The Wired Nonprofit 2012

Peer Indexing Presidential Candidates

PeerIndex is a web technology company that is algorithmically mapping out the social web.  If an individual or an entity has a twitter or facebook account, Peer Index provides a relative measure of someone’s online authority across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, and up to three blog URLs.

The site is easy to use and fun to compare authorities (including yourself!).  A word of caution, the tool is still in Beta and is ironing out how it calibrates “leaders.” Topic communities need to be conversing and large enough for meaningful analysis, and for the PeerIndex algorithm to automatically rank people in that topic.

PeerIndex uses three main indicators, which all rank out of 100 (100 is highest).

Authority score – measure of trust; how much others rely on the person’s recommendations and opinions

Audience score – measure of reach; number of people who are impacted by the person’s actions and receptive to what the person is saying

Activity score – measure of the person’s activity relative to the activity of the topic communities the person is part of.

A score of 40+ indicates the candidate is in the top 10% of the topic community.  A score of 90+ indicates the top 0.1% of the community.

The site is able to compare individuals.  Belwo is a snapshot of all the candidates’ indices.

User

PeerIndex

Authority

Activity

Audience

Barack Obama

85

84

44

99

Ron Paul

59

51

39

87

Mitt Romney

55

46

36

86

Newt Gingrich

92

94

40

95

Rick Santorum

29

27

39

28

According to the above, Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich are leading the pack.  Gingrich ranks most highly in how much others trust him and rely on his opinions, and relevant level of activity in his topic communities.  Obama beats Gingrich in his reach.

Using another tool on PeerIndex, the Topic Fingerprint, Obama is influential across a greater range of topics than Gingrich -  technology & internet; science & environment; health and medicine; leisure and lifestyle; finance, business and economics; and politics, news & society.  Compared to Obama’s six topic areas, Gingrich is only influential in two - finance, business and economics; and politics, news & society.

Katherine Crawford-Gray

Nonprofit Video Contests 2012

From Cairo to Wall Street, cause video has been changing the way people come together. Our friend Ken Brecher, the former executive director of the Sundance Institute, calls short-form, citizen video “the medium of the moment.” Last year at the Skoll World Forum for social entrepreneurs in Oxford, England, Brecher famously urged citizen activists and nonprofit leaders “to bring order from chaos and in doing so, fulfill the highest human function — not as a visionary but with a strong sense of reality.”

Greenspaces and Social Media

Developing the social media strategy for my chosen nonprofit – the Washington Park Association - has inspired me to find out more about social media for parks. Thankfully, there are lots of people out there experimenting with social media for parks. This is helpful because engaging a community with a public space feels overwhelming.  When I read other people’s experiences, I can start to break it down.  Despite being optimistic about new technology, for every great idea I have about using social media, I immediately think of barriers.  Two barriers we will be facing in Jersey City Heights and Union City are language and adoption of social media. The primary language of the area is Spanish – it’s spoken in all the shops, the post office, the banks, etc.  So, not only am I coming to terms with how to use social media, I also have a language barrier to work through.  The other barrier is not knowing the extent of the community’s adoption of social media and if they are using it in their daily life.

What makes me most excited about developing a social media strategy for Washington Park Association are the conversations we can have with the different groups that use the park. There are the dog owners, the sports players, the environmentalists, the exercisers, the teenagers hanging out, and the families using the playground, to name a few.  We are also an activist group, working to keep both Councils honest in their development of Washington Park.  So, we can have political conversations and maybe even change a few things at the local political level.  I am thinking of using social media for the Park in ways that will be more about engaging people in conversations about the Park, rather than traditional marketing uses, such as promotion.  Sure, we can use the tools for promotion, but the conversations give us the chance to hear what the community residents have to say and what they want from the Park.  What is occupying my mind right now is how to integrate new social media tools with our website so that we can be more efficient with our Facebooking and Tweeting, and how to find out who lives within a mile of the park and uses social media.  Oh, and can I claim the Park on Foursquare. See you Wednesday.

[KCG]

When Communities Revolt

Two kinds of digital swarms wield considerable influence in today’s nonprofit world. First, there are the kinds of groups that self-organize rapidly on the Web to achieve an urgent, common goal for good (to help Haiti quake victims, for example). And then, as this past week’s Komen for the Cure controversy has made clear, there are other kinds of groups that can form when an organization’s most influential fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking platforms start feeling that the organizations they support are ignoring them — or betraying their trust by doing something controversial without their engagement or prior knowledge.

Komen’s swarm this past week acted swiftly — “with head-snapping speed,” according to Jennifer Preston of The New York Times. It began forming on Twitter and Facebook minutes after The Associated Press Tuesday broke a news “exclusive” exposing a decision by the Komen board to eliminate grants funding Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening programs because of Planned Parenthood’s support for abortion. Within hours, criticsm of the action on the organization’s social sites had turned into an angry buzz. [In the early hours of the brouhaha, nonprofit marketing consultant Kivi Leroux Miller counted 80 Twitter comments criticizing Komen for every comment supporting the organization’s new policy.] 

The Komen swarm intensified throughout the day into Wednesday, fueled by a decision Komen made to remain silent, even as the size of the protest had become nearly overwhelming in its speed and furor. “It was as if they were trying to ignore us,” one Komen supporter tweeted Wednesday. But the uproar didn’t reach critical mass until cause-wired fans caught Komen deleting some of their most passionate criticisms from its Facebook pages. [Komen supporter Mary Anne Van Develde wrote on Komen’s Facebook page Wednesday that “…the post I made here yesterday knocking your decision is now gone. Please, no matter how you try to spin it, you have to know this is just wrong.”]  The swarm ended late Friday when Nancy Brinker, the founder and CEO of Komen for the Cure, reversed the decision.  

But it was too little, too late. Komen had already lost countless donors and experienced what Miller called “an accidental rebranding” of its once-stellar image as a marketing juggernaut able to convene women of all stripes behind its famous pink ribbon campaign to fight breast cancer. “It’s what happens when a leading nonprofit jumps into a highly controversial area of public debate without a communications strategy, stays silent and lets others take over the public dialogue,” Miller says.

Some social media communications strategy take-aways:

Don’t underestimate the power of social media. Komen did. In all, said The New York Times, ”Twitter users had sent more than 1.3 million posts mentioning Planned Parenthood, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation and related terms and hashtags. On Thursday, alone, there were more than 460,000 Tweets.” The online drumbeat became impossible to ignore, convincing 26 U.S. senators to call on Komen to reverse its decision. 

Don’t underestimate the power of your organization’s fan networks. They are following your activities closely. They are likely to be more engaged with you that you realize, and the most influential of them are always ready to engage further. Ignoring them, removing their posts from your media streams or chastising them for expressing their opinions, even if you don’t agree, “is one of the worst things you can do to your community,” says Care2 blogger Allyson Kapin. “It also riles them up even more.”

Social media can help people create a broad, shared awareness of a problem and accelerate the speed at which those problems play out. Be prepared with a communications strategy that takes into account Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, blogs and your Website. Be open and honest with supporters and upfront about controversial decisions. It took the Komen swarm less than three days to force Komen to reverse itself. The 2011 Arab Spring protests, the citizen’s campaign to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the Occupy movement and dozens of other protests all have leveraged social media to create rapid, full-blown displays of mass action.

Nonprofits (and governments and companies) tend to overestimate people’s access to information and underestimate their access to each other. Social media make it much harder to keep a secret, if it that’s what you intend. Komen’s non-public decision last December to end Planned Parenthood grants still may have been unpopular if announced immediately, but at least Komen fans would not have had to hear about it for the first time from a newswire breaking “an exclusive” almost two months after the fact.

Don’t wait to communicate in a crisis. Komen waited more than 48 hours to break its silence amid the backlash, posting a video of Komen Founder and CEO Nancy Brinker defending the organization Thursday. According to the Times, the video drew more than 2,800 comments and was viewed more than 39,000 times but did little to reverse the sentiments of the swarm, which had already taken over control of the story. Bloomberg News says Planned Parenthood was able to raise $3 million in three days from people in reaction to Komen’s decision. 

Bottom line? Don’t mess with your Facebook fanbase and Twitter followers. As Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross told this class last week, social media transparency may feel uncomfortable at first but it is ultimately a good thing. “It’s about having the ability to hear what people are saying and, therefore, to be able to respond to them in really human, honest and compassionate ways.” That way, when something big hits, it lands more like a stumble than a meltdown.

(Professor Stepanek)

(Illustration from #takebackthepink Super Bowl campaign on Twitter)