On the first, we need to learn how to be more nimble — learning new skills, evolving our decision making processes to be able to move more swiftly, and being able to adjust structures to keep the machine humming when the outside world shifts.

But all of this is only possible when we are successful with the second.  Leading through change is a great challenge, that involves not only good business strategy, but excellent communication, team building, listening, and attention to the psychology of change, not only the logistics of change.  If the Jewish community needs one thing, it’s people who are superb leaders in times of change.

Several years ago, when Darim was shifting from our original work of building web sites to a focus on training, coaching and consulting, I read a powerful book, Managing Transitions, by William Bridges.  The take home message:  Change is situational (like a light switch), but transition is psychological (a process).  We need leaders who know what change needs to be made to thrive in the “new normal”, but those same leaders also need to facilitate a transition, which requires a whole different set of skills.

If you haven’t noticed, the Jewish community isn’t the only one recognizing this need. (It’s comforting to know we’re not behind the curve on this one!)  A flurry of new books are hitting the shelves focused on change strategy and management in today’s world:

• Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath (from Amazon.com): In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.
• The Power of Pull, by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison (from Amazon.com): In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream.  But many of us remain stuck in old practices—practices that could undermine us as we search for success and meaning. Drawing on pioneering research, The Power of Pull shows how to apply its principles to unlock the hidden potential of individuals and organizations, and how to use it as a force for social change and the development of creative talent.

Coming out soon:

• Open Leadership, by Charlene Li (co-author of Groundswell) (from Amazon.com):  “Be Open, Be Transparent, Be Authentic” are the current leadership mantras-but companies often push back. Business is premised on the concept of control and yet the new world order demands openness-leaders do not know how to be open and be in control. This must-have resource will help the modern leader understand how to lead in the new open world-where blogging, twittering, facebooking, and digging are becoming the norm. the author lays out the steps that leaders must take to transform their organizations and themselves into being “open” -and exactly what that will mean.
• Empowered, by Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell) (from Amazon.com): Fueled by data from Forrester Research, Empowered is packed with the business tools and information necessary to move your organization several steps ahead … and lead … your people (who are) armed with cheap, accessible technology, and are connecting with customers and building innovative new solutions.

What are your strategies for managing change?  Where have you been successful?  What’s hard?  Do you have advice or other resources to add to the conversation?  Onward!

I am currently re-reading “Switch: How to change things when change is hard” by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. Amongst the many dog-eared, and underlined sections is a brief line on page 17: “What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.”

The author’s example is a public health campaign in West Virginia that specifically directed residents to switch their milk drinking from whole to 1% or skim. Instead of the valuable – but diffuse and difficult – goal of simply “acting healthier,” the campaign gave clear instructions.

What can this mean for non-profits? Quite a bit.

At a recent fundraising auction checkout, one of our cashiers requested “an additional donation to support the work of the beneficiary.” Her line had a smaller than 5% donation rate. Our other checkout line asked winning bidders to “round up their purchase by 2, 5, 10, or 18 dollars” (whatever brought them to the nearest $100 figure). This money would go to purchase a new pick up truck to be used by members. This second line had a 37% round up rate. For a small non-profit that was the difference between $10 dollars in the first line and $475 in the second. Neither was enough to buy a pickup, but with clear instructions the actual dollars in the bank increased by 40 times.

What about you? How specific are you with your asks? Do you tie gifts to specific programs, ask for discrete amounts at particular times, or take advantage of triggers in the environment of your supporters?

Other take home messages from Switch for fundraising:

1. Follow your bright spots. If a campaign, donor, or programming is exceeding your goals, try to determine why and replicate it.
2. Marry long term goals with short term critical moves. Your mission is critical, but showing your staff and supporters how you will get there shrinks the change, and energizes giving.
3. Script the moves. For an organization that fights homelessness, linking a monthly gift to equal to 1% of a donor’s mortgage payments can keep your mission front of mind and the amount and timing of donation clear.
4. Grow your people. Increase their role and identity within your organization. Donors who support a public health campaign might become “messengers” – with their donation receipt you can arm them with support materials and task them to teach 10 friends the importance of breast self exams.
5. Act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. Everything looks like  a failure in the middle. Focus on the valleys of a program as learning opportunities rather than failures. There should be no “never” – only “not yet.”
6. Use the score when it can help you. The herd mentality can work for you. If the majority of your board members have exceeded last year’s gift, use that fact. People tend to fall in line with their peers.

What is your favorite take home from “Switch”?

Anna Rosenblum Palmer founded winwinapps after years of board and staff service with small non-profits.  She’s always interested in improving efficiency to have more time for mission based work. She welcomes comments, suggestion or answer questions atanna@winwinapps.com, @winwinapps, cell: (617) 800-4607

winwinapps is a VT-based, internet toolkit that takes the hassle out of running a nonprofit, freeing you up to do the work that really matters. We help you. You help them. That’s a winwin.

One of the best sessions I attended was where Beth Kanter and Allison Fine (among the gurus of nonprofit technology) presented their upcoming book, The Networked Nonprofit (due out in June, but you can preorder here).  These two women completely understand the future of nonprofit organizations in the digital age, and I could listen to their wisdom, humor and case studies for days.

One element from their presentation keeps knocking around in my head, the idea of three stages of organizational development in this networked era.

1. Fortress – an organization where there are insiders and outsiders, and the two rarely meet or interact;
2. Transactional – an organization that is engaged with their community, but with the sole focus of transactions, such as getting people to sign up for an event or make a donation;
3. Transparent – an organization that fully engages and empowers their community to accomplished shared goals.

I love the simplicity of these three stages, and the acknowledgment that getting on social media platforms is not the ultimate goal. Plenty of people are promoting events on Facebook and measuring success by the number of tushes in the seats.  But the real paths to accomplishing our mission and goals, and the more accurate measurements of success go far beyond this.  They also require a leap of faith, and the ability to take that first leap.

Remember the first time you climbed to the top of a high dive as a kid, your heart beating so hard you thought it would leap out of your chest, and that moment when you finally hurled yourself into the air?  It’s the same moment really.  And remember when you went back again and again and again to do it over and over?  Yeah, it’s like that too.

So tell us — what stage are you at?  What do you need to move from one stage to the next?  Where do you see examples of “transparent” organizations or activities?

I often remind those concerned that control is largely an illusion — those rants and  conversations happen in the parking lot, the dinner table, via email and on Facebook.  The companies that have done a great job of turning around their brands (Comcast, Dell) have done so not be trying to shut down the conversation or ignoring it, but by listening, acknowledging, and learning from it.  (For stories about what they’ve done, read Twitterville.)

Chris Brogan, a widely known and well respects new media marketing specialist, writes a very prolific (and insightful) blog and weekly e-newsletter.  This week he talks about critics, and offers some advice :

If you are fortunate enough to have critics, you’re doing something right … I want to share with you how I deal with critics, and what you might learn from the gifts they give you.

Thank them. No matter what a critic says, say “Thanks for your thoughts,” or a variation. They have taken the time to offer their opinions, however invalid or unhelpful, with you. Say thanks. It’s the only good response to a criticism.
Don’t defend yourself. The person giving you the opinion probably doesn’t care what you have to say about it. They just wanted to share their take. You can reply and reflect back what they’ve said, but try not to defend. It only comes off as making you look defensive and it just goes nowhere fast.
Decide for yourself, in private, if you agree. You don’t have to take every critic’s opinion, but listen to whether there’s any grain of truth in what they say. I learn when my critics are my friends, but I learn LOTS when they are people who don’t much like me. Sometimes, I’m able to adapt their mean words into something of great value to myself.
Don’t just throw it out, is my point. Criticism can be helpful, even non-constructive criticism, if you are willing to hear a bit of it and throw away the junk. Thing is, don’t necessarily run around seeking it, either. It can build up like toxin in our veins, and if we’re only hearing a stream of icky things, that doesn’t help us at all.

… It took me a long while to believe in myself enough to not believe in critics. There’s a great bit from an interview (and I forget who the subject was), where she said something about really loving her positive reviews, but then her agent said, if you believe all the positive reviews, you have to believe all the negative critics. That’s stuck with me.

Personally, I’ve found most of the criticism we receive on the JewPoint0.org blog is really helpful — it teaches me where I can improve, adds value to the conversation, and often helps me identify knowledgeable folks who are invested in our mission.

How do you think about critics and criticism, whether it be on or offline?  How do you use it as a productive feedback loop?  How to you respond to critics? What have you learned?

1. While I’ve loved Shel’s previous work, I did expect this to be a well written “capitalize on Twitter’s exponential growth” book. In fact, it’s incredibly insightful, with great profiles of people and companies using Twitter in really creative ways.  It stretched me.  It’s also completely accessible to beginners. A fine line that Shel seems to have walked perfectly. I was pleasantly surprised.
2. It challenged some decisions I’ve made – decisions that were strategic and thoughtful when I made them.  For example, using the organization name and logo instead of the person’s name and photo, even when they are tweeting for the company.  I’m still chewing on this one.  In the meantime, I’ve edited @DarimOnline to show that it’s mostly, not entirely, Lisa at the keys.  I’m curious how others think about offering this “human face” and transparency while still promoting the brand and, perhaps most importantly for many small organizations, creating continuity if/when staff turns over.
3. I was reminded that you can start small and casual.  As one guy from Ford is quoted, “Twitter was… the country store, where people came in and out and shared their gossip, and there I was, sitting by the pickle barrel.” (pg. 85)
4. It’s more about listening than about talking.  It’s so counter intuitive to so many of us that it can’t be said enough.
5. One person in the organization can actually lead major change.  So many examples were about one person in a large organization using this little tool in their remote cubicle, and it seeped into company culture because it was so darn useful.

So… that leads us to the question: How is Twitter useful for you?  Alternatively, you can share your best piece of Twitter wisdom, or a Twitter-related question you’re wrestling with.  We’ll choose our winner around Sukkot. And… please leave your Twitter username with your comment so we can check you out!

We’re taking the wrong pulse.

The people we’re trying to reach are comparing their experience with our Jewish communal organizations against every other organization and company they are dealing with in their day-to-day lives.  We don’t get a free pass to have mediocre customer service or out of date information on our web site, or poorly formatted e-newsletters.

In today’s marketplace, we’re competing for attention.  People don’t allocate 10% of their attention for Jewish causes, they put their attention where they find quality, value, social capital, and authenticity.

Thus staff and board members of Jewish organizations would be wise to expand their gaze, and learn from examples in other nonprofit organizations and the for-profit world.  Even the trends that big corporations are responding to are applicable to local Jewish organizations, and today can be accomplished with no additional out-of-pocket dollars, and little (sometimes saved) staff time.

As Shel Israel writes in his new book Twitterville, companies like Dell and Comcast have pulled their reputations out of the gutter by putting real people out on the front lines of Twitter to listen and respond.  Innovative companies like Zappos have made this culture of “paying attention” part of their company ethos.  There’s a lot to learn from these guys.

Want to learn more?  We’ll be giving away a copy of Twitterville soon.  Next week we’ll be asking you about how you listen and pay attention to your community, and how you’re using social media to do so.  Start thinking …

What other companies or organizations do you see as useful models for us to learn from?  How have they inspired you?

Beth Kanter was giving away copies Twitterville the other day. I saw it on Facebook (I’m a fan of hers) but it was also on Twitter and her blog.  (She’s a pro at making the most of multiple channels, without leaving me feeling inundated from every direction.  It’s a real art.)

Beth periodically runs contests like this.  She asks people to leave a comment responding to a particular question to enter the contest.  It’s not random — she picks those whom she thinks are most deserving or will make the most of the prize.  What I love about these contests is that by having a public entry process, she creates a forum for interesting people to share their work and ideas.  I always learn something from reading the other entries.

So I left a comment saying how much I appreciate this approach to surfacing great ideas and practices.  And heck, if giving away the book can do it, if I win, I’ll re-give-away the book to surface more good things, specifically in the Jewish community where we work.

She loved the idea and I won the book!  (Well, to be honest, by the time she announced the winners she had about a dozen books – there were so many good responses that the author kicked in some copies, she found more promo copies, and others bought copies to add to the contest!)  You can read about the results here.

And the punchline is …  Shortly we’ll be putting up our own blog post to give away the book (once I get it, and read it).  We’ll be asking about how you’re using Twitter in strategic and goal oriented ways.  So start thinking about it, and experimenting on Twitter so you’ll have something juicy to share when we announce the contest.  And, as always, you’re welcome to share your experiences (what’s working as well as what you’re challenged by) in the comments here.

P.S Another great Beth post on Twitter:  How nonprofits are using hashtags

What you’re favorite Beth Kanter nugget of wisdom? Leave a link in the comments.

If this speaks to you, you’re not alone, and there is a wealth of support out there for you.  A few suggestions:

1. Be goal oriented.  If you can frame your social media project to be in support of larger or more specific goals of your organization, then you’re defining yourself on the same team.
2. Sometimes there are egos involved.  Two thoughts here:  First, give credit to your boss for great goals and big picture, so he/she feels validated, and not challenged.  Second, the unknown is sometimes scary — think about how you can help teach that person about your work in an exciting and not belittling way.  He/she may feel “out of date” or “being passed by”, and if you can temper these negative emotions, the whole conversation may be smoother.
3. Find low costs ways to begin, so all you’re asking for is a bit of time, not an outlay of cash.
4. Make sure you can articulate how you’ll measure your success, and then measure it.  You must be able to declare victory in order to build trust and future support.
5. Find relevant examples from related organizations or people who have the same job responsibilities as you do. While some leadership might assume that “all technology things belong with the IT guy”, we believe that all staff (and volunteers) need to be using the most up to date tools in their work.  The phone, photocopier, fax and email are all “technologies” that we use in our daily work.
6. Listen to their fears and objections.  If someone is terrified about a negative comment on a blog, consider meeting them half way by more aggressively moderating comments (needing to approve before they go live, etc.) to reduce fears and help everyone take baby steps forward.
7. Ask about privacy policies and any other guidelines that you should know about and use as you implement your project.  Avoiding accidental mis-steps will buy you good will down the road.
8. Consider framing your project as a “pilot” — short term, very focused, low cost – so that leadership feels they have an opportunity to reflect and assess whether the project will move forward.

Check out this blog post from The Buzz Bin on the topic, and if you’re hungry for more, read chapter 11 in Groundswell for strategies on how to move forward with social media in your organization.  Better yet, buy a copy for your boss!

How have you approached “selling social media” in your organization? How have you been an advocate? How are you teaching others?  What sort of feedback do you provide to others to demonstrate your impact? What support do YOU need?

Alban’s in depth knowledge of congregations (Jewish and otherwise) make this publication a unique and focused read for synagogue staff and lay leadership. Check out Lynne’s blog post on Myths about Communicating Congregational Identity for insights into her writing and thinking. Learn more about the book and order it here.

flickr credit: redverse

The holiday season is one in which we reflect on our place in the world – how we live our own lives, how we interact in our communities, how to make the world a better place.

I’ve been reading Digital Giving: How Technology is Changing Charity by Richard C. McPherson, thanks to a tip from e-Jewish Philanthropy’s Dan Brown. Digital Giving is a good, quick read chockfull of ideas and case studies. What I’m realizing is that it’s not just a book about philanthropy and creating change in a Web 2.0 world. It’s about community.

How can organizations tap into their extended communities?

Allow your supporters to contribute not just funding, but their energy to the cause. McPherson cites the example of Kiva, a person-person microlending site. In addition to its focus on matching lenders with projects, Kiva provides benefactors with the opportunity to create lending teams, send emails to friends and family who might want to support a personally meaningful project, and resources for learning more about microfinancing to become better informed about the theory behind the practice. Help supporters identify with your organization by making it easy to embed a badge or logo on their own sites. Create ways for supporters to educate themselves, act, be heard, and share in community building. Remember the tag line from the Syms clothing store: “An educated consumer is our best customer.”

Part of that community ethos is transparency and accountability.

GlobalGiving is another project that connects donors with projects. McPherson notes how they present a project and its funding goals. Once those goals are met, donors are directed to similar projects that are in need of support. Users can subscribe to updates and monitor the project’s progress. Reports from the field are expected and shared online. In addition, each project includes contact information to connect directly with the project sponsors.

These ideas and other lessons learned in Digital Giving can be applied to more local organizations to help our communities help themselves and each other. Who makes up your community? How do you respond to their desire to become more active supporters? What opportunities can you create together?