications, and strategy. In other words, these organizations (even the small ones) don’t put all online communications and campaign responsibilities into one “web” person. That is a recipe for failure because it sentences staff to burnout and leads to turnover. Often a step forward in these organizations results in two steps back when people leave because it forces the organization to reexamine their needs and start over. We have seen nonprofits of all sizes experience this, and it takes a heavy toll on the entire organization and its community engagement.

Preparing your organization to operate in an anytime, everywhere world means recognizing that everyone in the organization ultimately contributes to the success of multichannel strategies. Online campaigns and implementation can no longer be walled off in a separate team on the other side of the office. Today online channels and social media pervade all positions; staff may be part of a team that is creating content, organizing events, or even planning an appeal, and adapting materials for Facebook or the design of an email alert. This means including staff and teams from all parts of the organization in multichannel thinking and planning. It even means talking to and recruiting your board and funders to join you in these new approaches and models of working. With the principles, strategies, and tactics in place, you need to focus on setting yourself up for success “inside” the office.

In this chapter, we cover the “operating system” of your organization, in a sense. We first guide you through changing your organizational culture to better implement the strategies to create social change anytime, anywhere. Next we discuss staffing models that provide an internal foundation that supports anytime, everywhere action outside of your organization. Lastly, we provide suggestions and examples to help online teams build wide support in the organization for multichannel communications from colleagues, senior staff, board members, and even funders.

TEARING DOWN SILOS: CHANGING INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE

When you think back to the first time you realized that you wanted to do something to change this world, even in some small way, how did it feel? Did you feel inspired and excited to work side-by-side with people who were just as passionate as you to create meaningful social change that truly impacted people’s lives? Were you fueled by the possibility of collaborating and brainstorming with colleagues to develop innovative campaigns and programs that connected and motivated everyday people to change the world?

Are you still fueled with that same excitement and hope? If the answer is “no,” you are not alone. Too often in our work with hundreds of organizations big and small we encounter staff who spend a lot of their time trying, and failing, to change organizations that are sputtering in an online, multichannel world. Every minute spent working on internal issues is time not inspiring and empowering citizens. Organizational cultures that stifle staff creativity and ideas are often to blame.

Whether you have been working at a nonprofit for a year or over 10 years, you have probably been a victim of rigid, top-down management structures and teams that squash innovation and collaboration along the way. If nonprofits want to meet their missions more quickly and attract the most talented staff, they must change the way they do business inside the office and get rid of silos.

Does Your Nonprofit Have Silos?

Take a look around the office. Does your organizational culture allow staff to take advantage of the multichannel campaigns and strategies with direct input from several departments? Or is staff off in their respective corners of the office planning their own campaigns in isolation? Are colleagues from different departments encouraged to brainstorm ideas to move the needle on your issue? Do these brainstorms come naturally for the organization, or do they feel forced or fake? You can tell this by how comfortable staff are openly sharing new (even crazy or edgy) ideas without fearing that senior management will dismiss their ideas right off the bat. If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, your nonprofit is living with silos (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Common Organizational Silos Squash Innovation and Creativity

Breaking Silos Leads to Better Organizational Culture

In our experience working with nonprofits over the years, we have found that it’s important that nonprofits focus on breaking down departmental silos, encourage more open leadership, and create a transparent environment. This will help create an organizational culture that encourages people to think about new ways of solving problems using the web, social media, and mobile technologies while maintaining the important structure and processes that make organizations run smoothly. And most important, this new organizational culture will help create a safe space that doesn’t crush peoples’ spirits by punishing them when a strategy or campaign fails or when you think their ideas sound silly.

According to the Nonprofit Digital Team Benchmark Report that surveyed 67 nonprofits, 60% of digital teams are expected to drive new initiatives.95 And while that is encouraging to hear, staff can’t effectively drive new initiatives if their organization doesn’t truly embrace a more open and collaborative culture or if the organization does not invest in experienced digital teams with strong leadership skills.

INVEST AND BELIEVE IN YOUR STAFF

As organizations and community leaders continue to tackle some of the world’s toughest problems, there is a need to hire, support, and train more people who understand the evolving digital landscape. While online channels, social media, and mobile have made it easier to spread campaign messages, share stories, and connect with people, the channels are also cluttered with competing messages. Activists, donors, reporters, and legislative representatives are being pulled in numerous directions. To create real change on the ground, it’s going to take more staff resources and a combination of tried-and-true organizing strategies, creative storytelling, plus developing and testing new strategies to cut through the noise happening online to raise even more awareness about our issues and connect with our community on deeper levels. To achieve this, organizations must also break free from the top-down management style that comes with the traditional organizational culture, and focus on fostering a nurturing, creative, and open work environment where staff can collaborate as a team and innovate.

“All organizations have to contend with gaps between status, power, and expertise. At some point, the best solutions or insights come from those with less power,” said Charles Lenchner, cofounder of Organizing 2.0.96 “Change is too important to be left in the hands of the executive directors, board members, and consultants. Developing a shared language about these matters is key to sharing ownership, all of us together, in the success of our projects and missions. It’s about getting the best price in exchange for your ‘buy-in.’ Now that’s change you can believe in,” said Lenchner.

Welcome All Ideas with Open Arms

One of the social media strategies we discussed in Chapter Five is to make constituents feel welcome, whether they are engaging with you on Twitter or are part of a Facebook group. The same holds true for your staff. Encourage your staff to brainstorm ideas. Provide the space and time for them to get creative, and we mean supercreative—to the point that they will come up with some whacky or “too edgy” ideas for your organization. Talk through the ideas as a team because it’s these types of brainstorms that trigger some terrific campaign ideas in a collaborative environment. And sometimes these brainstorms won’t go anywhere, and that’s okay, too.

Break Out of Your Comfort Zone

Most nonprofits are averse to taking risks. That’s understandable. Nonprofits are dealing with, and accountable to, many different stakeholders, such as major funders and foundations, donors, volunteers, and so on. It can be scary to take risks and put the organization in a vulnerable position, particularly when you are developing campaigns that have a strong social media and mobile component. However, nonprofits can’t always play it safe when it comes to getting their issues and campaigns front and center. There is just too much competition in today’s “always on” world. As we highlight in Figure 7.2, don’t be afraid to take risks and experiment.

Figure 7.2 Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks and Experiment

John Hlinko, the founder of Left Action and the author of Share, Retweet, Repeat: Get Your Message Read and Spread, has this to say:

The most effective, impactful, spread-worthy messages are invariably the ones that seem at first to be the most discomforting or even downright crazy. But you can’t reach and mobilize people unless you get noticed, and in a world of nonstop stimuli you won’t get noticed unless you differ from the norm, and cause at least a little bit of a “problem.”

Many people play it safe, worrying about offending people, even if just a few. I say, let them be offended. Sure, it’s worrisome if a few dozen or even a few hundred people are turned off by something you send them, and unsubscribe from your email list or Facebook page. But if a few thousand new people end up joining because that edgier message was so much more “viral” that’s certainly a net gain, right?

Too often, great ideas die in the brainstorm phase because they’re a little bit edgy, and no one wants to take a risk. But the proper approach isn’t to avoid risk altogether, it’s to properly weigh the risks against the potential benefits.

Host Weekly Interdepartmental Meetings

To help break down silos within the organization, host smaller weekly meetings with key people from different departments so that you all know what everyone is working on. These meetings can be extremely helpful for staff to collaborate across multiple channels on upcoming programming priorities and events, legislative bills and advocacy actions, and fundraising so that everything is synchronized. It can also lead to some terrific brainstorming sessions filled with innovative ideas.

Danielle Brigida, manager of social media for the National Wildlife Federation, says, “Our monthly online marketing and communications coordination meeting works to bring people communicating online (through web, news articles, blogs, emails, social media, etc.) together to brainstorm and cross-promote through all the channels. With so many parts of the organization communicating online, we found it important to have these meetings to see where the opportunities overlap.”

“We keep a calendar for the group that displays when and what we’ll be focusing on depending on the month. It really helps us focus our efforts and it also feeds content for social media,” said Brigida.

The National Wildlife Federation has also found that many staff across the organization are communicating online about conservation issues in their free time and most through their personal accounts, which greatly extends the reach of their online communications network.

JustGiving, an online fundraising platform for nonprofits in the United Kingdom, takes it a few steps further. “We focus on creating strong cross-functional teams of experts from different disciplines to deliver products, tools and services—the focus is on ensuring the right people are working together to achieve the optimum output,” said Charlie Glynn, head of people.

These teams meet every morning to discuss progress and priorities, and the teams are empowered to make decisions and agree on responsibilities to ensure deadlines are met. It’s these teams that make the operational decisions together, not a department director. This also encourages the team to take responsibility and builds a culture of trust. “We have built an expectation around giving each other real-time feedback and holding other team members accountable, so the team feels like they are owners and they are in it together,” said Glynn.

Experiment with Tools for Communication and Collaboration Internally

While in person meetings are great ways to share campaign ideas or priorities, using different tools and platforms to collaborate with staff internally anytime and everywhere is essential too. For example:

An operations manual could be implemented as a wiki or Google doc to be edited continually. The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) says that their organization has benefited from creating operations documentation in Google docs. This approach means all their staff have access to documentation—from how to complete various tasks using the database to planning processes for major events—to reference and to update at any time. Periodically, staff and teams also focus on creating or updating certain documentation to ensure that the operations resources available across the organization are up-to-date and could support any staff member jumping into a project or even a new hire accessing knowledge and resources to assist on-boarding. We suggest scheduling quarterly opportunities for teams to work together to review and update documentation to be sure resources are in place and teams are sharing knowledge and best practices with each other in the process.

Yammer, which is similar to Twitter but is aimed at businesses and organizations to discuss internally what they are working on, is great for large staffs or for people who work in different office locations. “Yammer works well in having us all share important content and program initiatives. We use both the monthly meeting and the daily interaction on Yammer to strengthen our efforts and alert one another of our different but equally important priorities,” said Brigida.

An online listening dashboard is useful for staff members to get the latest organization information and news, as well as external news. Using an RSS reader like Netvibes (an online dashboard to monitor social media) or iGoogle, you can set up a listening dashboard that pulls in posts from prominent bloggers in your cause area, alerts of staff or program names, commonly used hashtags (a # followed by a word or phrase) or keywords, and even news stories on the issues your services or campaigns tackle. Organizations of all sizes use listening dashboards to help staff manage and identify priorities for responding and engaging online by making it easy to see popular topics, emerging issues, or popular content attractive to the community.

Private Facebook Groups can also be useful as an internal communications tool for staff, particularly at large organizations or when people don’t work in a central office. The International Fellowship for Christians and Jews (IFCJ) uses private Facebook Groups for their editorial and new media teams. “This works really well for breaking news types of items. For example, if a breaking news story hits and we see it on our Netvibes or Facebook, we post to the [Facebook] Group and decide if it is going to change our messaging for that week—bump our feature article, change our homepage image, etc.,” said Christina Johns, director of new media at IFCJ.

Seize Opportunities

Seize opportunities when they arise, particularly when it comes to leveraging current events that relate to the issues your organization works on. Don’t get stuck in rigid processes and long approval chains, as this will derail you from being proactive. Processes are often what prevent organizations moving at the fast speed needed to participate in anytime, everywhere campaigns. Instead, focus on setting up more nimble structures and teams that can efficiently vet information, develop accurate responses, and execute creative and simple campaign ideas. Right now, too many organizations are overly reactive and scramble to respond. By the time they feel that they have all of their ducks in a row, the moment to rally around has long passed.

Commit to Culture Change, Failing Fast, and Mean It!

As we discussed in this chapter, creating a culture of collaboration and innovation within a traditional and rigid organizational structure can be challenging, but it can definitely be achieved. Make no mistake though; it requires a major culture change within the entire organization that must be led from the top. Senior management must focus on breaking down the silos in the organization to have more of an open culture and leadership.

Teams must be integrated, meaning that people in fundraising, advocacy, marketing, PR, programs, and tech should be working together to develop campaigns that are integrated across multiple channels such as email, social media, and mobile. This means putting an end to departments working in isolation and competing for resources and budgets.

And finally you must believe in failing fast or as Paull Young from charity: water likes to say, “do it wrong quickly,” and mean it. Don’t pretend your organization believes in failing fast and then punish your staff when they do fail. For example, when we met with an organization that swore to us that “failing fast” was part of their organizational culture, when it came down to the campaign plan, it was a completely different story. They looked at us and said, “We can’t really fail though.” Guess what? No matter how well you plan your campaigns or how creative you get, at some point your organization will fail. And that is okay. Failure is one of the best ways to learn, and it can lead to success the next time around.

Once you are ready to commit to this culture change, you will want to examine staffing at your organization and how to set up collaborative teams that can implement social change anytime, everywhere.

STAFFING

What staffing structures are working today in the nonprofit community that are successful with online multichannel campaigns, fundraising, and outreach? We have found that the most effective way to staff for this is to have a dedicated digital team that is spread across different departments, something that is known as the hybrid model.

The Hybrid Model

The hybrid model is one of the most popular and effective multichannel models for nonprofits in the digital space; though organizations must be silo free for this model to succeed. According to the Four Models for Managing Digital,97 written by Michael Silberman, global director of digital innovation for Greenpeace International and nonprofit strategists Jason Mogus and Christopher Roy, who talked with senior online campaigners from over 60 nonprofits, “the most progressive and the most conducive to producing continuous innovation at the pace of digital change” is the hybrid staffing model. In this model, the digital team is spread across different departments (grassroots, IT, fundraising, communications, marketing, etc.), but all digital staffers are connected to and supported by a central and strong digital experience team that helps direct them toward strategic goals where campaigns are synchronized. “With this model, the culture of the central digital team is practicing . . . open leadership: service oriented, highly collaborative, hyperconnected listeners, who also have the technical and content expertise to be high-value strategists,” said Mogus, Silberman, and Roy in the Four Models for Managing Digital.

The hybrid model is also a good model for smaller organizations where the staff wear several hats. The bottom line is that we live and work in a multichannel world, and communicating with our people through all these channels should be a part of just about everyone’s job within the organization. It should not be siloed off into one part of the organization that works in one corner of the office.

Ideally, your core Internet staff is able to guide and collaborate with a team of campaigners and communicators spread across organizational departments and roles. This could be an official structure, clearly defined in the staffing charts and definitions, or it could be a somewhat unofficial arrangement. The right way to implement a hybrid model depends on the organization but regardless of approach it needs senior leadership support to succeed.

Staffing Your Website and Online Communications

Nearly 40% of nonprofits have one to two digital staff, according to the Nonprofit Digital Teams Benchmark Report.98 Yet 79% of nonprofits manage more than five online properties (websites, social media channels, mobile apps, etc.). Larger nonprofits manage an average of 24 properties and smaller nonprofits averaged 12. Clearly, nonprofits need to invest in more digital staff if they’re going to effectively use multiple channels and platforms to engage with constituents in meaningful ways around their issues and campaigns and create social change.

Here a few options to consider for staffing your organization’s online presence:

Internet Director

This position leads and directs the technical planning and high-level online campaign strategy for the organization. The Internet director collaborates with all departments in the organization such as advocacy, communications, grassroots, and fundraising to ensure that that all online communications, like email alerts and fundraising appeals, web content, and social media, are synchronized and adapted properly to each channel and timed accordingly. This position also oversees the organization’s online marketing and outreach, but does not necessarily implement it.

Web Producer

This position manages the day-to-day website and thoroughly understands website best practices, such as search engine optimization, optimizing graphics for the web, and writing for the web. Essentially, the web producer manages website content and ensures that items are posted to the site in a consistent and web-friendly format that is also engaging to your web audiences. The web producer should also have a strong foundation working with the organization’s content management system and have a proficient programming background in order to fix day-to-day website issues and bugs. The web producer also works with the Internet director, and with different departments to execute online campaign plans. Finally, the web producer analyzes the organization’s website traffic to determine traffic growth, popular content, and website referrals and looks for patterns that show how the organization can better optimize the website for target audiences.

Online Campaigner

If your organization works on a lot of online campaigns throughout the year, it’s worth investing in an online campaigner position. This position also works across different departments and helps the Internet director coordinate and implement the organization’s online campaigns, ranging from writing web copy to action alerts. Online campaigners are also tasked with implementing some of the organization’s online marketing and outreach and helping to build deeper relationships with constituents. This includes listening and responding to constituent feedback on different channels and social networks and connecting with like-minded bloggers and influencers to promote campaigns. This position is also responsible for compiling important online campaign metrics, such as response rates on action alerts and fundraising appeals and producing bi-weekly or monthly reports.

Database Manager

This position is important for organizations that have several databases running for different aspects of the organization. For example, if you use Raisers Edge for your main donor database, Convio for your constituent relationship management system, and NGP VAN for your voter file management, you are going to need a designated staff person to manage all of the databases and associated data.

Social Media and Mobile Staffing

At this point, you maybe asking yourself, how does social and mobile staffing factor in, given its growing trends?

Social media and mobile can be incredibly time consuming, especially if you are a big nonprofit like the American Red Cross or the Humane Society of the United States. These groups have a lot of people who are constantly interacting with them through social media and mobile. These large organizations can’t afford not to have full-time social media and mobile staff serving as “listener in chief,” responding to the community, relaying current news, or debunking myths. For example, when the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) started seeing the mobile trend “come to life,” they positioned the organization for the anticipated growth in that area by hiring a full-time mobile communications manager. “We actually repurposed an existing online position so that we could hire the mobile position right away,” said Carie Lewis, director of emerging media at HSUS. “In 2012 we will move mobile out from underneath emerging media and treat it as one of our major online communications channels along with social media, website, and email. This will position it for even further growth in the future.”

Social Media: A Shared Role

Recalling the hybrid staffing model we discussed earlier, social media can be a shared responsibility within your organization’s staffing structure. It does not always have to be done by the “social media person.”

Here are some great examples of organizations that have several staff contributing to their social media presence.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has found success staffing their multichannel campaigns, according to Ashley Palmer, senior marketing coordinator for PETA, by having full-time digital team members spend 50% of their time managing social media. They spend the other 50% of their time creating web features, working on PETA’s mobile apps, and coordinating email and action alerts in collaboration with several departments. PETA also has 15 other staff members who promote PETA via their personal social media accounts, as well as help plan out how to utilize PETA’s social media accounts when promoting new projects. These 15 staff members spend approximately half an hour on social media strategy or promoting PETA’s content each week, with a few participating slightly more at about five hours per week.

While the American Red Cross National headquarters has three full-time social engagement staff, they also have a field network of over 600 chapters and 36 blood regions, and many of them have staff or volunteers devoting a percentage of their time to social engagement. In addition, they have subject matter experts within their lines of service devoting 30 minutes to 2 hours per day to social engagement in their area of expertise. The American Red Cross is also developing a cadre of digital volunteers to “deploy” during disaster operations, said Wendy Harman, director of social strategy for the American Red Cross.

“Our vision is to make social part of the organization’s operational DNA, so participating in the social web is a part of many people’s existing jobs,” said Harman.

Other organizations, such as Conservation International, who have one full-time social media staffer, have also formed a social media content team responsible for submitting content to the organization’s social networks. This team consists of three junior staff members, a senior director of online engagement marketing and communications, and a media director. The team meets once a week to brainstorm content, campaigns, plan for upcoming staff absences, and to discuss any issues that arise. In lieu of meetings, questions and concerns are also discussed through the team’s email list so that they are in constant communication.

The social media content team has helped break down some of the silos in the organization and has increased their capacity to synchronize communications efforts across traditional communications channels and social media.

Social Media Staff Guide

The staff managing and participating in an organization’s social media should be the biggest champions of its brand and issue. For some organizations, social media has been integrated into many aspects of an organization, and that is a good thing, but it also presents organizational challenges. Having a social media guide for staff will be very helpful in empowering staff to be even better champions and help senior leadership be more comfortable with transparency around the brand. Here are some ideas for you to think about when drafting your organization’s social media hand guide:99

• Will you only allow certain members of your staff to post to your social media accounts? Will all staff have access? Personally we prefer for organizations to have more of an inclusive policy that encourages staff from several department to share, which falls into the hybrid staff model we mentioned earlier.
• What are your top five social media goals? Be explicit. Example: “Our goal is to foster discussion around our issues even if people disagree with some of our positions.”
• Adopt a “listen, learn, adapt” strategy. “No one can control what is said about your organization. As consumers have a voice and a means to make themselves heard, it is up to you be out there to listen, track, and respond,” said Ayelet Baron, director of Cisco Systems, in her presentation Social Media for Social Good.100
• Are you properly staffed to respond to all questions regardless of how silly or stupid you think they may be?
• Identify what private, illegal, or sensitive information is not permitted to be discussed publicly—including on social networks. For example, it’s illegal for 501C3s to endorse or oppose candidates running for office.
• How should staff respond to criticism? Note the answer is not to “ignore it.” Arm your staff with suggested tactics and a plan to quickly respond to criticism.
• How should staff respond to personal threats?
• There is no “delete” on the Internet. If your staff accidentally posts something that was not accurate or inappropriate, have them acknowledge it ASAP and post a correction.
• Remind employees that their professional and personal social media activity must be distinct, and they must be aware that even if privacy settings are used, anything posted online has the potential to become public. Suggest that they note that all posts are on their personal accounts, as a social media disclaimer.

Staffing Your Mobile Program

According to Jim Manis, chairman and CEO of the Mobile Giving Foundation, out of 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States101 there are a little over 1,000 nonprofits and associations using mobile to engage donors.102 That is less than a 1% adoption rate.

While a much larger percentage of nonprofits in the United States are investing staff in social media, as opposed to mobile, nonprofits should take note that 86% of those who donate money to an organization via text are willing to consider giving larger amounts via other channels, according to the Donor Survey Report by the mGive Foundation, so this channel should not be ignored.103

Admittedly, staffing for mobile can get tricky and expensive. Some larger nonprofits like HSUS have hired one full-time mobile staffer, since they have a significant, growing base of supporters who use mobile to access their sites, respond to appeals, and make donations. Other nonprofits, like the American Red Cross and the Human Rights Campaign, use some of their existing digital staff to integrate mobile into their campaigns. “As priorities shift and mobile activities heighten as they do in disaster scenarios, we typically designate a single individual to be responsible for the mobile channel on a full-time basis, and during non-disaster periods we revert back to shared responsibilities,” says Josh Kittner, Senior Marketing Consultant at the American Red Cross.

But some organizations, like Conservation International, that have experimented with mobile texting in the past have not seen a good return on the investment, because their mobile list was not large enough at the time.

Regardless of how you choose to staff your mobile presence, your nonprofit can effectively integrate some mobile tactics and strategies no matter what your budget is. For example, your organization’s website, donation forms, and email appeals should be optimized for mobile platforms, like smartphones and tablets. You can also assess whether mobile apps are a good investment for your nonprofit or experiment with QR codes in your marketing and outreach. You can also test text-to-donate campaigns around urgent and timely issues.

ENGAGING LEADERS IN CULTURE CHANGE

You are reading this book because you recognize the importance and potential of multichannel approaches for social impact. But you can’t do it all alone no matter how passionate or smart you are. Chances are, you aren’t in a leadership position with authority to change job descriptions, redirect resources, and train people to work more collaboratively on digital communications. Or maybe senior staff or a colleague in the next office is pushing back with, “We are doing fine online. Just do your job. Nobody needs more work around here.”

Whatever the circumstances, your organization needs multichannel communications to work, and it needs you to help lead it forward. We want to help. From your leadership staff and board to your staff and colleagues and even to your funders, the following examples and suggestions are designed to equip you in rallying both interest and participation for multichannel approaches to meet your mission.

Convincing Your Senior Staff and Board

When it comes to convincing anyone of anything, one of the most successful tactics is to figure out first what is important to him or her and what would influence the decision. When it comes to specific social and mobile tools or multichannel strategies in general, much of the push-back that executive directors and other leadership staff may exhibit in your organization comes from not fully understanding the tools and applications themselves. Strategic direction and relevance to your mission, in addition to the opportunity to engage donors, are some of the most influential topics on their mind. It is your opportunity to share with them not just the ins and outs of a given tool, but also the way these technologies and multichannel strategies will help your organization do more to meet its mission.

First, invite your executive director or a board member to actually sit with you at a computer so that you can really show them what these tools are like and how they are used; and let them hold the mouse! Be prepared for the meeting by pulling up a few tools that you want to show them and log in if necessary to speed up the process for exploring the tools. If you have accounts set up that represent the organization already, be sure to have those open and logged in. If you know that you will be meeting at a specific time, ask the community to say “hello” or send a message at that time or a few minutes sooner. For example, if you know you will be demonstrating Twitter to your board members at noon, post to the account at 11:50 that you are about to show Twitter to the organization’s board and would love the community to say hello; when you show them the screen, they will see very recent activity and give you content to demonstrate how to reply and engage.

You know that your organization’s leaders are focused on the strategic plan and mission of the organization. Show how the goals and strategies for anytime, everywhere technologies are aligned with the larger goals of the organization and how they can help you achieve your mission. Aligning your goals with the community and the various tools also helps you communicate about why and how you want to use social and mobile tools. This is also an opportunity to frame the conversation around these technologies from the beginning on what is really important: the quality and action versus the sheer number, for example.

One thing you can anticipate your leadership staff or board will ask for is the data. You can share this book with them and show them the infographics from the introduction to help illustrate the general data for anytime, everywhere technology. You can also pull some data together yourself. If you have profiles set up for the organization already, put together a list of the data you have for those platforms. If you don’t have profiles for the organization, or haven’t actively used them, you can still pull influential data. Use search to pull up example results on topics of interest to your organization or cause. Highlight example messages or interactions that organizations like yours have had online, especially if they highlight missed opportunities for your organization to participate. For example, look for posts on Twitter in which local community members asked for resources or talked about an event they attended where another organization replied with a link to resources or a message of thanks for their participation. That could have been you!

Don’t overlook the option of running a test to prove your point. This small test can take place using the channels you have set up for the organization already, or, if you have to, even on a personal or temporary account. For example, open up comments on a blog post or page of your website soliciting feedback or ideas. Then work with coworkers to orchestrate a collaborative multichannel approach to an upcoming message by tying an email message and social media messages together. Circulate a survey via your website and social channels that asks which platforms supporters use and where they want to communicate with you—or even add a field in your sign-up form for a mobile phone number (with a note that it would be used for SMS/text updates, not cold calls).

Be sure to track where you were before the test, what you did and why, and then what happened and what it means. Did you add the mobile phone number field to your sign-up form and see 90% of completed forms include a phone number? Even if you added the field as a test and don’t have mobile messaging in place at the organization, that’s a great number to show your leadership staff that the community wants to hear from you on their phones!

Convincing Your Staff and Colleagues

For many of the people we’ve talked to, if convincing their boss isn’t the issue, then it’s getting their coworkers and colleagues to join them. Just as organizational alignment is key for leaders and board members, for your colleagues the bottom line is the capacity to get it all done. Nonprofit staff are often stretched thin and using new strategies and tools, no matter how shiny and cool or mission-critical, can launch many of your colleagues into the feared realm of “more work.” As such, it’s important to approach your conversations and invitations to join you in an anytime, everywhere approach from the perspective of helping them meet their goals (maybe even with more participants or in a faster time).

Doing some of the legwork for your team or organization can really help people understand where they fit and how they can contribute without really doing anything new. As Katie Benston recounts from her time as director of annual support for Hospice and Palliative Care Charlotte Region, “I created a calendar for one month and populated it with messages we already had from other communications. This helped me show that creating content wouldn’t take much time.”

Try creating a shared calendar just for messages and sharing it with others so they can add links and updates they think could be distributed across various channels. You can also jump-start some of the multichannel options available by creating a content map that coordinates types of content and the channels that they align with.104

If you aren’t in a position to enforce adoption of anytime, everywhere tools and methods, you may want to start your convincing efforts on a strategic colleague. Find a friend outside of your team and get them on board with the value and alignment of these tools. You can then show that it isn’t just an opinion you have, or even something just from your team or department. And, even better, have that ally be someone at a management level to support your point that buy-in is already coming from staff with a strategic focus on the organization’s mission.

For those readers who are organizational leaders but find staff are the ones pushing back, remember that for this group the bottom line is really getting things checked off the to-do list and completing work as effectively and efficiently as possible. So, these tools and strategies need to be presented as a better way to do our work. There are also a few things you can do to build it into the structure, beyond the staffing models we discussed earlier in the chapter.

Provide incentives for participation. In celebrating making it through a big milestone or a hard day, we can celebrate together and provide team or individual incentives for advancing the organization toward an anytime, everywhere operation. Create goals that can only be achieved by using multichannel approaches and engaging staff across the organization to invite participation from many teams and focus all staff on a shared goal. Whether you meet the goal or not, be sure to celebrate and document what you learn from the whole process.

It’s also important that the various contributions each staff person makes toward achieving a successful multichannel approach to all your work be included explicitly in their job descriptions and evaluations. Even if a staff person does not use any of the tools or post content directly on behalf of the organization, that person may be responsible for or help with the content, events, or even internal reporting that ends up shared via email, social media, mobile, or elsewhere. Whatever the role an individual plays, supporting multichannel approaches to the organization’s advocacy, fundraising, and community engagement should be seen as part of every staff member’s job.

In 2010, Shelley Zuckerman, the executive director of North York Community House (NYCH) in Toronto, Ontario, started wondering if there were channels NYCH could use to better showcase their impact beyond their basic website. She did some research and investigation of her own, looking at how other organizations were using new channels, then brought her idea to her management staff that NYCH dive in to social media. “We all looked at her like scared children,” said Rabia Din, NYCH Settlement and Education Partnerships Toronto program manager. “Most of us not even being on Facebook (the simplest of tasks), were all terrified at the idea of Twitter, LinkedIn, and all other social media and networking tools.”

Recognizing that not only did the management staff have fears of adopting and managing these new channels, but so did the rest of the organization, Zuckerman prepared an inspirational presentation for the annual all-staff meeting, showcasing how other organizations were successfully engaging and growing their community. As Din explains, “She used real examples of how social media has changed people’s lives around the world, as well as the impact that it can have locally. We were all very impressed (and shall I say, even touched) by the presentation and began to see social media in an entirely different way. That night I, who was completely against anything ‘social media related,’ created my Facebook account—and it kind of sky-rocketed from there.”

Zuckerman ensured that the strategic use of these new channels was successful for the organization, not just individual comfort zones and use, by investing in professional development and capacity building. Din recounts, “The management team started to have meetings that were focused on reading and debriefing chapters from ‘Social Media for Good’ types of books, we were encouraged to attend social media sessions all over the city, we hired a communications administrator that was able to help all the staff get comfortable with different social media channels, created social media policies and procedures, and more.”

Zuckerman didn’t just train staff on a new communications tool or community building platform. She actually shifted the culture of the organization and expanded their opportunities for meeting their mission. Din confirms, “We are now able to share our wonderful digital stories and videos on YouTube, advertise our programs throughout the city (and world), connect with other people/agencies in our field, and most importantly, tell our story of impact.”105

Simply because you are the organizational leader, you can’t expect everyone to share your enthusiasm for new tools and new channels, especially when staff feel stretched thin. Recognizing where the hesitations or opportunities lay first, and then building the support for your staff from there, just like Zuckerman did, can help you create multichannel champions of all your staff.

Convincing Funders

Nonprofit organizations often feel at the whim and mercy of the philanthropic organizations that provide grants and operating funds, which for some organizations covers a large portion of the operating budget. When it comes to transitioning your organization into an anytime, everywhere leader, you shouldn’t feel that you are at the mercy of a funder, but instead that you have the opportunity to teach them a thing or two!

Start building multichannel techniques and plans into the proposals you present and the processes documented in your applications. Taking a multichannel approach to your work isn’t just for your communications department, so highlight the way your engagement plans, information and campaigning, and even program or direct service deliverables are supported across social and mobile channels. On top of your own plans, be sure to include the data that support your case: both data like those in the multichannel technology snapshot (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2) and the data you’ve put together internally from individual channels and the impact of working across them.

Just as we suggested that you add learning goals into your internal plans, be sure to highlight the learning goals you have for the work to be funded. It may be that you want to test which channels are most appropriate for the specific program or campaign, or even that you want to track service users across all channels from offline to the website to the text message reminder.

And as you learn, invite the funder to join you! Offer your data up for their analysis or your experiences for other grantees to learn from. For foundations and other grantmakers, the bottom line is really the impact and investment of their financial support. If you can accomplish progress on your mission while also learning and advancing your own multichannel strategies, you can report back on their investment on two levels. And offering to share it all, too? Well, now you’re just putting icing on the cake.

INVEST IN PEOPLE OR FADE AWAY

At this point, you may be saying to yourself, staffing for social change anytime, everywhere and creating a culture of collaboration is going to take a lot of resources and money. Even if some of the tools you use are free to use, there are real costs associated with using them well. We are not going to lie to you: it’s going to take an investment and, to be blunt, you really don’t have a choice if your organization is going to survive into the next decade.

While we recognize that nonprofits are on tight budgets and are slowly investing more staff and resources into these channels, they need to ramp up faster to keep up with the channels, which themselves continue to evolve. This means investing in a digital team and adopting a hybrid staff model, as well as fostering an open and collaborative culture.

Think of the hybrid model as a way to better utilize current staff for current and future needs. Meeting the needs of digital and multichannel strategies doesn’t have to mean adding new positions or adding more work to already burdened staff. Rather, it may be a matter of changing priorities and making more efficient use of current resources and staff.

We know that this is a lot to digest. You’re also probably wondering how you will transition your organization to operate with new staffing structures and a more open culture. What privacy issues will staff face? By having a more public presence on multiple channels, how will your organization respond to community feedback? The next chapter addresses all of these issues and provides suggested safeguards and processes to help you position your staff and community for positive engagement.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Spark a conversation with your team or organization about these core principles with the following questions:

NOTES

95. digitalteams.org/

96. www.organizing20.org/2011/04/25/strategic-plannery/

97. www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/four_models_for_organizing_digital_work_part_two

98. digitalteams.org/

99. Need some help determining the right social media policies for your organization? Check out this social media policy generator: socialmedia.policytool.net.

100. www.slideshare.net/ayeletb/social-media-for-social-good-1599758

101. foundationcenter.org/getstarted/faqs/html/howmany.html

102. yourlife.usatoday.com/mind-soul/doing-good/kindness/post/2011/02/haiti-earthquake-taught-world-the-power-of-mobile-giving/142536/1

103. www.mgive.com/Studies/Default.aspx

104. Here are step by step instructions from Amy about creating a content map: amysampleward.org/2010/09/01/diy-content-mapping/

105. To learn more about North York Community House’s process for adopting social media, visit the Appendix to see a detailed timeline.