Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

We’re starting a new series of informal gatherings to discuss topics important to nonprofits. The idea is to bring people together to talk about your ideas, successes, failures, needs, and best practices.

Our goal is to create closer community ties, connecting you with other nonprofit professionals. We want to create an atmosphere where you can feel empowered to talk openly about your challenges at work and what we, as a community, can do to address them.

CITI will be hosting these events, but we’ll be learning as much from these events as anyone there. We hope you’ll join us for an evening of exploration and sharing.

Register now for the first forum on January 20 to discuss Social Media.  Many of you are likely already familiar with and using tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to spread your message and gain supporters.  Come share your story and learn more about how other organizations are using social media.

Save the dates! The CITIzens Forums will be on the first and third Wednesday evening of every month, each one discussing a different specific topic of interest.

• Jan 20 – Social Media
• Feb 3 – The Value of a CIO Perspective
• Feb 17 – Salesforce
• March 3 – Nonprofit Capital Markets
• Mar 17 – Raiser’s Edge
• Apr 21 – Post NTEN Conference Wrap-up
• May 19 – Data Management, Cleansing, & Conversion

There’s nothing earthshaking in the new Alertbox posting on social media and RSS. Still, it’s nice to see things we think we know reinforced by credible research. And reinforcement of the fundamentals is always helpful.

Here are a few of the things that caught my eye:

• This strikes me as particularly well put — “[B]usiness messages appear in a context that’s permeated by personal messages. This context sets the stage for use. Businesses that post too often crowd out the user’s real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed). Users listed too-frequent postings as their top annoyance with following companies and organizations on social networks.”
• I love that the BBC is the counter-example “Users prefer a more casual style for business messages on social networks than what’s appropriate for most corporate communications. At the same time, they expect RSS feeds to be more business-like and to cut the chit-chat. Also, for some services — such as the BBC — people preferred a highly professional tone, even on social networks.”
• Here’s the most fundamental fundamental of them all, and the reason why any social networking effort needs to be part of an overall organizational strategy, with support beyond a single enthusiast. — “In some cases, companies had established a presence that they didn’t bother to update. These graveyard sites gave users a very negative impression when they were looking into companies’ social features. Even more irksome were cases in which friend requests weren’t promptly answered. Start using a social networking service only if you have the budget to support reasonably frequent postings.”
• Neilsen also points out that users rarely seek out an organization on social networks — they react to the social networking opportunity being pushed to the from the organization or from friends. Because it can be frustrating to search out an organization’s presence on social networks, the links to those pages need to be easy to find on an organization’s own site.
• The average usefulness of corporate/organizational messages was low. “The messages that received the highest scores had three things in common: they contained something of substance, were timely, and provided the kind of information that users expected from the source company or organization.” One user commented that she valued social networking messages that made her feel like she was “the first to know.”

Read the rest of the summary, and if that’s not enough, the full report has 107 usability guidelines. The link is at the bottom; the full report costs $198.

Last week, Glennette Clark presented a seminar on social media, covering key social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter and how to design and implement a social media strategy.  You can find the slides from the seminar here.

Attendees expanded the discussion, generating conversation around how to engage different demographic groups using social media, such as senior citizens, and the effectiveness of social media advertising.  With anecdotal examples, many agreed that social media was better for listening to and connecting with people on a personal level and building relationships than for targeted advertisements. All agreed that being deliberate about entering the social media realm and having clear goals for what you what to accomplish through social media was key.

I’ve been quiet on the blog front lately. In part, I’ve been waiting for the recordings of the NTEN plenaries to go up, at which point I’ll insist you listen to them. Both Eben Moglen and Clay Shirkey gave very thought-provoking presentations. What else can I tell you? I enjoyed Dean Hollander’s session “I Hate My Website!: Overcoming the emotional and logistical challenges of Web site development and online communications planning.” It wasn’t much different in content than a lot of the high-level online strategy sessions you get at NTEN, but I liked his take and his presentation. Unfortunately, his slides don’t seem to be available online.

In “A Nonprofit’s Guide to Client Data Collection and Privacy” we had a great, focused discussion on privacy issues. Presenters Sarah Tucker and Toby Shulruff made a great number of resources available online — sample policies and release forms, in particular.

I was also jazzed by NPower’s presentation on their tool for Measuring the Impact of Technology Projects, though the actual implementation remains to be done, and it’s huge. Slides for the presentation are linked through the session title, above.

On another NTEN-related subject, yesterday Beth Kanter summarized an NTEN webinar on Facebook: So you want a Facebook Fan Page for Your Nonprofit? Here’s the Scoop!. There’s a great list of linked resources at the end of the post.

The Washington Post’s article yesterday To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green (subhead – “Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising”) was sure to raise hackles in the nonprofit tech blogosphere. The bloggers who have been exploring social networking for nonprofits had had this discussion already.

Beth Kanter issued a concise rebuttal: Hello, Washington Post: Dolllars Per Facebook Donor Is Not the Right Metric for Success. Even if you’ve followed some of the discussion in the past, it’s worth reading her post, and the links therefrom, particularly the one to Allison Fine’s blog. Between the two of them, they nicely summarize what you can and can’t expect out of an investment in social networking for your organization.

Allyson Kapin’s post on Frogloop includes a link to the Frogloop Social Networking ROI calculator. The calculator is a nifty tool for looking at the costs vs. funds raised. It doesn’t pretend to calculate the indirect and non-financial benefits that Kanter and others point to, but it does provide the opportunity to decide what those other benefits are likely worth to you before diving into a social networking campaign.