open2media

We had 2 lively sessions on the first day of the conference, with a wide range of participants in our audience from across the UK who worked with a diverse range of voluntary and community organisations.

Beth Kanter from Boston joined us in the session using Skype (we hoped to have tested out the fab Oovoo but wasn’t to be, with wireless bandwidth issues on the day!).

Beth shared her experiences and enthusiasm of her recent fundraising successes and the factors which helped to make it happen by using social media. Big thank you to Beth for joining us, especially with the first time we ran our session being just after midday here in the UK, and only 7.30 am there with Beth in Boston. You can read Beths reflections on her part on our session here.

In our session we discussed about purpose, need, openness, transparency, and membership amongst other areas as well as some of the tools or ways that can help make it happen. Resistance from management or committees was raised several times as a potential barrier from adopting social media in voluntary nonprofit organisations. Our session was very much a discussion and conversation about use of social media and the change needed to help make it happen rather than us just saying ‘here are the tools and here’s how to use them’. We discussed about the reasoning and about the wider picture too, how people are using different ways to communicate and work together and that organisations should be looking to incorporate social media in addition to their current communications practice.

Paul Henderson from Ruralnet was able to share the insightful experience of his organisation that currently are ‘naked in a goldfish bowl’ themselves, as they are consulting with stakeholders and the wider community in exploring how to develop their future services online and openly.

We also ran the social media game (devised by David Wilcox) which is a really useful way to introduce the range of web 2.0 tools available to help organisations to make choices about what they want to do, and to decide how they are going to do it, and find and discuss a variety of tools to help make that happen. The tools included those for supporting of telling your story and reaching out and the tools to help work in collaboration or partnership with others or that can support more effective information management.

As with many conference sessions, we only had 90 minutes and on the second run of the session later in the afternoon, our lively discussion and conversation left us too little time to actually play the game, but we equipped participants with lots of ideas and examples for them to take away and use when supporting their own organisations in the field.
If you want to download the social media game as a tool to use in exploring social media with your organisation, you can download it from www.socialmedia.wikispaces.com/social+media+game.

For me this year’s Circuit Rider conference will be a great opportunity to take forward some of the discussions we had at last year’s event - and again get the benefit of working with a front-line expert.

Last year I had the chance to run a workshop with the amazing US-based blogger Beth Kanter, which included her knock-out presentation on social media, and the first run of the social media game. Reports are available on the social media wiki, together some other guidance we’ll be updating there and on this blog.

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More later on how we are planning the game - meanwhile here’s Beth’s slides from last year. I hope Beth may be able to join us virtually. I already know it is going to be a lot of fun developing this year’s workshop with Laura Whitehead. However good the Net, there’s something about being in the same country, sharing the same issues …. and running to catch up with yet another highly productive collaborator! Beth, Laura - how do you manage to do so much good stuff?