One of the reasons I embrace social media is that it enables conversations to continue. Indeed, I am of the opinion that a community is a continuous conversation.

The Planning Forum for York Region sponsored the first Community – Funder Roundtable. The goal was to begin an ongoing dialogue with funder and policy makers about building our York Region community. Michael Johnny, Manager of the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University welcomed everyone and explained what we hoped to accomplish.

To help participants understand the challenges and envision a future where funder groups and community groups work in sync with eachother, the planning group brought in Liz Weaver from the Tamarack Vibrant Communities organization. Liz is also the lead spokesperson for the Hamilton Round-table on Poverty. The Hamilton Round-table has done incredible successful work combining support from the grass roots, government, corporate and community service sectors. The collaboration amongst stakeholders in Hamilton is a success and we (the planning group) felt that we could emulate their process or  at least learn from their experience.

We did learn a lot from Liz about the ingredients that made the Hamilton Roundtable a success and I’m sure many in the room started to imagine how those lessons might apply to York Region.

Like other participants, I thought there would be an opportunity to discuss important and emerging issues about our community. Unfortunately, the dialogue process didn’t get off the ground as a few of the funder representatives felt that it wasn’t necessary to start a new dialogue on building community as there wasn’t any tension on  these issues.

As a member of the planning group, I was very frustrated  by the position taken by a few of the funders. On a personal note, I was disappointed that I didn’t have a chance to talk about how the funding sector can help non profits invest in social web 2.0 strategies and tools.

Liz Weaver
Liz Weaver gave a very inspirational presentation. Despite not be able to engage funders on a new conversation about our York Region community, her talk got us going in the right direction. It’s about 9 minutes long but well worth it. Here is a quick bio taken from her Linkedin site

From 2006-2009, Liz Weaver was the Director for the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction a cross-sectoral community initiative with a strategic focus on poverty reduction and the aspiration of Making Hamilton the Best Place to Raise a Child. Liz brings a wealth of community based experience, knowledge and leadership to this position. In June 2009, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction was recognized by the Canadian Urban Institute with the David Crombie Leadership award.

Dennis Bailey
Dennis Bailey, Executive Director of the Community Legal Clinic of York Region gave a very timely and important talk about community collaborations. He talked on many other important topics however this video only covers his perspective on collaboration amongst community groups.

Well that is my quick synopsis of our first community – funder roundtable. I’m looking forward to hearing from others who where present.

How did you feel when the dialogue process came to a standstill. Where you disappointed or upset with the objecting funder representatives or with the planning group? Did the speakers, Liz, Joanna and Dennis add to your understanding of the current realities faced by service users and social benefit groups in York Region?

I’m interested in hearing from others who were part of our Community – Funder Roundtable.

I’m sure you appreciate the impact social technologies are having in all sectors locally and around the world. Your leadership role now includes managing how your organization connects, networks, and collaborates with your diverse stakeholders. Also, your new role includes learning how to listen to your stakeholders in new ways so you can adapt and respond to a rapidly changing environment.

These are challenging & exciting times, full of new opportunities to engage the communities you serve in furtherance of your Mission. To move your organization on to (or closer to) the social web dance floor, I’ve put together a simple model that illustrates what I see as the building blocks necessary for supporting a dynamic and engaging web presence. A core value that is front and centre of your organization’s transition to the social web is “incremental changes over time”. The transition doesn’t’ happen overnight – take it slow!

Here are the building blocks for your web site:

1. An organization’s willingness to engage their constituents with online technologies in places where your stakeholders currently inhabit  i.e. social networking sites, collaboration & networking platforms, videos, photos, blogs, twitter, etc.
2. A well crafted online communication strategy based on your organization’s Mission and goals. With your online strategy you will develop specific policies and procedures so that your staff and your organization operate safely within your online policy framework.
3. A web site that is user friendly with a content management system that allows you and your organization’s staff to add content, monitor & evaluate the conversations and interactions taking place on your site.

These building blocks were applied in a recently completed project for the York Region Alliance to End Homelessness. The YRAEH’s willingness to use social technologies, coupled with their online communication goals and use of a staff driven web site has transformed their organization. YRAEH is now actively enrolling members in their network and collaboration groups. They are also using a range of social media tools such as blogging, video and photos to engage their constituents.

In another example, our building blocks are part of the Multi Media Film Council of York Region. My partner Alain Hurtubise (iAutomate) and I developed the first phase of the Film Festival site. Now that the first year of the festival is drawing to a successful close, the Film Festival Council has asked us to broaden the ways in which multimedia artists can interact and share their productions on the site.

To meet this goal we will add features such as photo galleries, video exhibits, membership options, purchasing options, private spaces for networking and collaboration etc. The Film Council is also interested in having us develop a resource bank of multimedia tutorials, social media guides and an online peer mentoring system that can support youth as they develop their skills.

We are using the term “networked social benefit organization” to describe the results that are achieved when you combine these three vital building blocks.

Thanks for  reviewing our building block framework. If any of these ideas resonated with your situation or your organization’s online goals, please give me call or an email. I would be happy to  chat with you about your vision for a stronger more responsive web presence for your web site. Better yet, leave a comment on this post so others can follow our conversation.

P.S. I took the metaphor “From the Balcony to the Dance Floor” from Beth Kanter’s blog post titled The Dance Floor and the Balcony Social Media Training. As usual, Beth’s perspective is spot on. Here is how she explains her metaphor.

I used this metaphor to talk about the importance of having both the strategic view of social media as well as the hands-on experience of the tactical and tools. It is important to shift between the tools and that strategic overview. As one participant noted in the discussion, a big problem she observes with social media within nonprofits is that the leadership is “divorced” from the social media and tactics are delegated to the “young person on staff” without strategic insight.

Related Posts:

Building Networked Social Benefit Web Sites – were getting there

Canada Online With Social Media – implications for non profits

Building Better Relationships in Your Non Profit – Canadian Data Released

Cooking Up a Collaboration Web Site with Drupal and Open Atrium

We became embroiled in a discussion about the difference between a person attending the meeting on behalf of their organization and the person who comes to the meeting without representing anyone except their desire to contribute to a better community.

I was fascinated by the indignation expressed as to why we would consider the Agency representative less valued than the resident. What button was pushed here? I’m not sure to this day but the conversation stayed with me.

I and a few others felt that having a person attending who didn’t represent any group or agency was preferred over the agency representative. It was not that we would exclude or didn’t want the Agency representative to attend. It was more a case of viewing them as not motivated in the same way as the citizen coming to voice their points of view.

I think those at our planning meeting that were indignant about our viewpoint believed that we were insulting the character of the agency representatives. “How can you say my presence and voice is less valid than someone”?

Some of you know how much I’m learning from Peter Block’s book, Community – the structure of belonging. I think in this quote, Peter Block unpacks this issue very acutely.

The conversations that build relatedness most often occur through associational life, where citizens show up by choice, and rarely in the context of system life, where citizens show up out of obligation.

I highly  recommend Peter Block’s book for anyone who is interested in community restoration and development. His lens is helping me wade through my associational and system life.

Most of all his book has helped realize the limitation to constant efforts to problem solve the building of community. Put another way, the futility of constant efforts to improve relationships between organizations.

There is need for problem solving and relationship building but restoring our fragmented community needs to be the starting point. I’m sure that across the country, countless organizations are mired in collaboration (negotiations) efforts in the name of building community.

What’s your take on focusing on our fragmented community rather than improving our organizational relationships

Goals

The goals of the School Community Round Table are 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 have 3 videos from the session. The first one is on this post. You can view the opening words of welcome from the Directors of Education from our respective York Region Boards of Education and an excerpt that shows a bit of the topic setting process.

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.

Will Davies reflects on Social Capital and Digital Inclusion from Tim Davies on Vimeo.

Lately I’ve being immersed in a variety of community restoration and change groups. The focus for many of these efforts seem to default to righting inequities and fixing long standing communication and power issues. People like Margaret Wheatley and Peter Block offer alternative strategies for community change. I am suggesting that we use or integrate elements of these community engagement strategies however the shift to that thinking is pretty hard to make.

Despicte these challenges, I’m enjoying the planning sessions and I especially like contributing my experience in online communication strategies and tools to support these change processes. I hope you find some great questions in watching these videos. As Peter Block says, the right questions can be more transformative than answers.

In 2010 I will be hosting workshops for organizations that are re-tooling or aligning their online communication strategy to enhance responsiveness, trust and relevance to their stakeholders.

My goal is to initiate a bottoms up, learning and discovery process that will help organizations identify their best starting points for establishing their online communication strategy.

I believe that non profit organizations can increase their resilience, capacity and sustainability in the face of rapid change and ever decreasing resources by utilizing well thought out online strategies.

It’s a simple fact that consumers and supporters expect more from organizations via online tools and online access to resources. Non profits need to go where their constituents are and that is increasingly online.

My starting point is that caring relationships, opportunities for meaningful participation and genuine communication with supporters, consumers and donors fuels an organization’s resilience. These dimensions need to be examined internally by key staff and then the findings can be organized into an online strategy that is delivered through the organization’s web site.

In the workshop, staff will be engaged in a discussion and a shared learning process in which an online strategy can begin to take shape. This bottoms up approach taps into the organizations creativity and wisdom. Once the online strategy is in place and the most appropriate social media tools are implemented the organization begins a process of listening, learning and adapting to the new culture and environment they are inhabiting.

Supporting this transition to a strategic online communication strategy is the demise of high cost web sites that do little to further relationships with supporters, donors and consumers. Furthermore, organizations are spending huge amounts of money to pay outside contractors to make the simplest of content changes on their site.

Today, affordable open source web platforms that allow staff to upload content are putting the ownership and controls back into the hands of organization. The days of static, one way brochure web sites, controlled by expensive outside contractors are coming to a close.

What follows is a list of preliminary outcomes that I envision flowing from the workshop.

• More dynamic and trusting relationships with consumers, supporters and staff;
• Enhanced innovation, collaboration and creativity amongst staff ;
• Increased responsiveness and decision making in a climate of rapid change & diminishing resources;
• Greater alignment of your online communications with the core values and services of your organization

Please stay tuned for more news about this workshop opportunity in the new year. If you have any questions about booking a workshop now rather than waiting for my formal workshop flyer, I would be pleased to have a conversation with you.

Related Posts:

Building Better Relationships in Your Non Profit – Canadian Data Released

21st Century Media Literacies

Cooking up a Collaboration Web Site with Drupal and Open Atrium

Social Web Platforms for Non Profits – Our Approach

“A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs”.

I found this article, titled “The Non Profit Starvation Cycle” – Sanford Social Innovation Review on the Ontario Non Profit Network Site.

What an eye opening and revealing paper. The research report is called, Nonprofit Overhead Cost Study, a five year research project conducted by the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

The article provoked quite a reaction in me. I’ve worked as a senior manager in the non profit sector for quite a few years and felt those starvation pangs on a regular basis.

In my role as a consultant, I help organizations with their online communication and web site strategies. The impact of this starvation cycly phenomenon still affects me as I’m discovering that for many local non profits, finding budgets for creating an effective web site that engages their stakeholders is luxury they can’t afford.

In this U.S. based report,  I recognize many correlations to my experience in Canada. The article describes the elephant in the room. Another name for the elephant is funder expectations. The article contends that this elephant is the leading contributor to the non profit starvation cycle. The advice to grantees was especially useful as this portion of the report pointed the way out of this “low pay, make do, and do without” culture.

The non profit starvation cycle has being around so long, I think it’s become the norm. It seems to me that non profits have quietly accepted the way things work in the funding process. Their conditioned approach is to continue juggling the mix of different funders, squeezing a portion of overhead from each one and keep on organizing special funding drives or in kind donations to cover admin shortfalls. I’ve seen this year in, year out cycle wear out very talented managers, direct service staff and volunteers. It’s no wonder that it is getting more difficult each year to find candidates willing to step into the shoes of departing staff.

I would like to believe that there is a rising tide both in the non profit and funding sector that is turning this dysfunctional Titanic called “funder expectations” around. The rate of change is going much to slow for my liking. When non profit groups across the country are reporting record increases (often over 25%) in service usage (that’s food, beds, crisis services etc.). More than ever, the non profit sector is asked to meet these challenges. I feel that we can’t afford to continue perpetuating this dysfunctional practice.

The Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN) is a network of networks that helps to build communication and coordination amongst nonprofit organizations working for the public benefit in Ontario. They are doing some outstanding work across Ontario. It was nice to see the Twitter tab but I couldn’t find an RSS feed anywhere.

I’m interested in hearing what my colleagues and fellow collaborators in York Region feel about this study. Did it provoke you as much as it did me.

This post is about the shared journey that these groups are following and the interconnectedness of these diverse yet complementary initiatives.

From my vantage point I recognize how these unique programs, working towards a common purpose of a stronger, healthier, inclusive York Region, are implementing their projects with values sets that are very similar or at the least overlapping.

I thought it would an interesting reflection exercise to map out these initiatives with their diverse, yet shared value sets. Firing up my Mindmeister collaboration mapping software (free) I began adding the names of these initiatives and what I believed were the predominant supporting values that guided activities within the initiatives.

The final outcome is 2 maps. The first map (on top of page) reflects what I see are the value sets that provide a guiding theoretical base to those projects. The value sets are not connected to any one initiative as they often overlap or apply to multiple initiatives.

The lower map contains the initiatives that from my perspective are sharing similar purposes. Please appreciate that many of these initiatives are under development and not fully implemented at this time.

I know there are many other initiatives that are emerging in York Region that could be part of my map. If you know of or a part of these initiatives you can send that information to me and I would be happy to add these to this map.

Collaborate Online – You can add your initiative and value set to an online collaboration map. This map can grow and show even a larger picture of the changes that are emerging in York Region.

You can participate in building a larger collaboration map of York Region Initiatives. You can do this by visiting my Mindmeister map and add the name of the initiative to the map. you can also visit this map to add the “value set” or lens used in the initiative that you have listed.

To help you get a sense of what a few of these value sets mean, I’ve added links to online resources  that further describe the value sets.

4 C’s of Social Media – Gaurav Mishra (Content, Collaboration, Community, Collective Intelligence)

Complex Adaptive Systems – Nine_Lead_Principles PDF

Knowledge Mobilization – Research Impact – York University

Informal Learning – Jay Cross

Resiliency Framework

Social Determinants of Health

Mindmeister Collaborative Online Mapping Software