2. Who is this guy?
About Communicopia
About us
We are a boutique digital consultancy working globally
for change. We lead transformational digital projects
that help social mission organizations increase their
impact & effectiveness in a networked world.
Our clients
Include Human Rights Watch, NRDC, Tar Sands
Solutions Network, UN Foundation, The Elders, & the
TckTckTck global climate campaign. We also founded
the Web of Change community.
3. We live in times of
massive systems change
The web & networks are
creating new models
13. The web past & present
Traditional Web Today’s Web
• Knowledge
share via textPublishing
• Drive traffic
homeMy Site
• Email list
• Site traffic
Grow Base
• Asks: send
$ or “form email”
Simple
Advocacy
Storytelling
Meet Where
They Are
Social +
Distributed
Meaningful
Participation
19. • MOBILISATION STRATEGY AND DESIGN :: creative and collaborative workshops
with multidisciplinary teams
• ASSESSMENTS AND REVIEW :: evaluating past performance to inform future
mobilisation efforts
• DATA ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH :: building a culture of data-driven campaigning,
designing tests with campaigns and offices, and setting up controlled experiments to
optimize and improve performance
• TRAINING AND PEER LEARNING :: skill-building, knowledge sharing, and network
building
• STORYTELLING AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER :: sharing innovations, lessons
learned, fail stories, and emerging best practices
• STAFFING SUPPORT :: advising on staffing structures, integration efforts, and
hands-on support with talent recruitment and hiring
• INNOVATION INCUBATION :: piloting new ways of working, from practices to
technologies
• SYSTEMS CHANGE :: advising global organisation, campaign teams, and
national/regional offices on new ways of working
25. Digital Team Development
Foundation Optimized Integrated
LowperformingHigh
performing
A framework to understand digital evolution
Informal
Centralized or
Independent
Hybrid
Goal Online Presence Acquisition & Retention Innovation
Key Activity Publishing Managing Engaging
Culture Reactive Strategic Transformative
27. Foundation Teams
27
You are probably at this level if you…
• Are not focused on digital as a core competency, or have just started
to look at it more closely
• Have one or two junior staff working on digital who are likely
overwhelmed, reactive, and in a tactical support mode
• Primary focus is publishing: basic digital content on a schedule or
in reaction to internal demands, with little time to curate, connect, or
promote key content
• Have basic but limited website + technology in place
• Are not actively driving traffic to campaigns or fundraising
29. Optimized Teams
29
You are probably at this level if you…
• Have a digital director who provides some leadership
• Have a centralized or independent digital team(s), supported by
reliable contractors and partners
• Have a stable website and core technology framework
• Have a growing or flat constituency and fundraising base
• Manage an outbound marketing plan, track sophisticated metrics,
and know what is producing the best results
• Are focused on refining and optimizing digital activity in order to
grow & retain supporters
• Are able to respond well to changing external conditions
31. Integrated Teams (are very rare!)
31
You are only at this level if you…
• Are good at optimizing and maintain your lead here
• Have excellent technology that is agile and adaptive
• Have a high level organizational strategy (ie focus)
• Use digital channels strategically to build community and
relationships with supporters at all touchpoints
• Digital is integrated w/program, comms, fundraising
• Have a team focused on some core digital services but as much
on supporting and enabling others to lead
• Are focused on continuous learning and innovation of the whole
institution rather than pure departmental goals
33. A term coined by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine
Networked Nonprofits
Simple & Transparent Orgs
Networked nonprofits are easy for outsiders to get
in and insiders to get out. They engage people to
shape and share their work.
They work differently than other orgs. They
engage in conversations with people beyond their
walls to build relationships that spread their work
through the network. Relationship building is a
core responsibility of staff. They are all
comfortable using social media to encourage two
way communications between people.
34. Networked Nonprofits
Beth’s Three Attributes:
Social culture. Transparency. Simplicity.
Other attributes:
•Smaller budget, less reliant on staff-driven model
•Focus on doing a few things well
•Hold back resources to jump on big, emergent opportunities
•Project based structures focused on outcomes
•Staff are ambidextrous + sometimes younger (Millennials)
•Listen well. Many are actually member-driven
•No barriers between “online” and “real world” work
Institutions born after the Internet
36. Driven by policy, run by experts, focused on elites
Traditional Nonprofits
Create & promote policy solutions
Find the right policy answers. Run many long term
campaigns promoting or defending them.
Expert based culture
Program / policy professionals drive the ship. The
“real work” of the institution. Senior leaders were
often experts previously, not managers.
“Grass-tops” audiences
Communications & campaigns typically targeted at
senior decision makers or media.
Policy
37. Traditional Nonprofits
•Very silo’d structures: departments compete for
resources, disincentives to collaborate
•Hierarchical, top down cultures: young/web ppl not asked
•Gap between what supporters are interested in (cause) and most
organizational comms work (policy) is very wide
•Small donor fundraising drives “regular people” work & owns
supporter lists. Sometimes even runs parallel programs
•Typically very protective of & conservative with brand
•Incentive to always promote their own experts/reports/wins, acting
somewhat narcissistically
•Often work in isolation, or in cumbersome coalitions
Additional attributes
39. NGO’s struggle with digital
Online is separate: Run within one silo, it has metrics focused on list
growth, struggles to keep up with publishing demands, much less
drive new outreach models based on engagement.
Other challenges:
•Online lives in communications, driven by content needs
•Communications is under-invested in across the sector
•Dept that does “real world” is separate from “online”
•Culturally, leadership built careers being experts, being perfect, being
professional, being the best, having control
It’s not about building a big list
41. People lie at the core of their Theory of Change
Network Orgs
Social culture
Co-create or improve solutions along with partners &
people outside their walls.
Transparent model
Openly share theory of change. Comfortable with
emergence, testing, & learning in public.
Simple focus
A clear goal and limited program areas. Also stronger
investment in comms, messaging, UX.
People
42. The model suits our times
Maps directly to web values: Transparency. More conversational style.
Meet people on their terms. Enable self-organizing systems. Offer
meaningful participation.
Other benefits:
•Complex world, difficult issues take many players
•Can stretch fewer resources a long way
•Engages talents locked up in our communities
•Can turn on a dime; focus big attention on opportunities
•Innovation doesn’t always come from experts; front lines
An adaptive model for a rapidly changing world
46. Innovations in people-powered campaigning and
digital mobilisation from around the world.
Signup for dispatches:
MobilisationLab.org
Join campaigners from 350.org,
ActionAid, Oxfam, Red Cross,
Save the Children and other
leading organisations.
@MobilisationLab
47. Digital Team Development
Foundation Optimized Integrated
LowperformingHigh
performing
A framework to understand digital evolution
Informal
Centralized or
Independent
Hybrid
53. This is not about technology.
It’s about relationships.
Editor's Notes
Opening words. Excited to share, culmination of my long and Michael’s storied careers. Key finding: All the digital goodness you want is limited by your people, structure and culture, more than your budget, size, or fancy dongles we all keep chasing.
Background on me. 20 years also! Some big gigs for Elders, ran $1M digial campaign for TckTckTck, digital vision led to restructure of UN Foundation, major digital audit for HRW last spring. I learn from failure. Ran web development shop, published a LOT of content onto the web. Depressing results. Then participative web comes along, Trend towads openness and democratized systems, has kept me in the game. Org change to help institutions adapt, dream assignment here.
Let’s start by explore the cultural, political, and technological drivers behind the changes we see.
Cultural. Over-marketed to. feel manipulated. Too many options, everyone sounds the same. Interrupting and Shouting, as Seth Godin says.
People don’t believe large institutions are there to help them any more. Washington-itis. Liberal elites. Harper’s regime. No matter what kind of institution we are, they don’t easily believe in our claims. Youth aren’t joining non-profits anymore!!! I see it across the board.
Not interested in single issues anymore. Don’t believe single orgs can solve big problems. They see interconnections. They also seek meaning, many, esp youth and baby boomers, want to be more engaged, feel more of a connection. Bowling alone no more.
More responsiveness, faster. Working on their timescale, in real time, 24/7. Customer service orientation. Authentic voice from institutions. Institutions, esp policy oriented NGO’s, also don’t have the world of change locked up anymore. Engaged volunteerism.
Organizational: Rapid growth of a new kind of organization with people-power at the core of their business model. Big ones, MoveOn and Avaaz, now in almost every country, starting in India. New global development models like Kiva and Charity.water. Corporate or “moms issues”.Climate networks like 350.org and TckTckTck. I saw both sides working for Tck, Youth movement. How nimble small groups of mujlti-skilled young professionals with few titles, programs, or hierarchy accomplished in many ways more effective things than NGO’s 100X their size. Organized in very different ways. These are member-DRIVEN organizations, where members tell them where to focus.
Not just NGO’s making change. People disengaged from traditional structures, random passionate actors who use the power of the web and networks to organize things. Uprising in Middle East not from NGO’s or institutions. Bradley and Edward massive impact on world, no infrastructure. Change.org, Causes.com and old guard Care2 business models to support free agents. Aaron may have more impact after his death, key in SOPA/PIPA which blew apart your tidy power structures here. Most trad NGO’s can’t integrate the efforts of these guys. They go around you.
The 15 years since the start of online advocacy with NGO’s. Internet has been the vanguard of change and new models many times. From fundraising to constituency building, meme-spreading to supporting actual grassroots organizing, the web offers opportunities that advocacy orgs have rarely seen in one place. But most is just “clicktivism”. The web is not a communications channel, it’s your whole organization.
Finally let’s get back to the reason for this strategy. Let’s look now at the technology drivers of change.
You’ve heard all this before.
Doesn’t mean you throw out the left hand side of the list. You should have mastered everything on the left first.
The change-making business is different today than it was even a decade ago. Everyone has access to tools to be a broadcaster, a campaigner , organiser , fundraiser -- make change happen. Campaigning changed -- from org lead people-lead changeAccess to money, resources and highly trained leaders no longer just in hands of orgs / institutions People take action whether we ask them to or not
When Michael was consultant, project in 2011 including world’s first research report on Non-profit digital teams. In our research 2011, we identified four models for how orgs manage digital. Blast through them.
A legacy leftover. Informal is typically a legacy of how the Internet grew up organically in institutions: Program funding drives needs, and digital work is loosely and randomly dispersed across various functions and departments. The structure would more accurately be called un-managed, and is marked by an extreme lack of brand consistency, inefficiencies, and an overall rudderless strategy. Surprisingly, there are still institutions stuck in this pre-digital leadership stage. It’s not pretty.
Structured but stilted. is a much more common model, as it fits well with how institutions have learned to manage other single-focus channels or functions, such as fundraising. They put digital in a silo (most often in communications), hire a smart person to run it, and serve the institution from this central place. The benefits are consistent messaging and branding, common tools, and, importantly, clear ownership and easy reporting lines. Unfortunately, these teams can be slow to respond to change, and get bogged down in heavy processes that stifle creativity from the fringes. These teams also typically have strong technical and publishing skills, but lack the ability (or, importantly, a mandate) to provide content leadership, design or usability services, and engagement with the constituents of the institution. These positions are typically low paid, low-level positions without much ability to shape how the institution uses digital strategically. This model makes for a cleanly run, professional system, but it does tend to make innovation difficult, especially around adding capacity for increasingly mission-critical functions such as storytelling and engagement.
Distributed but inconsistent. Quite a common model. This model sees multiple centers of digital leadership established, with digital roles sprinkled throughout the institution. It is unfortunately somewhat random: Some departments run high-performing digital silos (often with their own brands, sites, and social networks) that are “protected” or isolated from the rest of the institution, while others with less clout struggle to get the attention of an over-taxed and under-resourced central digital team. This model can create a competitive rather than collaborative culture, can end up duplicating resources, and—with no strong digital services group looking after the whole and how it all fits together for the audience—can contribute to inconsistent voice and confusing user experiences (with subsequent low actions and conversions) found on most institutional websites.
Ideal for managing innovation. Distributed leadership. This is the most progressive and the most conducive to producing continuous innovation at the pace of digital change. In this model, different business units continue to build their own capacity based on their specific needs, but all digital staffers are connected to and supported by a central and strong digital experience team that directs the whole system toward long-term strategic goals. With this model, the culture of the central digital team is practicing what we’ll call “open leadership”: service oriented, highly collaborative, hyper-connected listeners, who also have the technical and content expertise to be high-value strategists. They take on leadership of high-leverage or high-risk projects themselves, but leave space for others to lead on their own initiatives. This may sound ideal, but in practice it is a more organic model than most institutions are comfortable with. It’s actually unclear whether this model can actually exist if the rest of the institution is highly silo-ized, politicized, and competitive. To be sustainable, support for this new type of collaborative leadership needs to come via a larger change initiative from the top that moves toward looser, more adaptive structures overall.
Teams evolve from Foundation (publishing driven) to Optimized (growing the program). They may evolve further towards Integrated (engaging). Teams can be low or high performing at each level. The arrow shows the progression of team. The star shows the ideal digital team for UNICEF, high performance optimized.
Gets you where you’re going, but not very elegant or efficient (or safe). You don’t want to be here long.
Presence. Publishing. Reactive. Informal
Where most NGO’s aspire to be. Complicated system, run by technicians. Management is key feature. Acquisition and retention.
Acquisition & Retention – TransactionalMost big institutions are stuck here. So focused on transactions, limited by internal structures, overwhelmed by daily volume, or not equipped for true leadership. Not really engagement – either internally with other departments, or with supporters. No ability for truly game-changing innovations. Missing major opportunities.
Innovation. Engagement. Transformative for the org and its relationships with supporters/partners. Moving into Network Org territory.
Also willing to expirement but super driven by metrics. Supernova vs. Red Dwarf.
Professionalization, control, and centralization.
For orgs that started off being grassroots driven, but have overly professionalized, online is a cheap and easy grassroots organizing program. Low cost. Low effort It makes them feel good. Sometimes (rarely), it even works. Not really though.
Last bullet: Experts = not asking for help. Perfect = not making mistakes. Professional = boring, inaccessible policy wonk voice. Being best = erosion of influence.Control = you can’t control the web.
To add to Beth, 4th attribute: People lie at the core of their Theory of Change“Focus on what you do best, and network the rest”.
I’m not saying we should all be networks, or there should only be network orgs. There should just be more of them.
Teams evolve from Foundation (publishing driven) to Optimized (growing the program). They may evolve further towards Integrated (engaging). Teams can be low or high performing at each level. The arrow shows the progression of team. The star shows the ideal digital team for UNICEF, high performance optimized.
RAN: Focus on engagement organizing, using the network and people power at the core of all campaigns, growing capacity everywhere
Dropping fundraising, focus on networks of networks, capacity building, deep engagementFirst two are commited to Digital First business.
100% focused on thought leadership, building 21st Century think tank, distributed leadership
TSSN: Deep analysis of the gaps across 60 NGO’s working in Canada, US, Europe. Great campaigning, weak communications. Deepen collaboration, cross group/issue/ border connections. Comms shop to grow capacity across groups that need it, fill in gaps, and pour gas on major moments bringing major promotions resources. Working like a network.
