I use Twitter for work, and my work is all about the social sector. So I assume my followers form a cross section of the sector. A typical follower of mine is following 500 people. The all-time Twitter-holic on my list is following me plus 37,695 others. The most followed individual in my orbit who is not a politician or an institution has 340,757 followers. This made me stop and think – how do you follow 37,000 people on Twitter? For that matter, how do you follow even a mere 500?

Let’s break it down. Assuming you sleep, eat, and work a few hours each day you have at most 12 hours to hang out on Twitter. If you follow 500 people and each of them posts one tweet a day that means you have to read about 41 tweets an hour for each and every one of those 12 hours, every day. Most tweets appear deceptively short. You only have 140 characters to work with, but in my informal survey the number of easily readable tweets such as this one from Robert Egger

“Looking forward to working with you tomorrow David!!!”

are far outweighed by the number of tweets requiring a significant investment of time. Like this one from Nonprofit Quarterly, NPQ:

“Al Sharpton’s nonprofit @NationalAction faces financial troubles owl.li/7ZX8op”.

In order to get anything out of this tweet (beyond a bit of gossip) I have to click the link and then read the article. That took a good five minutes.

My point is that no one who is following 500 people is actually following much of what those 500 people are saying. Social sector Twitteratti seem to be using Twitter mostly to flog things on their own web sites, as NPQ does in the tweet above, or to let everyone know of a cool new resource or tool they have found. But how many people are actually reading all of this? It seems to me we are all just trying to collect followers for some purpose other than having them read our tweets.

So I have 3 suggested don’ts to help the social sector use Twitter more effectively:

1. Think twice before retweeting – is this something others will not be able to find if you don’t retweet it?
2. No superfluous tweets “It’s a beautiful day in Mazatlan” being one of my favorites in this useless category. Especially since I was freezing my anatomy in a blizzard in NYC last winter when I read this.
3. No ads like FFMW’s recent post “Don’t forget to sign up for our eNewsletter list for news, updates, and funding opportunities”.

If you are wondering what these don’ts leave to actually tweet about, that’s a very good question. Start with things you might want to actually read yourself. Remember it’s almost a haiku – short and pithy. Speak from your heart; don’t just troll the Internet for interesting articles and then tweet them to the masses – say things that would be worth reading.

If you have followed the emergence and spread of the Occupy Wall Street movement, you can see these trends at work – and it’s precisely the changes implied by the trends that have made this a difficult story for traditional media to cover.   How many times have you seen reports that this is a “leaderless movement?”  In a session on social change at the recent Independent Sector conference, a young woman expressed her frustration at this term, saying “The problem that people seem to have in understanding OWS is that it is, in fact, a leader-full movement.”  She makes a good point.   Those involved are sharing leadership, inviting others to engage in the movement, and they are using technology to communicate broadly and through open channels – but not necessarily the channels to which traditional media are accustomed (no one issues press releases announcing the next day’s events).

If we try to understand what is happening in the sector through applying an older framework, we are likely to end up with a conundrum like that expressed by Arthur Brisbane in the New York Times in which he says “Occupy Wall Street has proved to be a difficult sprawling story to report” and one that has generated a great deal of reader concern about the coverage.  Much of the concern seems rooted in the challenges of applying an old framework (single leader, traditional means and channels of communication, civic engagement bounded within a hierarchical institution) to an emerging new world.

Can advocacy organizations learn anything from the spread of OWS around the country and the world?

Has the media’s confusion regarding the “message” of OWS caused you to look at your communications strategy?  Which way are you going?

But I was drawn back into the discussion when he told a story from his childhood – one about he and other neighborhood kids who competed to see how high they could swing, standing up, hoping to get enough velocity to swing the whole way around.  While attempting one of these standing 360 feats a piece of the swing broke and he fell.  He noted that he got pretty scraped up, but no attorneys got involved, there wasn’t a petition to close the playground, he (and other neighborhood kids) were just back on the swings the next day – standing – trying to swing up and over the swing set.

I thought about my own experiences (and the scars still visible on my hand and both knees) from my own childhood mishaps while at play.  But I also thought about the feeling of swinging over a creek on a vine – and making it to the other side – or those perfect summer days playing a pick-up game of ball.  In fact, most of our play was on the street or in empty lots rather than an actual playground.

It was a long drive so this took my mind to the way in which nonprofits have had to create a dynamic in which there is a BIG PROBLEM that has to be defined in order to capture donors and volunteers.  Hammond defined a “play deficit” and the “play deserts” that cause physical, emotional, and intellectual harm to our children.  He connected these to increasing rates of childhood obesity and poor school behavior and performance.  I don’t doubt this.  Play is not only about learning to get along with people, physical activity, and creativity – it’s also about risk taking and pushing the limits.  KaBOOM! has done a brilliant job of bringing a lot of resources to building playgrounds in places that need one.

However, creating this negative frame of reference always bothered me when I was running a community-based organization.  Sure, my communities were some of the poorest in the region – communities that had lost their economic heart and a lot of young residents when the steel mills closed.  But they weren’t communities without good people, good ideas, and a willingness to work.

The calamity that hit them was created by much bigger international market forces and reverberated throughout western Pennsylvania – and other steel-making places around the country.  But to get the resources needed to reshape still viable residential neighborhoods and support the remaining core of small manufacturers in the region meant defining the negatives – the deficits and deserts – and pushing the assets far down the list.

I remember a drive through one of those communities – Rankin – with Paul Grogan, who was then the President of Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).  Paul noted that the housing stock didn’t look that bad compared to some of the other places that LISC was working.   That comment really frustrated me.  (Sorry, Paul.)  I think I answered with something like, “Does a neighborhood have to reach rock bottom before it’s worth investment?  Wouldn’t we be better off intervening while there’s still some decent housing and a neighborhood to build on?”  (LISC decided that the answer to that was “yes.”)

All of us are looking at a very difficult funding environment in which these critical questions come up every day.  More and more often foundations are asking for the ROI when they make a grant – or less elegantly – where’s the biggest bang for the buck? How big is the problem and how creative the solution?  Do you go to the biggest problems that require the most significant time and resources?  How long do you sustain the investment?  Does that influence the approach?

All big questions – and ones that make me appreciate the challenges in making these decisions.

What’s your experience been like as a grantseeker or grantmaker?  Do the deserts get all the attention at the expense of the gardens that may be facing a temporary drought and just need some water to bloom again or are the deserts so vast they can’t be ignored?

It strikes me that when municipal governments start looking to local nonprofits for help with public sector financial problems the end of civilization cannot be far off. What’s next, the mayor standing in line at the soup kitchen?

This phenomenon reminds me of a story I heard from a client who worked for a tech company. He claimed he could track his company’s fortunes by the prices at the soda vending machine in the lunchroom. When he first started at the company the vending machine was left open and the sodas were free. As the economy tightened a modest charge was imposed at the vending machine, basically to cover the cost of the drinks. “But,” he told me, “when they raised the prices again and I figured out that the vending machine was now being viewed as a profit center, I knew the company was in trouble.”

Viewing nonprofits as a revenue source for local government strikes me as the “vending machine as profit center” way of thinking.  The entire tax system is off, yet we look to nonprofits rather than to tax reform. The U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the world – yet many large companies pay nothing at all. Let’s look to close those loopholes before we start asking the local community hospital to contribute to the city’s coffers.

Prizes can be an effective tool for innovation and can also be used to identify best practices and new levels of excellence, change wider perceptions, build a more effective network of problem-solvers, and mobilize new talent or funding.  Of the organizations surveyed by McKinsey in their report And the Winner is…the majority said that their prizes had been most successful at setting standards of excellence and influencing perceptions of a field.  However, organizations found prizes were less successful in mobilizing talent from unusual sources or improving participants’ skills.  Additionally, they identified that competition for a prize may have the unwanted tendency to deter collaboration.  Nonetheless, prizes may have the capacity to promote changes in skills, outcomes, and behavior.  And with changes in technology, widespread use of the social web, and new concepts like crowdsourcing gaining in traction, we can anticipate that prizes may be able to deliver even more powerful end results.

There are several elements for developing and implementing a successful prize competition. The first and one of the most important steps is for an organization to clearly define the change it seeks.  By developing a finite and measurable statement that defines the problem and the end result desired, an organization can access if a prize is the most effective strategy.  Successful prizes must have concrete and easily measureable goals that can be translated into significant, motivational, actionable, results-focused, and time-bound objectives.  Developing clear prize criteria is also essential to testing whether a prize is a potential solution to a problem.

The right prize design is critical to any prize success. A successful prize will employ one of at least six prize mechanisms:

• Excellence: Focus attention on and/or influence a field or issue
• Best practices+: Highlight best practices, ideas or opportunities
• Network: Strengthen a community
• Innovation: Source innovation and expose additional needs in the system
• Solution: Solve a challenging, well-defined problem
• Participation: Educate & change behavior

After determining if a prize is the right strategy and choosing a mechanism, the next steps are prize and process design.  The nuts to bolts of prize design and process include many complex tasks requiring substantial investment of staff and fiscal resources.  A growing industry of prize facilitators means that some of these activities can be outsourced for a price.  However, even outsourcing still requires substantial staff investment.

There are challenges, however.  Some prizes have expended a great deal of money, but achieved little impact.  Prizes can tax both human and financial resources with high transactional costs including: research and planning, outreach and media, overall administration, coordination of evaluation and selection process (e.g., coordinating judges), and hosting an award event.  An effective prize requires significant resources in the design, process, and implementation stages.

Prizes are a powerful tool that can promote a positive result if matched to the right focus; prizes are not panacea and any mismatch in prize type to the change sought may deliver less than desired results.  Successful prizes can create a demonstration effect for organizations looking for innovations to impact a problem along with increasing visibility for the problem and potential solutions.  However, running a successful prize competition requires extensive work and expenditure of substantial financial and other resources.

Sources for this post included:

And the Winner Is…, McKinsey and Company. 2009

Federally Funded Innovation Inducement Prizes, Congressional Research Service. 2009

Prizes, Challenges and Open Grant-Making, Gail Davenport’s blog. 2010

Promoting Innovation: Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking.  A report from the conference hosted by the Case Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the White House Domestic Policy Council. 2010

Citizen Centered Solutions. Lessons in Leveraging Public Participation from the Make It Your Own Awards,  The Case Foundation. 2010

1.    Home foreclosures are still going gangbusters. Until this trend eases there will be no incentive to buy a house that is not in distress and with 10 houses on the market for every buyer prices will continue to drop. States where the housing market is an important part of the economy, and the tax base, will continue to suffer.

2.    Employment is stagnant and what new jobs we are seeing are largely temporary, with no benefits or security. The continuation of the perfect poverty storm – more people needing more services just when there are fewer tax and donor dollars to pay for them – is assured for the next year.

3.    The federal government just passed the largest package of tax breaks in recent history yet is “firmly committed” to deficit reduction. How does that work? By cutting discretionary spending. Since they can’t cut Social Security and Medicare, and they won’t cut the military, that leaves relatively small pockets of social program spending – pockets which nonprofits depend upon – to take deep cuts.

4.    The states are in real trouble. Many are nearing insolvency. Unlike the feds they can’t just print more money, and most have a constitutional requirement for a balanced budget. The quickest way to electoral defeat is to mention the possibility of raising taxes, and states too have entitlements that must be met. That means those few dollars spent on discretionary social programs are going to be squeezed even more tightly, and  even required programs like health care for the poor are going to be pared down to the bone. In California, where counties deliver the bulk of human services, we have already seen health and social services authorities both “lengthen the line and thin the soup.”  The pot will soon be empty.

5.    No one cares. In times of economic difficulty it is normal for people to look to their own needs first. And with jobs dicey, homes under water, and the general gloomy economic environment, “compassion fatigue” is in full swing.

Lest I leave you with no hope – let’s remember that this whole period of deep misery is temporary. The economy will improve, employers will begin adding jobs again, and we’ll return to the normal moderate level of misery. We just need to keep being smart, doing what we can, and finding creative solutions – to get us through 2011.

At one point I raised the possibility of networked activity replacing the function of some nonprofits. This is the dreaded disintermediation we all wince when hearing about.

If an artist can sell his or her work through an easily-constructed web site, why do we need art centers and galleries? If a volunteer can surf the net for places to give time, what role do volunteer centers play?

There are certainly value added activities associated with each of these entities so I don’t mean to imply that they can be readily replaced tomorrow.

On the other hand we should not delude ourselves that there is something sacrosanct about our current line-up of nonprofits. If major cities and small towns alike can lose their newspapers they can also lose their once-cherished nonprofits.

As I made this point a young woman commented that she was not sure there was reason to mourn the loss of these groups if they were made irrelevant by advances in technology, changing community needs or generational preferences.

My initial reaction was that people who had worked or volunteered on behalf of these organizations for major portions of their lives might feel differently. But I immediately realized that was a defensive reaction.

There is a classic case of nonprofit law involving cy pres, a legal doctrine which asserts that if a donor’s intent can no longer be met his or her gift should be devoted to another cause “as close as possible” to the original cause.

The case I’m thinking of involved a lighthouse in Boston Harbor. A trust had been established to bring the local newspapers to the lighthouse keeper from Boston each week by boat. Eventually the lighthouse was automated and the keeper retired. Through this technological advance there was no way for the trust’s original intent to continue to be pursued. The court determined that delivering newspapers to an old sailors’ home was close enough and the trust’s purpose was shifted. Here is a hundred-year-old case of technology impacting a nonprofit’s purpose and fundamentally altering it.

I assume no one cried over the loss, but then again, the lighthouse no longer had any employees to shed those tears.

Aside from the politics there are just no good choices for reducing our nation’s indebtedness. Raise taxes generally and you hurt the recovery.  Raise taxes on the rich and you incur their wrath and mobilize an onslaught of lobbyists. Cut spending and you hurt the recovery plus a lot of people who are in need of government services ranging from unemployment insurance to mental health care.

What’s the President to do?

One approach that is sure to be included in any agreement is to delay implementation until the economy improves. By the time that happens we will be a lot further in debt, but any draconian moves will be less damaging.

Another approach, recommended by economists, is to ignore the debt per se and focus instead on growing the economy so that the debt becomes a smaller percentage of GDP. This is how we have dealt with it in the past. Robust economic growth coupled with modest reforms could do the trick.

Lost in the debate over the deficit is the role our nation’s nonprofits can play in bringing about economic growth. If the engine of employment is small business, most nonprofits are local, community-based employers of anywhere from one to a couple dozen people. Increased funding for essential services such as homeless shelters, food banks, and counseling programs achieves a trifecta of economic benefits.

First, most of many local nonprofits’ budgets are devoted to human resources so any new money coming in is instantly translated into new jobs, and those workers pay taxes.

Second, newly hired nonprofit workers help their fellow Americans deal with the consequences of the poor economy. Whether it is finding a stable living situation or putting food on a family’s table, most nonprofit programs involve helping their clients through increased economic activity. Renting an apartment or providing a service enhances a community’s economic output.

And third, safety net services provided by nonprofits help government at all levels to avoid expenses.  For example, mentoring programs or other support services provided by nonprofits benefit adolescents  – who might have struggled with an unplanned pregnancy or juvenile detention in the absence of those nonprofit services – and save the state tens of thousands of dollars in related health, welfare, and police expenses.

Unspoken in my argument above, but equally important to our country’s well-being, is the alleviation of suffering nonprofits deliver to our society.

The bottom line: added investment in our nation’s nonprofit service providers will yield immediately increased employment and other economic activity plus long term reductions in cost. It is not the total solution to our economic mess but it is a step in the right direction.

Yet in recent weeks we have seen two more major affiliates of well-known national nonprofits leave the fold. Planned Parenthood Golden Gate, in Northern California, is now Golden Gate Community Health, and KCET, the PBS affiliate in Los Angeles, recently announced its intention to leave the PBS family in January 2011.

Each of these situations is unique and involves a combination of differing perspectives, financial tensions and interpersonal conflicts, but I wonder if economic pressures are increasingly going to drive large affiliates of national organizations to leave behind their household brand name in favor of independence.

KCET will lose access to crucial PBS programs such as Sesame Street, while the two health organizations named above will continue to offer the same service but without the benefit of instant name recognition.

Given the demands of participation in a national organization (financial, programmatic, quality review, brand usage and the like) we may see additional large affiliates deciding they can do better on their own.

In the short run that may be true, but it remains to be seen whether they can replace the instant name recognition and credibility of their former national partners with local support. And of course there is always the possibility – indeed the likelihood – that the national organization will establish a new franchise in the same area, providing a high profile competitor who will build on the previous organization’s name recognition, now abandoned.

Stay tuned.