Here are the slides from a webinar we did recently for CommPartners’ Wit and Wisdom series.  This was a particularly fun one, with a GREAT, active chat. Get the free recording and archive here.

You’ve heard that more engaged members lead to better retention. And maybe you’d like to build more interactivity into your webinars. But what if your subject matter experts are not “social”. What if your participants are not so participatory? How do you even start? 

Maddie Grant, CAE and Lindy Dreyer—the experts behind social media strategy firm SocialFish—will share specific ideas designed to encourage engagement around your online education. As educators themselves, Maddie and Lindy have methods your subject matter experts can use, along with ideas for integrating social tools into your webinar platform and instructional design. Hear what other associations are doing, and how they are training speakers (and participants!) to be more interactive. 

The SocialFish will answer your questions, share ideas and inspiration, and give you actionable ideas that you can put to use right away.

Nonprofits are changing the world. It’s what we do. The smart ones understand the importance of leveraging technology to support these world-changing endeavors. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Our organizations often struggle to be nimble and agile in today’s changing environment, or to stay focused and on target in our program implementation, or to effectively engage employees, funders, and stakeholders in the process. Sometimes it feels like our organizational challenges outweigh our change efforts.

In fact, this is precisely the problem. Despite our progressive efforts to leverage technology to change the world, our organizational structures, processes, and management “best practices” haven’t seen real change in fifty years or more. Our organizations are stuck in outdated, 20th-century management models that are becoming more and more unworkable in today’s social and technology-driven world.

It’s time to bring change to the way we lead and manage nonprofit organizations – and make them more compatible with 21st-century reality.

We are partnering with NTEN—the Nonprofit Technology Network–to offer a three-month, action-learning course that takes the ideas in Humanize and puts them to work for your nonprofit organization.

21st Century Nonprofit: Leveraging Technology to Transform Leadership

The inaugural program runs January through March 2013, and to be a part of it you must fill out an application (deadline to apply is December 20). If you have questions, contact Maddie or Jamie.

Program Information

The 21st Century Nonprofit is a 3-month action-learning program designed to help you actually move away from the more mechanical and rigid management practices of last century and embrace a more open, transparent, and dynamic approach to the management and leadership of your nonprofit. The program will provide tools and analysis for developing and implementing change efforts internally, focusing particularly on using technology (social and otherwise) to move the needle on more effective leadership and management. Participants have the opportunity to learn from experts as well as peer-based learning and support from other nonprofit professionals who are going through similar efforts.

The 21st Century Nonprofit Program will be led by Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant, co-authors of Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World. Using frameworks and tools drawn from the book, as well as their years of consulting experience, they will work with participants through a combination of webinars, group teleconferences, and individualized coaching and advice for participating organizations. The webinar series in the program will be open to the public, but the other (primarily virtual) interactions in the program will allow course participants only to learn and discuss with other nonprofit executives in the program, as well as direct feedback and advice from the organizers. The program culminates with an in-person session at the NTC in April 2013.

After completing this program, you will be able to:

• leverage technology and social media to change not just marketing and IT, but the way you lead and manage your organization.
• identify actionable ways you can start shifting your organizational culture to embrace a more human approach to leadership and management.
• identify specific changes you can make to internal structures and processes to encourage more collaboration, experimentation and openness.
• address the individual behaviors and skill sets your people need to acquire in order to run with these changes and leave the traditional, mechanical management practices behind.

Participant Qualifications

The program is open only to qualified nonprofit organizations and can accommodate up to three individuals from each organization as participants in the program. At least one of the individuals must be the Executive Director or other senior-level manager. Participation from at least one person representing the technology/social media functions is recommended. Organizations must complete an application prior to registering for the program that indicates the organization’s interest/capacity for exploring significant organizational change, as well as the ability to meet the time commitment of the program.

The first cohort will be limited to 30 participating individuals.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAM HERE.

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As you know, we read Clay Shirky religiously over here at SocialFishing, and in the rare moments when he posts an essay or there is a video of him speaking, we always post it and it’s always thought-provoking.  This time, however, it’s not just thought-provoking, I think it has direct implications for the association industry.  In this article, Shirky’s talking about the imminent disruption to higher education. (My bold below).

The people in the music industry weren’t stupid, of course. They had access to the same internet the rest of us did. They just couldn’t imagine—and I mean this in the most ordinarily descriptive way possible—could not imagine that the old way of doing things might fail. Yet things did fail, in large part because, after Napster, the industry’s insistence that digital distribution be as expensive and inconvenient as a trip to the record store suddenly struck millions of people as a completely terrible idea.

Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.

It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralized and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.

Read the whole post: Napster, Udacity and the Academy

Now, this imminent disruption to higher education that Shirky goes on to describe is not a new topic, at least not in social media circles where we love to discuss the disruption of anything and everything (and, in fact, wrote a book about it).  But the higher education issue is one that I am concerned that not enough associations are thinking about (that I can see).  Associations, most of them anyway, are in the business of professional development for the people in their industries.  Are you positioning yourself to be part of the new world of social learning when it starts to happen overnight?  What happens to the millions of new college graduates in a couple of years who are used to learning online? Will they find the educational resources they need from your association website?  Will it be easy to navigate?  Will they be able to share educational courses, or videos, or quizzes, or anything else with their peers on a topic-by-topic basis?  Will they be able to include their peers, including some who may not specifically be signed up to your webinars, in their learning?  Will they find it easy to conduct online discussions around your educational content with people across the globe and in different time zones?  Will they be able to dip in and out however they please?  Will they be able to get the CE/CME/CPE/CEU and every other continuing education credit they might need in the ways that they need them?

This is a HUGE OPPORTUNITY – not a threat.  What are YOU doing to prepare for the disruption of higher education?

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