From Acronym…
What if associations promoted all of the lowest-ranking staffers to VPs for a week?
It’s “big idea month” over at the ASAE blog Acronym and here comes a thought-provoking post which makes you stop and think about organizational hierarchy.

From Beth’s Blog…
Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media To Achieve Mission
A great post from Beth Kanter in which she hypothesizes on the future of networking events and her predictions of the melding of online social networking and in-person events.

From Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog…
How Many Thank-Yous Will I Get This Year?
Kivi blogs about a great experiment she conducted testing the gratitude and donor follow-up of organizations to which she donated through the Capital One No Hassle Giving site.

From A Small Change…
Fundraising Generalist or Practitioner
Jason at A Small Change muses on thoughts that, even if you’re not in fundraising, have occurred to all of us. Is it better to be a specialist in one section of your chosen field (he speaks specifically to fundraising)? Or is it better to have some knowledge about everything?

From Small Change…
Want to vs. Need to Hear
I brief but thought-provoking post from Jason at A Small Change about how we all view and receive criticism.

From AFP Blog…
Top 10 Ways to Boost Online Giving at Year-End – Resource Center – AFP
AFP blog has a post from Fundraising Consultant Gail Perry. Definitely worth a read since (as she points out) about 40 percent of online giving happens in December.

From Beth’s Blog…
Social Media in the Board Room
A great post from Beth at Beth’s Blog about social media and how to turn regular social networking done by the employees of a company into a powerhouse.

Avery, Baird, Courtney, these are all first names that could be assigned to either gender. As made famous by the Saturday Night Live character “Pat,” hilarity ensues while you try to determine which gender to assign!

Let’s genderize

From a report from a customer visit this week, I learned that they can detect the gender of a particular contact record by comparing the iMIS data to a second database. If your particular association requires licensing, for example, there would be a second database, likely maintained by the government, that would have accurate gender information so you could know whether the contact record is a man or a woman. They built an in-house “genderizer” but a Google search (done with trepidation, who knows what that search would find!) found another Genderizer where users  “Help Freebase assign genders to people, fictional characters, and biological organisms.” Freebase in itself is a fascinating concept, described as “a place to organize and share collections of information about a particular subject, like San Francisco, American Comedy, or The Smurfs.” It’s not a wiki, but a structured database, so you can look at the data in different views or export it. I also found that IBM also has a name management API that will lookup a given name’s gender associations. Their goal is to ensure that multicultural names are used correctly according to the “linguistic rules associated with the name’s culture.” Wow. Their tool also helps you determine which name is a given name and which is a surname.

Gender matters for message

Based on the data tools I’ve learned about, knowing a person’s gender is important, likely for multiple reasons. I think that all communications, including mailings, email messages, and customized web pages, could be customized based on gender. The most basic example in the U.S. is addressing an envelope with Mr. when the recipient is a woman. That person is unlikely to send a donation check because they don’t feel like the organization knows them well. Making sure that your communications match the intended recipient goes a long way towards meeting the goals of your organization, and gender certainly plays a role in the match-up.

Social media and gender

What about social media interactions? The use of photographs usually helps us as humans know when we’re talking to a man or a woman on Twitter, for example. With the improvement of face recognition software, I wonder if you could automate gender assignment in a database using face recognition software. Picasa is a photo organizing tool from Google, and its latest release has face recognition capability that helps you tag your photos with names, and even draws a square around all the faces in a photo, organizing all the square faces cropped out into groups based on the name of the individual. It’s really cool, and even does a good job recognizing my children from baby pictures to toddler pictures and on up through elementary school. Impressive.

It’s also important to know demographics of your members or constituents when looking for social media sites that they use frequently. In the book Groundswell, the authors describe a social technographics tool. In fact, their Profile tool has been updated with 2009 data and is available online. This graphic shows the tendencies for U.S. Women aged 45-54:

If they are more likely than the rest of the population to be Critics, perhaps find where they are writing reviews, offer them a forum to discuss topics of interest, or a wiki with articles where they can comment or edit (though realize that this group is less likely to start their own articles.) They will also be likely to comment on blog entries, so offering a blog for this group to comment on may work well for the organization as well.

What do you think? How much effort do you take to ensure your message is reaching men or women specifically?

From NTEN…
Impact of Social Media on the Nonprofit Sector
An interesting post where NTEN answers the questions of an NYU grad student on the impact of social media on the non-profit sector.

From AFP Blog…
Online giving on the rise despite recession and bleak nonprofit forecasts
A brief post that gives some interesting numbers about the status of online giving during the economic downturn.

From Small Change…
Key Pieces of Database Info
A great post from Jason at Small Change about maintaining and utilizing the information you collect on your donors.

You’ve picked a date, fretted about the location, selected the best treats and eats, arranged the tables and chairs just so, and you’re confident that your event will be a blast! But have you decided on how your event looks on the social web during or after the socializing is done?

Here are some pointers, and I’d love to hear more ideas from our readers. Beth Kanter has some great posts on the subject that I’ll link to throughout this post.

I think the starting point, though, for any strategy about tying events to the social web, is to know your goals beforehand. If it’s to get sponsors, or more attendees, or more page views of your web content, you may want to pick and choose wisely from these ideas.

Photo sharing

Let event participants know that they can share photos with others on a web site, such as Flickr, by using a specific tag on the photo. By indicating a tag, you are setting up a collection spot on Flickr so the photos can be viewed as soon as they are uploaded, and people can subscribe to updates using RSS feeds supplied by Flickr at the bottom of the tagged collection page.

If your event is an annual one, you may want to ask people to use a tag with the year in it. For example, the recent New York City Marathon event caused a lot of people to upload photos tagged with nycmarathon but there are also photos tagged with nycmarathon2009.

Beth Kanter has several good tips for selecting the right tag for your events. Before choosing an event tag, you should test it out to be sure another event or organization hasn’t already tagged photos with it. Also be sure the tag is short and easy to type. Avoid using underscores or dashes, and if you must use a somewhat different tag for uniqueness, test it out with some people who might want to use it. If they hate it, find another tag.

Blogging

Liveblogging is when bloggers write and publish blog posts during an event, taking notes while they listen to speakers, and so on. If your event will not have reliable wireless connections, liveblogging may not be easy. Bloggers would have to blog while offline and then upload posts once a connection is available. Beth Kanter has great tips about liveblogging based on her experiences. I’d summarize by saying, livebloggers should be both bold and brave.

From my view, blogging during an event makes sense if you want to connect more people to the event than could be there in person. But the tradeoff is that some people will pay more attention to their laptops than the session. When people and connections are the main reason for your event, liveblogging is not a good match.

Blog entries live long after the event is complete, though, so you may want to identify and encourage bloggers to write up their notes and reactions after the event. This type of event content helps you get attendees for future years. Writing a summary blog entry is a great idea as well, and it may become the most visited page, says Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality Not Included.

Twittering

Ideally, you’ll use the same tag that you selected for photo sharing as a hashtag for Twitter. Hashtags place a pound sign (#) in front of the tag to enable automated collection of the tweets with those tags with a link to the collection. For example, NIUG, an iMIS user group community, used #niug for its Twitter hashtag and you can see the collection of tweets by going to Twitter search and entering the hashtag.

Since Twitter is often used on mobile devices, it helps people coordinate places and times for meet ups in person during an event or after. I personally like to follow people who are Twittering during events that I couldn’t attend. It helps me feel in touch with the general feel for the event and the people who were there.

Podcasting and video blogging

Some of the best chances to record interviews in person is at an event where interesting people get together. Tom Johnson, writer of idratherbewriting.com, talks about his podcasting experiences at several different professional association conferences. The first year, he interviewed attendees, which wasn’t nearly as interesting as interviewing presenters in the following years. While both podcasting and video blogging require more equipment than a laptop computer, events are a great opportunity to talk to people and record their views.

Collecting and sharing

Make sure your organization is “on top” of all the media outlets, including social media, for your events by listening in on conversations as they happen. You can set up and subscribe to a search for your event’s name and tags using Google Alerts, for example. If your event has sponsors, using social media is a good way to get them the attention they deserve for participating in and sponsoring your event.

You can also make your organizations blog or website “the” go-to place on the web for people who couldn’t attend the event itself to get the latest notes, photos, and tweets. With some roving reporters and a few digital cameras or video cameras you could increase the content and increase the online traffic surrounding your event. Your site is where you aggregate and collect all the content being created for your event, so that others can find it easily and learn from it.

What are some strategies that have worked well for your events?

From A Small Change…
Drowning in Agendas
A great post from Jason at A Small Change that we can all relate to. He discusses the need to balance the time that we spend meeting about a topic and actually acting on it.

From AFP Blog…
Churches connect with parishioners online
AFP posts this quick but interesting tidbit about how churches are vying for younger parishioners online.

From NTEN…
Measuring Organizational Influence In Social Media
A must-read article from NTEN about quantifying the time, effort, and resources your organization is putting into its social media program.

From Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog…
You! Up Against the Wall!
A great post from Kivi’s blog about how to improve your photo taking skills of volunteers and other events for use across multiple areas of your organization.

From Panopea Consulting…
Configuring the SMTP server
An interesting technical entry with helpful instructions on settings for the SMTP server used to send emails from iMIS.

From AFP Blog…
Facebook’s Gift Shop Sings A New Tune – washingtonpost.com
AFP blog posts about a new opportunity to donate via Facebook’s gift shop.

by Anne Gentle

I’ve been assisting with a report for the Society for Technical Communication about social media for professional organizations. I’m also on an editorial advisory panel helping to shape the articles and authors for their Intercomm magazine, which is printed 10 times a year and has over 10,000 subscribers. Survey results show that members still want a printed magazine, but also value the speed and interaction that an online presence can provide. So, I’ve been trying to find good examples of association magazines that work well online also.

Building a brand, educating, or raising awareness?

I’m finding that association magazines are sometimes thought of as a branch of “brand” magazines. There’s a bit of controversy on this point though. I read this blog entry that asks, “Are association magazines just flashier custom pubs?” The author says “While some associations work with custom publishers to produce their magazines, the publications they create are not marketing-based vehicles for a particular brand. To use a custom publishing study to explain habits of association magazine readers seems like a stretch.”

I suppose “branding” isn’t quite the right term for what professional associations offer their members. Is it “raising awareness” instead?

I also found a reference to the Roper study that the blog entry above cites. The bullet points they choose to highlight are:

• 85% view custom publications as a preferred source of information because they provide targeted information
• 79% view companies that produces a custom magazine as believing in its product
• 69% after reading a custom magazine feel they know more about the company
• 65% view companies that produce a custom magazine as caring about its customers

The print to online spectrum

I subscribe to a great association magazine for an association called CHADD called Attention magazine. I appreciate their hybrid approach for print and online even though it’s a pretty simple implementation with PDF files secured behind a membership login. It’s not interactive, as in, there are no comments on articles that I can see. The site touts their recent (June 2008) award for redesign from the Society of National Association Publishers.

What’s also interesting to me is that there’s another magazine called ADDitude that does a great job of online engagement. It’s free for online content and a paid-subscriber magazine for printed content. It’s interesting that the market can bear two similar magazines, but there you go. It appears is a huge range of the amount of online and print offered.

One association magazine that is a great example of online engagement even after the printed magazine has been mailed is the Associations Now magazine from the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives). There’s an RSS feed so you can subscribe to updates to the magazine’s main page. You can rate an article or write a review of it, and bookmark or share it with others with an AddThis widget.

Looking at a brand name example

An interesting note, if you do want to correlate brand and custom pubs as being similar to association magazines, Adobe magazine had probably half a million subscribers but stopped doing print production (as far as I can tell) in 2000. Archives are still available online. Adobe is miles ahead in print-online hybridization, and apparently tried a 2.0 magazine, but isn’t offering it now.

There may be lessons learned in these examples. What are some of your favorite association magazines, and how much engagement is online?

From Acronym…
What have your members taught you?
A great way to wind down week! This post from Acronym reminds us that we should not only look at what we can DO for association members, but what we can LEARN from them.

From AFP Blog…
New Video Series Helps Exempt Organizations Understand Redesigned Form 990 Requirements
AFP posted a link to a helpful video for exempt organizations that explains recent changes to the Form 990.

From NTEN…
Blog Action Day 2009 Climate Change: Technology in the Climate Movement
NTEN and 9,427 other blogs from 150 countries with 12,896,974 readers are smashing the debate  about what impact the online world has on offline action with these numbers and think about the over 12 million people around the world who are raising their consciousness about climate change. NTEN posts some highlights.

From TechSoup…
Happy Birthday, TechSoup New Zealand!
TechSoup celebrates the anniversary of their New Zealand partners and their rapid growth.

From Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog…
What Nonprofits Can Learn from Politico’s Success
Kivi takes an interesting look at the success of the Politico website and draws some interesting comparison.

From Acronym…
My Top 5 Things to Remember in 2010 as an Association Professional
Acronym takes a look to a new year and what it will take to be successful in 2010.

From A Small Change…
Eating Excellent Fundraising For Breakfast
Jason at A Small Change has some interesting and inspirational musings about the important of breakfast and successful fundraising.