We tried… and we tried… and we tried… and we finally succeeded!

After more than 3 years, the Diabetes Hands Foundation finally has a Wikipedia page.

Because it was such a painfully long process and because I couldn’t find too many complete articles when I googled “Wikipedia nonprofits“, I decided to share the lessons we learned so that you may not make the same mistakes we made.

Build your reputation and “notability” first

No matter how important you think your work is (and I am sure you are doing amazing things for others in the world), your organization needs to be notable, according to Wikipedia’s guidelines, before it can be Wikipedia-worthy. Quoting:

An organization is generally considered notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. All content must be verifiable.

Don’t kill the messenger! This set the rules of their site and it’s worked for them so far… though the jury is still out on this one. So, your blog? Not typically a reliable, independent secondary source. A passing mention in an article in your local newspaper? Not notable enough. Does it suck? Ask me! But if you come to think of it, it’s what keeps the site as encyclopedic as it can hope to be.

Make the page about your organization, not your programs

Our earlier attempts at getting a Wikipedia page up were focused on a page about TuDiabetes, the diabetes social network we run in English. As our first program, it got the most visibility at first and it got the most reliable (in our opinion) media coverage earlier. However, TuDiabetes, unlike Facebook or Google, is not a household name (not yet at least!) and it isn’t its own organization: it is a program of the Diabetes Hands Foundation.

The results when we posted a TuDiabetes page on Wikipedia in 2008 were disastrous. But I am going to let a screenshot of the page speak for itself:

Your Wikipedia page should encompass all your work. Not only will this be a more complete depiction of your work: it will also furnish you hopefully with more notable and reliable sources to insert as references in your page.

Let others write about you

This, to me, was one of the most puzzling things about getting a Wikipedia page started (for a nonprofit or any other organization). One of the arguments we heard from Wikipedia in our first attempt to write our own page was that others had to do write about us. It didn’t dawn on me that the this implied other MEDIA (reliable media, that is). It is not a problem for you to write your own page, but you have to make sure the reliable references are there and that you are writing about something bigger than a program you just launched.

Last few tips

• It helps to get a copy of a book like Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, but you don’t need it as much these days as you used to back in 2008 when it first came out. Recently, Wikipedia has added new features that make creating and editing articles a lot easier.
• Reputation management online is key, so make sure to watch your page. After you log in to Wikipedia, you will see a little star (it’s blank by default) next to the View History link for the page. Click on it (which will turn the star blue) to have your page added to your Watchlist.
• No matter how tempted you may feel to “trick” Wikipedia, don’t do it. Don’t waste your time or loose your account’s credibility in the process. Stick to the Wikipedia guidelines and address the concerns they may have about your page when you post it in a timeline fashion. Respect their decision even if you dislike it: this doesn’t mean you are not supposed to talk with them about your questions or ask for a more detailed explanation about a particular decision, but always do so in a respectful way.
• Most important of all: getting a Wikipedia page for your nonprofit is not a sprint. In the world of Web 2.0, this is as close to a marathon as it gets. Be patient and do your homework. It will pay off in the long run.

If you have any lessons you have learned from your experience with your Wikipedia page, I would love to hear them.

IF YOU FOUND THIS POST USEFUL, PLEASE CONSIDER MAKING A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION TO THE DIABETES HANDS FOUNDATION.

Aug. 18, 2010 Whole Foods Market launched the new Whole Foods Market Missions iPhone app. Read the app description below, taken from the iTunes Preview page (the bolded words are mine, to point out the coincidences between this app and another app we launched on Facebook two months ago):

Get on a mission to better health! The Whole Foods Market Missions (WFMissions) app will help you broaden your palate by introducing you to a range of delicious, nutrient dense foods. Learn more about healthy eating and start a conversation with your social networks about the road to good health.

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Missions — Complete steps of varying difficulty and earn badges through fun and healthy Missions.
Tips – Get simple, practical advice on cooking, nutrition, green living, food storage and more. Save your favorites for easy reference.
Profile – Keep track of your accomplishments and brag about them via email, Facebook, and Twitter

More than two months before, the Diabetes Hands Foundation launched HealthSeeker™, a new Facebook® game, with the goal of helping players make specific lifestyle changes that focus on healthy eating. While the benefits of the game are available to anyone, HealthSeeker™ specifically helps people with diabetes make more informed lifestyle decisions in an innovative way that complements their daily use of social media.

There are MISSIONS and ACTION STEPS to help players achieve LIFESTYLE GOALS and create an opportunity to advance in the game. These LIFESTYLE GOALS include eating more healthfully, achieving or maintaining a healthy weight, improving one’s diabetes control and lowering cardiovascular risk factors. As ACTION STEPS are completed and players return to report their progress, they receive experience points and other awards for their achievements.

HealthSeeker™ combines a supportive social networking environment with important information on managing diabetes. The game utilizes the player’s own Facebook® friends as sources of inspiration and support on the road to better health.

On HealthSeeker game, missions are made up of action steps as shown:

This is how a comparable screen looks on the Whole Foods App:

When you complete a mission on HealthSeeker, it appears as follows:

This is how it looks on the Whole Foods App:

This is how my achievements page looks on HealthSeeker:

This is how the badges tab looks on the Whole Foods app:

Has Whole Foods Market been patterned off HealthSeeker™? Is it a ripoff? I would like to hear your thoughts…

All I can say is: there seem to be a LOT of similarities. Considering how broad this space is and how much resources Whole Foods should be able to put behind developing a truly innovative and groundbreaking app, I would have imagined that they’d try to avoid repeating the same thing that others are already doing out there… but I digress. What do YOU guys think?

¡¡El 25 de Agosto, celebramos el tercer aniversario de la gran familia de EsTuDiabetes!!

Compartimos esta gran ocasion mientras vimos hacia atras, celebramos lo que hemos logrado y hablamos un poco sobre los planes para el futuro de la comunidad.

Si te perdiste el evento, aqui esta el video:

Esta es la presentación a la cual se hace referencia durante el video:

I honestly don’t know how I feel about it. I know I have been fairly paranoid about using FourSquare: I probably used it for a couple of weeks and then removed the app from my phone.

Do you see how Facebook Places is going to be any different? Would love to hear your thoughts.

1. Don’t “follow” all 5,000 people. Pick up on conversations as they cross your Twitter home feed.
2. Follow people you care about. If you do this, you increase your chances of finding relevant conversations you care about whenever you take a look at your Twitter feed.
3. Look at who the people you care about are following: you may find some great people worth following there.
4. Create, maintain and use Lists, to listen more intently to a particular topic or within a particular vertical.
5. Take advantage of saved searches.

For more tips, read the fabulous post “Follow the Few To Get To the Many” by @kanter (someone you should follow, BTW!)

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Bing and how it had broken into the top 5 referrers of traffic to this blog. Today, I am happy to report StumbleUpon has entered that space too.

A few weeks ago, as a result of a former Ning colleague joining the ranks of StumbleUpon (SU, among friends), I decided to give it a shot again. I installed the extension to help me stumble upon pages as I visit them.

So far this month, I am seeing SU behind approx. 5% of the traffic to my blog. Are you seeing anything like this?

I was gone for a few days, taking a vacation around my birthday last week… this is what happened to my Twitter account.

I am not saying you should tweet a lot every day. I am just saying, when you don’t people stop following you. Who? Those who NEED you to show signs of Twitter “life” (i.e. fake followers) every day. Should you care? Not really…

Should you NOT tweet at all ever? Not either. It may actually make others think (even your friends following you on Twitter) that you forgot about your Twitter account.

]]> http://askmanny.com/2010/07/what-happens-when-you-dont-tweet/feed/ 0 http://askmanny.com/2010/07/diabetes-hands-foundation-as-a-networked-nonprofit/ http://askmanny.com/2010/07/diabetes-hands-foundation-as-a-networked-nonprofit/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:13:54 +0000 Manny http://askmanny.com/?p=2308

Networked Nonprofit, image from Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter’s most recent book, The Networked Nonprofit, co-written by Allison Fine, points out social media tools integral to nonprofits fall into three general categories of use:

• Conversation starters
• Collaboration tools
• Network builders

In this post, I share examples of how the Diabetes Hands Foundation, behaves as a networked nonprofit and ways in which we can become more networked as well.

Conversation starters
Conversation starters are a natural part of our day to day. We run two social networks on Ning for people touched by diabetes: TuDiabetes in English and EsTuDiabetes en español.

On the networks, people seek for support and information, posting fairly specific questions like “What do I do to cover my diabetes supplies now that my COBRA is about to expire?” Or they may conduct informal surveys like “What is your favorite way to handle a low blood sugar episode?”

We’ve learned that open-ended questions in general elicit the largest number of comments and replies, while the more specific questions typically generate fairly useful and targeted answers, though perhaps not as many as a “survey” kind of post.

The lessons we’ve learned we’ve incorporated into other channels such as Twitter and our Facebook page and seen comparable results, when we’ve initiated new conversations.

Collaboration tools and crowdsourcing
A good example of collaborative work and crowdsourcing the Diabetes Hands Foundation has conducted is TuAnalyze, launched in mid-May 2010.

TuAnalyze is diabetes data-mapping app running on TuDiabetes. Almost 1,100 members of the network have signed up for TuAnalyze so far, close to the 1:10:100 rule of user-generated content, considering the network has more than 15,000 registered members.

Participants enter their hemoglobin A1c data, a reflection of their average blood sugar level for the past three months. Once a minimum number of data points have been entered in a particular area, the area lights up on the map getting colored according to the average A1c value. The data collected also informs research at Children’s Hospital Boston, a nonprofit with whom we collaborated for the development of the application.

Another example of crowdsourcing at DHF is the No-Sugar Added Poetry book, available July 2010. This diabetes poetry book is the result of poems submitted by TuDiabetes members in early 2009. We conducted a contest during which we judged poems submitted based on a series of attributes and gave prizes to the winning submissions. We got a sponsor for the book (Roche Diagnostics Corporation), secured permissions to publish the poems and identified a publisher for the project. I plan to share more about the lessons we learned throughout this project soon.

Network builders
Having run two diabetes social networks since 2007, we understand how important it is for people to connect with one another in meaningful ways. This is indeed part of our mission (“To connect people touched by diabetes and raise diabetes awareness.”)

In 2009, we confirmed it is equally important for diabetes social media leaders and advocates to connect between them. A summit that gathered several people in this category inspired Diabetes Advocates, a new program we launched in early 2010.

The premise behind the Diabetes Advocates program is simple: to leverage the power of networked resources in a co-op fashion, introducing members of the program (bloggers as well as organizations) to new audiences and constituents through diabetes conferences and media outreach. These offline channels that are normally outside our individual reach become accessible and affordable when you pull a network together.

Another example of network building we’ve developed in Diabetes Hands Foundation is the HealthSeeker Facebook game we launched in mid-June 2010. The game gives rewards for simple tasks such as eating brown rice or going for a walk. In the game, the players’ Facebook friends become a source of support and encouragement to help them adopt healthy lifestyle changes.

Becoming a more networked nonprofit
Is the Diabetes Hands Foundation the best example of a networked nonprofit? Hardly. We need to keep on listening, engaging and building relationships along the way. We also have to improve how we leverage social media specifically in two fronts: fundraising and governance.

I hope this post may inspire you to make your nonprofit more networked and I look forward to your thoughts and suggestions.

IF YOU FOUND THIS POST USEFUL, PLEASE CONSIDER MAKING A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION TO THE DIABETES HANDS FOUNDATION.

Yesterday, I met an email in my Inbox with a BIG smile! Just as Pearson came forward to underwrite educational networks on Ning, WEGO Health, a social network for Health Activists who are passionate about health conditions, announced an exciting option for health networks on Ning.

Under this partnership WEGO Health will provide health-related communities with Ning Plus service. Jack Barrette, CEO of WEGO Health said:

“Since its inception, WEGO Health has been dedicated to empowering Health Activists to lead active health conversation on the web. The health networks built on Ning are a powerful example of Health Activists at work, and we’re thrilled to be able to extend our mission through this sponsorship. We look forward to collaborating with health-focused Ning Network Creators to expand their reach and impact.”

If you want to learn more about the partnership, read the announcement on WEGO health or apply for a WEGO Health-sponsored Ning Plus package.

If you work in the nonprofit space and are anywhere near technology, you HAVE heard of Beth Kanter and Allison Fine. Well, now they’ve come together to write an amazing book that you absolutely must read, titled “The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change.”

The book is packed with brilliant concepts from cover to cover: social capital, network weaving, social culture, the ladder of engagement, do what you do best and network the rest and microplanning, just to name a few. But The Networked Nonprofit is not about tactics (though there’s lots of great examples in it). Fine and Kanter take you through the basics and the thought process you need to be in, in order to have your nonprofit successfully enter the social media space and thrive in it.

From listening to sharing, from fundraising to affecting change on- and offline, The Networked Nonprofit looks at social media for nonprofits as part of your multichannel strategy, also taking into account the stories others share about your organization, the way you communicate over email, your web site presence, your Google ads, your media outreach and most definitely your offline presence (face-to-face events).

Being a hound for books that overlap nonprofits and social media, I can tell you The Networked Nonprofit is the best out there today!

IF YOU FOUND THIS POST USEFUL, PLEASE CONSIDER MAKING A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION TO THE DIABETES HANDS FOUNDATION.