Last week was my eighth SPIN Academy, and my return as event organizer—my colleague Holly Minch, with whom I planned this year’s event, has been at it even longer, having helping found the event back in 1999. Planning SPIN Academy reminded me what a privilege it is to work with people who are so passionate about their work. It also put me in a nostalgic mood, as I reflected on how dramatically things have changed—and what has remained the same—in the field of strategic communications for nonprofits.

The site we’ve used for the past eight years, Walker Creek Ranch in Marin County, is as beautiful as ever, of course. The rolling hills and wandering deer are still there, the foxes are still bold, and the organic garden is still a great place to take a break. The weather still confounds participants who’ve never visited Northern California before, and many of them were making snide comments about my warnings of cold nights and foggy mornings when the temperature hit triple digits on Tuesday. Two days later the high was in the sixties, and they were glad they’d brought that extra layer. Cell phones still don’t work on site, and that’s still more a blessing than a curse when you’re trying to make sure everyone stays present at the training.

The technology has changed, of course, and not just in the content of the workshops, but in how we run the conference. This year, for the first time, we didn’t print a participant binder, but moved all of our materials to DropBox, where presenters could upload slide decks, worksheets, and anything else they thought would be useful for the participants. Instead of installing event phone lines and worrying about calling cards, we moved to Skype, and that worked out fine, as well. With a T1 line and a fairly stable wireless network, everyone managed to feel connected to home in a way that a few phone lines never seemed to allow back in the dark ages before the interwebs.

Perhaps the biggest way the event has changed is in the level of comfort with strategic communications, and plain old buy-in, in the room. Years ago we spent a good deal of time at the beginning of the Academy trying to win over the skeptics in the room to our belief that being strategic about communications didn’t mean you were lying, or selling out your values. We also spent a lot of time explaining how it could help an organization or a campaign succeed. Over the years that has become less important as more organizations have internalized the belief in the importance of doing communications work right. I’d like to think that the work that Holly and I have done over the years at the SPIN Academy have something to do with that. Of course that means that our participants come into the room with more experience than they used to, and all of our trainers have had to step up their game to keep up with them, but that’s a good problem to have.

The model of strategic communications that forms the framework of the SPIN Academy– articulating goals, identifying audiences and crafting messages that connect with them, then pushing those out using the tactics most likely to reach them– hasn’t changed at all, and it’s as relevant as ever, whether your messages are going out through a press release or a Twitter stream.

Even more important, the passion our participants bring to the event hasn’t changed a bit. When you bring together a group of smart, funny, highly skilled advocates for social change to connect with each other and a whole host of professional communicators in a beautiful place for an event like the SPIN Academy, the results are bound to be exhilarating.

The SPIN Academy remains an important, unique event in the field of strategic communications for nonprofit organizations.

And I still feel very, very lucky to be a part of it.

An alternate version of this post appeared earlier this week on the LightBox Collaborative blog.

Laguna Honda Hospital has been caring for San Franciscans for more than 100 years, and this year marks the opening of a new state-of-the-art facility that will replace a building built in the 1920s. It’s a very exciting moment for the residents of Laguna Honda, and for the whole city of San Francisco, which proved how much it cares for it’s own by passing a bond measure to pay for the new building.

It’s always good to work on something in your own community, and I was excited when Mission Minded asked if I’d help them produce a video to introduce the new building. The challenge was creating a video that highlighted how the new buildings would help foster a stronger sense of community at Laguna Honda when the residents won’t be moving in until this fall.

Working with Director Jake Kornbluth and Director of Photography Eriq Wities, I wrote and produced a video that explains Laguna Honda’s role as a safety-net hospital here in San Francisco and highlights the opportunity for a renewed sense of community everyone at Laguna Honda has been working toward for more than a decade– from the city leaders who led the project to the hospital administrators and nursing staff that cares for the residents and the architects who conceived the project, and of course to the residents themselves, whose quality of life will be improved tremendously by the move.

The end result is a video that marks a place in time and lays out a vision for what the new Laguna Honda can be. I’m proud of the work we did on this video, and even more proud of my city for helping make the new Laguna Honda a reality.

Beth Kanter and Allison Fine have received a lot of praise for their new book, The Networked Nonprofit, and they deserve it. The technical term for its contents, in fact, is “an embarrassment of riches.”

From stories to help reluctant executives see the benefit of social marketing to real-world examples of how others became networked nonprofits, the book is packed with useful information. Among the highlights:

• The story of Peggy Padden, a complete newcomer to online fundraising who still managed to use social media tools to raise more than $115,000 for research into a rare blood disease, including a large grant from the Case Foundation (Chapter 1).
• Demystification of social media policies for nonprofits, including this gem that they pass on: “Don’t write stupid stuff you’ll regret, ’cause some day you’ll regret it.” (Chapter 4)
• A list of realistic, concrete steps to take to avoid feeling overwhelmed by a constant stream of facebooktwitterlinkedinblogpostemail—something that many of us could use in our personal lives, let alone in our work lives (Chapter 7).
• The inspiring tale of the Hudson Institute, who overcame internal fears about loss of control and an organizational culture that encouraged thinking in full paragraphs (not 140 characters at a time) to connect with new audiences and develop new research methods using social media (Chapter 8).

Kanter and Fine don’t shy away from the legitimate questioning of social networking’s utility for nonprofits. In fact they make this point in the book’s conclusion: “What, if anything, does all of the clicking, blogging and ‘friending’ add up to in the end?” It’s a good question.

It’s no accident that Peggy Padden’s story is front-and-center at the beginning of this book—nonprofit leaders have spent entire careers thinking about where the funding they need to fulfill their organization’s mission is going to come from, and so it’s not surprising that fundraising would be high on their list of reasons to try social media. But, perhaps even more intriguing for nonprofits is how online social networks enable reputation economies.

Reputation economies are simply sets of transactions—information shared, actions requested and taken—where it’s someone’s reputation rather than their wallet that’s facilitating the transaction. They’re not new, of course, and neither are social networks, but both phenomena have been enabled, systematized, and made transparent by the internet.

When someone looking for the best cup of coffee in town heads to Yelp, or asks their Facebook friends for music recommendations, they’re participants in a reputation economy. The reputation of the recommender—whether it’s the friend with indie rock cred or a stranger with Elite status on Yelp—is connected with what action is ultimately taken by the asker.

Nonprofits are well-placed to thrive in reputation economies. They’re inherently credible because they’re mission-driven and (one hopes) not in it for the money. They have the infrastructure to support strategic use of the social networks that facilitate reputation economies. They often have content to share through these networks that helps them acquire authority in their area of expertise. Best of all, they can make excellent use of the kind of outcomes that reputation economies make possible.

An individual with a great reputation on social networks can get more friends. A corporation can have all the friends in the world, but if those friends don’t buy their products, they won’t be in business for long. A nonprofit, on the other hand, can find volunteers, solicit donated service, and ask their friends to support legislation related to the organization’s mission. A networked nonprofit can do all these things by building the right kind of reputation through social media.

A truly savvy networked nonprofit might even be able to achieve the remarkable feat of turning all of those friends into donors, a process Kanter and Fine further explore in Chapter 10.

The Networked Nonprofit is a remarkable book, and while it certainly won’t be the last word on social networking for nonprofits, it represents the state of the art in 2010.

Cross-posted from the LightBox Collaborative blog.

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