Training Program Area: Online Seminars | Packages
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Beyond Lip Service to Mission: The Risks, Failures, and Opportunities of Nonprofit Technology Planning – Getting the right answers involves asking the right questions. For years, many practitioners of nonprofit technology planning have been asking the wrong questions. They’ve been asking questions defined by the technology, rather than by the mission of the organization. The results have been resistance to change, long sales cycles, inappropriate technology, unexpected costs, and unused tools. This seminar is a radical re-examination of ‘technology planning’ as it is currently conducted with practical recommendations to planners, technology consultants and staff, nonprofit leaders, and funders. Slowly, our field is maturing to the point where we have started to develop a collective narrative about truly effective technology. The time is ripe to take that narrative and use it to put technology planning fully into the service of mission. (more)
Beyond the Email Blast: Tapping the Full Power of Email Marketing – The Email Marketing Model is a rich framework for cultivating relationships with stakeholders by taking advantage of the inherent two-way nature of email communication. And yet, the number one phrase used for describing how most organizations apply the model is: The Email Blast. Taking that metaphor to its natural conclusion, doesn’t a blast seem like the opposite of cultivation? A landscape that’s been blasted is one that is barren and full of holes, not one that is green and productive. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Despite the hype of other media, email is still the single most powerful online communication tool we have. This workshop will help you avoid the destructive model of the Email Blast and enable you to take full advantage of the power of email. (more)
Breakthroughs in Organizational Communication – This is a predecessor course to our intensive workshop on Strategic Communication, in which we facilitate a team of yours to actually plan major breakthroughs for your organization. But if you want an overview of where those breakthroughs are likely to come from, you can explore that in this survey workshop. (more)
Building a Blog Network: Scaling Up Your Organizational Reach through the Voices of Your Community – Your organization is sitting on top of a vast untapped well of communication resources – stakeholders, allies, peers, donors, volunteers, and others in your community who have something to say. One of the most effective ways to tap into these resources and achieve some real influence over online conversations about you and your issues is to nurture a network of loosely affiliated weblogs. That’s what we’ll teach you how to do. (more)
Building Your Online List: A High Integrity Model for Reaching Large Numbers on the Internet – Ever since the publication of The Gilbert Email Manifesto, organizations have been asking how they can build lists of email addresses like the ones of postal addresses they have developed over the years. We’ve answered that question in many different ways, but now, for the first time, we are putting all those answers together in one place. (more)
Communication Centered Technology Planning – Enormous amounts of irreplaceable time and money has been spent and is continuing to be spent on technology projects that, in the end, are often only marginally successful, if they can claim success at all. The underlying causes of this can be found in flaws in the conventional technology planning processes of nonprofit organizations. (more)
Course Corrections: A Mid-Career LifeWork Seminar – You’re making a living. You’re even making a difference. But is it the difference you want to make? This workshop asks the hard questions that need to be asked about the work we settle for, about the difference we’re actually making, and about the legacy we leave behind. (more)
Delivering Online Seminars: A Sustainable Model for Engagement of Staff, Volunteers, and Donors – The Internet has helped civil society organizations transcend geographical boundaries like never before. One of the demands of our new reach is the need to make presentations and host seminars without paying for everyone to be in the same room. At the same time, the Internet is replacing expensive remote conferencing tools with cheaper, generic systems that nonprofits can afford. While nothing entirely replaces face to face meetings for building trust and connection, online seminars are a increasingly powerful vehicle for management, training, organizing, and relationship building with our stakeholders – allies, staff, volunteers, and donors. (more)
Email Newsletter Marketing – The core practice of the “Email Savvy” organization is the successful use of an email newsletter. Blasting email out the door is easy, but creating newsletters that actually work, in the context of a flow of communication that genuinely engages people, that can actually be much harder. It’s become especially true in today’s world of spam-inundated mailboxes. This series will help you develop and maintain a newsletter marketing model that avoids common pitfalls, implements best practices, and moves you in the direction of continual improvement of your systems for engaging your stakeholders. (more)
Email Newsletter Reinvention & Improvement – Email newsletters have become a mainstream practice in much of civil society. But very few of these newsletters have reached their full potential as tools for building and leveraging relationships with donors, volunteers, and other stakeholders. Many are impaired by common mistakes and most don’t achieve clearly defined objectives. This seminar, despite being online, will offer collaborative, hands-on analysis of your newsletter, leveraging the insights of both students and instructors. This seminar is right for you if you’re looking for practical improvements to your newsletter and a framework for continued betterment. (more)
Exploring Email Marketing: An i4 Seminar on Discovering Actionable Communication Patterns is a free thirty-minute seminar based on the written report with a similar name. The focus of this case study is to show how business intelligence can produce actionable insights. We look closely at five key email practices, the research that showed how they were correlated, the marketing model that emerged from them, and the lessons that this has for metrics, planning, and evaluation in nonprofit communication. (more)
Facing Facebook: Achieving Meaningful Success in Online Social Networks – Chances are good you are either using Facebook or are thinking about it. What proportion of that effort is money well-spent? Are you using Facebook or is it using you? We all have to face the power that Facebook derives from some very powerful network effects. The trick is to make it a tool for your communication strategies, and to not allow yourself to be made into a tool of Facebook’s marketing. The key to that is the ability to apply the principles, practices, and tools that make Facebook itself successful (sometimes even using Facebook for this purpose!), and that is what we’ll focus on in this workshop. (more)
Frictionless Fundraising – The Internet has the potential to bring the art and science of fundraising back into balance, restore the confidence and trust of donors, and deeply enhance the relationships our organizations have with our stakeholders. Or it can be yet another way to alienate our supporters and disempower our fundraising professionals. The Frictionless Fundraising workshop will help you avoid the easy pitfalls and set you on a path of success. (more)
The Golden Goose: Building Trust Online with Donors, Activists, and the Media – Trust is the great productive force of civil society, a force that you turn into money, action, and attention of all kinds. Trust is the difference between a one time donation and lifelong financial commitment, between tossing your news release and calling you whenever a story breaks, between considering your petition and calling a hundred friends on behalf of your cause. Today, it’s easier than ever to both build and destroy the trust of your stakeholders. Building trust – the “goose that lays the golden egg” – is a critical practice that is frequently undermined by the mechanics of email and web communication. (more)
Grantmaker Collaboration: A Presentation of the i4 Case Study on Foundation Speech and Behavior is a free thirty-minute seminar based on the written report with a similar name. In this case study, we applied the i4 analytical method to a current research project of ours. The research methods that get this treatment include (1) correlation tests, (2) website text analysis, (3) website social network crawling, and (4) network analysis and visualization. In this short seminar, you will be exposed to each of those four research methods, and some specific research tools. (more)
How to Win the Grantwriting Game: Mastering Standards of Evidence in these Demanding Times – The research staff of The Gilbert Center spent a year studying the top foundations in the U.S. to learn how each of them conceives of and applies standards of evidence to their grantmaking decisions. Before that they spent fifteen years developing an increasingly well-refined model for program planning and evaluation, which is currently described in our i4 Framework. In this seminar, we bring these bodies of work together to help teach you how to win grants in a time when more is being expected of you than ever before. (more)
How to Write a Book in One Year: Keystrokes Book Plan Workshop – If you have a book you want to write — and many creative people do — most often the biggest barrier to completing it is not a lack of ideas or even a lack of craft. It’s a perceived lack of time. Writing is an exercise in discipline. The Keystrokes Book Plan Workshop addresses that issue by teaching a writing discipline that works. (more)
Integrated Program Evaluation: An Affordable Model for Better Metrics, Improvement, and Accountability – We all need to know how well we are actually doing in our work. Increasingly, we are being called upon to document our effectiveness in specific, often numerical, terms. The standard solution these days is to do after-the-fact evaluation, which frequently yields results that are far from rigorous. It can also be very expensive. The alternative is Integrated Program Evaluation. Although by no means a new concept, Integrated Program Evaluation is now cheaper than ever. Thanks to new media and work methods, it’s now possible – by integrating evaluation into planning, communication, and peer networks – to design programs and activities that are essentially self-evaluating. (more)
Less is More: Personal Empowerment in the Age of Information Overload – The age of information overload has been with us for some time. Neil Postman’s famous 1990 speech on Informing Ourselves to Death was neither the beginning nor the end of the era. But among people who want to make the world a better place, more is at stake today than ever before. Too many people are paralyzed, distracted, interrupted, or stressed. At the same time, the opportunities for personal empowerment in regard to information are greater than ever. (more)
Light a Fire: Successful Social Marketing for Nonprofits – Whether it goes by the name Viral Marketing, Network Marketing, Social Marketing, Flipping the Funnel, or even old school Community Organizing, activists and fundraisers are understandably excited about the power that networks have to carry their message for them. It’s not enough to imitate commercial successes. Rather, civil society organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the elements of trust, passion and community that are the ingredients of successful social marketing. (more)
Making Peace with Time – Our culture teaches us that time is an enemy. There is never enough time to get everything done. We are pressured by time. We begin to hate the very idea of time and yet we have a peaceful ideal that we keep hoping for. Time terrorizes us and yet we cannot escape. This is particularly true for those of us who are dedicating our lives to social change and service. (more)
Measuring the Value of a Web Page: An i4 Seminar on Backlinks as a Relevance Metric is a free thirty minute seminar based on the similarly named case study. The focus of the seminar is on the use of inbound web links as a metric for determining the value of a web page to stakeholders. The seminar will review the case study — which concerns the web pages of major nonprofit data portals (left anonymous in the case study) and explain the i4 analytical framework. However, it will spend the majority of its time on exploring the methods by which the metrics were developed and gathered. (more)
The Modern Nonprofit Web Site: Strategies, Patterns, and Tools – We all know now that the modern nonprofit web site is not simply an online brochure, but knowing what it is not only gets us started. Maybe that will help us avoid spending our limited budgets on pretty online boondoggles, but we still need a proactive vision. We still need to know what works. These seminars will give you that answer and more. (more)
Money on the Table: The Financial Opportunity of Converting Your Stakeholders to Email – For what proportion of your main stakeholder list do you have email addresses? Some organizations are on top of this, but most aren’t. Of course, old media are still working and are not going to vanish overnight. Postal campaigns are still the bread and butter of many fundraising programs. Nevertheless, billions of dollars are spent every year by civil society organizations on postal based stakeholder relations that are marginally effective, but are very, very expensive. What this means is that the budget for dramatic expansion of successful online communication programs is tied up in the cost of printing, paper, and postage. (more)
Nonprofit Blogging Strategies: Leveraging the Best of Old and New Channels – It’s easy to start a weblog. It’s harder to have it be of strategic value. To most people, even the words “blogging” and “weblog” don’t sound strategic. Blogging’s conflicting reputation as either the future of journalism on the one hand or personal gossip rag on the other makes it hard to see where it fits in our communication plans. Weblogs are overhyped but underused. This workshop is right for you if you’re looking for the middle path, if you need sensible ways to promote blogging in your organization, if you want to make sure that your blogging efforts are successful. (more)
Nonprofit Knowledge Management – Knowledge Management is an overused phrase with a dubious lineage, often connoting a software centric solution of some kind. But underneath the phrase is a powerful concept: that there are opportunities for learning in the new information and communication networks. This series will help you find those opportunities, keep you from taking expensive wrong turns, and give you guidance for high impact knowledge management initiatives. (more)
Nonprofit Technology Consulting Skills – The field of nonprofit technology consulting has grown and evolved enormously in the last few years. One of the essential tensions in the field is the sense that technology consultants, in order to do their job responsibly, have to become communication and management consultants as well. As nonprofits get more sophisticated and the technology develops to address mission critical needs, this tension is only getting worse. These seminars will address that tension head on, by identifying appropriate roles in the consulting process and by helping technology consultants ground their work in the communication needs of the organizations they serve.(more)
Nonprofit Technology Planning and Implementation – The last few years of technological change have brought nonprofit leaders enormous opportunities and challenges and that pace of change shows no sign of slowing. The potential to make the same mistakes over and over continues to be an issue for many organizations. Nonprofit leaders rarely have the time for conferences or workshops outside their issue areas. These seminars on Nonprofits & Technology will provide you with solid tools and guidelines targeted at your role as a decision maker. (more)
Online Community Organizing: Proven Techniques for Building Power, Leadership, and Connection – Although organizations have mostly failed to tap its potential, the Internet is one of the greatest community organizing tools of all time. Unfortunately, most nonprofit online community efforts seem to follow the anemic suggestion that stakeholders “talk amongst themselves”. We can do much better than that. Indeed, the power of old school community organizing combined with new media has the potential to utterly revolutionize our work and our impact. (more)
Online Fundraising: You’re Doing it Wrong! – We’re all trying to do online fundraising right, but we’re pulled in so many directions. We have web pages and newsletters and social network doohickies and donate buttons, and possibly more things that someone felt we just had to do to be serious about online fundraising. But in fact, we’re still doing it wrong. Right now, the most powerful change strategy is probably not to add yet another new thing. Instead, we need to take a ruthless look at what we’re doing right now and fix the mistakes that keep what we’re doing from delivering results. That’s exactly what we’ll be aiming for in this 90 minute workshop. (more)
Online Marketing Reinvention & Improvement: A Hands-On Workshop for Your Online Marketing Programs – For most nonprofits, online marketing development has been driven by a series of hype cycles, leading organizations to turn their attention to a series of semi-connected activities, such as websites, ecommerce, email newsletters and campaigns, viral messaging, online community, and social networking. The result is often a mix of strong and weak programs and a meager planning and evaluation framework. Many groups can benefit from an organized process for improving (and sometimes even reinventing) their online marketing programs. (more)
Online Social Networks Are Not Mailing Lists: But If Not That, What Are They? – One of the most attractive questions that arises is how organizations can put formal online social networks to good use. But most nonprofits are suffering from a flaw in their frame of reference, when it comes to the question of such networks. This revolves around the notion of what kind of asset they think an online social network is. Our attitudes seem to be shaped by the familiar metaphor of the mailing list – a broadcast model of communication that involves the organization asking and people on the list giving. But, as Michael Gilbert wrote recently at Nonprofit Online News, Online Social Networks Are Not Mailing Lists. Mr. Gilbert’s talk will build on the ideas from that article, address objections to its thesis, and briefly suggest a few alternative points of view that respect the notion that nonprofits still have to pay the bills. (more)
Organizational Restructuring in the Age of Networks – Boundaries are shifting. Resources are expanding. Responsibilities are changing. The opening up of our organizations to the influence of the networks that we’re a part of is transforming fundraising, volunteer management, education, and advocacy. But what does this mean specifically? How does it affect staff responsibilities, hiring, communication and management policies, compensation? (more)
Pageviews vs. Visitors: A Presentation of the i4 Case Study on Web Analytics is a free thirty-minute seminar based on the written report of the same name. Using the i4 methodology through the lens of a common aspect of nonprofit web analytics, it shows how to look critically at different types of web traffic numbers and how to design and set up certain online metrics that serve your mission. In this short seminar, you will learn about the application of four key aspects of data-driven decision making to web analytics: the application of (1) logic models, (2) business intelligence analysis, (3) management methods, and (4) innovation strategies. In the process, specific examples of planning and measuring will be explored. (more)
The Permeable Nonprofit: Organizational Integrity and Effectiveness in the Network Age – The nonprofit sector is about to change and no organization will escape the transition. A convergence of technologies and practices foretell a radical restructuring of the nonprofit sector. The pressures to collaborate are growing. Weblogs, social bookmarking, email, messaging, and all the permutations of network centric communication are dissolving the traditional boundaries of the organization. What does this mean for your organization? Will you even be around in five years? Or will you find a way to thrive and pursue your mission with even greater vigor? Nonprofit organizations have to find a way to strengthen their center, while opening their boundaries to collaboration and communication of all scales and types. Like a healthy living cell, they must find the right balance of permeability. Many organizations will not make it. Will yours? (more)
Practical Collaboration: Working Together in the Age of Networks and Perpetual Connectivity – Too often the barriers to collaboration between individuals and between organizations are invented by our anxieties, false perceptions, and destructive narratives. Collaboration should be a practical affair that calms relationships, increases transparency, and helps make accomplishment more natural. Together, new technologies, networks, and connectivity have created an environment where we can collaborate naturally, effectively, and with remarkably little overhead. (more)
Rapid Project Prototyping: Raising Money and Reducing Risk in the Age of Agility – We think too small and we start too big. The age of networks and agility is upon us and we still lumber along with projects that do too little, take too long, and cost too much. At the same time, funders are getting more rigorous: More and more they are asking for proof of concepts, meaningful assessments, and pilot projects, before they are willing to put serious money into new projects (and sometimes even current ones). Fortunately, these two apparent problems – the speed of change in a networked society and the caution of funders – together present a new vision of project development and management. (more)
Scaling Up Listening: Powerful Online Relationship Building – Listening is the most effective persuasive strategy in existence. Nothing builds trust, loyalty, commitment, and action like feeling heard. We live in a society of unaccountable government and corporate power, where people’s everyday experience is akin to talking to a telephone company’s customer “service” department. In this context, civil society organizations can be a breath of fresh air. The Internet represents an opportunity for scaling up listening to our stakeholders that we haven’t seen since the intimate life of villages. In so doing, our organizations will raise more money, mobilize more volunteers, and build vastly greater capacity to pursue our missions. (more)
Small is Beautiful: Using Twitter, Flickr, Microblogging, Links, and Other Microcontent for Engagement – At the same time as popular commercial platforms such as Twitter and Flickr have brought attention to the fundamental power of microcontent, the inventor of the WWW and others are promoting the transformative vision of the Semantic Web. What does this mean for you and your organization when you have little enough time for the regular, everyday web? How do you navigate through the hype and tap the real opportunities for mission-fulfilling engagement? (more)
Social Networking Strategies and Tactics: A Guide to Maximum Return and Minimum Lock-In – There are social networks and then there are Social Networks. The first kind – our connections with our colleagues, our stakeholders, and our communities – are essential to organizational success. The second kind – the web based services that both support and profit from our connections – are the subject of regular conversations by every organization engaged in online communication and organizing. FaceBook, MySpace, Linked In, LiveJournal, Bebo, Orkut, Imeem, StumbleUpon, Last.fm, Friendster, Twitter, Ning, and others… Are they worth our investment as an organization? How do they affect our ability to reach our stakeholders? How can we leverage what they have to offer? How can we use them without getting locked in? (more)
Technology Planning: You’re Doing it Wrong! – Technology planning is a lot like an endless journey into foreign lands. The tools of navigation are wonderful and varied, but when we’re about to head into risky terrain, there is nothing as useful as a great big Stop Sign. There are a lot of great models that will tell you what you need to do for successful technology planning, including our own Communication Centered methods. But in this workshop, we’re going to focus on what not to do. Why? Because year after year, everywhere we look, nonprofits are continuing to do it wrong. We all need to take a hard look at what we’re doing – and what we’re planning on doing – and fix the mistakes that will undermine our work, sometimes for years to come. That’s what we’ll be doing in this seminar. (more)
Trust: Building a Renewable Base of Funding, Volunteers, and Leadership – We live in a time when people are hungry for the truth. A combination of forces, including the inhuman scale of many institutions, the breakdown of community ties, and the promising transparency of new media, have come together to give simple honesty a truly compelling power. Authenticity is an untapped resource of extraordinary proportions. Civil society organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity. Authenticity leads to trust and trust is the essential currency of our relationships with our stakeholders. Research confirms this: Time and again, surveys shows that we are the most trusted sector, above both business and government. Whether it’s in art or advocacy or education or healing or any other cause, we are at our best when we are authentic. And yet, we can get as caught up in the layers of obfuscation and avoidance as anyone. In our day to day work, we let anxiety become institutionalized and keep us from the power that the truth has to motivate, to teach, and to calm. With a focus on civil society, this series of seminars will address three key practices of authentic organizations: learning to fail faster and thus learn faster; embracing abundance over scarcity and thereby making peace with time; and being brave enough to make space for the truth in our relationships with stakeholders, staff, and ourselves. The context throughout will be on the practical results of such practices in the areas of greater funding, broader enrollment, and more effective leadership. (more)
Visionary Budget Cutting: Enhancing Mission and Capacity in Hard Times – We’re coming into some hard times. We don’t yet know how hard they’re going to be, but we’re all starting to prepare for them. We’re looking critically at our budgets and wondering what we can do without. We’re asking ourselves what we do best and how we can focus on our core competencies. Although most of us lack a coherent method for doing this kind of work, we fumble our way through it. Fascinatingly, looking at your organization through the lens of information and communication mapping, with an eye toward technology-based savings, can be a powerful and liberating approach. (more)
The Voice of Your Community: The Strategic Role of Stakeholder-Generated Content – New media has given every one of your stakeholders the means to communicate in much the same ways as you do, whether it’s news, information, action alerts, fundraising appeals, organizing, recruitment, teaching, or community building. Organizations are all looking at so-called “user-generated content” programs, but most of our actual efforts are banal failures. (more)
The Voice of Your Organization: Making CEO Blogging Work for Everyone – Someone thinks your CEO should blog. Maybe it’s your CEO. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s someone else. But chances are there is someone who thinks it’s a good idea. And the fact is, they are probably right. But what are the actual decisions to be made and steps to take to launch a nonprofit CEO blog that works? (more)
Website Reinvention & Improvement – Across large swaths of civil society, even in parts of the developing world, websites are the public face of an organization. The Web is a powerful medium that often disappoints, if only because its potential is so great. Very few websites do what they could to build and leverage relationships with donors, volunteers, and other stakeholders. Many are impaired by common mistakes and most don’t achieve clearly defined objectives. (more)