Life and taxes.

Apr 17, ’12 8:40 AM

The smart folks at Community Coalition in Los Angeles have been running a great campaign thanking folks for paying taxes that fund things we need as a society, like schools and clean drinking water.

On Tax Day, it’s good to be reminded that taxes aren’t an affliction, and they don’t require relief. They pay for our highways, and our children’s schools. They paid for the R&D that made the Internet possible, and they pay for our grandparents’ Medicare. They’re the cornerstone of our shared prosperity, and the lifeblood of the commonwealth.

We can (and we certainly will) fight over who pays how much, but we should never concede that taxes are anything less than vital for our society and fundamental to the public good.

Now, isn’t that better than grumbling about the IRS?

UPDATE: I see my LightBox Collaborative colleague Holly Minch and I are seeing eye to eye. More great examples of nonprofits making the case for taxes as a good thing at the link.

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Two years in.

Mar 6, ’12 9:30 AM

Last month marked the second anniversary of my move to independent consulting. A year ago I was celebrating the joys of building a practice that allowed me to help causes I care about while paying the bills, and looking forward to a second year helping my clients build communities where neighbors understand each other better and a country that lives up to our ideals.

I’m happy to report that the people and organizations I was lucky enough to work with over the past year allowed me to do just that. Among the many great causes I worked with, a few stand out. I got to help Welcoming America develop a brand, messages and communications plan to help them weave immigrants into the social fabric of their adopted home towns. I also helped articulate the editorial stance of a fascinating online magazine exploring the intersection of religion and public life in America, Religion Dispatches. They are (in case you were wondering) “respectful but not reverent, an informed observer (but not necessarily observant).”

I also worked with an inspiring organization called Uniting NC that’s reminding North Carolinians of the values they share with their immigrant neighbors. I developed a set of ads for them and then helped them plan a crowdfunding effort to finance a statewide billboard campaign. The billboards earned them a huge amount of positive media coverage, and more than half of the donations that supported it came from new supporters of the organization.

To celebrate my second year in business, I’m sharing the blueprint we used on the campaign as a model for any cause that wants to pay for an ad campaign and build their base of support at the same time.

So what’s ahead for Year Three? I still get excited about helping good causes build strong connections with the people they need to reach in order to achieve their goals. Sometimes that means articulating a brand, or drafting some compelling messages. Sometimes it means creating an ad, building a website or running a crowdfunding campaign.

In other words, helping nonprofits tell their stories. If you could use some help with that, or know someone who could, please do get in touch.

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Ogilvy on writing.

Feb 13, ’12 12:02 PM

We could all benefit from applying the wisdom of one of the original Mad Men, David Ogilvy, to our writing:

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David

Natural writing, clear action steps, an attack on jargon and pretentiousness? What’s not to like?

(via Brain Pickings)

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Not so echoey.

Jan 19, ’12 10:57 AM

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has a very interesting piece this week about a new study from a researcher at Facebook named Eytan Bakshy. It turns out a lot of our ideas about the “echo chamber effect” on the web– or at least on Facebook– might not be true.

The echo chamber idea, propagate by folks like Eli Pariser and Manjoo himself, was that rather than encouraging exposure to new ideas, the web actually enabled us to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals, leaving us all comfy inside an intellectual bubble of our own devising. Instead of challenging us, the internet makes it feel like our opinions are much more widely held than they really are.

According to this new study by Facebook’s Eytan Bakshy, this bit of received wisdom might not be so. By gaming Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm (which determines which posts users see) and splitting his test sample into two groups,

…Bakshy could answer some important questions about how we navigate news online. Are people more likely to share information because their friends pass it along? And if we are more likely to share stories we see others post, what kinds of friends get us to reshare more often—close friends, or people we don’t interact with very often? Finally, the experiment allowed Bakshy to see how “novel information”—that is, information that you wouldn’t have shared if you hadn’t seen it on Facebook—travels through the network. This is important to our understanding of echo chambers. If an algorithm like EdgeRank favors information that you’d have seen anyway, it would make Facebook an echo chamber of your own beliefs. But if EdgeRank pushes novel information through the network, Facebook becomes a beneficial source of news rather than just a reflection of your own small world.

That’s exactly what Bakshy found.

The study does indicate that we’re more likely to share information from our closest contacts, but we also share information from the weak links in our networks, and that’s how new information spreads through the network. This makes intuitive sense to me, and gibes with my experience of using Facebook.

Sure, there’s an echo-chamber effect, and I often find my close friends sharing the same articles and YouTube videos. But Facebook also allows for sharing with the looser connections in my network. Take this video I shared on Facebook earlier this week:

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

Among my Facebook friends who liked or commented on it were:

  • My cousin in Anchorage
  • Two nonprofit communications colleagues
  • An old friend from college now teaching in Texas
  • A nonprofit communications professional I met at a training a couple years ago

That simple act of sharing crossed several social networks, and when my cousin in Alaska shared it on her Facebook page, it crossed over to a whole new network. Now, what I shared was just a funny video, not the kind of hard news or political opinion that people worry about with the “echo chamber” effect (and in fact Bakshy is planning followup research to explore this kind of sharing), but it’s encouraging nonetheless.

It also points to another problem with the direction social networks are moving in with things like “frictionless sharing,” where apps from media companies like the Washington Post automatically publish everything a user reads on their site to his or her Facebook stream. I’m much more likely to click on a link from someone I’m less close to if I think they’ve put some thought into it before posting– that they’ve curated the information they’re sharing, rather than out-sourcing the job to some automated script. That’s less true of links posted by my close friends, because, well, I’m close to them.

But that only increases the echo effect, and decreases the chances for interesting content to spread across social networks. It’s one more way Facebook is making itself more attractive to its corporate partners at the expense of its ability to share novel, interesting content with people who wouldn’t otherwise have seen it.

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Antisocial behavior.

Dec 14, ’11 11:49 AM

Recent developments have left me frustrated with social media. Setting up a Facebook campaign for a client, I was struck by how the walls of Mr. Zuckerburg’s garden keep getting higher and higher. A nonprofit’s page, for example, can no longer mention individuals in its status updates, and as of a couple of months ago, it can no longer e-mail individual members.
The new UI that Twitter announced last week will, among other things, make direct messages less prominent. What these changes have in common is that they seem designed to increase revenue at the expense of fostering actual connection between people.

The promise of Facebook (and LinkedIn, and Google Plus, were anyone to join it) is in the way it replicates our real world networks in a digital space that makes it easier to share with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. But I’m beginning to think the trade-offs involved in this plotting of “the social graph” might not be worth it– and maybe even that the premise itself is flawed.

Over the weekend I got around to reading a blog post that crystalized a lot of this for me: The Social Graph is Neither, by Maciej Cegłowski, the developer of Pinboard.

The first half of the post tackles the idea that you can graph the complexity of our human relationships with the kind of orderly structure of nodes and edges that computers like:

And then there’s the question of how to describe the more complicated relationships that human beings have. Maybe my friend Bill is a little abrasive if he starts drinking, but wonderful with kids – how do I mark that? Dawn and I go out sometimes to kvetch over coffee, but I can’t really tell if she and I would stay friends if we didn’t work together. I’d like to be better friends with Pat. Alex is my AA sponsor. Just how many kinds of edges are in this thing?

There’s a flattening that happens whenever you try to represent something from the real world in a digital medium. Sometimes that flattening isn’t terribly noticeable, or important, but when it wipes out some key emotional detail– when the graph just isn’t up to the task– we feel it.

Even more damning is Cegłowski’s take on what “social” means for the companies who have created the most popular social networks:

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

Ouch. Now, nonprofits aren’t responsible for fixing the problems that Cegłowski has identified with social networks as they exist today. But they do need to understand their limitations and the tradeoffs we’re making when we use them.

Maybe a system built around companies that are in business to collect, share and monetize their users won’t ever allow the kind of real connections with supporters and donors that nonprofits need to make. Maybe we’d be better off using more direct tools like e-mail to forge those connections until someone comes up with another model that works better for its users than the companies who run the networks.

The next time we’re wondering why it’s difficult to turn Facebook fans into donors, maybe we should consider whether there’s something missing because of Facebook itself– some critical piece of your brand that just doesn’t translate through a system geared towards selling ads.

Maybe a clearer understanding of how social networks are broken can help us use the tools available to us– and create the authentic connections we’re all striving for– more wisely.

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The shape of stories.

Oct 11, ’11 2:30 PM

Jason Kottke recently posted this video of Kurt Vonnegut giving a lecture on the shape of stories. It’s a great introduction to how to think about one of the most important aspects of storytelling: the arc of the narrative.

In Vonnegut’s (unique, to say the least) telling, stories can be plotted as a change in the circumstances of a person’s life (the “good fortune/ ill fortune axis”) over time (the “beginning/ end” axis). Using this idea, he diagrams a few simple curves that explains a great many stories that we tell each other, from “boy meets girl” to “Cinderella,” though as he takes pains to point out, “boy meets girl,” for example, needn’t involve a boy, or a girl– it’s just a convenient shorthand for describing a particular kind of human experience.

There’s an important lesson in here for nonprofit storytellers about the mental frames that our audiences bring to the stories we tell them. Our listeners have heard many stories over their lives, and in order to make sense of a new story, it helps to try and fit it into one of a few templates that they carry around in their heads (for more on this, see TV Tropes’ summary of the Seven Basic Plots).

They’re going to do this whether you like it or not, so you might as well think about which common plot your story resembles, and make sure that the moral content of the story you’re telling matches up with what you want them to take away from it.

Are the ugly stepsisters to your Cinderella plainly identified as the societal problems you’re trying to solve? Is it clear that the “man in hole” you’ve described got out with the help of your organization? By taking the time to think through what simple plot your story resembles, you’ll be able to build a narrative that’s more emotionally resonant and more memorable.

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The building blocks of stories.

Sep 13, ’11 8:56 AM

In between welcoming a new baby to the world and traveling to my sister’s wedding last month, I was lucky enough to get to spend a little time at the SPIN Academy, where I presented a new workshop on Storytelling. In pulling together the deck for that presentation, I came across a number of different ways of thinking about how to build an effective story. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing some of the best of these ideas from master storytellers, along with some of the implications of their thinking for nonprofits.

The simplest version of what makes an effective story comes from This American Life‘s Ira Glass:

In Ira’s framework, stories are made up of a narrative (a basic sequence of events) and a moment of reflection, when you tell your audience why you thought the story was worth telling in the first place. Ira is talking specifically about stories for broadcast, but I think there’s some important implications for nonprofit storytelling in what he has to say.

Narrative is the most basic building block of a story, and it is an incredibly powerful one. In the chain of events we relate in an anecdote, we pull our listeners in, engaging their desire to hear what happens next. There are powerful reasons for this engagement, going all the way back to our origins as a species, when we created myths to make sense of the natural world, and our origins as individuals, related to how are brains develop.

In the narrative form itself we’re holding up a mirror to the way we perceive the world. Each “thing” in a story– each event, piece of dialog, description of a person or place– gets woven into a larger whole, and we assign some meaning to that whole. Human brains work the same way, with our senses feeding data to our brains, which assemble all the sights, sounds and smells into a coherent narrative of what’s happening around us. Storytellers are doing that work for their audience, and humans have a natural affinity for the form. That’s why stories are so much more compelling to us that reams of data and statistics.

As important as a compelling narrative is for a good story, the moment of reflection is even more important for nonprofit stories. This is where an organization’s values are transmitted, and you should be clear about what values you want to communicate even before you pick a story to tell. When you’re clear whether your story is really about justice, or community, or human rights, it makes it easier to pick the right details to include in your narrative. It sets your audience up for the moment of reflection where you make the point of your story explicit.

Are you clear about the values your stories are conveying? And are you making sure to include a moment of reflection in every story you tell about your organization’s work?

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What we talk about when we talk about message discipline.

Jul 5, ’11 11:41 AM

I’m of two minds about this video of British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband answering (and I use the term loosely) some questions about the recent one-day strike by public employees in Great Britain.

On one hand, this is message discipline run amuck– you can stay on message and get your point across without using the exact same words over and over again, as Miliband does here to comedic effect. When you see the whole interview, as in this clip, he comes across as programmed, pedantic, and insincere– certainly not the impression he and his team wanted to convey. Reporter Damon Green has a great response explaining what this kind of message discipline feels like from the other side of the camera.

On the other hand, it’s clear that Miliband knows exactly what he wants to say about the strike, which implies the kind of forethought that is a prerequisite for effective messaging. And in Miliband’s defense, this was a pool interview, and his answers were never meant to be seen strung together like this. By using the same words over and over again, he ensured that whatever snippet the BBC, ITV or Sky News chose to show, their viewers would all get the same answer. That’s smart, and gives him control over his message in a format where the clip shown is often chosen precisely because it’s where the interviewee went off message.

So: points for forethought and discipline, demerits for sounding programmed. Next time, Miliband should try to vary the phrases he uses, offer more direct responses to the questions posed, and try for more natural sounding transitions back to his talking points. That’s what truly effective message discipline looks like.

(via Kevin Drum)

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Lucky number thirteen.

May 18, ’11 9:52 AM

It gives me great pleasure to report that applications for the thirteenth (!) annual SPIN Academy are now open, and are due by June 17. This four day residential training retreat for nonprofit communications professionals takes place every year in Northern California, and it’s a great resource for individuals looking to build their skills or their network of colleagues around the country working on similar issues and facing the same challenges. It’s also a lot of fun.

At last year’s event, we were lucky enough to have Chris Jordan, a multimedia producer, filmmaker and photographer on site to document what the SPIN Academy is all about. Here’s the video he produced for us:

The SPIN Academy has always been a special place where learning about strategic communications, storytelling and message development is combined with workshops like Op Ed writing, spokesperson skills, social media and other tactical skills that progressive communicators need to change hearts and minds on their issues. This year’s event is expanding into new areas like branding, brand messages and internal communications. The SPIN Academy continues to grow and change along with its participants and the shifting media environment.

It’s the passion our participants bring to the event that makes it worth all the time and hard work that goes into producing the SPIN Academy each year. You won’t meet a smarter, more dedicated group of individuals from a huge diversity of backgrounds coming together to learn something new and have their ideas challenged. It makes for four days of intensive learning, fascinating conversations, and new colleagues– and friends.

Our participants also benefit from the combined wisdom of dozens of Bay Area communications professionals who give generously of their time and experience because they care about they care about the field-building mission of the SPIN Academy (and because it never hurts to get out of the office for a little while to enjoy the rustic charms of Walker Creek Ranch in Marin County). We couldn’t do this even without them, and we’re deeply grateful for their support.

This year’s even represents a homecoming of sorts for me. My colleague Holly Minch and I have set up a fiscally sponsored project at Community Initiatives to house the SPIN Academy, and we’ll be managing it going forward with the help of an advisory committee made up of some of our colleagues who’ve been involved with the Academy over the years. Holly was actually present at the creation of the SPIN Academy, so this is indeed lucky number thirteen for her. I’m a relative newcomer to the event, but it was still the first thing I worked on when I joined the SPIN Project– and the field of nonprofit communications– back in 2002. Which means that I’ve been doing this work for a decade now. Time, as they say, flies.

If you know someone who could benefit from attending the SPIN Academy, if you’ve never been yourself and want to know what all the fuss is about, or if you’re a communications professional interested in supporting the Academy as a presenter or consultant, check out the info page, or just drop me a line.

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The art of the blog post.

May 12, ’11 12:50 PM

Tim Carmody had a great guest blog post last week on Kottke.org about what a great blogger Jason Kottke is. Sure, it’s a little meta, but I think Carmody hits on something really important about what makes for a good blog (and good social media generally):

But really, if I had to pick my favorite thing I love about Kottke.org, it’s the structure.

The structure of a Kottke post is totally elemental:

  • Title
  • Link
  • Pull (blockquote, picture, video)
  • Response
  • Reader comments (optional)

And that’s it. It’s the five basic units that blogs were built on, distilled to their essence. And titles and comments are important, but Jason’s done without them both. They’re paratext. The real core is link, pull, response.

…

These are also the elements that help establish bloggers’ identity as readers in conversation with other readers: I have seen something that I feel strongly enough to think and write about, and what would make me happiest is if you look at it, then think and write about it too.

For me, this is the key point about social media that I find myself trying to convey over and over again to my clients. If you want to do it right, social media has to be about playing nicely with others. It doesn’t always have to be about something someone else has written, said, or done– but it does a lot of the time.

If you’re unhappy with the response (or lack thereof) you’re getting to your blog posts, it might not be because the post is uninteresting. It might just be because you’re not taking the time to respond to others.

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