Accelerating Social Innovation: NGOs, Open Networks & Developing Marketplaces

Accelerating Social Innovation: NGOs, Open Networks & Developing Marketplaces Ayelet Baron, Director, Social Networking and Collaboration May 28, 2009

NetHope

NetHope

Founded in 2001

26 international NGO consortium

$33B+ programs in 150+ Emerging Market Countries supported

Connectivity Emergency Response Capacity Building Shared Services ICT for Development

Cisco Relationship

Cisco Leadership Fellows (3)

Impact Grants/Cisco “Store”

NERV, NetReliefKit ( NRK) and similar mobile direct response solutions

Deliverables

Strategic programs

ICT4D Healthcare working Group/mHealth

Proof of concept

Social Networking

Shared Specialization Partnering “ How can we work with corporations?” Basic Info Sharing “ What are my peers doing?” We need to collaborate or perish Increasing Levels of Trust Joint Projects “ What can we build together?”

THIS PRESENTATION WAS CREATED NOT BY ONE PERSON, BUT BY MANY IT’S A PRESENTATION ABOUT THE POWER OF CONNECTING WITH PEOPLE ONLINE AND USING COMMUNITIES TO GET IT DONE http://www.flickr.com/photos/pogonophobia/

HOW MEDIA IS CHANGING FOREVER

SOCIAL MEDIA HAS BECOME UBIQUITOUS

BUT THIS ISN’T THE POINT

184 million bloggers 73% of active online users have read a blog 45% have started their own blog 57% have joined a social network 55% have uploaded photos 83% have watched video clips 39% subscribe to an RSS feed Source: Universal McCann Comparative Study on Social Media Trends April 2008

BUT THIS ISN’T THE POINT EITHER

Influence Revolution Universal McCann, When Did We Start Trusting Strangers? PRE MEDIA AGE Talk face to face Talk to shop worker Government, monarchy, religious institutions dictate the agenda MASS MEDIA AGE Consult a professional Readers letters Phone in; TV / Radio Talk to shop worker Talk face to face Phone call Professional media dictate SOCIAL MEDIA AGE Personal blog Social network page Widgets Photo sharing site Chat rooms Message boards Video sharing site Comments on blogs Comments on websites Viral emails Wish lists Ratings on retail sites Reviews on retail sites Auction websites Social Bookmarking Chat room Price comparison sites Social shopping sites Consult a professional Readers Letters Phone in; TV / Radio Talk to shop worker Talk face to face Phone call SMS Email Instant Messenger Consumers dictate

Social Media Is Counter-intuitive To Communications Media Space defined by Media Owner Brand in control One way / Delivering a message Repeating the message Focused on the brand Entertaining Company created content Space defined by Consumer Consumer in control Two way / Being a part of a conversation Adapting the message/ beta Focused on the consumer / Adding value Influencing, involving User created content / Co-creation COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA SOCIAL MEDIA

COLLABORATING ONLINE

The internet is for people . For people to form groups Groups with shared purposes http://flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/ David Cushman, Brando Digital…http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adviceposters/sets/72157602720078403/ WE HAVE TO RELEARN WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW

ONLINE COMMUNITIES CAN BE A PUZZLE UNTIL YOU REMEMBER THEY ARE ALL HUMAN AND STOP TRYING TO CONTROL THEM www.spy.org.es/upload/actuacion/imagen-35.jpg

"Over and over again, connecting people with one another is what lasts online. Some folks thought it was about technology, but it's not.“ Seth Godin Image: http://www.gapingvoid.com/ UNTIL YOU REMEMBER THAT IT’S NOT ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY

“ It’s about relationships” Andrew Rogers, Head of User Content Development, RBI…http://engagement101.blogspot.com/

Online communities aren’t like the real world, they ARE the real world. As people change, so will the online communities they form - being right isn’t important, but being right there is Predicting how we form and shape our communities online is impossible. But it is safe to say that the future will be awesome. Sam Ismail, Digital Strategist…http://www.samismail.com/

Community is not a place. It’s about people. People own their communities: brands don’t. http://www.flickr.com/photos/piet_musterd/1858568495/ Katy Lindemann - Naked Communications - kitschbitch.com

“ Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices .” – Henry Jenkins, Professor of Comparative Media, MIT and author of Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide Faris Yakob, Chief Tech Strategist, McCann Erickson New York…http://farisyakob.typepad.com/

Pic by skeddy in NYC on Flickr (CC Licence) If you want to know what technology will change the world, watch young mothers and don't watch teenage boys - young mothers have no time for any technology that isn't useful and doesn't work. Clay Shirky, 2005 Dan Thornton, Bauer…http://thewayoftheweb.net/

3 THE CITIZEN SECTOR

Emerging Markets Lead The Super Influencers Super Influencers by country, share of active users

http://www.flickr.com/photos/picturesofthings/3009655146/ Mobilising Offline And On 4.8 million facebook fans 200,000 events 500,000 blog posts 35,000 volunteer groups Ben Akin-Smith, Head of Strategy, Enable Interactive…http://www.akin-smith.com/

Social Networks

News & Bookmarking

Blogs

Microblogging

Video Sharing

Photo Sharing

Message boards

Wikis

Virtual Reality

Social Gaming

Related:

Podcasts

Real Simple Syndication (RSS)

SOCIAL MEDIA DEFINED

Are Twitter Users More Generous than Facebook? Dollars per Click Through Twitter: $4.50 Facebook: $0.29

Twitting for Charity:

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone launched a campaign asking those with Sept. birthdays to accept online donations in leui of gifts this year

Donations for Charity:Water, which builds wells in Ethiopia.

Many did: the site claims to have raised $393,000 since the end of August.

NING Source: Disaster Relief 2.0 How the social web lent a helping hand during the hurricane season of 2008 http://deannazandt.com

NING

Quickly collect people and information via:

Forums

Task assignment

Discussion

Breaking news (internally)

Blogs

Breaking news (externally)

RSS aggregators

Source: Disaster Relief 2.0 How the social web lent a helping hand during the hurricane season of 2008 http://deannazandt.com

WIKI Source: Disaster Relief 2.0 How the social web lent a helping hand during the hurricane season of 2008 http://deannazandt.com

WIKI

Static information @ www.hurricanewiki.org

Shelters

Donations / volunteering

Where to get more info

Two others started and abandoned

Ported info over from KatrinaWiki.info

TWITTER Source: Disaster Relief 2.0 How the social web lent a helping hand during the hurricane season of 2008 http://deannazandt.com

TWITTER

Calls for volunteers

Engineered Twitter storm alerts from government sources

Created an “I’m okay” alert system (which we later abandoned)

Engineered Twitter news alerts about the storm

So what happened?

Approx. 350 volunteers within the first 24 hours

Approx. 700 volunteers total

Expanded to cover entire hurricane season

Significant traffic to NING and wiki

Significant media coverage

Ongoing Dialogue: Creating Sustainable Online Network

Romanus Berg, CIO, Ashoka Mark Dronzek, CIO, Family Health International by @ SamTheButcher

Collaborative Approach Romanus Berg, CIO, Ashoka His team develops and manages a global operations platform integrating 12 programs that cover over 60 countries. Romanus joins Ashoka from Oceana, where he served as VP of Global Operations. There his team rapidly pushed a fully integrated operations footprint spanning over 10 time zones across Europe, North and South America - all via an initial growth timeframe of under two and a half years. Born in Guatemala to German immigrants, Romanus attended university in France and Germany before obtaining a BS in Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences from the University of Maryland. After graduation, he helped build public-private bridges supporting the successful $1.8 billion privatization of the United States Enrichment Corporation; he continued to work across public, private and social sectors to find his true calling in developing sustainable, competitive advantages for substantive missions at the intersection of communities, practice and technology. Mark Dronzek, CIO, Family Health International. Mark has more than twenty years of experience spanning leadership positions in pharmaceuticals, start-ups, state and federal government and overall technology management. His roles during the past ten years have had a global focus, including multi-language IVRS for clinical trials, ERP development and implementations, business processes and infrastructure deployment. In his current role, he is CIO for $400M organization conducting work in over 70 (developing) countries for research and public health services and programs; over 1,500 partners including U.S. government, private sector and foreign governments; areas of responsibility include: global infrastructure, application development, legal and regulatory compliance, knowledge management, service desk (ITIL-based) and data center operations. He has a BA in English from Wake Forest University, is a member of CIO Executive Council and is currently testing for his black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Every country has its own unique challenges therefore the solutions need to be tailored specifically to those challenges Family Health International: Driving Global Communities of Practice

Global collaboration to drive solutions and integrated services

More than 2,100 employees in more than 70 countries

Proven track record in being pioneers in aid

Strong relationships with governments, agencies and foundations

Excel spreadsheet of health facilities for an HIV program identified listing of sites

Initial weeks of the program, sign-up was very poor or non-existent

Analyzing the facility locations in a geographically spatial (and visual) context, majority of healthcare facilities were located away from the target populations

After re-assigning locations of healthcare facilities to areas of the target populations (easily viewed with GIS), sign-ups increased dramatically …. and had to be stopped to ensure quality of care

Highly successfully program since. Without GIS, the program would have been dramatically redesigned – but due to erroneous and incomplete information rather than the quality of the program itself

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Mapping in Nepal

Kenya HIV Spatial Projections

GIS enables visually forecasting where HIV-infected populations will expand to based upon population growth and current HIV prevalence

Enables us to build or expand healthcare facilities closer to the affected populations, project the number of resources and supplies needed … and where, and to identify other positive or adverse impacts based on geographic locations (accessibility of roads, electricity, water, etc.).

Establishing a Center of Excellence (COE) to support GIS for NGOs will help regional communities compress the time it takes to share innovations between the field and global communities

Through FHI’s existing CoP pilots (four pilots), two of the world’s experts on malaria recently discovered…that they both worked for FHI

By providing a CoP, we can literally enable interaction which until this time did not, or could not, occur

flickr.com/photos/polandeze THE PROBLEM: “LANGUISHING IN SILOS”

Social entrepreneurs achieve great change—but their social innovations often become fragmented and stuck in local communities

Diffusion is slow, and investment capital has trouble finding its way to successes; innovation often dies on the vine, or fails to replicate

Increased innovation finding more resources—knowledge, talent, financial—increases sustainability and growth for all http://www.flickr.com/photos/8998965@N05/ ACCELERATE INNOVATION AND INCREASE MARKET-MAKING Linking entrepreneurs to others catalyzes more knowledge and innovation and accelerates the rate of change Linking new and faster innovation to other networks--citizen sector organizations, corporations and funders—strengthens the “community of practice”– and enables new markets to form

Moving from knowledge repositories (people-to-information) to knowledge collaboration (people-to-people) Building A Sustainable Online Network of Social Entrepreneurs and Practitioners for Social Good

OBJECTIVES http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbegofoto/ Focus on the citizen sector as the baseline for implementing successful communities Pilot an online network of practitioners and social entrepreneurs to create dialogue to drive incremental change around solutions Create a scalable “social innovation toolkit” for the developing world to drive an adoption strategy that can be expanded and sustained by other practitioners

Challenges

80% of Uganda’s people survive on less than $2 a day, most live in rural areas and are fully dependant on agriculture for their livelihood

Majority is cut off from education programs that would enable them improve their farming practices for diversity, increased productivity and, ultimately, improved livelihoods

Wealth of unique and indigenous information that could benefit thousands of farmers across the country and beyond is tied up in small villages that are scattered all over the country

Farmers often lack direct access to markets that pay them a fair price for their produce

Sale of produce by farmers is often done through middlemen who exploit them by offering in rural places prices much lower than the going market rate for the same products in urban areas

The Solution

Vincent Bagire established a network of farmers’ groups and a mechanism for knowledge transfer between them to boost the yields from their farms and ultimately to address persistent poverty in rural areas of Uganda

Uses variety of ICT tools such as a website, blog post, SMS, printed how-to guides and monthly knowledge sharing meetings, exchange visits between farmers groups and an annual knowledge fair to enable farmers from different parts of the country to share knowledge and best case practices

Farmers from different cultures and parts of the country are learning and sharing indigenous agricultural practices as new ways to diversify and improve their yields

With over 30 ethnic groups in Uganda, each with its own indigenous farming methods, Vincent’s model grows and spreads nationally

Omar Rodríguez, Environment Ashoka Fellow, Costa Rica, 2007-Present Omar has achieved demonstrable success in one region of Costa Rica and is spreading his approach through ten different Latin American countries, as well as the rest of Costa Rica Omar identified local schoolteachers as a means to educate the community and promote practices, both on land and in the sea, to protect the ocean’s marine life and coral reefs. He translated the complicated technical description of the problems into practical, common sense explanations that he explained to primary school teachers in coastal towns. The teachers incorporated this material into their curriculums and began to incorporate reading about the sea into their daily classes, use seashells in math class, and introduce class projects about the sea. As teachers became more committed and children learned more, they gradually became important new actors in their communities, promoting healthier practices and opening new dialogues with their families and local fishermen. Omar holds festivals in the communities to celebrate the best student projects and teaching techniques, which broadens and deepens the communities’ recognition and understanding of the issue and has helped spread his ideas to neighboring communities. Government officials noticed the groundswell of local support and began sponsoring these innovative school and community programs more substantially. In response, enthusiasm has grown and communities have begun to clean their beaches, implement more sanitary practices to reduce seawater contamination respect fishing regulations, and mitigate the harvest of undersized clams. Eventually, many ecosystems in the Gulf of Nicoya began to show signs of improvement. By converting the local community members and fishermen from substantial polluters to protectors of the environment, Omar has proven that community involvement is a critical component in reversing marine life degradation. Furthermore, Omar has planted the seeds to spread this approach to ten countries in Latin America.

Antonieta Castro Abaj, Human Rights Ashoka Fellow, Guatemala, 2004-Present Antonieta Castro Abaj helps marginalized, indigenous Guatemalan women become knowledgeable civic participants who are willing to defend their otherwise neglected human rights and even pursue leadership positions. Recognizing that her model is relevant throughout Central America and indigenous regions of southern Mexico, but that she and her small staff cannot alone reach much beyond the current state of 28 groups, Antonieta intends the current participants to be the multipliers. Before spreading to new communities, however, she is focusing on the growth potential of the existing groups to become effective multipliers. Antonieta’s has been part of regional networks of Central American women’s groups and has begun disseminating her concepts and techniques. She is pulling together her approach to serve as a comprehensive model that she wishes to spread not only within Guatemala but to indigenous women far beyond.

Collaborate Address day-to-day issues and build relationships Engage On real time issues and solutions regardless of geographic location Innovate Leverage practices to scale solutions the right people, issues, and solutions at the right time Connect

The Online Peer Network Tool Kit

Provision or incorporate into existing device

Leverage local vendor

Funding for connectivity charges, hardware, software

Establishing baseline for 2011-2012

Find and connect with experts and peers

Threaded discussion forums, wikis, blogs, document repository

Knowledge sharing

News feeds

Event calendar

Leverage existing directory of contacts

Central location for sharing subject matter knowledge

Ability to pull in key types of information by leveraging user tags

Connect people and groups via expertise tagging

Directory Device Community Platform

Purpose – these are members inherently vested in their mission. Their mission’s outcome can be dramatically amplified by collaborating with fellow experts in the field – something that they largely cannot do today within their own organization, let alone across like-minded organizations and other communities. Reputation – the entire community of members are practitioners and subject matter experts, rather than a primary contributor and a passive audience of consumers. This is also the first ongoing mechanism for these experts to confer, as they’re geographically isolated and have minimal opportunities for collaboration.

LINEAR Scheduled Appointment Sit back Messages NETWORKED On demand Whenever, wherever Participative Experiences We control the way it is delivered We allow you to play with it, pass it on Content we think you’d like Content we know you like (because you’ve told us)

Why Now?

Extensive path-breaking experience and unmatched knowledge base; relationships with social entrepreneurs and practitioners—and their networks

Upfront investment in knowledge aggregation and infrastructure building among multiple successful, ongoing social entrepreneurial initiatives—core seed upon which to build the “network of communities”

Others have envisioned such a knowledge resource before, but critical mass was not in place, and markets were not formed—Ashoka and FHI can now start the ball rolling. But we can’t do it alone

There is nothing else like this available today. The world is ready

Rapid innovation in the developing world connecting solutions with people

Citi : In the "Banking for Social Change" competition, Citi was primarily interested in finding 1-2 investable innovations that they could take to market within in India in 18 months, but they were also focused on leveraging the social marketing activities and media hits spurred through the competition. Ultimately, they found over 120 potential investees they are now evaluating. Nike : Over two separate competitions, Nike has used the competition model to source and connect a community of sport for change innovators, while also using the competitions to test market entry strategies in specific cities. The results have been new partnerships and product offerings in emerging markets, allowing Nike to expand its geographic reach and build trust with local communities. Global Water Challenge : Focusing their competition on water and sanitation issues, the Global Water Challenge used the competition primarily as a sourcing and vetting mechanism to more efficiently identify a pool of potential investments; they were then able to mobilize over $6 million in investments from partners like Coca-Cola and the Rwanda Development Bank to invest in multiple entrants from their competition.

Haidy Duque Cuesta, Human Rights Ashoka Fellow, Colombia, 1999-Present Haidy Duque has created an integrated set of psychosocial interventions to help people who have been displaced by violence in Colombia to recuperate their lives, increase their self-esteem and reintegrate themselves into society through productive means. She has a special emphasis on working with African-Colombian communities. Soon after her own displacement and move to Bogotá, Haidy created an organization, Taller de Vida, geared towards helping people in similar circumstances recuperate or "reinvent" their lives. The organization became a legal entity in 1995. As her work on the ground progressed, Haidy sought out alliances with institutions with which she could multiply its impact. Her strategy is to bring together citizens' organizations, schools, university students, and community groups to recruit and train members, forming local teams that will carry out her methodology in their towns. The Taller de Vida model has already received funding support from Amnesty International, as well as Swiss, German, and Norwegian funders. Haidy has also turned the handicraft projects into sources of marketable goods, such as greeting cards with poetry, jewelry, and candles. This phase of her work has provided a dual benefit.