Tag: Voluntary Sector

4th Social Media Surgery for Birmingham charities, community groups and Volantary Orgs

The new venue for the social media surgeries.

Sorry it is such short notice. The next social media surgery for voluntary groups is this Wednesday March 25th 2009, as a drop in from 5.30 to 7pm.  We have a plush new venue, which is a few minutes walk from BVSC. For all the details and how to sign up please visit the link below:

http://www.paradisecircus.com/social-media-surgeries/

The surgeries are run by a group of volunteers, mostly from the Birmingham bloggers groups. They are willing to show people from the cities charities and voluntary organisation how they can make best use of social media.   If you want to see what people have made of the first three surgeries you might like to watch this video on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEPbtfdIkVY

Ending Government "lockdown" on the internet.

Really good clear suggestions from the World Wide Web Consortium on, amongst other stuff, how some basics need to be put in place to allow the web to really play a part in modernising the way we govern ourselves. You can find the whole report “Improving Access to Government through better us of the Web” at this link.  Here’s an extract:

How Can Participation and Engagement Be Achieved?

Access of Public Servants to Web Sites that Citizens Are Using

Public servants need to be given access to the Web sites that citizens are using in order for them to be able to engage. The “lock-down” culture that exists in many government IT departments often restricts access to the more interactive Web sites for security reasons. This badly hampers the effective engagement with online communities by public servants.

Clear and Simple Rules for Public Servants

Governments need to set clear and simple rules for public servants to follow so they can be confident about engaging online without risking their career.

Training, Support and Cultural Change

There needs to be training and support for public servants in the use of appropriate tools and techniques to use the web to engage, particularly for the development of public policy. Engaging with online communities over the development of public policy will involve significant culture change in government. To achieve it will require clear leadership at senior levels. As the use of the web for engagement is so new in government there are few people with both the practical knowledge and the seniority and experience to provide this leadership.

Allow Comments on Policy Documents

Policy documents need to be presented in formats which allows for comment and discussion in a granular way. Fragments within such documents need to be directly addressable. In consultation documents for example, the relationship between the questions for discussion and the proposals to which those questions refer need to be made explicit. The RDFa [RDFA-PRIMER] based ArgotConsultation [ARGOTC] which was developed for the UK government is an example of the type of technology required for publishing consultation documents in ways that enable engagement.

What Amanda Learnt from Twestival

Beth Kanter has written a really thorough piece about Twestival as an online and social fundraising model. I would heartily recommend you read her post based around a conversation with the woman behind Twestival: Amanda Rose. Beth has this summary of lessons from Amanda:

1) Don’t Spearhead A Worldwide Event Alone.   Amanda says the next Twestival needs a better system and more capacity for managing the large number of cities and volunteers that want to participate. She notes, “I believe I did the best I could under the circumstances but felt really frustrated because I wanted to give city organizers all of the resources they asked for but either physically didn’t have time or capacity to implement.”

2) Providing A Better Virtual Hub To Support Volunteers.   Amanda says the website was a key element in reaching out to the cities and that she was not prepared for the amount of work that went into setting it up.  Says Amanda, “Even through this was a volunteer-run event, there was a level of expectation from people once they signed up.  I think most understood that we were doing the best we could with our resources and limited time – but it was frustrating not to be able to offer them something beyond a blog to connect and share.”

3) Be more prepared to work internationally.   Amanda says it was difficult to work with cities around the world, all with different financial systems, fundraising approaches, and cultures.

4) Set up a system for incoming donations to be aggregated quickly and easily.   Donations were coming in from several streams, including Amiando, Tipjoy, Paypal,  and cash donations.  This made it difficult to tabulate the amount raised quickly.  In addition, being able to produce real time tracking reports that showed how much each city still had to work to achieve their original fundraising target would have motivated them and spawned a bit of friendly competition.

5) Extend the planning timeline to 2-3 months.   Amanda admits that it was stressful to work under these very tight timelines.  “However, not unlike Twitter which is restricted to 140 characters, I wanted to challenge everyone to see what we could do in the span of a few weeks.  This generated a lot of buzz and enthuasiasm on Twitter and extended offline.”  Amanda observes that volunteers were amazed with what they could do in this short a timeline and the amount of creativity that surfaced was truly inspiring.  Amanda points out, “Hawaii raised over $7k in 9 days, Toronto $10k in about 15 days.  What we are left with now are international teams who have a passion to do this again – only bigger.  The feedback so far has been incredible and many cities feel disappointed that they couldn’t reach their goal this time; but the amount of awareness they were able to generate through their community or local press is a testament to their hard work.”

People who’ve blogged after going to Twestival in Birmingham include:

John at 383project – who picked up the baton of brumtwestival when Amanda asked – says: “Well that was it folks! Only a few weeks since we first speculated about the possibility of organising a Birmingham Twestival and it actually happened. Thursday night saw Birmingham gather with over 175 cities around the world to get together and raise money for Charity: Water. The turnout was amazing and saw 185(ish) local tweeple make it down for an evening of music, raffles, games and general fun. To cap it off, the total raised was  a superb £1519!”

Digital Birmingham’s Simon Whitehouse wrote: “So, well done and a big thank you to the BrumTwestival organisers – and I nearly forgot to say what a thoroughly enjoyable night they laid on, didn’t I?  Well, they did.   It was a lot of fun, most of which I won’t put on a work blog ;0)”

Any more?

Links: Fake websites, Digital Literacy, Deirdre without the Lol and Membership Organisations

Yoosk Birmingham.  Question some of Birmingham’s political figures including Deirdre without the Lol.
Fake websites used to teach real digital skills in a US school.  “Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.”

Mark McDonald at Gartner “The public sector mission is a powerful tool and reflects the best of what it means to be in public service.  Use the mission as a leadership tool, because it’s never been more important than right now.” (Via Devon Enterprise Architects spotted by Carl).

David Wilcox: “Clay Shirky really pins down what any organisation relying on members or supporters for its life must do if it is to stay in business as people increasing network online. That means change for campaigning charities, trade associations, and membership bodies who may have worked in the past through a mix of newsletters, events and perhaps not very special services. If they don’t offer more value, members and supporters will stop paying their subs. I’ve suggested this before, Clay says it much better.” The interview is by Amy Sample Ward.

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Finally: Obama’s folk say Twitter is a Gimmick: “The problem is that the new tool on the block tends to distract. It’s easy for a lazy and unimaginative campaign flack to sell story of “politician on twitter!”. Case of shiny object moving to shiny object. For organisations that need to invest in deep relationships, new services like twitter are scattershot and dizzying. They burn political capital. Besides, they don’t talk to the people you want to talk to [case of early adopters not being very useful to political campaigns? I’d still consider Twitter to be an early adopter service – won’t change until it has 60 million users, not just 6 million].”