Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 4: Listening the Gateway Drug: Red Cross Case Study

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

The American Red Cross initiated its social media strategy shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2006. The organization knew there were negative blog posts about its disaster relief efforts, but had no capacity to respond, let alone track. They hired Wendy Harman, a social media integrator, to “combat” bloggers and to increase organizational transparency. “It felt like we were going to war. There were concerns about negative comments, fear even,” says Wendy whose current title is Social Media Manager.

Her first task was to identify and follow the existing conversations. “There were hundreds of mentions across social media platforms each day. I had to set up a listening post to monitor and analyze them as well as figure out how or if  to respond.”

The American Red Cross started a listening program with some key goals: correct misinformation, to be informed about public opinion, to track conversation trends, to identify influencers, and to build relationships. Wendy Harman notes, “We needed to listen and engage first before we could do anything successfully with social media.”

Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 3: Listening Tools: A Starter Kit

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

There are free and paid monitoring tools available to support listening through social media channels. To make your scanning efficient, you’ll a RSS Reader, software that grabs fresh content from blog posts, web posts, Twitter, and other sources. Most RSS readers, like Google Reader, are free.

Many nonprofits like Google  Reader, especially those who are working as a team because it makes it easy to share items without cluttering up email.

For additional tutorials and tips on using RSS Readers, see the NTEN’s WeAreMedia ToolBox.

Listening tools consist of monitoring, tracking, and analytics software. Here is a good starter kit using free tools.

Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 2: Listening Skills

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

Far more important than our choice of tools for the listening task, are your listening literacy skills. These include composing and refining keywords, pattern analysis, and synthesis of findings. There’s also a fourth skill:  Effectively engaging. Listening is not just quietly observing, sooner or later you need to interact with people and build relationships. Working out when and how to respond is an important technique that needs to be mastered.

Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 1: Why Listening Is Valuable

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

A Simple Definition: Listening

Listening is knowing what is being said online about your nonprofit organization, field or issue area. Listening uses monitoring and tracking tools to identify conversations that are taking place on the social web.  It is a prelude to engaging with your audience. At its very basic, listening is simply naturalistic research, although more like a focus group or observation than a survey.

Listening Literacy For Nonprofits

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009.  She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

Source: timbradshaw on flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I am an early adopter of social media and set up my listening post 5 years ago to scan for people, trends, and ideas related to social media and nonprofits. Listening and engaging with people has been critical to any success I’ve achieved as a social media practitioner – whether I’m blogging or fundraising for Cambodian children. For the past five years, I’ve been teaching social media workshops for nonprofits and lately doing deeper dives on the techniques of listening both for nonprofits and in my role as Visiting Scholar at the Packard Foundation.

This is a four-part series about listening for nonprofit organizations summarizes the insights I’ve learned about listening.

PAH Nation’s PAH-FEST Hollywood ’09: Democracy In Action

I had the honor of being asked by the gracious and giving Christopher Coppola – who just lost his father, August, this week – to be one of the judges for PAH-FEST Hollywood 2009. If you don’t know what PAH (Project Accessible Hollywood) is, take a moment to find out, because it’s a very important part of lending a hand to let all voices be heard.

It was amazing to judge… in the Circus Vision category I saw children being challenged to talk about more than whether or not they’d been to a circus, but to use that premise to get them thinking about how to represent rings, animals, flying, balance, colors, funny and opposites on the same school playground… brilliant!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Who’s Really Poor?: Confessions of a Journalist, Turned Peace Corps Volunteer, Turned Journalist Again, Turned Social Media Evangelist

 

Poverty…
 

To write about it is to see it. To experience it. To try to save people from it.

Hopefully.
 

Once upon a time, I was a TV reporter in my hometown. I was known – and to be known –  by anyone and everyone who knew my stories about last-dash Christmas shopping or Sarah McLachlan coming to town.

 
I often covered a different caliber of stories, though.

I covered the cases of hundreds of missing children, who were almost never found alive and were a constant reminder of, perhaps,  how the media lies in wait for tragedy to befall families. Often of little means, these families would wait, hold vigils and allow us access to their lives that would later make them recognized, for the most unsettling of reasons, at the local grocery store or pharmacy for the rest of their lives.

 

Jennifer reporting on the streets of New York City.

That was my early take on the media before I spent more than a decade reporting for the ‘big three’ and going to Columbia for my master’s. Somehow I knew if I didn’t take a break – a break to give back and help the plight of children – I would, by not making a decision to do otherwise, become bitter.

 

At 22, that’s a terrifying prospect.
 

So I searched my soul, looked back at the list I’d made a couple years earlier and embarked on the most testing experience of my life. I gave up being a local celeb to become a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkmenistan. It was one of the richest, most defining experiences of my life. I still remember a local journalist telling me at my going away party that he could never join the Peace Corps because one can’t be promised a working hair dryer.