Here is a recent roundup of articles, blog posts, and research on the "Age of Automation" and what it means for nonprofits.

SPECIAL REPORT:  AI FOR GOOD:  Earlier this month, Allison Fine and I wrote an op-ed for the Chronicle of Philanthropy on the age of automation and it implications for fundraisers. It is part of a special report on AI for Good.  While it is behind the paywall, we looked at some early adopters and how they use ChatBots for fundraising, identified specific challenges, and lay out steps to get started.   Allison Fine and I have been actively researching and writing about the Age of Automation.  Other recent articles include: Leveraging the Power of Bots for Civil Society on SSIR Blog and The Robots Have Arrived: How Nonprofits Can Put Them To Work on Guidestar Blog.

HIV.GOV LAUNCHES CHATBOT:    HIV.gov recently launched a pilot chatbot on Facebook Messenger  The bot is designed to share information from AIDS Society Conference taking place July 23 -July 27 in Amsterdam. The agency used bot authoring platform ManyChat for this pilot. HIV.gov has written about the use of ChatBots in healthcare on its blog that offers best practices uses for healthcare, identifies current research, and suggestions for getting started.

AI AT WORK STUDY: Future Workplace, partnered with Oracle to interview 1,320 U.S. HR leaders and employees to better understand how companies are adopting AI in the workplace. The study examined HR leader and employee perceptions of the benefits of AI, the obstacles preventing AI adoption and the business consequences of not embracing AI. The study found that 71 percent believe AI skills and knowledge will be important in the next three years, 72 percent of HR leaders noted that their organization does not provide any form of AI training program.  

AI AND IMPLICIT BIAS:  CNN/Money reports that AI is hurting people of color and the poor. Researchers say that artificial intelligence, which could fundamentally change the world while contributing to greater racial bias and exclusion."Every time humanity goes through a new wave of innovation and technological transformation, there are people who are hurt and there are issues as large as geopolitical conflict," said Fei Fei Li, the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. "AI is no exception."  Experts attending the AI Summit - Designing a Future for All, said new industry standards, a code of conduct, greater diversity among the engineers and computer scientists developing AI, and even regulation would go a long way toward minimizing these biases.

AI CAN BE SEXIST AND RACIST — IT’S TIME TO MAKE IT FAIR: In this article in the Journal of Nature, the authors argue that we must identify sources of bias, de-bias training data and develop artificial-intelligence algorithms that are robust to skews in the data. The articles shows some examples and how biases in the data often reflect deep and hidden imbalances in institutional infrastructures and social power relations. The authors suggest what is needed to change this.

AI4ALL -  AI4ALL is a nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence. They create pipelines for underrepresented talent through education and mentorship programs around the U.S. and Canada that give high school students early exposure to AI for social good. Their vision is for AI to be developed by a broad group of thinkers and doers advancing AI for humanity’s benefit.

HUMAN-CENTERED AI -  Term coined by AI researcher Fei Fei Li, the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, that says that the development of AI technology must be guided, at each step, by concern for its effect on humans.  More in this Op-Ed in the NY Times, "How To Make AI That's Good for People."

AI AS PRODUCTIVITY BOOSTER:   This HBR article discusses why and how IA (Intelligent Assistants) can reduce techno stress and boost productivity, but unfortunately most people are not using them.

Mobile phones and 24/7 connectivity blur the lines between personal and work time, especially during summer break or vacation.  And according to recent polls, some 62% of people check their work email while on vacation. And that can ruin your time at the beach and more importantly prevent you from reaping the full benefits of taking break.

In the Happy Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout, Aliza Sherman and I did a deep dive into the research literature about the proven links between vacation time, employee resilience and productivity, and how it contributes to the organization’s goals.  We learned that taking a technology break during this time can help accelerate the benefits of time off.

One reason that people don’t take completely disconnected vacations is that they are afraid they will miss too much work and get too far behind.  Others fear they will have millions of emails piling up and find themselves compulsively reading and responding to email during a holiday break, ironically to reduce stress.  It is hard for many of us not to check our work email once we put that out of office message on.

It is time for a shift in perspective.   Tell yourself that taking a vacation is good for your mental health and even better if you disconnect from work. Tell yourself that  you’ll return to work more creative, energized, and resilient. Here are some tips for unplugging from work during a summer vacation:

BEFORE:

* PREP YOUR GETAWAY: Before your beach getaway, let other people know you are leaving. Some people put on a pre-vacation bounce message.  Make sure you remind people to get their requests to you a few days before take off so you can get back to them or get that task done or delegated. Try to clear out your email box as much as possible before you leave so you won't be met with a mess when you return. It'll help you shift out of work mode before you leave for vacation, too. * SCRAMBLE YOUR APPS:   We have something called "Thumb Memory." One way to avoid falling back into work email without knowing it, is to remove your work email or at least put it and other work apps on the last screen of your phone.  (Also a good idea to remove or scramble your social media and other apps.) * REMOVE NOTIFICATIONS:   Also, remove all notifications from your apps - that way you won't be tempted when you notification flash up. * BOUNCE MESSAGE:  Put a bounce message on your email letting people know that you are out and won’t get back to them until after your return from your vacation. While it might be tempting to include a humorous bounce message, let people know you won't be responding. Add a few days to your bounce message, so when you come back, you won’t feel obligated to respond to everything at once. * INCLUDE EMERGENCY CONTACT: Let key people know how to reach you in case of a real emergency which might be calling or texting immediately.  This will help reduce your worries that you’re missing something urgent. * DELEGATE: For specific projects or needs, point people elsewhere during your absence. Be specific in your out-of-office response who should be contracted for what.  DURING

* RESIST THE URGE TO CHECK EMAIL: It is easier to say than do, especially if you are addicted to your email and mobile phone. One option might be to remove your work email entirely, or put all work apps on the last screen buried in a folder. At least your thumbs will have to do a walk of shame before taping your email app. * IF YOU MUST READ EMAIL:  Reading your email is different than responding to email. Try not to engage, just read and focus on deleting and clearing out.  Try to avoid having it ruin your vacation mood too. Also,  answer your email when you are alone, perhaps 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at the end of the day. More tips here. * HAVE AN ACCOUNTABILITY BUDDY:  Make a deal with your family or other travel partners that if they see you on your phone responding to a message it is work-related (yes, they can look at your phone), you owe them $5 or will pay for dinner. AFTER

* RE-ENTRY DAY: When I go on a break, I try to give myself a full day back home before going back to work. I use that day to do laundry and clean up my email. Here are some tips about coming back from break without more stress than before you left. Luckily, early January tends to be slow for most nonprofits and you might return from your holiday with some time to get organized for next year. These tips apply to What's App, Slack and texting for work during your vacation too!   To get the full restorative benefits of a vacation,  take a technology break and set boundaries about responding to work emails and texts.

I will be taking a summer vacation shortly and look forward to using these techniques to help me disconnect and recharge. What are your tips for unplugging during your summer vacation?  Come join me for a free webinar on Wednesday where I will share tips for avoiding nonprofit burnout.

_NOTE FROM BETH:  __Momsrising continues to forge ahead with innovative and effective ways to use social media for engagement and results. Here's a guest post that shares how they are using Facebook Live._

FACEBOOK LIVE: A TOOL FOR PARENT MOBILIZATION AND ENGAGEMENT IN DIVERSE COMMUNITIES Guest Post by Jeannina Perez, Senior Campaign Director MomsRising.Org / MamásConPoder.Org

MomsRising/MamásConPoder is an online and on-the-ground grassroots organization working with over a millions families and communities to increase family economic security, end discrimination against women and mothers and create a nation where both families and our economy can thrive. We’ve successfully done this for over a decade through our unique, powerful parent mobilization strategies - including our ever-evolving innovative use of social media.

This is critical, because according to the Pew Research Center, 75% of parents regularly use social media. As one example, we are increasingly using Facebook Live to provide engaging parent education in multiple languages to diverse audiences, to partner with the media and influencers from communities of color to reach large numbers of diverse parents, and to engage large numbers of parents in our on-the-ground activities who may be unable to attend because of their work and caregiving responsibilities.

The Facebook live filming tool, a free resource provided on your business Facebook page, allows you to do the following with a smart phone, computer, or even an ipad:

● Host easy-to-access public discussions that allow questions to be answered in real time, ● Enables the development of innovative partnerships with media, influencers, and community leaders, and ● Stream events as they happen.

MAKING PARENT EDUCATION FUN AND ACCESSIBLE TO DIVERSE COMMUNITIES

Social media is not an “extra,” but a continuous layer of engagement that is built into MomsRising’s areas of work. As such, Facebook Live is a tool that we have used to share important information with the diverse families in our network, connect families to experts straight from their living room, stream on-the-ground events, open avenues to take action, and provide families with meaningful opportunities to share their experiences.

EXAMPLE: DUAL LANGUAGE PANEL DISCUSSION ON FACEBOOK LIVE IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH

In April 2017, MomsRising hosted a Facebook Live discussion with the award winning author of Arroz con Pollo and Apple Pie: Raising Bicultural Children, Maritere Rodriguez Bellas, and early childhood mental health specialist, Lina Acosta Sandaal, on the social emotional benefits of supporting bilingualism and home language use. The Facebook Live reached an audience of 29,220 and generated 273 comments and questions. In April 2018, we held the same panel discussion again, but on our new Spanish MamasConPoder page. After only a week, the video has already reached an audience of 3,000 of Spanish speakers who otherwise would not have had access to our English video.

Partnering with Media, Influencers, and Community Leaders in Diverse Communities In addition to engaging families already in our network, Facebook Live partnerships with media outlets and influencers from communities of color has been an excellent way to expand our reach to diverse communities across the nation. This has been particularly critical in connecting with high-need populations by working with other trusted messengers.

EXAMPLE: FACEBOOK LIVE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE PANEL WITH THE ROOT

On September 8, 2017, we collaborated on a two-part Facebook Live series with The Root called, How America is Failing Our Children and What We Can Do About It. The panel included MomsRising’s Beatriz Beckford, Kassandra Fredrique of Drug Policy Alliance, Dr. Stacey Patton, author of Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won't Save Black America, Dr. Monique W. Morris, author of PushOut: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, and moderator, asha bandele. The Facebook Live reached an audience of over 53,000 and generated over 600 comments and questions. Since then, we have continued to partner with The Root on topics ranging from education to maternal health.

Making High-Impact On-the-Ground Events Accessible for Busy Parents Who cannot Attend in Person We know as parents ourselves that with the difficulty of accessing childcare, multiple child pickups, inflexible work hours, and more - it can be incredibly difficult for parents to attend on-the-ground activities. To ensure that families who can’t attend an event still have the opportunity to engage, we promote and live stream these events on Facebook Live.

EXAMPLE: TAX BILL IS A LUMP OF COAL PRESS EVENT ON CAPITOL HILL

On December 6, 2017 moms, dads, and MomsRising’s little elves stormed Capitol Hill to tell lawmakers that the GOP Tax Plan is a giant lump of coal for America's families and children. We held a press conference with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Nita Lowey Rosa DeLauro Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard and Congresswoman Katherine Clark. The Facebook Live stream of this event reached an audience of over 56,000 and generated over 100 comments.

At MomsRising, we know that the more moms, dads, grandmothers, caregivers, and more who raise their voices the more powerful our movement becomes. Tools like Facebook Live help us break down some of the barriers of engagement and ensure that whether it’s online or in person - the voices of families in our communities are front and center on the issues that impact them the most. What have been your experiences using Facebook Live in your work?

Jeannina Perez, Senior Campaign Director MomsRising.Org / MamásConPoder.Org

The Pew Research Center has released a research report called "The Future of Digital Life and Well-Being."  Pew interviewed technology experts and scholars (including me) about the benefits and drawbacks of our digital lives.  The expert predictions  about the impact of the internet over the next 10 years came in response to questions asked by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center in an online canvassing conducted between Dec. 11, 2017, and Jan. 15, 2018. This is the ninth Future of the Internet study the two organizations have conducted together.

The report, The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World, was designed to answer the question: Over the next decade, how will changes in digital life impact people’s overall well-being physically and mentally? Pew surveyed 1,150 experts in a non-scientific canvassing. About 47% of these respondents predict that individuals’ well-being will be more helped than harmed by digital life in the next decade, while 32% say people’s well-being will be more harmed than helped. The remaining 21% predict there will not be much change in people’s well-being compared to now.

Pew Research Center recently released the full collection of anecdotes and stories shared by experts about their personal experiences with digital life.   The following positive and negative themes about the impact of digital life surfaced:

POSITIVES

* Glorious connectedness * Invent, reinvent, innovate * Life-saving advice and assistance * Efficient transactions NEGATIVES

* Connectedness overload * Trust tensions * Personal identity issues * Focus failures The report elaborates on these themes and is organized into three sections:  1) anecdotes and comments about the positives of digital life; 2) anecdotes and comments about potentially harmful aspects of that life; and 3) responses in which people’s statements or anecdotes were fairly evenly split with both pros and cons of digital life.

POSITIVE PERSONAL IMPACT OF DIGITAL

While there are concerns, many experts pointed to the positive impact of a digital life in many areas including:

* Family enrichment and enhancement * Work creation enabler and enhancer * Health and wellness aid * Community lifeline * Knowledge storehouse * Wonder creator and problem solver * Education tool * Travel companion * Safety Enabler Digital technology has a positive impact on aspects of life - family, work, and play.  One way is as a health and wellness aid because patients and their caretakers can easily share information and support one another. As Gina Neff, an associate professor and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said in the report, _“Digital technology has been a godsend for care-givers, allowing people to coordinate their efforts to help during cancer treatment, when a newborn arrives, or during a health crisis. Apps and websites cannot replace the communities that have always connected and supported us, but they can help diverse and dispersed groups coordinate care in unprecedented ways.”_

Another positive is the "community lifeline" to other people that connectivity offers. Anne Collier, consultant and executive at The Net Safety Collaborative, said, _“I ‘talk’ with people all over the world on a daily basis on Twitter – seeing, learning from, supporting and spreading what’s meaningful to them in their work and lives. It’s a tremendous source of inspiration for me. Together, we grow intelligence, connect up one another’s work and support positive social change just by doing our work, following one another and sharing what’s meaningful more widely.”_

NEGATIVES

While the study showed that the negatives were not as many as the positives, the stories shared by respondents point to how internet has challenged personal well-being and relationships.  One respondent noted, _"The ritual of a weekly phone call with friends where there seemed like enough ‘space’ to talk about things in a meaningful way has eroded to texting to ‘keep up.’ On the one hand, several of my friends feel more in touch because they are sharing memes, feel they are sharing witty things ‘on the spot,’ but there is less going into depth. We don’t seem to be able to maintain both. That is what is so curious.”_

Other negative themes:

* Alone together * Distractions and addiction * Family and societal challenges * Toxic social media * Never ending work with new demands and expectations * Changing norms about speedy response and engagement * Attention economy and surveillance society * Sleep problems and stirred up woes FUTURE PREDICTIONS

Some respondents stressed that both kinds of futures are possible and can be affected by the choices that are made now.   Amy Webb, futurist, professor of strategic foresight at New York University and founder of the Future Today Institute, said,

_“If our current habits continue unchanged, it’s easiest to map pessimistic and catastrophic scenarios. People will be surrounded by more misleading or false information, not less. We’ll see more YouTube and Twitch stars testing the thresholds of what their audiences are willing to watch, which means ever more salacious, incendiary content, disturbing images and dangerous behaviors. Government officials and political leaders at all levels will add to the vitriol online, posting quick hits that don’t advance democracy in any meaningful way. __Eventually regulators, hoping to safeguard our well-being, will introduce laws and standards that differ from country to country, effectively creating a splintered internet. Regional splinternets will likely cause more harm than good, as the big tech companies will find it impossible to comply with every legal permutation, while our existing filter bubbles will expand to fit our geographic borders. _

_Our well-being is directly tied to our sense of safety and security, which would be upended in these scenarios. But the good news is that these scenarios haven’t happened yet. We can decide that we want a different outcome, but that requires making serious changes in how we use and manage information today. … We can choose to improve the quality of our digital experiences by forcing ourselves to be more critical of the information we consume. … The world we see looking only through the lens of a single post never reveals all of the circumstances, context and detail. Schools must teach digital street smarts … from an early age, kids should learn about bots and automatically-generated content. They should have provocative ethics conversations – with their peers, not just their parents – about online content and about technology in general. Content distributors must stop asserting that they are merely platforms. … As we enter the Artificial Intelligence era we must examine and make transparent how platforms make decisions on our behalf.”_

The report also asked experts about what interventions were needed during the next decade to ease problems.  This is a robust section of report with many ideas. The themes included:

* REIMAGINE SYSTEMS: Societies can revise both tech arrangements and the structure of human institutions – including their composition, design, goals and processes * REINVENT TECH: Things can change by reconfiguring hardware and software to improve their human-centered performance and by exploiting tools like artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) * REGULATE: Governments and/or industries should create reforms through agreement on standards, guidelines, codes of conduct, and passage of laws and rules * REDESIGN MEDIA LITERACY: Formally educate people of all ages about the impacts of digital life on well-being and the way tech systems function, as well as encourage appropriate, healthy uses * RECALIBRATE EXPECTATIONS: Human-technology coevolution comes at a price; digital life in the 2000s is no different. People must gradually evolve and adjust to these changes * FATED TO FAIL: A share of respondents say interventions may help somewhat, but – mostly due to human nature – it is unlikely that these responses will be effective enough What you think?  Over the next decade, how will changes in digital life impact people’s overall well-being physically and mentally?

NYC EVENT:_ On Thursday, July 12th, Allison Fine and I will be leading an event at the NYC Tech Club on Bots, AI, and Nonprofits.  If you are in NYC, you are invited to join us!  We will be talking about emerging best practices for using bots and artificial intelligence for nonprofits for fundraising, marketing, program delivery, advocacy, and internal management.  We'll cover different examples, discuss how nonprofits can be prepared, and cover the challenges and cautions as we enter a new age of technological disruption by robots!_

Allison Fine and I have been researching and writing about the age of automation and nonprofits.  The age of automation, a term coined by Jeremiah Owyang, refers to a family of technologies such as bots, robots, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and smart devices.  We've written about some early adopter nonprofits are harnessing the power of these tools for fundraising and marketing (published on Guidestar blog) and the larger issues for program delivery and civil society (published on the SSIR blog).

This post looks at how some nonprofits are using bots and artificial intelligence for internal management and administration to work smarter.

Ask anyone who works in the nonprofit industry what one of their biggest challenges is and they will most likely say something like "lack of time to implement everything that needs to be done."  (That is usually second after money.) The Age of Automation technology tools will offer nonprofits a gift: the give of more time to get more work done and an easy way to delegate boring administrative tasks, known as "grunt work," to an algorithm or a bot. (I can hear nonprofit interns all over the world applauding)   

One of my favorite examples is how international development agency OxFam is using bots internally as part of using Facebook's "Workplace for Good" platform, a free version of Facebook's internal collaboration tool and a competitor to platforms such as Slack, Hipchat, and Microsoft’s Teams.

Facebook Workplace allows users within an organization (and across multiple organizations) to communicate, connect, coordinate, and collaborate across desktop and mobile versions, using familiar Facebook interfaces such as Facebook groups, Messenger and Live Streaming.  It has the ability to integrate with a variety of tools, including commonly used video conferencing tools as well as those powered by bots and artificial intelligence.

Facebook's Workplace has the ability to unleash virtual assistants or internal bots to help staff get stuff done.  Workplace for good users can @mention a bot to initiate a task or workflow, similar to Slack. As you might expect, when tasked with something, the bot will take action and reply back with relevant information. Bots can also be used to deliver important notifications and reminders.

Oxfam, an international nonprofit with 20 affiliates that work with organizations in 90 countries. With over 10,000 employees, Oxfam faced the challenge of balancing separate hierarchies and encouraging innovation while at the same time providing central leadership and decision making.  Oxfam  uses an internal  suite of internal bots and automation tools that help alleviate boring and time-consuming tasks.  Oxfam created the OxBot is a jargon-busting bot.  

This might not sound like much, but this account by an Oxfam intern shares how difficult it is for a newcomer to the organization, newly hired staff or interns, to master all the inside jargon.   It takes effort such as creating your own glossary, asking other employees, or resorting to googling terms. Imagine trying to decode vocabulary and concepts while trying to complete a task - it slows you down. The Oxbot to the rescue - like other bots you can ask it what an acronym means and the bot also provides links to other internal sources of information.

That is just one example of how bots can help nonprofits free up time, a precious resource in nonprofits, to get work done.

Is your nonprofit using an internal-facing bots for productivity and collaboration?  How?

I'm hearing from many nonprofit folks that they are feeling the exhaustion from a perpetual cycle of outrage.  Many felt stressed and exhausted back in Nov. 2016, and have been fighting for important causes for 18 months now.  The environment nonprofits find themselves operating in is going to last for awhile.  Nonprofits have carefully think about how best to channel their energy while working and living in the midst of an outrage storm that can drain our energy.

Many nonprofit professionals work with organizations that provide programs and services that are under siege. No doubt they will be busy this weekend standing up for what's right. But it is important to remember that we need to take care of ourselves so we are in it for the long haul. My personal mantra for this year has been _Resist, Rest, Revitalize, Repeat._

If you don't take steps to address your stress, it can tear you apart.  In this Psychology Today blog post about stress management, stress can take a toll on your physical and mental health.  The article also suggests that you can steps to turn your stress into meaning and purpose. Here they are:

* _Be aware of your stress_ * _Embrace, don't fear it_ * _Find importance in your stress, it is a sign that something big is at stake_ * _Flip oppression into choice_ How will you turn your stress into meaning?

Last week at the IFC-Asia, I co-designed and facilitated a 90 minute workshop with Marco Kuntze titled "The Digital NGO: The Journey from Paper to Screen." Jo Wolfe, Aseem Thakur, Gillian Tan, Cherisse Beh, Katie Bengaard, and Toral Cowieson joined our session as small group facilitators.

JUST A LITTLE CONTENT TO GET STARTED 

There are different ways to design a participatory workshop. It could be 100% in that participants provide the content by connecting with others and sharing experience and knowledge.  Another option is to briefly share some content or a framework to kick off the participant knowledge sharing.  We opted for the latter.

We focused on digital transformation because incorporating digital has become essential for delivering on all aspects of a nonprofit's mission, not just fundraising and communications but program delivery and governance. We designed a highly interactive workshop based on Jo Wolfe's "NGO Digital Maturity Matrix," an assessment tool that enables nonprofits to codify mindsets and skill sets required for moving along the path of digital transformation. The assessment helps nonprofits look at eight different areas:  Technology, Content, Channels/Devices, Audiences, Analytics, User Experience, and Governance.  Each section lists best practices and processes for being a digital nonprofit.   The matrix enables your organization set a baseline and goals for improvement.

We kicked off the session with a brief overview of the framework by Jo Wolfe, who created it.  Because the taking the assessment in full would require a lot more time than we had for the workshop, Jo prepared a high level summary. Something that you might use to introduce the assessment to the senior leadership team to get buy-in.

OPENING EXERCISE

The session kicked off with a Spectragram exercise involving the full group.     I learned this technique from Allen Gunn from Aspiration over ten years ago at 2007 Penguin Day.  It is also used in education, although it is called something different, “The Human Continuum.”

The spectragram is typically used as a warm up and traditionally the facilitator identified a couple of provocative questions related to the topic being discussed and had people line up as to whether they agree or disagree with the statement.    It is a useful method for getting participants to express a point of view, engage in debate, listen to others and hear another person’s different point of view.   For training where you are focusing on a skill, it allows for folks to express their opinions (negative or positive) and not have debate get in the way of the instructional flow later on.  My colleague, Dirk Slater, has written about how he applies the Spectragram technique in his technology/activist trainings.   Others have also documented and used the technique or taught others how to do it.

A more participatory approach, and one that Allen Gunn uses, is to crowdsource provocative  questions from participants.  Have them self-organize into small groups of three or four people and use sticky notes to come up with some statements.   Participants volunteer their question for the Spectragram.

Another way to use the Spectagram is to help you and participants better understand skill levels in the room.   You ask participants to line according to a pre-determined scale.  We used the digital maturity matrix and created a series of statements related to the small group topics and asked participants line up from 1 to 10, with 10 being completed the digital transformation journey and 1 just starting. This also helped participants think about what small group they wanted to join during the breakout groups.

STATEMENTS:

* User experience: We provide relevant and personalized experiences to our users and optimize this through an ongoing programme of testing. * Fundraising campaigns: We launch and manage the digital aspects of fundraising campaigns, integrated across all relevant staff teams. * Audiences: We have defined and accepted audience segments based on user attributes, behaviors and analytics and tailor our offer to these audiences. * Culture and mindset (governance): We have digital expertise within the senior leadership team and board of trustees. These groups support and understand the strategic importance of digital.

FOUR CORNERS/BRAINSTORM SMALL GROUP FACILITATION

The meat of the session was done in small group work using a technique called “Four Corners” where participants go to four different corners of the room to focus on a specific sub-topic. There are different approaches to assigning people to groups and facilitating small group discussions from assigning to letting participants self-organize. We chose the latter.

It is also important to have an experienced facilitator for the small group.  We recruited people with both subject matter expertise and facilitation experience  and we assigned them a topic and a corner of the room.  It is also important to design a similar process for each small group to work through.   We decided to use an understanding exercise, a SWOT analysis related to the topics.

Each facilitator’s “corner” has two pieces of  flip chart paper on the wall which was divided into a two x two grid and a stack of colored sticky notes.  We were asked to brainstorm ideas in each category, jotting down notes on the post it notes and adding to the wall.

a) Green: Great things you’ve heard of, or done yourself b) Blue: Things you’ve heard of, or done yourself – that failed c) Pink: Name all the things getting in the way of (topic) d) Yellow: Name all the things that you can do to get over those things standing in the way

As with most brainstorming techniques, you get participants to generate as many ideas of possible and categorize the ideas into different clusters or themes.  As a facilitator, there are different ways to do this and they work best depending on the size of the group.  You can have participants work individually, writing down their ideas on sticky notes and putting on the wall and then discuss.  Or discuss and document on the sticky notes as you go.

The final task was to do a synthesis, using this fill-in-the-blanks sentence:

As the facilitator, you have to keep a watch on each group to make sure they are not getting stuck and moving through the exercise. This can be done by "bumble beeing" around to the different groups.  You can give people five minute, three minute, and one minute warning.  As the facilitator, you can help the group move along gently by asking how much more time they need and letting them know how much time is left. You also need a method to get people's attention - ringing chimes, clapping, or talking loudly.

FULL GROUP DISCUSSION

This section consisted of each small group giving a one or two minute summary of their discussion by reading the sentence and highlighting some of the key themes.  We facilitated audience feedback and insights.  Most of the insights and questions had to do less with digital technologies and more with methods of changing culture such as breaking down silos or getting senior leadership buy-in.

REFLECTION AND TAKEAWAYS

The true test of any training is how participants apply it to their work.  I used Thiagi's reflection game, Thirty-Five.  I handed out index cards to participants and asked them to write their name on the index card. Then I asked them to write down an action step that they can do next week to apply what they learned.  We had participants stand in a circle and pass their cards.  Next, participants got to rate a card on a scale of 1 to 7 based on the impact and ability to implement takeaway, with 1 being the lowest and 7 being the highest.  We did four more passes.   The cards that scored the highest the winners received prizes.  Finally, at the end I had each person find the person whose card they were holding and exchange contact information to become accountability buddies. The idea is that they would follow up with each other on whether they implemented their action step.

LEARNING MORE

If you are looking for some simple participatory exercises to make your workshop more interactive, I recommend Thiagi's book, Training Games.   I also has kept a trainer's notebook describing all the various methods I've used over the past 25 years. You'll find those blog posts here.

I'm just back from spending a week in Bangkok, Thailand at the IFC-ASIA: Ecosystems for Good. I co-lead a workshop on digital transformation, co-facilitated a master class on digital fundraising campaigns, co-hosted a learning breakfast for scholarship participants, co-designed a Big Room session on Technology for Good, and in between attended some amazing sessions.  I also served on the program advisory committee.

It was a lot of learning in a short time-period and I'll be unpacking and sharing it here on this blog over the coming weeks.  Rather than start at the beginning, I'm starting at the end by sharing some tips for a formal reflection process that can lead to improving results of a project or event.

A structured reflection process generates insights about what worked and what could be improved. More importantly, it can avoid replicating mistakes or activities that don't work and are a waste of resources.

One of the simplest ways to practice continuous improvement is to incorporate a process evaluation.  It is important to write down observations as the event or program unfolds because if you wait until the event is over, there is a chance you won’t remember it in vivid detail.  I know this sounds like extra work, especially after an intense event like a conference when everyone is exhausted, but it will pay your organization back by improving results.

It isn’t just about writing it down, it is also reviewing what your captured with your team in an “After Action Review.”  And, of course, your evaluation will also include looking at the data from surveys and interviews with participants after the event.  In short, the process boils down to these steps:

* Capture the lesson learned (big or small) from your own observations or asking for informal feedback from participants during the event * Use a google document (or create a Slack channel or What's App group) so  your team can capture during the event * Ask team members to reflect on their lessons learned * Review it together in a meeting and summarize * Survey participants and incorporate their feedback THE PROCESS STEPS IN DETAIL

Our advisory committee includes Courtney Lawrence from DSIL, a company that focuses on innovation and human centered design practices, who lead us through our reflection process. What I liked best about the process is that was streamlined and simple, yet powerful. It took us approximately 60 minutes.

1) During the event or program, advisory committee members were asked to write down their observations as well as get informal feedback participants. We used a private group on What's App to do this during the event so it was simple to capture. We also met as a group every morning and shared what we were learning over breakfast.

2) Immediately after the event, we did a formal debrief. We had several flip chart pages on the wall that were divided into quarters with the following labels: _KEEP, DELETE, ADJUST, AMPLIFY_. We looked at following areas: content, logistics, social, communication, and pre-planning. We had about 10-15  minutes individually to write down our thoughts on different sticky notes and put them in the appropriate page and section.

3) Next, we divided into small groups that worked on each area to synthesize the notes into key themes and followed by a rapid report out to the full group.

4) The next step is compare these top level themes against the participant evaluation.(We also worked on developing personas and questions for post event interviews - I'll save that reflecting on that process for another blog post.)

This was a simple post event debrief and internal evaluation to look at ways to improve it in the next year.  Does your nonprofit use a formal debrief process after programs, events, or activities?  What is your process? How has it helped your organization get better results.

ADDITIONAL READING

How To Routinize  Reflection - http://www.bethkanter.org/reflection-routine/

Facilitator Guide:  http://www.emergingleader.co/toolkit/routinize-reflection/

Keep Calm and Write It Down - http://www.bethkanter.org/keep-reflect/

After Action Review Guide -  https://www.cebma.org/wp-content/uploads/Guide-to-the-after_action_review.pdf

In light of the recent high profile suicides by Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain,  Vu Le wrote an excellent piece on what nonprofits need to know about mental illness.  One of the points he brings up is the importance of creating an environment where life/work balance flourish.  Overwork and stress can lead to burnout and depression and that can lead to even bigger problems. As a sector, we need to understand that working endlessly long hours is not productive.  And here's a summary of the research that proves it.

Dying for A Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance and What Can We Do About It by Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer is an examination of the sources of workplace stress, its impact on employees, and how to change it before we're all dead or sick from overwork.   One of my motivations for writing "The Happy Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout" was to advocate for healthier and happier nonprofit workplaces and I'm happy to see another book that is tackling the monster that is work related stress.

RESEARCH ON TOXIC WORKPLACES

It is too often written off by leaders as not important and there is significant resistance to change.  After reading this book that examines the research on the negative health and productivity impacts on overworking, one can't help to wonder why we are still doing it.  Pfeffer explains some of the whys, but more importantly how to change.   Here's a summary of the research cited in the book:

* Toxic workplaces are taking a toll on our physical and mental health.  Professional “white collar” jobs are as stressful as manual labor. Stress is considered an inevitable part of the modern workplace, including nonprofits. * Leaders and employees differ on their view of cause of workplace stress according to research.  This disconnect that can undermine the success of any initiatives designed to increase well being the workplace.  Leaders identified big-picture challenges like technology, which makes it harder to separate work and home, and organizational change as top contributors to stress while employees were focused on concerns like low pay, unclear job expectations and company culture. * Stress in the workplace is expensive for organizations according to research. The American Institute of Stress, a nonprofit that aims to educate the public, found that job stress costs U.S. industry more than $300 billion annually in absenteeism, turnover, diminished productivity and medical, legal and insurance costs. * Stress is the leading cause of turnover.  Employees feel pressure to accomplish more with less resources and they are not happy. Nearly 50% report having changed jobs to escape stress.  Approximately 61% report that workplace caused them actual physical illness, insomnia, depression, or family issues. LONG HOURS CULTURE IS NOT PRODUCTIVE

The book devotes an entire chapter to the problem of working excessive hours.   The Japanese have a word for it, Karoshi, which means working yourself to death by working long hours. This phenomenon not just a Japanese thing, it is happening all over the world and in the US.  There are many manifestations of overwork and all have negative impact on employee health and the organization's productivity and effectiveness.  Here's a few:

* Working long hours during the day/evening and being sleep deprived which can weaken the immune system and lead to illness or lead to family conflicts * Working excessive hours during the year, but not taking paid time off. It is well documented fact that Americans are taking fewer and shorter vacations or forgoing them all together, despite having paid vacation benefits from work. * Working when sick. Not taking sick days when you are ill because of the belief that your job would be danger or you would get too far behind. This does not allow you to recover and it spreads your germs to other people at work. Why are we doing this?  These instances of overwork are not necessarily needed for the organization to be successful. There is a “work long hours” culture where people work long hours, even if it is not needed. Some employers see this an expression of loyalty.

But it’s not for-profits are alone in the arms race toward constant overwork. Research has even found that people who work at nonprofits tend to put in longer hours–some call them “hero hours”—than others, with higher rates of burnout and turnover, possibly because they’re driven by a higher purpose.  Over the last 25 years, we've shifted from leisure time as status to busy and stressed out as a badge of honor.

HOW TO CHANGE

The book concludes that if anything is going to change to cultivate workplace well being, several things need to happen:

* Employees need to understand the stress-related factors in an organization and make that part of their decision to work there. (Easier said than done)  They also need to take care of themselves and have a self-care plan - even if their workplace does not support or encourage it. (Of course, The Happy Healthy Nonprofit has lots of practical advice for nonprofit professionals on how to practice self-care in and outside of the workplace.) * Employers need to measure and and understand the costs of toxic workplaces - what it is costing in terms of health costs, sick days, and loss of productivity. This is a first step towards change.  Most importantly, it is about workplace culture. Work environments matter for people’s engagement, performance, and satisfaction - but they also matter for physical and mental health. Creating a culture of community and giving more control to staff over their jobs create workplaces are less stressful. When people care and feel connected to each other, there is less toxicity. Creating more opportunities where staff can socialize together - share a meal or celebrate birthdays, program launches, and other milestones and testing initiatives like Google's "Dublin Goes Dark" and other ways to encourage work/life balance. * Governments should address toxic workplaces in policies. This is already happening in Europe (France has a no after hours email law) and many Scandinavian countries focus on work life balance.  Finland ranked first in happiness. * Movements that focus on workplace sustainability just as their movements to protect the environment.  The Center for HumanTech is an example. During the past year, I have been delivering keynotes on this topic as well as workshops and staff retreats on how to activate a culture of well-being.  Here is a simple recipe and tips for getting started.  Don't wait until horrible happens or everyone burns out.

How does you handle workplace stress as a nonprofit professional?  How does your workplace mitigate or contribute to workplace stress?  How has your nonprofit activating a culture of work/life balance?

_NOTE FROM BETH:  Blocking out time for your nonprofit's staff to do planning and work on areas like organizational culture is essential for success.  Designing the meeting so it is effective and encourages team-building can be tricky.  Here's some terrific advice from Sarah Axelson._

HOW TO DESIGN AN EFFECTIVE STAFF RETREAT: A LESSON FROM LIFE - GUEST POST BY SARAH AXELSON FROM ETR

When is the last time your organization held a staff retreat? Did it help you accomplish your organizational goals?

A few weeks ago, ETR held its annual staff retreat. I was genuinely inspired. The planners of this event offered some valuable lessons for any organization on how to design effective and engaging retreats.

I’m a relatively new employee at ETR. This was my first retreat, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. “Staff retreats” can mean all sorts of things: hours-long strategic planning sessions, reviewing annual reports and budgets, feedback sessions where staff are encouraged to ask questions of leadership but no one speaks up because everyone is in the same room. The list goes on.

I was optimistic that ETR’s retreat would be something different—that it would, in fact, exemplify the professional development principles that ETR holds dear.

Knowing those principles, I anticipated that the retreat would be meticulously planned and organized, with clear intent about goals. Pre-work would prime me for the learning objectives. There would be plenty of activities that asked me to think hard, interact with colleagues, move around the room, and spend some time in personal reflection. There would be lots of opportunities for meaningful face-to-face connection with other ETRians. There would be follow-up.

And of course, we’d have fun while we did all of these things. Lucky for us, this retreat delivered!

ABOUT THE DISTRIBUTIVE LEARNING PROCESS

The principles used in ETR’s retreat come from the Distributive Learning Process. Developed by ETR in 2014, this is a research-based approach for designing and delivering skill-building trainings. It reflects best practices in adult learning and provides a framework that results in positive change.

The goal is to ensure that adult learners are _prepared to learn_ new information, and then able to _transfer _that information to_ application_ after the event. Now, our staff retreat was not actually intended as a skill building training. But it turns out that applying the relevant elements from the DLP into retreat designs _is_ an effective way to engage staff and ensure that relevant content “sticks.”

STEP 1: BE INTENTIONAL ABOUT INTENT

The first step in the DLP is identifying projected outcomes: what do you want learners to achieve? What are your goals and objectives? Clarity of intent is key for any learning event.

ETR’s retreat planning team set objectives that Goldilocks herself would have been proud of. They didn’t set the bar too low, aiming only to “network” with colleagues or “learn something new.” They also didn’t overreach, promising to deliver a deep understanding of organizational concepts that would require hours of discussion and reflection.

Instead, the objectives were just right. The day included a healthy mix of connection and social interaction, with appropriate work on key organizational concepts that could be covered sufficiently during the time we had available.

Our Intent: Bringing Together Our Patchwork of Connections

We are a distributed workforce of 90, with folks located all around the country. Staff are in one of three offices in California or are part of the Remote Team (R-team for short—people who work from their home communities, wherever those may be). It’s rare for us to see everyone in the organization, all at one time. That’s why the planners asked everyone to make connections at the retreat with at least 15 people they hadn't known well before. Following up on this intention, the planners presented activities that made this possible.

They also wanted staff to make connections with our newly reworked mission and vision statements, as well as our recently developed organizational norms document. They wanted to strengthen connections with ETR’s Health Equity Framework, an evolving model that is essential to all of the work we do.

Our theme, “A Patchwork of Connections,” brought us back to these goals throughout the day.

Taking Care of the R-Team

In a distributed workforce like ETR’s, one of the keys to building an engaged and energetic culture is making an extra effort to respect and celebrate remote workers. To this end, the day before the all-staff event, the R-Team participated in a half-day retreat of its own. Their retreat helped solidify connections within the team and identified practical steps to enhance their inclusion and leadership throughout the organization.

STEP 2: SET THE STAGE THROUGH PRIMING

The Priming phase of the DLP sets the stage for learning before the event takes place through two processes: pre-assessment and pre-work. Pre-assessment gathers a sense of participants’ current knowledge and skill so that facilitators can tailor training designs to “meet participants where they are.”

Similarly, pre-work gets participants focusing on the content that will be delivered during the event. They complete a few key activities on their own, get thinking about the issues, and then use the meeting time to process and apply the information together.

As ETRians, I think it’s safe to say we knew pre-work was coming. And it did, but not in that way that so often feels like busy work. The pre-assessment asked what we wanted to get out of the retreat. It included items that were fun and made us feel part of something bigger—like adding a song we loved to the “ETR playlist.” (This music was played in the meeting room during transitions and breaks. Copies of the playlist were included in all of the participant folders. Let me tell you, our staff has some great taste in music!)

We also took part in pre-work addressing diversity and inclusion. We engaged in thoughtful dialogue with our colleagues on some pretty difficult issues. This is something we don’t often get to dive into during busy days. This work was connected to an activity in the retreat addressing similar issues.

The priming work didn’t take much time, but the value of the pre-work was equal to the work we did on retreat day. I can’t overstate the importance of this part of a learning event.

STEP 3: TRANSFER OF LEARNING

Learning transfer is the heart of any learning event. Here are some common elements for engagement:

An inclusive, learner-focused environment Group interaction, discussion and sharing Development of concrete action steps Our retreat had all of these elements. I was most impressed by how seamless they were, and how they moved the day forward in an exciting and engaging way.

Over the eight hours we were together, our group participated in more than 15 unique activities, exercises or discussions. The design of those activities reflects two important principles of adult attention: (1) most adults have relatively short attention spans, and (2) attention will be enhanced when people are enjoying themselves, motivated in what they’re doing, and fed (or at least are not hungry, thirsty, stressed, etc.).

Our retreat had plenty of good food. We were never sitting and listening for more than 10-15 minutes. Longer activities were interrupted by physical movement that supported the learning goals (e.g., “Rotate to a new table and discuss this question…”).

Activities were separated by Pop-Ups, delightful little three-minute segments where staff members “popped up” and shared information about something helpful for others to know. Our Pop-Ups covered our active ETR Steppers group, leadership team office hours, and social media strategies within and beyond the organization.

Through it all, what mattered was that we were engaged in the learning, even when it just felt like fun.

STEP 4: IMPLEMENTATION AND BEYOND

The intent of most learning events is to help learners apply the information—to change something for the better when they return to their work settings. The DLP suggests this is best achieved through follow-up support and post-assessment. These steps reinforce the content, skills and information from the learning event. They remind participants of what they learned, and encourage them to apply new skills, even though they are no longer in the learning environment.

Not more than a day or two after our staff retreat, the planning team was operationalizing our follow-up support. They emailed a checklist “so our retreat learnings, connections and commitments stay alive.” It included action steps (literally: “Join the ETR Steppers and thrive!”), key learning, and reminders of where and how to access resources discussed during the retreat.

Don’t Forget the Fun!

We did a lot of work over the course of the day, and we modeled the Distributive Learning Process in a way that I found incredibly valuable. What I loved most about the retreat, though, was that none of that was at the cost of having fun. Julie Dirksen, author of the awesome book Design for How People Learn (2016), makes the point that “a lot of what makes for a great learning experience is not about the content, but about the way the content is taught.”

For ETR, that meant music, games, photos with colleagues and so much more. It was truly a wonderful experience, one that I can’t wait to repeat next year. I can only hope that those of you who don’t work at ETR can take a little bit of our retreat and infuse it into your own, so that your staff retreats can be ever more exciting places of learning and connection.

Sarah Axelson, MSW, is the Director of Training at ETR. She leads the conceptualization, expansion and management of ETR’s training and professional development work. She can be reached at sarah.axelson@etr.org.

Is your nonprofit grappling with digital transformation of its programs and operations? BoxWorks 2018 is just over three months away on Aug 29-30 in San Francisco and the nonprofit sessions are a great place for learning about digital transformation (and networking too.)

The good news is that your nonprofit can request a full scholarship . The first 800 eligible nonprofit leaders will receive a full scholarship (a greater than $1000 cost savings)! The simple application to request a scholarship is here.

Check out this year’s agenda and nonprofit track starring Teach for America, DonorsChoose.org, Relief International, PATH, Global Fund for Women and more. Also, plan to connect with leaders from the TechSoup, NetHope, Tides and all ten #ImpactCloud coalition members. Over 650 nonprofits registered for BoxWorks last year; get a feel for what nonprofit leaders experienced through this gallery

See you at BoxWorks event on August 29-30!

_NOTE FROM BETH: Digital storytelling is key to fundraising success, but using a storytelling lens in your organization can have further benefit of busting organizational silos.  Miriam Brosseau and Stephanie Corleto share why._

HOW AND WHY STORIES CAN BUST NONPROFIT SILOS - GUEST POST BY MIRIAM BROSSEAU  AND STEPHANIE CORLETO 

Silos are for corn. Stories are for people.

Fortunately, storytelling busts silos.

Organizational silos are the bane of too many nonprofit communicators’ existences. Artificial barriers among program areas and staff can breed reactionary environments that are frustrating at best and debilitating at worst. Worse is the impact of siloed organizations on nonprofit audiences - cuz really, how many emails can you get from the same organization before you go a little nuts?

To be fair, silos do exist for a reason, and do have their benefits. In fact, we (that is, we organizations) kind of love them. They’re easy to manage. They make it easier to harness specific expertise. They create a sense of belonging (within the silo), trust (again, within the silo), and provide focus.

But in the individual-centric digital age, silos are doing nonprofits zero favors. The challenge is to reach our audiences where they are, in that moment, with compelling content and a call-to-action… Not exactly what siloed organizations are best at.

Delivering on that promise on the outside means making some changes on the inside.

Inspired by a session on busting organizational silos through digital storytelling delivered by the See3 team at the most recent Nonprofit Technology Conference, the National Institute for Reproductive Health is using its web content to move out the silos and bring in the stories.

“Addressing the website in the first place came from a recognition that it just wasn’t functioning for our constituents,” says Stephanie Corleto, Digital Communications Manager at National Institute for Reproductive Health. “We had to shift our content from speaking to our core constituents in the reproductive rights movement to being more approachable and externally focused.”

That meant shifting the organization of the website, but also adjusting the lens. “The website can’t be movement-centric; it needs to be supporter-centric,” says Corleto.

And that’s where the opportunity lies to not only improve the website, but to bring the NIRH team closer together.

The silo-busting is beginning with the planning process.

“We met internally with the communications team, but then also with Policy and Partnerships. We needed eyes from other departments to get buy-in on the project, bring in their expertise, and identify holes in the content,” Corleto relates. Those meetings led to content assignments, so everyone was contributing based on their role in the organization and the unique perspective they could bring to mission-driven content.

NIRH now has a solid plan to update the content on the website - and they’re starting their implementation this month.

“It’s really just the beginning. We have existing meetings with departments across the organization, but now we’re approaching them with an eye for  _their _stories of impact and success. We’re going to be working with departments across the organization to create content, instead of just reporting out from a policy or movement perspective. Bringing in those diverse voices means we can tell more stories and invite in new audiences.”

Those stories, then, have become both a tool for aligning the team and can act as the main pillars of NIRH’s digital engagement. Win-win!

At See3, we’ve observed that marketing challenges are often actually organizational alignment challenges. The messaging itself is almost a function of way the internal team is structured and communicating. Is the organization really set up on the inside to deliver on the promise they’re making on the outside?

There are three basic steps that anyone trapped in the communications department can start taking now to drive more engagement with their external audiences while knocking over silos internally:

* TELL THE WHOLE STORY. IF YOU’RE ONLY FOCUSED ON TELLING THE STORY OF HOW AWESOME YOUR IMPACT IS ON YOUR ORGANIZATION’S DIRECT BENEFICIARIES, YOU’RE MISSING OUT ON A WORLD OF CONTENT, IMPACT, AND NEW DOORS TO WELCOME IN NEW SUPPORTERS. TRY SHIFTING THE HERO OF YOUR STORY TO A VOLUNTEER, DONOR, SPONSOR - WHAT’S _THEIR _JOURNEY? THAT PERSPECTIVE SHIFT FORCES YOU TO CONNECT WITH OTHER DEPARTMENTS TO GET INSIGHT INTO THOSE MOMENTS OF TRANSFORMATION, IT EXPONENTIALLY INCREASES YOUR ORGANIZATION’S IMPACT, AND IT PROVIDES ASPIRATIONAL MODELS FOR ENGAGEMENT WITH YOUR CAUSE. (HERE’S A BIT ABOUT HOW SEE3 IS DOING THAT WITH THE GOOD FOLKS AT MAKE-A-WISH.) * BUILD STORY-GATHERING INTO YOUR PROCESS. NIRH is building story-gathering into its website content refresh. Your organization may add it into your content calendar. Every See3 client is encouraged to include storytelling moments in their cross-departmental meetings. Some use Slack channels to share ideas and elevate small moments of success. See3’s clients at Hillel International integrated storytelling into their team meetings. How can you lead with stories? * TREAT YOUR TEAM LIKE DONORS: REPORT ON IMPACT. Busting silos is ultimately about culture change. Any culture change initiative is most effective when you start with what’s working and nurture that, as opposed to focusing on what’s lacking and trying to fix (read: complain about) it. So, take those little moments and let your team know when their contribution made all the difference in, for instance, an especially popular blog post. Or share that an anecdote that came from another department led to a personal response from someone on your email list. Notice and lift up the bright spots. Start with what’s working to build trust and momentum. Organizational silos aren’t going away anytime soon. But communications folks are in a unique position to use storytelling to start building some windows and doors between them.

Tell us how you’re letting the corn out and the stories in!

Miriam Brosseau is Chief Innovation Officer at See3 Communications where she consults, coaches, and trains clients like Make-A-Wish, Alzheimer’s Association, and Ceres on digital strategy and storytelling.

Stephanie Corleto is the Digital Communications Manager at National Institute for Reproductive Health and NIRH Action Fund, and has previously worked at WNET New York Public Media, French Institute Alliance Française, and Girl Scouts of the USA.

_NOTE FROM BETH: In my recent book, THE HAPPY, HEALTHY NONPROFIT and leading workshops for nonprofits all over the world on this topic,  I continue to be passionate about the need to build resilient and sustainable nonprofit leaders and organizations. This is true now more than ever. And new report, The New Normal,  spells out exactly why that is important_

A CULTURE OF WELLBEING AS A NEW NONPROFIT STRENGTH: BUILDING CAPACITY DURING A TIME OF DISRUPTION - GUEST POST BY HEATHER MCLEOD GRANT, ADENE SACKS, & KATE WILKINSON

Let’s face it: being a nonprofit leader is hard. And in the past year, it has only gotten harder. The current political administration and U.S. Congress are undermining decades of the sector’s work on immigration; women, minority and LGBTQ rights; the environment; and the social contract with government—among other issues. Recent federal spending cuts, paired with a tax bill that may de-incentivize giving, only add further uncertainty to the mix.

Eager to understand how nonprofits are faring in this challenging environment, we recently interviewed a number of diverse leaders about their capacity-building needs. Funded by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, our research was recently published in “The New Normal: Capacity Building During a Time of Disruption.” What we learned—among other things—is that “wellbeing” has become a new capacity.

Why? Many nonprofit leaders and organizations are literally under attack in this political environment. In our interviews, we heard stories of physical attacks on clinics, on individuals being served, and on staff. Cyber-security threats have increased, as opponents leverage hacking and social media to harass, terrorize, and even shut down nonprofits. As a result, leaders are needing to keep their staff and communities safe, which increases the complexity and cost of their work, and creates greater stress. “Staff is doing work to address the attacks, AND they are targets of the attacks,” said one interviewee. “Our need to support the wellness of staff has increased drastically in this time.” This includes creating opportunities for staff to unwind, practicing mindfulness, developing sabbatical programs, and planning for succession as more staff burn out.

In addition to facing these attacks, many nonprofits are seeing a rising demand for their services and are scrambling to secure revenue in the face of impending budget cuts. Larger nonprofits like the ACLU face the opposite challenge, as they grapple with how to absorb donations driven by political headlines and aspire to step into a larger role on behalf of under-resourced communities. Meanwhile, existing gaps within the sector have grown, including: the unequal distribution of resources between large and small nonprofits, the chasm between the skills leaders possess and the ones they want to develop, and the disconnect between what funders provide and what nonprofits actually need.

Welcome to the new normal. Social change leaders are tasked with doing what they have always done _and _collaborating more readily, while under threat, and at the current speed of change. As one leader put it, “Since the election, people need to work harder and more efficiently. There’s no more ebb and flow in the work—it’s a constant flow. It’s taking a toll on people, and some may not be able to keep up.” This has important implications for how the sector thinks about building social change capacity, now and in the future. Indeed, the sector’s current approach to “capacity building” needs an overhaul. Even the outdated term is insufficient to describe the broad range of needs across the diversity of individuals, organizations, and networks working in the sector today.

As if these challenges weren’t enough, many of the nonprofits we interviewed shared that they don’t feel well supported by their funders. To them, institutional philanthropy seems calibrated for an era that no longer exists, and foundations seem largely insulated from the disruption facing the sector. Universally, we heard social-change leaders wanting funders to understand their realities, struggle alongside them, and trust them enough to make multi-year, unrestricted operating grants. As one leader said bluntly, “The foundation world is out of touch and too slow. Their ways of doing business and the ways that organizations are supported by foundations are archaic. Funders need to listen and follow local groups to understand what the community needs.”

If there is good news, it’s that the old social change model is breaking down, and we now have a chance to invent a new one. We think this begins with social sector leaders adopting a “both/and” mindset and navigating the following tensions. These leaders must:

BE RESPONSIVE _AND _STRATEGIC. The lines between “strategy” and “capacity building” are
 blurring, if not outright disintegrating. Social change leaders need more-flexible 
strategies, adaptive leadership, organizational wellness, unrestricted funding,
 and short-term feedback loops that enable them to react to a rapidly shifting environment and assess whether they are gaining traction.

BUILD INTERNAL _AND _EXTERNAL CAPACITY. The traditional notion of capacity building is sequential: Strengthen organizations, then catalyze networks and movements. But in a moment when organization building often _follows _collective action (as with #MeToo or Black Lives Matter) social-change leaders don’t have the luxury of thinking this way. They must invest in capacity at different levels of systems, and they must also build the resilience and capacity of their staff.

THINK SYSTEMICALLY _AND _ACT PROXIMATELY. Social change leaders need to continue to think and act at different altitudes: They must see the systems of which they are a part and understand their role, while simultaneously staying proximate to needs on the ground. And funders should recognize that nonprofits are closest to the end-user and have important knowledge and wisdom to share.

Funders must also embrace these “both/and” tenets and make a commensurate shift in their own work; they should be as nimble and adaptive as they are asking their grantees to be. Critically, they must get over the overhead myth, and fund the full cost of social change by giving nonprofits what they are most desperate for: flexible, long-term capital. As one interviewee said, “Multi-year, unrestricted, general operating support is what nonprofits need most. It’s so obvious, especially in a moment like this.” Many leaders and funders are already on this path, and we highlight several examples in our report.

Regardless of where you work in our sector, we believe this is a moment of both crisis and opportunity. The “crisis” is about protecting the values, people, and priorities that our sector holds dear. The “opportunity” is about addressing the inequities and dysfunctions in an outdated system and innovating to create a better model going forward. As one interviewee asked, “This moment has only accelerated the work and added urgency. How do we match the bigness of this moment with the bigness of our strategy?”

Authors

HEATHER MCLEOD GRANT is the cofounder of Open Impact, a social impact advising firm, who has 25 years of experience working with social change leaders. She is coauthor of the bestselling _Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits_, and numerous other reports and articles.

ADENE SACKS is a senior advisor to Open Impact, and a social impact strategist with decades of experience advising entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and foundations on how networks, design, and strategy can amplify social change efforts.

KATE WILKINSON is an engagement manager at Open Impact, has spent 15 years working in nonprofits and philanthropy, and recently led the research team for _The Giving Code: Silicon Valley Nonprofits and Philanthropy_.

_NOTE FROM BETH: George Weiner from Whole Whale wrote this insightful piece about the Google Ad Grant program. He kindly offered to let me republish here.  _

HELP I JUST LOST MY GOOGLE AD GRANT  - GUEST POST BY GEORGE WEINER

The title of this article is becoming more frequently used by the roughly 35,000 nonprofit recipients of the popular Google Ad Grant. The Google Ad Grants program gives nonprofits up to $10,000 per month in free in-kind AdWords across the search network through the Google for Nonprofits platform.

On December 13, 2017, the Ad Grants team announced significant changes to the program that went into effect on January 1, 2018. A statement to the international news agency Reuters read:

“We revised our Ad Grants policies to help nonprofits be more effective with AdWords and improve the quality of their ads, which will lead to targeted awareness of their projects and mission.” We’ve posted the exact email at the bottom of this post.

WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED

The upbeat tone of the Google Ad Grant email, that highlighted the lifting of the $2 bid max for maximize conversions buried the real lead. The email was in fact a huge alert that many accounts needed to make serious adjustments on the quality of their ads to remain eligible.

The big 5 changes that call for a restructuring of most accounts:

* Minimum 5% CTR account-wide. Accounts will be suspended after 2 consecutive months with a CTR below 5%. * Minimum keyword quality score of 2 * Minimum of 2 ad groups per campaign * Minimum of 2 ads per group * Minimum of 2 sitelink ad extensions The timing of the mid-December notice, when many nonprofits are knee-deep in end-of-year giving campaigns and then holiday breaks, made it especially easy to overlook the changes required.

Whole Whale has managed tens of millions of dollars in Google’s amazing grant. As of this writing, we also have the only online course through Udemythat trains nonprofits in managing this grant.

Our team of account strategists, who know this stuff cold, had to spend around 11 focused hours on each of our accounts across 4 weeks. For each account, this process involved cleaned up (~2hrs) and then optimizing for spend and CTR including re-writing ads, restructuring campaigns, and creating new maximize conversion campaigns/ad groups. We were able to save 95% of our accounts managed, losing one due to English ads in non-native English geographies (since regained). Even as an agency specializing in managing the Google AdWords Grant, we found the shift in strategy required for this policy update to be far from a few tweaks in order to be more effective.

WHY DID YOU DO THIS, GOOGLE AD GRANT TEAM?!

Whole Whale believes that the Google Ad Grant is an unbelievably generous in-kind gift to nonprofits in both dollars and the impact it has. We love this grant so we contacted the Ad Grants Team for comment and they were nice enough to explain what is going on.

Michelle Hurtado, Head of Google Ad Grants, explained that the program is focusing on quality and performance to make the offer more valuable to both nonprofits and people searching for nonprofit causes.

As explained in Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg’s _How Google Works, _all Google employees are held to Objectives and Key results (OKRs), a goal system that aligns ambition with measurable performance indicators. For 2018, Michelle’s team is driving toward higher CTR and conversion rate in order to connect more people with social causes..

One of the big problems that has arisen with the grant is that, in order to use the full amount, many spend excess money on broader terms that may not apply to the organization rather than losing the chance to spend the money. “Ads for terms like ‘movies’ or ‘children’ are common in accounts looking for broad awareness,” Michelle pointed out. “But these rarely result in good connections made between people and nonprofits.” Google wants us to also see the big picture: “The Ad Grants program is here to stay, and we hope that our policies serve as a guide on how to use Ad Grants better.

This will hopefully lead to more intelligent uses of the Grant across all grantees though it is clear that there are going to be a number of growing pains in the coming months. Michelle was careful to add the word ‘temporary’ to the suspensions that have impacted a small proportion of Ad Grantees as of this writing. “It is our goal to get these accounts back in action once the necessary changes are made to increase the quality and relevance of ads.”

THIS IS STILL AN AWESOME GRANT

In dollars, let’s do the math: Based on Google’s data, 35,000 nonprofits spent at least $10,000 per month in 2017 (not accounting for those who were receiving the now-discontinued GrantsPro, which gave $40,000 a month in ads) equals $4.2 billion in potential ad spend.

That’s for one year, and this thing has been around for 15!

Now, compare that with Google’s competitors and you’ll be hard-pressed to find something that stands out as analogous. Facebook, for example, has never had a formal ad grant system for nonprofits — though they did have a one-time nonprofit ad credit program that discontinued in 2016.

Turning to impact, Google cares about using its platform to make a difference. Awesome organizations use these ads to drive more people to their websites and engage them in their causes. At Whole Whale, we’ve driven over 6 million site visits to our nonprofit clients’ websites this way. And believe me, those nonprofits feel that impact in the form of more people learning about, engaging with, and becoming committed to their cause.

Most nonprofits simply can’t compete in the crowded marketplaces of social media and digital advertising. AFS-USA Intercultural Programs, which has been the leading study-abroad organization for high schoolers for over a century, is now facing greater competition with for-profit companies that run similar, but far more expensive, programs. In order to regain exposure in the crowded study abroad marketplace, AFS and organizations in a similar position will increasingly rely on the support of platforms that believe in a greater mission and not just a one-size-fits-all pricing model for advertising. Google Grants are helping AFS — and thousands of organizations like it — reclaim their spot in the front of users’ minds.

GOOGLE AD GRANTS AS AN ANSWER TO #FAKENEWS

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer data are in, and while we are living through a multi-year decline in public trust, the NGO sector remains the leader in what trust we have left in four major sectors.

This erosion is a symptom of globalization, polarization, attacks on the media, and a general lack on consensus on facts. The net effects of the current U.S. leadership pushing out terms like “alternative facts” and trumpeting #FakeNews haven also accelerated distrust in the Government and Media sectors.

If NGOs are the kings and queens of trust, it’s time to double-down on the investment in content. The idea of #FakeNews and overall public distrust means that important information around health, education, unemployment, and the environment are being lost in a sea of finger-pointing and gerrymandering. There is an incredible opportunity for NGOs to fill this gap through reporting on and disseminating trusted information around the issues they cover.

To make this point a bit more tangible, consider some of the following Google autocomplete searches. Autocomplete shows the collective result of trillions of searches that are done on the search engine, narrowed down by searches across the world. When people want to learn something, they Google it and then let the algorithm sort out what they should see based on myriad factors.

The question is, who is fighting to answer these questions and win the battle on consensus? Take a minute and explore how people are searching for terms around your cause with this simple and powerful tool:

For 15 years the Google Ad Grant has helped nonprofits get an equal playing field in the online dialogue and discovery around key issues. Issues that companies and special interests spend billions to manipulate. The value of allowing small nonprofit players to show up when it matters most cannot be underestimated, especially in our current media and political climate.

HOW DO I GET MY GOOGLE AD GRANT BACK?

If you haven’t already, make sure that your CTR for active keywords is above 5% and keywords are all relevant. The Google AdWords customer service team is awesome and has been fielding our calls and emails regularly. In order to regain your Ad Grants, you need to follow the details of their notice, completely removing irrelevant keywords/ads. Then consider contacting the Google AdWords support line and explain that your grant was “temporarily suspended” due to Ad Grants’ policies. They should be able to help you understand exactly which ads, groups, or keywords caused the issue.

Beyond this, Whole Whale will continue to create Google Ad Grant trainings, webinars and courses.

PS  The full text of the email from Google can found here.

George Weiner is the founder of WholeWhale.

Last month, I was honored to present and facilitate an all-day workshop for nonprofit leaders at the Oregon Nonprofit Leadership Conference on how to activate a culture of well being in the nonprofit workplace, based on my book, The Happy Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout. I also delivered a workshop to South Carolina nonprofits on the same topic hosted by Shine The Light, Nonprofit Forums. The participants were amazing and came up with some terrific strategies and action plans.

Many times the reaction to focusing on organizational culture and wellbeing is considered "soft" or "nice" stuff that not lead to results or impact.  There is now enough evidence from research that focusing on resilience in the workplace is an essential strategy for sustainable results.

And there is another reason to focus a culture of wellbeing.  We are living in an age of radical transparency, powered by movements like #metoo, it is beginning to shine a light on toxic nonprofit workplaces for all to see what was once hidden. Potential job applicants are beginning to place as much emphasis on positive organizational culture as they do on job tasks and salaries. This means activating a culture of well being in the nonprofit workplace is even more important to avoid turnover and attract top talent. Organizational culture really matters when it comes to high performance and results.

The workshop focused on how nonprofit leaders can activate a culture of wellbeing in their organizations.  Leadership skills are only just about our inner-selves, it is also how we relate to other people and manage those relationships, especially in the workplace. If we lack the skills to avoid collaborative overload, manage difficult conversations, learn from failure, the resulting physical, emotional, and mental strain gets in the way of a nonprofit organization’s success.  Why?  Because staff turnover challenges effectiveness and poor morale does not inspire staff to move the organization's forward to great heights.

One of the workshop exercises was to teach leaders a process they can facilitate back in their organizations to begin the discussion about how to activate a culture of well being. I use framework developed by Laura Putnam, from her book, Workplace Wellness that Works.The framework helps us better understand and how to shift organizational culture. The framework is based on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, mapped to an organization’s hierarchy of needs:

• LEVEL 1: Functioning Factor – Do people have what they need to do their job? • LEVEL 2: Feelings Factor – Do people feel appreciated and respected? • LEVEL 3: Friendship Factor – Do people feel connected to one another? • LEVEL 4: Forward Factor – Do people feel like they have opportunities for growth? • LEVEL 5: Fulfillment Factor – Do people feel like they are inspired and working towards a higher purpose?

As part of the set-up to the exercise, I share some examples from the Happy Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout.   Then, I have participants work in small groups, using a structured brainstorming process. We had a dozen small groups that each brainstormed 20-50 ideas each.  Participants prioritized the ideas by combining and evaluating the cost/impact, boiling down to a couple of ideas to present to the whole group.

Participants were able to share what they were doing to activate a culture of wellbeing with each other as well as come up with new ideas.  Here's the list:

FUNCTION

* Building basic processes for getting work done, for example collaborative calendar planning * Enough staff to cover work or prioritize work flows * Improve internal information systems * Responsive tech support * Make sure there are enough basic supplies * Sound proof the office * Better lighting in office, natural light * Adequate desks and chairs for how people want to work * Encourage staff to take breaks, go outside to get fresh air * Healthy food and snacks available at meetings * Use surveys to find out what staff need * Remote working policy with flexibility * Flexible hours to accommodate personal time FEELINGS

* Clear expectations with supervisor and employee through regular check-ins * Give real-time feedback and praise, established feedback loops for employees * Work anniversary celebration, shout outs to staff, hand-written gratitude notes * Birthday cards from the board, celebrate staff birthdays at monthly staff meeting, give staff member the day off for their birthday * Whiteboard of love - written praise for staff accomplishments, * Reserved parking space awarded to an employee each month who had done a great job * Ritual of staff praise at meetings or monthly award, not just a raise * 80/20 rule – 20% leaders talk at meetings * Do walking meeting one-on-ones and train staff to listen to each other * Start meetings with a feelings check-in – how are you feeling today * Encourage genuine curiosity for others’ wellbeing * Encourage more dialogue and discussion at staff meetings, team retreats * Create safe space to discuss any negative issues, * Provide clear procedure for reporting grievances or complaints so people feel heard * Honor healing time needed to heal from trauma from work if working with vulnerable populations * Review self-care activities and celebrateFRIENDSHIP * Establish norms around compassionate behavior and modeled by SLT * Motivation Monday, Taco Tuesday, Waffle Wednesday, etc. * Staff goes out of the building for a meeting at least once a quarter * Understand diversity and blind spots and how they might hurt people * Casual Fridays or "Fun Fridays" * Encourage staff to ask for help * Give comp time or days off after stressful weeks * Do fun icebreakers at meetings and other team building activities * Hike during staff retreat * Connect through moments of play * Take other teams out for lunch * Ice Cream for staff appreciation or other staff organized social activities * Gift exchanges or potluck not during the holidays * Volunteer on a project together * Leadership training on communications styles FORWARD

* Robust on boarding program * Special projects that are professionally fulfilling and interesting * Promote from within * Include personal growth in professional development plans * Encourage staff to be creative or do creative things * Asking about career goals and how they might be pursued at current job * Paid volunteer team at another org * Encourage sharing what is learned at conferences with staff * Professional development plans/funds * Create a leadership library of nonprofit books for staff to check out and read * Allow staff to identify “stretch assignments” * Mentoring program and cross training * Create a norm about respecting work in progress and need for quiet time * Minimum mandatory meetingsFULFILLMENT * Annual retreat to remember why everyone does the work and be client focused * Celebrate our organization’s accomplishments once a month – but also share frustrations as well as joy * Have staff share their origin stories, why passionate about nonprofit work * Mission moments – photos, videos, make them visible * Mission statement and values on the wall * Staff meetings that have some time to share accomplishments, not just problems * Transparency * Create mission moments collage and put on the wall * Accomplishment wall related to mission/program success * Field trips to visit programs and clients Working on improving workplace culture is always a work in progress. But an exercise like this done with your staff can generate a lot of great ideas and help your team land on a small pilot to work on.  If you are curious about the implementation requirements for any of these ideas - many are low cost - The Happy Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout has more.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF RUTH D. KANTER

My mom passed away peacefully last month a few months shy of her 90th birthday. My mom was generous and supportive of everyone in her life and those less fortunate than her. Even though I lived 3,000 miles away, I was blessed to get to spend time with her in the last five years since my Dad died. Her memory is a blessing and my comfort is that she and my Dad (who were married for 60 years) are together again.

To honor her memory, I'm raising money for NTEN to offer diversity, local, and general scholarships for the 19NTC in Portland.

The Facebook data scandal (reports that Cambridge Analytica, a firm used by the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, scraped Facebook data for millions of users without their knowledge or permission) that erupted in mid-March and prompted user outrage, including a hashtag #deletefacebook, continues to grow. Yesterday, Facebook dropped another bomb: It now believes that information of up to 87 million members may have been "improperly shared"  with Cambridge Analytica. [* nearly 71 million U.S. users are included in that number]

The new number is much higher than previous estimates of around 50 million. The revelation was a footnote in a blog post from Facebook's CTO and also described some additional steps that Facebook is taking to better protect users’ information going forward.  Yesterday, Zuckerberg did a call with the media saying the main goal going forward is to get all of Facebook's systems under control, keep users safe and ensure that the site isn't being used to undermine democracies all over the globe.  He also mentioned that on Monday, users whose data was compromised will be notified in the newsfeed. This could prompt even more outrage ahead of Zuckerberg's appearing before congress next week.

How will users react?  Will the #deletefacebook movement swell with millions of people deleting their accounts, leaving Facebook an empty ghost town? Will it become the MySpace of 2018?  Hard to predict, however bear in mind the following:

* This analysis, "Is Facebook Doomed?"  by co-founder of LikeFolio, says that their data on the daily account deletions shows that people quitting Facebook have doubled their previous high, but the #deletefacebook movement has petered out and the indicates (for now) that it there was not wholesale user revolt.  Also, there was no impact on Instagram (owned by Facebook) as a result of this scandal. * While I have seen a number of friends say they were going to delete their accounts, some did and some are already back on Facebook, quitting Facebook is psychologically difficult.  Apart from our "addiction," many year have invested so much time and sharing content that it is hard to cut the cord.  Here's an analysis of the reasons why quitting is difficult. Given this all might change after users get a direct notification that their personal data was used by Cambridge Analytica - this will cause more outrage and probably regulation. The optimists in some of us hope that Facebook might be able to fix the problem.

What does this mean for nonprofit digital strategy?  As much as many of us would like to use this scandal as an excuse to quit social media or maybe stop investing time and resources into Facebook, I think that might not be the best approach.    The important points is that your digital strategy has to be more than Facebook -and that you need to be strategic and consistent.

* Measurable objectives, well-defined target audience, and personas * CONTENT: Storytelling that creates community and meaningful interaction and engagement: Focus on quality, not quantity * CHAMPIONS: More important than ever to leverage your supporters’ networks as well as “insiders," but train them on how to protect their privacy and personal data. * CHANNELS: Don’t abandon other social media platforms, but you’ll need to invest in the right ones for your audience and capacity. * CHANNELS: Don’t build your house on rented land. Make sure you make the best use of "owned": web site and email newsletters * CHANNELS: Facebook - Video, especially Live is top performing content to maximize organic and paid reach. Consider using groups in conjunction w/ your Brand Page – link and promote. Paid advertising budget, can be small * Small pilots with the next wave of disruptive technologies – the age of automation: messaging, and bots. Messenger integration on FB easy place to start How is your organization reacting to the latest Facebook/data scandal?  Have you changed your digital strategy?

Back in November, 2014, Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans published an article about “New Power” in the Harvard Business Review that caught my eye.  The concepts around connectivity and leadership were synergistic with the concept of networked leadership that Allison Fine and I wrote about in the Networked Nonprofit, published in several years before.

The article caught fire - not only in nonprofit and philanthropy circles - but also business, government, and beyond. Today, after several years of researching and writing, Timms and Heimans have finally published their book called “New Power: How Movements Build, Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch Fire in Our Hyperconnected World.” It is a sector must read.

The book is a guide about how to navigate and thrive in a connected world that has been increasingly been influenced and increasingly defined by two different forces, old and new power.  Here is how Timms and Heimans define these terms:

* OLD POWER is held by a few, once gained is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend.  It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads and it captures. * NEW POWER is made by many.  It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads and it distributes. It surges.  The goal is not to hoard it but to channel it. As we have seen over the last decade, with the power of connectivity comes the opportunity for people with similar interests to come together and organize themselves in ways that transform geographic boundaries. Connectivity helps facilitate highly distributed groups of people to work on a campaign, project, or share ideas that spread with unprecedented velocity and reach. We also seen how organizations can harness connectivity as well as movements. This way of working requires a different, more participatory leadership model and mindset that Allison Fine and I first wrote about in The Networked Nonprofit and others have written about called "networked leadership."

And, as we've seen in the past year and especially in the few last weeks, new power can be harnessed for evil just as it can for good. New power is behind some of the most impactful movements (and business models) of the decade.  This includes social good movements like #metoo, #marchforourlives, #icebucketchallenge #givingtuesday and others. The book suggests that those who want to reach their goals and be successful whether it is for good, bad, or the trivial, need to know how to best channel this participatory energy.

We, in the social good sector, especially need to keep honing our skills in unleashing new power for good causes.  As Henry Timms says, "Will the voices of reason be drowned out by extremists of all kinds? Will the platforms we are all addicted to truly make us more powerful, or will they simply be participation farms? These are key questions of our times.

The book is filled with stories of people and organizations that have more recently harnessed new power, both well-known examples like the Pope and lesser-known examples too.  It also analyzes the skills - which are often misunderstand as the ability to use the social network platforms like Facebook. It encompass mindset and ways of working which can be used to exercise new power despite whatever platform or tool is available to us.

The books answers many questions that are useful to nonprofits in their quest to spread and harness social good.  Here's a sampling of just a few:

* How do you create ideas that the crowd embraces, makes stronger, and spreads? * How can your organization internalize new power values like radical transparency or constant feedback to achieve success? * How can your organization inspire an enduring and loyal following in an era of transient affiliations? * How can your organization harness the best of both new and old power? How do you blend? How do you decide which one is best for a particular situation? New power is not just a passing trend, it matters for civil society.  Connectivity and platforms like Facebook can bring us closer together and inspire amazing work or they can be weaponized to drive us further apart as we've been witnessing over the past 18 months. Here and now, it might feel less like the utopia that tech leaders envisioned a decade ago, especially when platforms like Facebook can harvest our data and that of 2 billion users for their own gain and the highest bidder. We are also seeing that our hopes for toppling dictators are diminishing because the authoritarian leaders are mastering new power techniques.

One of my favorite chapters of the book describes different leadership profiles based on the values and leadership approaches that different leaders use.  Each profile is illustrated with an in-depth case study.  It goes like this:

* THE CROWD LEADER:  Combines new power leadership model with a commitment to, and articulation of, new power values.  The Crowd Leader wants to do more than channel the power of their crowd; they want to make their crowd more powerful. Examples: #BlackLivesMatter leaders, Candidate Obama, and Beth Comstock. * THE CHEERLEADER: Champions new power values like collaboration, transparency, and participation, but leads in an old power way. They either aren't able to do not want to genuinely distribute power.  Examples:President Obama and Howard Schultz. * THE CASTLE:  Pairs old power values with an old power leadership model.  This is the traditional hierarchical and authority-based model of leadership that many of us are familiar with and is widespread in across different sectors such as business, military, education, and nonprofits. An example is Kim Jong-un. (In the Networked Nonprofit, Allison Fine and I called this type of leadership "The Fortress.") * THE CO-OPTER: Deploys a crowd and skillfully uses new power tools and tactics, but does so in service of old power values, and to concentrate power for themselves. Examples: Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick. As Henry Timms says, "More than ever it is becoming clear that new power - the ability to harness the energy of the connected crowd - is the essential skill of the 21st century. In an age of participation, those who mobilize best will win. We need this on the side of the angels - non profit leaders, academics, journalists - to master the methods and mindsets of new power."

If you are a leader of a nonprofit, this book, New Power is an absolute must-read.

Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons is a collection of 137 case studies and policies in 11 categories how self-organized, democratic, and people-powered policies and initiatives can help solve some of the most thorny problems we face around the world in urban areas. The problems include inequality, climate change and fiscal challenges.

The book's case studies offer us hope and inspiration for urban dwellers - that if we put people at the center - not markets, technology, or government - that people can meet their own needs by sharing resources. The book is a practical reference guide for neighborhoods, citizens, and communities that want to create solutions for affordable housing, food desserts, transportation, and more.

The book was created by Shareable, an award-winning nonprofit news, action and connection hub for the "_Sharing Cities Movement_."  The way the book was produced also embraces the idea of sharing through collaboratively publishing with a team from nine countries to crowd source the book proposal and write the book. And, the paperback version includes a library card inside the back cover to encourage sharing.

There are many inspiring examples in this book, but a few of my favorites:

* Walking School Bus: Concerns over safety for children translates into children being driven to school.  That leads to traffic congestion, increased stress on parents, and lost opportunities for physical activity.   As the name sounds, it is self-organized groups of parents and children that walk as a group to school providing many benefits.  The Walking School Bus (and the Bicycle Train) have become a global phenomenon, widely adopted in the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the US. *  Restaurant Day:  In many cities, people from different cultural backgrounds live near each other but rarely get to experience each other's diverse traditions.  In an effort foster cross-cultural interaction, local organizers in Helsinki created "Restaurant Day," where residents create pop-up restaurants all over the city.  The event is run by a distributed organization and become a global movement with over 270,000 pop up restaurants in 75 countries. * Kitchen Share:  Kitchen appliances can take up space and be expensive.  Yet interest in healthy eating is growing and people are experimenting with different techniques that require different kitchen tools.  This project is a lending library for home cooks in Portland, Oregon.  It helps residents save money and learn new skills. You can learn more about how to get your copy of the book here.