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.

Today, I used Oovoo for the first time to chat to Beth Kanter, based in Boston about her participation in our session taking place this Thursday. Oovoo is amazingly simple to use and see the picture about for a snapshot of what it looked like when speaking to each other. We hope to be using Oovoo in the session or Skype so that Beth can join in with David, Nick and myself to share her experiences with social media and nonprofits.

This may change - and I haven’t really checked with Laura - but at our workshop I expect to be referring quite a bit to the amazing development work my friends over at Ruralnet|UK are doing. Briefly, they are about to celebrate 10 years of providing online services to community and voluntary organisations, rural and urban too. It has been a “walled garden” approach with paid-for services behind a login. They are now re-inventing the whole thing in the social media world where a lot of good stuff is free. What’s extremely interesting is that firstly, they are doing the whole thing in the open, and inviting people to contribute online and in meetings. Secondly,they are rising to the challenge of mixing free tools and paid-for services. More at the links above to items I’ve written, or directly at ruralnet|online here.

I should say I’m working with Ruralnet, particularly with the sort of game we’ll be running at the workshop … so I’m a touch biased. But since it’s all open, you can form your own judgements.

I also hope that Paul Henderson, who is leading the development work, will be at the conference … and that I can tempt him to give a wave from here!