This is an excellent video (slideshare below) from Tim Davis, a consultant in Britain. He is one of the founders of UK Youth Workers Online site. It is a bit long (20 min.) but very worthwhile. I think the video is quite useful for youth workers who are struggling with how to address risk issues of youth participating in online social networking sites. Download the fullYouth-Work-and-Social-Networking-Final-Report
Isn’t this data exciting! Thanks Forrester Research for your great work. Now when I talk with non profit organizations about adopting social media strategies, I can use current data about what Canadian adults are doing online. More important, we can begin a conversation about the implications to their online communication strategy.
If the organization doesn’t have an online strategy, then the data can be a persuasive argument for developing a strategy. After all, if your donors, supporters, service users, staff, past and future stakeholders are engaged in online activities doesn’t it make sense to be were your constituents are?
An even greater challenge to organizations without a social media strategy is the rising number of Canadians that first judge a non profits online presence when they are considering making a donation. If the organization is not presenting any compelling social media options that engage them in their cause, those potential donors will move on – very quickly.
Non profit organizations and staff are by definition consummate researchers. It’s very important to keep abreast of new programs strategies to engage hard to serve populations.
Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that will let you create your own bookmarking list using your own taxonomy and you can share your your bookmarks by using tags. By sharing your list, you create a network that exponentially expands your research capabilities. From chaos to order, Delicious is a must have for knowledge workers.
This short video will explain how to set up your account, what it does and why this social media tool can add to your research capabilities.
The Community – School Roundtable was an event that brought over 80 people from very diverse organizations and sectors together. The Roundtable was organized by a group of school and community partners in York Region. It was an Open Space session in which you can choose your own topic to lead or select a topic that you wish to participate in. With the “rule of 2 feet” you can find another topic to participate in if you don’t find the session right for you. Here is how the workshop organizers framed the session.
Goals
The goals of the School Community Round Tableare to bring our collective wisdom together to:
Increase achievement and success for all our children and youth;
Share perspectives on community engagement;
Explore a different conversation about school/community relationships; and
Discover new ways to strengthen our school/community relationships.
Our overarching question for the open space conversation is:
How can school and community partners work together over the next ten years to support children and youth in reaching their full potential?
I had a great time leading a discussion titled “changing the nature of the conversation for civic engagement”. I adopted the question format used in Peter Block’s community restoration approach to civic engagement. It was just a snippet from his model but it did prove to me that powerful results can come from powerful questions.
I like his approach because it frees up the participants to think of what’s possible instead of what do we have to fix and going down that problem solving road. The people in my group shared some very personal and insightful comments about what is community and what is civic engagement.
A social non profit is attuned, responsive and adaptive to the complex factors affecting its constituents and communities. In a social non profit there is an alignment between staff, services, governance systems and online communications. Social non profits value learning and innovation and believe in working smarter by using social tech tools to enhance communication, collaboration and learning amongst staff, volunteers, partners and service users. These organizations believe that strategic use of social media empowers staff, improves services and strengthens governance practices.
Recent and Current Projects
Faith Community
• Social Learning & Collaboration
• Return to Rural – Alberta;
• Film Development Council of York Region;
• Delisle Youth Services - Toronto;
• York Region Alliance to End Homelessness;
• York-Durham Association of Museums & Archives ;
• Streetjibe – York Region Youth Poverty Program, Street Kids International.
Contact
brent@socialmediatools.ca
Social Web Partners
I'm very pleased to have a number of very capable and talented consultants as friends and partners that work with me from time to time.
Alain Hurtubise (iAutomate.ca) designs and developments web 2. 0 platforms. Alain has over 20 years experience in web design and enterprise systems programming with large corporations. Alain's passion is paying it forward through his work with me in the non profit sector.
Peter Levesque's company, Knowledge Mobilization Works (based in Ottawa) is dedicated to building the capacity of people to create value through knowledge mobilization.
Mark Holmgren (Mark Holmgren Consulting - Edmonton AB) contributes his extensive organizational change expertise along with an array of social media integration expertise.
Social Media – a definition
Social media are works of user-created video, audio, text or multimedia that are published and shared in a social environment, such as a blog, podcast, forum, wiki or video hosting site. More broadly, social media refers to any online technology that lets people publish, converse and share content online. (via Socialbrite)
Social Learning – a definition
Social learning is participating with others to make sense out of new ideas. What's new about this is how powerful social media works together with social learning.
Marcia Conner, Tony Bingham: The New Social Learning, A Guide to Transform Organizations Through Social Media.
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