And tips on how to reinforce habits for social good

This is the first of two articles on NTC 2013. Also see:
• Nonprofits, online giving & secrets from the Obama campaign (the 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study)

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, journalists, general public.

Last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in Minneapolis was the fourth NTC I’ve attended in the past five years. I spoke twice at last year’s event, but this year I had the freedom to roam the hallways in search of interesting people and ideas that are shaping the nonprofit sector.

NTEN’s NTC serves an invaluable role as the one central gathering spot for the nonprofit community — a place where those of us involved in the sector (I run Socialbrite, a leading social media consultancy for nonprofits) can see friends and colleagues, keep abreast of new trends and, most importantly, encounter smart, interesting, passionate people we haven’t met before.

Oh, and I took a few photos, as usual. Here’s my 70-photo set on Flickr.

Highlights from the Nonprofit Technology Conference

There were far more interesting sessions than I was able to attend, so here are just a few takeaways that I managed to scribble down:

• Kathryn Engelhardt-Cronk, at lunch: “Storytelling without data is just an anecdote. Asking people to donate on the basis of anecdotes – those days are long gone.”

• Danielle Brigida, National Wildlife Foundation: “Make sure your data is actionable. It’s not just about creating a pretty spreadsheet.”

• More Danielle (@starfocus): “People are your supporters when they think they’re your supporters.”

• Joanne Fritz at About.com has a roundup of the DoGooder Video Award winners. In the Best Nonprofit Video category, the Rainforest Alliance won for Follow the Frog (great video — and here’s where to shop the frog). In the Change Agent Award category, the winner was Raf Bauer for 350km Message for Women with Ovarian Cancer.

• Ken Bess of CARE: “If a campaign doesn’t have an email element, it fails.”

• At “Introduction to User Centered Design,” Golli Hashemian and Lauren Hayes reminded us of Henry Ford’s classic quote about innovation: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

• At one session: “In order to have influence today, you must have networks.”

• “Charity muggers”: The term for people who accost you on the street on behalf of a charity.

• Even though Blackbaud bought it, Convio (pronounced con-VEE-o) is still operating as a brand. Convio is among the services that enables A-B testing of email messages. If you’re a small organization, a DIY solution is to split your list in half and send different emails to the two groups of recipients.

• To the gentleman who used the real name of someone whose lifetime giving to CARE.org totaled $241,500, you may want to black out those real names in your next presentation.

• Zerista, the communications platform NTEN uses year after year, continues to suck.

Using behavioral science to create habits for social good

One of the conference’s most interesting sessions was Thursday’s “Creating Habits for Social Good: Using Insights from Behavioral Science to Increase Engagement and Repeat Behavior,” with the marvelous Katya Andresen of Network for Good and Allan Burstyn of See3 Communications. Some highlights:

• Six main types of donors: The Repayer (someone whose life was changed through an experience, like going to a university), the Casual Giver (buy Girl Scouts cookies or plunk down a dollar at Safeway for cancer research), High Impact (we give to the Red Cross and Save the Children because they’re high-impact relief organizations), Faith-based (about a third of all giving goes to religious institutions), See the Difference (“I only give to small organizations where I feel I can make a difference”) and Personal Ties (your niece runs in a race for the cure). The two categories that attract the most donations are Repayer and Personal Ties.

• We make decisions more emotionally and justify them after the fact with facts. You can’t show an emotional argument and a factual argument at the same time – we have different pathways in the brain for reason and emotion. Words affect us more on a rational level and pictures affect us more on an emotional level. Make sure the very beginning of your video has an emotional hook. Use images, and less text, for more long-lasting impact.

• 60 percent of donors are “lost” every year by nonprofits. On the one hand, nonprofits need to do a much better job of not just cultivating new donors but maintaining existing ones. Still, as someone who gives to a wide range of nonprofits — and not the same ones every year — I wouldn’t panic about churn among donors.

• Great advice from Katya: Step out from the role of communicator and look at the fundraising experience from the POV of a donor for a good reality check.

• One genius aspect of mobile giving: $10 text donations are effective because they eliminate the barrier of entering billing information.

• Katya: “A lot of fundraising is bad because it’s about how big and bad the problem is. You need to juxtapose that with a way to take corrective action.”

• More Katya: “You blow people’s minds by thanking them.” So, do it. Send a hand-written thank-you or even an email.

• Check out childrensmn.org for a good example of an interactive infographic on impact.

• If you missed this from Katya 10 days ago, it’s worth a read: How to make your donors twice as generous.

A whirlwind of connections

I was in Minneapolis for less than three days. Here are some of the new and old friends I spent a little time with:

John Haydon, Beth Kanter, Brian Juntti, Matt Haugen, Danielle Brigida, Kathryn Engelhardt-Cronk, Caroline Avakian, Debra Askanase, Kivi Leroux Miller, Lori Jacobwith, Casey Golden, Frank Barry, Melanie Mathos, Taylor Corrado, Cassie Bair, Amy Sample Ward, Fara Trompeter, David Krumlauf, Mark Horvath, Sue Anne Reed, Janna Chan, Emilie Valentine, Corinne Rusch-Drutz, Julie Ha Truong, Rebecca Saar, Christina Johns, Kelly Rand, Austen Levihn-Coon, Christine Egger, Annie Lynsen, Jason Vance, Jasmin Cruz, James Rooney, Elisa Willman, Lauren Girardin, Marah Rosenbert, Deborah Elizabeth Finn, Michael Smolens, Julielyn Gibbons, Susan Tenby, Marc A. Pitman, Patrick Duggan. Mark Pothier, Michael Spear, Layla Zaidane, Kara Fujita, Michael Bento, Scot Chisholm, Andrea Roy, Karen Graham, Cary Walski, Amanda Bingham, Johanna Olivas, Rebecca Einstein, Steve and Becca Heye, Jenna Sauber, Allyson Burns, Dave Boyce, Laura Norvig, Jeanette Russell, Maddie Grant, Michael DeLong, Susan Chavez, Shanon Doolittle, Lindsay Bealko ‏and too many others’ names I didn’t have time to jot down.

And here are some of my friends I didn’t spot (and I’m not 100 percent sure they all attended):

Geoff Livingston, Kami Watson Huyse, Nancy Schwartz, Annaliese Hoehling, Gregory Foster, Kami Griffiths, Manny Hernandez, Vince Stehl, Randy Paynter, Claire Kerr, Peter Deitz, Shai Coggins, Allyson Kapin, Rachel Weidinger, Andrea Berry, Laura Quinn, Jereme Bivins, Rob Cottingham.

Mark your calendars: Next year’s NTC will be held March 13-15, 2014, in Washington, DC.

Related

• We love social data, but what do we do with it? (Slideshare presentation)

• Highlights from the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference (Socialbrite)

• Calendar of 2013 nonprofit & social change conferences (Socialbrite)

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At 2012 NTC, we delved into tools, strategy & storytelling

Last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco was easily the most fast-paced and frenetic of the three NTCs I’ve participated in, and not just because, at 1,800 attendees, it was the biggest NTC to date.

Several reasons for the frenzy: Four Socialbrite team members led sessions or participated on panels; I wound up also attending the Where conference on geolocation technologies, two blocks away; I commuted home each day (a three-hour round trip by train) even after attending the evening social gatherings; and I reached out to a number of attendees to sit down and share their nonprofits’ experiences and challenges with social media.

I also captured a Flickr set of my NTC photos. And here are a few of my takeaways from the annual gathering.

Nonprofits need a social media strategy

• I’ve been giving a lot of talks lately, to organizations, at conferences and in my monthly CharityHowTo webinar, about how to create a social media strategy for your nonprofit or organization. At NTC, my Socialbrite partner Carla Schlemminger and I led a 90-minute session Thursday on You need a strategy, dammit, not a Twitter accountthat drew 100 people. An artist from Rally.org captured a graphic recording of the session, at top.

• We set up a special training summary page on Socialbrite at socialbrite.org/ntc, containing both our full slide show, 12 handouts to share with your team and a directory of resources on monitoring, metrics, creating media, storytelling and more.

• Libby S. asked for an example of how Pinterest — now the third largest social network! — has been effective for nonprofits. Turns out that one of the folks I sat down with, Briana Kerensky of Communities In Schools, had a good example: They’ve begun using Pinaquote, which lets you post any text on the Web to Pinterest (or another social network) instead of an image. So Communities in Schools has been pinning inspirational quotes for students about success and volunteerism.

• Kristina T. tweeted during our session: “Twitter can ID who is tweeting on a particular subject within a zip code range. New to me! Great potential tool.” Yep. Look at the Advanced Search options in Twitter and you’ll see that you can scroll down to Places and enter a town or location. When you do, you’ll see “within this distance” (1-50-500 miles) automatically appear. Click Search and presto!

The future of nonprofit storytelling

Jenna Sauber of the Case Foundation, Cara Jones of Storytellers for Good, Rob Wu of CauseVox and I appeared Thursday on the panel “The Future of Nonprofit Storytelling.” Here are a few takeaways:

• We all agreed on the need for nonprofits to maintain an editorial calendar or story bank to keep track of upcoming stories and make sure upcoming events are given appropriate coverage. Open it up to the staff to add story ideas, even if they don’t commit to writing it.

• Great quote from Cara Jones: “Save video for motion and emotion.”

• I returned to the idea of creating photo slide shows and mashups using tools like Animoto, Stupeflix and others. See our roundup: 4 ways to mash up a visual story for your nonprofit.

• I pointed to the fact that few nonprofits have joined Google for Nonprofits, which would allow them to add call to action video overlays to their videos. See How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos on Socialbrite.

• My advice to a questioner: “Don’t make your story about your organization, make it about your cause and constituents.”

• My response to a question about optimal length of an online video: “I have rarely watched a video and then thought, Oh, that video wasn’t long enough.”

• Someone mentioned ShoeBox for the iPhone, by 1000memories. It’s “the fastest way to scan old paper photos and share them with family and friends.”

• A member of the audience pointed out that YouTube can tell you the hot spots and cold spots in your video — the portions that people replay or the spot at which they bail. When logged into your YouTube account, go to YouTube Analytics > View Reports > Audience Retention.

• Reps from both Call2Action and Active Voice were at our Storytellnig session. Call2Action helps partners with online social issue campaigns with its portable microsite technology. Active Voice is a group of communications strategists who harness the power of film, television and multimedia to spark social change. They’re both worth following at @Call2Act and @active_voice.

Final words

• Jenna pointed out earlier that when you call up a photo in Facebook, clicking the L key will Like the photo.

• Shoutouts given to Astrid To-do: a personal organization and group collaboration app that’s free for iPhone, Android and the Web. And Asana, a shared task list for teams to collaborate.

• Dan Roam, author of “The Back of the Napkin” and “Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work,” gave a great presentation during Wednesday’s plenary on how to use pictures to communicate in ways everybody can understand. “I have a simple proposition. We can solve our problems with pictures. We can clarify our ideas with pictures.” Here are Rally.org’s visual notes/graphic recording.

• Thanks to the Community Techknowledge Foundation for the great dinner at the St. Francis.

• In the days ahead here on Socialbrite, look for my summary of the See3 session on video storytelling best practices, My take on GroupeMe, my interview with Leila Khoury of Frontstream Payments, Debra Askanse’s take on our Storytelling panel and more.

Of course, the best part of NTC was in the hallways, catching up with friends like Beth, Kivi, John, Debra, Peter, Lauren, Carla, Darian, David, Deborah, Cara, Robert, Mark, Kirstin, Kaitlyn and dozens of others. Thanks, NTC crew, for another amazing gathering.

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