Vote for our SXSW Interactive Panel!

Posted on August 15, 2011 by askmanny

A few weeks ago, I was approached by Amy Sample Ward (@amyrsward) and Debra Askanase (@askdebra) to join them, Jess Main (@jessmain) and Vanessa Rhinesmith (@vrhinesmith) in a panel proposal for SXSW Interactive 2012.

Here is our proposal:

Social Media Boundaries: Personal/Personnel Policy

Description
As our networks expand, our profiles get more public, and our work requires a human face, where do we draw the line between personal and professional identities online? How do we maintain those boundaries for our community members? How do we respond to attacks, opportunities, and over-shares online? When does over-sharing hurt the community? When should you share your own personal stories as a manager, or personally reach out to community members? Growing and cultivating an active community also requires that the community manager walk the fine line of personal and professional sharing. Every community manager wonders when and how to professionally cultivate leaders and members to create a thriving community while still being personal. On the reverse side, sometimes community members share too much, which can hurt the health of the community. This panel will address these questions and more from experience in nonprofit and public media sectors.

Questions Answered

How and when is it most appropriate to engage personally with community members, as a community manager?

Can mixing professional and personal help online communities thrive?

How to handle oversharing and other inappropriate community member contributions?

How do you handle personal attacks within communities?

How do you address personal use in social media policies?

Here are 161 other great proposals in the Greater Good/Charity/Social Good category (yep! it’s pretty competitive…)

Please vote for us!

We need your support to show SXSW that there is a need for a panel to address the topic of Social Media Boundaries: Personal/Personnel Policy.

Why your .org does what it does

Posted on March 1, 2011 by askmanny

There was a moment a last weekend’s Wisdom 2.0 conference that I won’t forget. When I learned that Kiva sends everyone in their organization to the developing world they help serve to reconnect with the original reason they first joined, I was blown away!

How often does your organization step back and remember your mission? Sure, you know what your mission is, but how often do you refine the sense of mission that exists in the hearts of your staff, board members and supporters?

This year’s Heart & Soul grant program, put on by the CTK Foundation, is designed to do just that.

To win, you have to channel your creativity to write an original four- to eight-line poem or stanza that reflects the work or mission of your nonprofit. No poets on staff? Ask your supporters to write a poem for you.

The 1st place winner will receive $10,000 and will have their submission turned into a song to be used in public education or awareness. The song will be written and recorded by songwriter Bill Dillon — who was recently exonerated after 27 years in prison thanks to Innocence Project of Florida — and produced by Jim Tullio of Butcher Boy Studios. The contest is open to all nonprofits in the United States, Canada and the UK.

The winning nonprofits will receive one of the following awards:

1st place award is the song, plus a cash grant of $10,000 (US)
or it’s value in foreign currency
2nd place award is a cash grant of $5,000 (US)
or it’s value in foreign currency
The 2011 Blogger’s Choice Award, where a randomly selected blogger participating in spreading the word among nonprofits about the H&S Grant Award Program will choose a nonprofit applicant to receive a $1,000 cash grant
or it’s value in foreign currency
2 steel-stringed guitars, signed by all members of Los Lonely Boys (which you can auction for fund-raising)
Up to 20 technology grants, valued at $10,000, to nonprofits that indicate an interest

There is a quick turnaround on these grants. You must submit an application by midnight on March 28, 2011, and you’ll be notified if you’ve won on April 10. Visit www.communitytech.net to apply.

Follow the effort on Twitter at #ctkgrant.

December: an overcrowded month for Online Fundraising?

Posted on February 7, 2011 by askmanny

For us at Diabetes Hands Foundation, it definitely seems so. This past holiday season:

We raised less money than we did in our September campaign.
We didn’t reach our goal of $15,000 (we did in September!)

My question to all of you out there doing fundraising online is:

Do you think that “competing” for donor gifts in December, when every nonprofit is recommended to do it, may have led to the end-of-year becoming an overcrowded time for successful fundraising?

Please share your experience…

Big Blue Test 2010: the numbers and the lessons

Posted on December 1, 2010 by askmanny

So November (diabetes awareness month) is over and the Big Blue Test event we held this year is also behind us. We are so proud and happy about the results that I wanted to share them here, so we could all celebrate together as a TuDiabetes family!

The BG numbers

The memories and the excitement of 2009 were still fresh in everyone’s mind. And it was exciting all over again to discover the impact that 14 minutes of exercise can have on blood sugars.

1,154 people entered their BG numbers on BigBlueTest.org (you can enter your numbers any time you want, even if it’s not World Diabetes Day!):

The median BG before exercising was 133.6 mg/dL
The median BG after exercising was 111.6 mg/dL

The median change was -19 mg/dL (a 14% drop)

157 people entered their BG numbers on GranPruebaAzul.org (in Spanish):

The median BG before exercising was 129 mg/dL
The median BG after exercising was 110 mg/dL

The median change was -17 mg/dL (a 13% drop)

The video numbers

This year we promoted the Big Blue Test through a very special video. Roche committed to donate $0.75 for each time the video got viewed, for the first 100,000 views. This would add up to $75,000 should we reach or pass 100,000 views before the end of Nov. 14, World Diabetes Day.

The video was translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French and German, expanding the number of people who could watch it, understand the message and share it around the world.

We also relied on many partners to get the word out about it: diabetes partners, nonprofit partners as well as media partners. This included Roche. Besides making the donation in connection to the number of views, they also gave more visibility to the video by including it as part of a box that appeared on the home page of all their affiliate sites in the days leading up to World Diabetes Day. You can read more about the partnerships that drove success for the Big Blue Test on this blog post by John Haydon.

Ultimately it was ALL of you who saw the video that made the project a success! Here’s a beautiful comment from a mother of a 6-year old girl with type 1 diabetes about the video:

“I showed [the video] to my daughter… and she was thrilled. She was so excited to see people just like her doing so many amazing things and when I explained that it was to help other people that didn’t have the same support she did, she wanted to watch it over and over again. Thank you for simplify the message that anything is still possible, because when you are 6 I think seeing is believe.”

The impact on others

What impact did the views have?

Maybe you know the story by now, but in case you don’t, the video has accumulated more than 123,000 views and we passed 100,000 views some time between Nov. 13 and Nov. 14 (depending on where in the world you live). So we reached the goal!

As a result of this, Roche will soon be sending their donation of $75,000 to the Diabetes Hands Foundation. Of these funds, $74,000 will be regranted to two charities:

Half will go to Insulin For Life.
The other half, to International Diabetes Federation, earmarked for their Life for a Child program.

Both are humanitarian programs that assist children with diabetes in need in third world countries (at times, Insulin For Life works with Life For a Child to source particular needs). Based on their past record track and their past financial reports, we estimated that roughly each of the first 100,000 views (the ones that counted towards the donation) translated into approximately one week’s worth of insulin given to a child in need.

So, if you do the math, nearly 2,000 children

will be getting a year’s worth of insulin

as a result of this initiative.

This comment shared by one of the viewers of the video sums it up very well:

“So many people think diabetes as ‘sad’ because of the need for shots and finger pricks. But for all too many, it is a death sentence as they can’t afford the life saving drug called insulin. We have the power to change that reality.”

We have the power and we used it! We did it, you guys! We did it!

I want to make sure to thank a few people by name before wrapping up this post about Big Blue Test 2010:

David Edelman from DiabetesDaily.com, Riva Greenberg from DiabetesStories.com and Boudewijn Bertsch: for being such amazing production partners.
Sean Ross: for working his MAGIC directing, shooting, editing and motion designing the video.
Andreina Davila, from Diabetes Hands Foundation: for her acute eye and opportune feedback that shaped the creative direction of the video.
Rob Muller (Social Media Consultant at Roche) and Todd Siesky (PR Manager at Roche): for championing the project from the beginning at Roche.

Re: Ning: Phoenix or Fizzle?

Posted on November 19, 2010 by askmanny

Earlier today, my friend Amy Sample Ward wrote an amazing follow-up post to the changes announced by Ning back in April that led to the elimination of their free option.

It is always good to go back and assess the impact changes have had on us. In the case of social networking platforms, the change in business model Ning announced certainly sent shock waves through the nonprofit and education world. Since then, a few things have happened and I thought I’d take a moment to share in this post what I’ve taken away from it:

In May, Ning announced the details around pricing levels for their new model. As I mentioned to Ning back then, I was glad to learn the details about the new price options. They do cover a broad range of Network Creator needs, including an option running at $2.95/month for networks up to 150 members.

A similar path has been followed by Grou.ps, as Amy pointed out in her post. They had been following the footsteps of Ning to give users tools to create their own social network. The cost of running the service appears to be too much to sustain free networks indefinitely at the expense of networks paying for premium services/features, so the freemium model doesn’t seem to work in cases of large scale/data intensive platforms that help users run entire social networks, as opposed to “simply” hosting photos (Flickr) or managing their social network updates/tweets (HootSuite).

As self-evident as it may be, it’s worth remembering once more that technology is not free. The change announced by Grou.ps shortly after Ning, eliminating their free service is a testament to this:

“The big lesson for nonprofits and education technologists alike would be to keep in mind that if you want absolute control over the way a certain platform or solution works, the only way that can be accomplished is by housing it yourself,” he said. “Unfortunately that comes at an additional cost, and that cost has to be taken by someone.”

This has not changed: the nonprofit and education sectors continue to be at the expense of changes in business models and will have to remain agile and flexible, ready to adapt on a moments notice (if possible) when/if the company hosting/running the service they offer changes or (even) goes out of business. The alternative is to run and host your own service with the additional IT costs this entails. So, as my friend Luis would say “there’s no free lunch!”
In July, Ning and WEGO Health announced a partnership through which WEGO started sponsoring qualifying health-centric networks. Seeing up-and-coming Health Networks benefit from a program such as this and Education networks on Ning made possible by Pearson feels great. But there are still far too many sectors that make social good possible that are waiting for their WEGO or their Pearson.

My hope is that we will see more companies and social entrepreneurial spirits step up to the plate and help cover the cost of running these services to make them possible for groups that cannot still afford them.

Last, one area that I have seen Ning make some strides in is helping Network Creators (nonprofit and for-profit alike) is helping generate revenue through your network. I highly recommend anyone running a network on Ning to check out the detailed resource page they put together on this topic, stemming from collecting donations, to running your merchandise storefront or serving your own ads (leaving Google Ads by the side) within your own network.

From our experience running TuDiabetes and EsTuDiabetes, I can tell you that even running Google Ads (which I am personally not a fan of, I admit) in a network of more than 100 members with a moderate activity level will help you generate enough revenue to easily pay for the lowest level on Ning, most likely helping you get the nearly $20/month plan so you don’t have to be limited by the 150-member ceiling.

So, are we out of the woods yet? Far from it… as Joan Manuel Serrat sings, “Caminante, no hay camino: se hace camino al andar” (Walker, there’s no road: you make your own road when you walk… -or something like that).

Why Malcolm Gladwell is Wrong!

Posted on November 9, 2010 by askmanny

A few weeks ago, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, wrote in The New Yorker about Twitter, Facebook and social media. In his article, near the end he argued:

[Social media] makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

I have enjoyed many of Gladwell’s books and highly respect him. But I think he got this one wrong. The best example of this is this year’s Big Blue Test video:

We asked the community (the diabetic blogosphere, nonprofit geeks, friends, family… you name it) to watch this video and share it, because (literally), each view equals a donation that will help a child with diabetes in need.

How is this possible? Roche Diabetes Care will make a donation of 75 cents for every view the video receives between Nov. 1 and Nov. 14 (World Diabetes Day) up to 100,000 views, for a maximum donation of $75,000. These funds will be donated to the Diabetes Hands Foundation and they will use the donation to help the Life for a Child program, run by the International Diabetes Federation, and Insulin For Life, two global, humanitarian organizations that provide diabetes medication and supplies to children in the world’s poorest countries.

What kind of impact can $75,000 make for these programs? Ron Raab, President of Insulin For Life told us:

“Every time someone watches this video, it will make a real contribution to someone actually staying alive. These donations go a long, long way. In places we assist, like Ecuador, less than 50 dollars keeps a person needing insulin alive for an entire year as it covers the transport cost for us to send the donated insulin.”

What has the response to the campaign been so far?
Amazing! We’re about to hit 70,000 views, 700 likes and 300 comments and have five more days ahead of us to reach the 100,000 views goal. On Twitter, there have been more than 2,200 tweets including #bigbluetest in the past 7 seven days.

By the time, the donation is made, the lives of thousands of children with diabetes in need will have been saved. If THAT is not making an impact, then I don’t know what to say to Gladwell… So, if you have not watched the video yet, please check out the Big Blue Test video. If you have watched it, take a couple of minutes and watch it again. Regardless, watch it and share it.

And if you are Malcolm Gladwell and you are reading this… please watch it and share it too!

Update:
As of Nov. 19, 2010, the video had been watched nearly 120,000 times. We reached the goal of 100,000 the evening of Saturday, Nov. 13 and Roche will be making the donation of $75,000 they pledged to help children with diabetes in need.

Big Blue Test campaign countdown begins…

Posted on October 27, 2010 by askmanny

These are some stills from the video we will be unveiling Nov. 1, to support the Big Blue Test. This year, the Big Blue Test will be bigger than ever!

Ask Manny Hernandez

A Venezuelan in Berkeley blogging about social media, nonprofits, diabetes and health 2.0.

Tag Archives: nonprofit

December: an overcrowded month for Online Fundraising?

Big Blue Test campaign countdown begins…