3. Deepening relationships, collaborations and engaging stakeholders – resist the urge to hammer down the hatches because you need  to make friends, get people on your side and look at new ways of working together.  With collaboration and mergers high on the agenda, use tools like Twitter to make sure you’re a part of the conversation and to generate buzz about what you do.

4. Using location based services to raise awareness of volunteer events, etc – make it easy for people to find your events and spread the word by publishing them in services like Gowalla and Four Square.

5. Online videos can help your message go viral - beneficiaries and service users can also tell your story.  Some of the most effective videos feature beneficiaries talking about the positive impact a project has had on them.  Using the camera built into a mobile or low cost flip cameras keeps the cost down and adds an edge of authenticity.

6. Use analytics to make the case for using new media – explaining new media to the unconvinced members of senior management and your board can be a hard sell.  Use analytics to demonstrate the increased reach and effectiveness of your message.

In hard economic times, it can be easy for organisations to cut back on ICT, particularly with maintenance support and training.  These are false economies – ICT underpins service delivery, and used effectively can help organisations to better achieve their goals.  This workshop is designed as a brief tour around time and money saving tips and tools to help organisations make their ICT go further.  I was also asked to talk about using new media in the context of organisations being able to use these new free and low cost tools to extend their reach and tell their story to funders.  The list of examples is not exhaustive, let me know if you have others.

The presentation is available for download from here:

Two things quickly emerged from the evening:

Blogging platform of choice:

(i) Typepad and Moveable Type had their fans, but WordPress hosted and WordPress self-hosted was the most popular blogging platform of choice amongst the audience.  Apart from being free, WordPress is easy to set-up, easy to use, and has a large community of developers.

We met Miko, a London based web consultant and blogger, who has a great write up of the blogging platforms compared at Net Tuesday.  As someone with much experience of blogging,  and working on web-based projects, her thoughts on different blogging platforms are well worth checking out.

Blogging for work isn’t as easy as it first looks:

(ii) Many people rush to set up blogs either because their project requires it or, the Chief Exec thinks it will help trigger dialogue with stakeholders.  However, the reality is that many people find blogging for work an imtimidating prospect – they don’t know which blogging tool to use, can’t find the time or the inspiration to write, and lack any ‘editorial’ guidance from their organisation.

This is something the Champ blog very much identifies with and we’re still wrestling with those questions 18 months on!

The personal aspect:
The discussion at Net Tuesday made me realise how many people prefer personalised blogs, even if the blog is for professional reasons.  This is because it enables the reader to get a sense of the blogger/author and make a personal connection on some level.

However, The Champ blog is a non-profit organisation’s blog about a non-profit project in a niche part of the non-profit sector.  And the dillema is should I come out from behind the veil in Wizzard of Oz style and confess to some terminally credibility destroying sin? Like growing up with a Tom Baker haircut and a liking for 80s pop.  Or starting work in art gallery before stumbling into community ICT as an accidental techie?  Too much information?

Tips to get started with blogging at work:

Fortunately, Miko has come up with some great tips to help you get started on blogging at work.

• Why do you want a blog in the first place?
• Does my organisation have an internal/corporate culture that supports blogging?
• Start reading other people’s blogs – and join in the conversations.
• Think about the practical requirements of blogging
• Have realistic expectations
• Get your manager’s approval

I know I’ll certainly be re-evaluating the champ blog after reading her posts, so stay tuned.

Lasa’s Ian Goodman reports from Idealware and Aspiration’s Managing NonProfit Technology Projects (MNTP) conference.

Last week I attended the Managing NonProfit Technology Projects (MNTP) conference in New York, USA. Despite some confusion (mainly on my part) on some of the language used – the conference was an excellent opportunity to learn and share ideas. I am happy to report that the ICT Hub Knowledgebase and Guide to Managing ICT in the Voluntary and Community Sector were both very well received.

The conference offered a great opportunity for learning about technology project management in the voluntary sector and shared experience of what does and does not work. It was interesting to see the disparity of opinion of whether managing technology projects in the voluntary and community sector was different to other sectors. The general consensus was that there was no real agreement – but it should be considered that the values of the sector do play a significant role in how projects are managed.

A full set of notes can be seen on the conference wiki - I was very impressed with the way the wiki was used to record notes from all the sessions and allows for attendees to add their own thoughts after the event.

The final session of the conference looked at whether a Community of Interest could be created around managing technology projects in the sector. There were a number interesting ideas on how to facilitate this – see the Brainstorm notes. It will be interesting to se how this develops and how we might think about something similar “this side of the pond”.

NB. Ian looks after the ICT Hub Knowledgebase and Suppliers’ Directory.

On this blog, we’ve previously talked about web 2.0 or software as a service – the ability to run web based services like Ebay, Amazon or Google Mail with nothing more than a computer and a broadband Internet connection – and the positive impact it could have on freeing organisations from the cost and complexity of maintaining their own IT systems.

BBC Radio’s 4 In Business looks at how businesses are using software as a service to reduce their dependency on internal IT and instead focus on delivering to their customers. Andrew Johnson of San Francisco Bay Area Paediatric reckons that moving to Google Apps – cost $50/£25 per user per year – has saved his business thousands of dollars on maintenance, hardware and software licensing that can be reinvested in staff.

However, as we’ve also pointed out before, there are still security and privacy implications to be weighed up, and these are well discussed by Brad Templeton of Electronic Frontier Federation.

Download it:
The show can be downloaded as a podcast (29 minutes) from BBC Radio 4 and features contributions from some of the biggest names in the software as a service world:

Marc Benioff,
Chairman & CEO Salesforce.com.

Richard Wetenhall,
Head of Corporate Development, Celerant

Matthew Glotzbach,
Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise

Andrew Johnson,
Chief Operating Officer, San Francisco Bay Paediatric

Brad Templeton,
Chairman of Electronic Frontier Federation

Ricky Reemer,
Chief Exec of Unicorn IT Solutions

Steve Prentice,
Chief of Research at Gartner

In this article, we give a brief tour of podcasting, what it is, why your organisation should adopt it, and point towards resources and other articles for getting started.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to the excellent Jude Habib at SoundDelivery for her time and generousity and for pointing me towards the case studies listed below. They deserve to be heard.

What is podcasting?

According to urban myth the term podcasting derives its name from a combination of Apple’s iPod portable music player and to broadcast. Another urban myth suggests that former MTV video DJ Adam Curry is often referred to by the media as the “podfather”. Curry didn’t invent podcasting, but he was one of the first to popularise it and now has his own show, the Daily Source Code.

Podcasting describes the uploading or publication of audio files to a website and syndication, subscription or automatic downloading of those audio files to a computer or portable music player.

Why podcast?

• Powerful – audio is a powerful, exciting and emotive tool – great for getting your message across
• Ease of use – can be produced cheaply and quickly by anyone
• Widen your audience – easy to publish to iTunes, Yahoo!, etc and reach a wide audience of listeners
• Subscribe – listeners can subscribe to your service using RSS
• Convenience – can be downloaded so listeners can play your podcast anwhere anytime they like

Case Studies:
Still not convinced? Try the studies below which highlight the many different styles of podcasting from story telling, interviews, news reporting, panel discussions and how to guides.

Family Holiday Association: Hear what a London mum, her daughter and her daughter’s friend had to say about their trip in October last year to Flanders.

Podnosh: Nick Booth’s excellent Grassroots channel brings you first hand stories of people who get things done and change the places where they live and the people they live alongside.

Thames Reach: Homeless people interview each other before Christmas

Cancer Research UK: Mix of survivor stories, news and research

St. John’s Ambulance: iFirst Aid

Wandsworth Community Empowerment Network: A single mother tells her story

Tips & Techniques:
Some useful links to get you started on creating and publishing your own podcasts.

How and why articles
Simon Fairway of Juvi Media talks about the power of web audio here.
Check out Paul Colligan’s why podcast video.

Apple, iTunes and podcasting
Download Apple’s free iTunes software
Links to tips, technical specs, FAQs, tutorials and podcast forums

Check your podcast feed is correct
Submit your URL for an instant check.

Podcast directories
BBC Radio podcasts available for download
Podcast.net
Podcastalley.com
Mobilcast.com
Mypodcastcenter.com
Odeo.com
Yahoo! Podcasts

Equipment List:

Recording machine: Edirol R09
Microphone: Bayer MCE 58 (with leads) or similar. There are other microphones which will be just as good – take advice.
Headphones: Sony MDR V-150
Flashcards: Kingston or other 1-2GB Flashcards
Rechargeable batteries
Software: Audacity is open source and free to download for PC, Mac and Linux from other editing software includes Adobe Audition which offers charity rates.

You can also compare equipment prices at:
Dolphin Music and HHB.

According to Twitter’s own blurb, “Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives. Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away. Curious people can make friends. Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool.”

Twitter considers itself “the medium between your friends and yourself; we just relay the information.” All you have to do to tap into this viral social network is send a text message from your mobile phone, type a message from the Twitter site, or send an instant message from AIM, Jabber or Google Talk.

In a world of information overload – see Moore’s Law and decreasing attention spans, we’ve now moved from newspaper articles, to blogs, SMS text messages, ICQ and IM (Instant Messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text) to 154 character chunks of boiled down Twitter headlines. Supporters like Steve Rubel, describe Twitter’s value to an information overloaded life as:

“Despite it’s lack of management/search features, Twitter is downright addicting. I love it. It’s brevity lets me blog more actively and at the same time engage in real-time conversations with my “followers” (as they call it).”

Also on the upside, I can see how Twitter might be used to quickly mobilise support for a campaign, which is how US Presidential hopeful, Senator John Edwards, uses Twitter to communicate with his legions of supporters.

A typical entry from Senator Edwards:
“Three cities today and back home in Chapel Hill tonight. 10:44 AM March 16, 2007 from web”

It was Tony Blair who coined the “Big Conversation” , a self-validating bubble of focus groups during the run-up to the 2004 general election, and it can only be a short time before Prime Ministerial wannabe, David “Dave” Cameron gets in on the act with Twitter, if he hasn’t already.

A sprinkling of breaking headlines from Twitter-world this morning:

Jochiewajij: I don’t have a twat, therefore i twit. less than 20 seconds ago from web

KenV: Rise and shine! Drinking coffee and checking email…then hitting the Merritt for the drive to work. less than 10 seconds ago from web

Or more usefully:
bbcengland A debt-hit hospital trust says it still needs to cut 220 posts in order to meet its £16m saving target. http://tinyurl.com/273xg8 half a minute ago from web

From NMK’s Ian Delaney via Steve Bridger, what we’re looking at here is the fragmentation of social media.

So, you’re now asking “How might a voluntary sector organisation use Twitter?” Possible uses might be to micro-blog news headlines as per the BBC England story above. Or you might use Twitter to let service users know via their mobile phone that tomorrow’s coach trip to the beach has been cancelled.

Kathy Sierra has a take I identify with:

“Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it’s a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong “feeling of connectedness” Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain “knows” something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another–potentially more dramatic–contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking… you can’t be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.”

How did it come to this and whatever happened to face to face? My own personal take is that Twitter hooks users with a surface level feeling of connectivity, fostering an always on, always connected, 24/7 mentality – what Linda Stone calls Continuous Partial Attention. Is this healthy?

“….in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we’re inaccessible. The latest, greatest powerful technologies have contributed to our feeling increasingly powerless.“

One wag described Twitter as “like the Seinfeld of the internet — a website about nothing.” Seinfeld was better than that, it was about pre-Internet, pre-millnnial narcissism and self-absorption.

Does any of this really matter and is Twitter the user interface for narcissism? As usual, Nick Carr says it better:

“The great paradox of “social networking” is that it uses narcissism as the glue for “community.” Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. “

In other words, our virtual friends in our virtual world give us real life validation.

Shakespeare would’ve been rubbish at Twitter. Let’s close with the Twitterisation of Hamlet’s third soliloquy (3.1.64-98):

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Be all my sins remember’d.

(114 characters)

Inspired by IT Redux’s Office 2.0 and the Dot Organize ‘Organizer’s Toolcrib’ of online tools, the aim is to find out just how easy or hard it is to apply online tools to my everyday tasks. This means no more Outlook for email and calendar, Word or Excel as I’ll be using only online tools to do the same jobs.

My own perception is that online tools have the potential to allow voluntary sector organisations to more easily exploit ICT (which many aren’t doing) and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector (apart from the big boys like Greenpeace, NSPCC and Oxfam) are not grasping the opportunities of online tools to connect with their stakeholders.

For me, the key is going to be showing how online tools can be applied to everyday tasks. David Wilcox and Beth Kanter have develped an excellent social media game that aims to show organisations how they might apply online tools or new media to their business. The question is are web 2.0 tools suitable for business tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets?

Paul Henderson at Ruralnet did some good work on exploring how small organisations might be trained to use and exploit online tools or new media on the I-See-T project.

My basic criteria for the Web Office that the tools must all be online, free or low cost and sustainable. I’ll be putting up a more detailed page on my web 2.0 experiment next week – this will detail why I’ve chosen the tools below and list a few alternative choices.

Web Office tools:

Address Book: Plaxo

Bookmarks: del.icio.us

Calculator: Google

Email: Gmail

Calendar: Google Calendar

Documents and Spreadsheets: Zoho

File Manager: Box.net

Images: Flickr

Personalised homepage: Google

RSS Reader: Google Reader

Are you using any of the above tools or different ones for everyday business use. If so, let me know about it.

ESRC: ICT, social capital and voluntary action

The Economic & Social Research Council’s ‘ICT, Social Capital and Voluntary Action’ (download PDF – 1.6Mb) report contends that ignoring the Internet is no longer an option for voluntary and community organisations.

It warns that those failing to embrace information and communications technology (ICT) risk having their work overshadowed by those who do draw on this new source of ‘social capital’ – the reserve of goodwill generated when people interact. And though local ICT initiatives are taking place, the booklet says that the smaller online communities they create need ongoing technical and funding support if they are to survive.

The report concluded:

“Our research suggests that top-down, centrally managed projects are prone to a range of problems that make their long-term sustainability doubtful in contrast to grassroots initiatives owned and managed by the communities themselves.

In other words, grassroots ICT initiatives may be more sustainable than those driven by outside policy interventions.”

You can download the full report from ESRC.