the groupery blog

Fundraising: Tips and Strategies

It's never been more important for volunteer-driven groups, such as parent-teacher school communities, to boost their participation and revenue from their fundraising efforts.  the groupery is hosting a webinar to help!

FREE Webinar -- Fundraising: Turnkey options you can start now!

In this webinar you will:

• Gain practical tips on how to improve awareness and participation in your existing fundraising projects.
• Learn about a new fundraising alternative that allows you to immediately unlock the previously hidden value of your community.
• Consider more efficient fundraising alternatives for the Fall that can run alongside your existing projects.
• Learn about successful fundraising programs from other group leaders.

This webinar is being offered by the groupery in conjunction with over 400 volunteer group leaders.  the groupery offers a free, secure web platform that dramatically improves awareness, participation, and productivity of volunteer groups while delivering innovative fundraising features.  To learn more about using the groupery's platform in your own community visit www.thegroupery.com, or to gain access to next practices, free webinars, and a community of over 400 volunteer group leaders, register at www.thegroupery.com/leaders/@@newuser.

Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/661397403

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

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System Requirements

PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

Social Media Mix

There are sites on which your group can communicate and gather to do its work, like the groupery. But there are other needs for social media.

How do Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and other sites contribute to building your community?

Beth Kanter eloquently describes a frame for understanding how social media fit into the non-profit sector and talks about how she helps non-profit groups get acclimated. Here, I'm going to get more detailed, and I admit I wrote this post in part to help people follow world events.

It's about time: Twitter

One thing to think about is that we're each members of many communities, and sometimes the membership lasts a long time, but for some communities membership is very brief, for example when people come together because of an event.

One reason a community might form and disband in this way has to do with breaking news.  Whether it's the a sports playoff, elections, or a tragic global event, people who have that interest come together, meet each other at least to some degree, and may choose to stay in touch or not. 

An physically-established community -- like a school, religious, or community group -- has its own time scale which is fairly long. But some event might come up, and you might join an ad hoc community that only lasts the length of the event! 

An example: I'm sure you have heard about the tragic and historic riots surrounding the Iran Election.  Mashable has written a helpful article: HOW TO: Track Iran Election with Twitter and Social Media.  It explains how Twitter and YouTube have the fastest-breaking news, but it's hard to find and filter for the best examples. Blogs tend to get that information together more quickly than traditional news services (again with a higher degree of questionability in some cases). And if you think about it, for every person with a video camera, there are hundreds with a camera phone: Flickr has a tremendous volume of relevant pictures - again, when they can be sorted through.

Past global events covered this way have included the terrorist attack on Mumbai, and the May 2008 earthquake in China.

Particularly in a diverse school population, some people may be more distressed than others about a global news event.  Enabling a mechanism for people to have fluid interactions and share the experience builds relationship strength and fosters community resilience.  Yes, it's true that a large percentage of your main group might not want to follow playoffs or a specific world news event very closely.  However, by allowing those that want to, to do so, you're building the overall resilience of the group. (Community Resilience handbook by National Children's Traumatic Stress Network - 83 pages.)

So one way to think about how to use social media is to think about the time scales:

• Twitter and other media that can be captured quickly: ad hoc communities meant to be fast, to err on the side of too much information and information that's not quite accurate... rather than not enough.

• Blogs and other media that you want to persist: information that's been thought about and subject to public censure if it's inaccurate, and published as you would any newsletter, whether daily (or more frequently) or quarterly.

• Community information and tools that support the critical work that a community does. Yes, like the groupery.

And what about Facebook?

Facebook, MySpace, and to some extent LinkedIn are meant as a generic area that can be used to fulfill any purpose, depending on the creativity of the user.  Consequently they function well as gathering spots. News and "found items" are shared, games are played, photos are swapped.  I have heard it said that the absolutely best thing about Facebook is its ability to keep track of everyone's birthdays. 

Once you have added a friend who uses Facebook, it's relatively easy to go to their page and see what's going on in their lives (to the extent they want to share). MySpace is similar, and while LinkedIn is focused on professional aspects of peoples' lives, it works the same way: put up a profile, add relevant content, and keep in touch.  (I know one family that spans three generations on Facebook, ages 84-19.)

Public social network applications are great places to look for the people you need, and invite them to ad hoc conversations and group interactions elsewhere.

By understanding how social media work together, you can communicate online in a way that's comfortable to all your groups, teams, and family members.

#octribe

Online Communities Unconference - 2009

The Groupery staff were at the Online Community Unconference yesterday, in Mountain View, CA.

Top Five Takeaways:

(1) Everyone and their brother has online communities!  There are online communities for retired people, people with brain health and injury recovery, caretakers of elderly or ill people, those organized around environmental preservation goals, for governmental agencies, companies, consortia, and for people who bring those separate sectors of society together to produce social good.

(2) It's not about the specific tool, it's about how to best help the community. Choosing a tool because just because your competitors (not community members) use it is a strategic decision similar to creating a "me too" product in order to offer a product line that includes everything your competitors do. Instead, the "which tool?" decision should be made to meet the strategic needs of the community membership.

About competition in the non-profit space, a conversation in a forum hosted by the Skoll Foundation's Socialedge.com led to the wisdom that while consortia are imperfect, they're the best mechanism to date for overcoming "competition" in the non-profit sector.  For education environments, this is not only PTA's / PTO's, but Local Education Foundations, which even have their own consortium!

(3) Tying the online community to the physical community requires deliberate effort. At the groupery, we focus on this specifically. In some environments, the online community has an independent validity.  But in most efforts represented at the unconference, it was important to make the community relevant to the day-to-day life of its members.

(4) It's about making sure you're "where your community naturally is already online" and not try to force control of the location; you may need to be in several places. At the Non-Profit Technology Conference, a lot of conversation happened about the sheer amount of time and effort required to not only to aggregate and sort through information, but to reach out and cultivate the community. This was underscored at Online Community Unconference.

(5) While tools are emerging to help organizations keep track of their communities as they are roaming about in the real world, the fact is that control itself is an illusion, and the most any community manager does is shepherd and nurture the community.

It was a fabulous conference, and I encourage people who are interested to look through the posted materials when they are up.

#octribe

Parent Leaders: Get Organized Now for an Efficient Back-to-School

Last week, Lynne Steffens did our inaugural webcast, "How Parent Leaders can get members organized, 
take the Summer off, and hit the ground running this Fall"

She points out:

Typically summer is the time for families to disconnect from the rigors & rituals of the school year.  For the parent leader however, summer can be a time of working hard to prepare for the upcoming year.  Many leaders are hesitant to enlist the help of their Board and opt to go at it alone.  Far too often the result is “leader burn-out” before the school year has even begun. 
 

She presents a detailed plan of action to help leaders get prepared now so they can relax this summer and hit the ground running in the Fall.  Download How Parent Leaders can get members organized (.pdf).