The Charity Place

Serious fun from SXSW - the Social Media Nonprofit Poetry Slam

I've just been catching up with this session - run yesterday at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas - via the Twitterstream and the links to various blogs that people have shared in their tweets.

Conducted entirely in rhyme (yes, really), the session was moderated by Beth Kanter, with contributions from:

• Danielle Brigida - National Wildlife Federation
• Wendy Harman - American Red Cross - National Headquarters
• Carie Lewis - The Humane Society of the United States
• David Neff - American Cancer Society [Judge]
• Katie Paine - KDPaine & Partners [Judge]
• Holly Ross - NTEN [Judge]

Unsurprisingly, Twitter is mentioned heavily - along with a range of other social media - in the examples shared by the panel.

Beth has kindly shared a comprehensive range of content from it here, on her blog - including the slides, transcripts of the poems recited by each of the panelists, along with a variety of links to help you get a fuller picture of the nonprofit case studies, experiences and insights that the session pulled together and shared.

And here's a video (via the NTEN blog) of the panelists in action:

Looks like a lot of fun, whilst making a serious point about how charities - and brands in general - are re-evaluating their traditional views on metrics, measurement and ROI to account for a different style of engagement with supporters through social media. 

It's really quite clever to deliver a session on measurement and metrics in such a unusual and engaging way - reflecting how social media enable nonprofits to engage supporters in helping them meet their challenges in new and innovative ways.

Beth also shares some reflections from the session on her blog here.

NFPtweetup - during and after

I'm delighted to report that the first NFPtweetup, held last night (4.30-8.30pm, GMT), seemed to be enjoyed by those that took part, and provided a useful forum to bring people together and start exploring all things Twitter for nonprofits.

To think that it started out as a casual, off-the-cuff, remark in a conversation between two not-for-profit tweeters...

... but evolved to be so much more - just like so many things do, wherever social media enables like-minded people to come together.  You can see most of this by looking through tweets mentioning NFPtweetup here and checking out the wiki here.

In all, 35-40 tweeters participated - either in person and/ or online - to share ideas, insights and thoughts, and discuss some of the issues and opportunities for charities and nonprofits using, or thinking of using, Twitter.

(I should say that, although Twitter was the focus of the event, one of the main objectives that emerged as the idea for the event evolved was to engage around the topic of social media in general, using Twitter as an entry point for the conversation - since many of the challenges, considerations and opportunities are the same across the many social platforms.)

To get as much value from this gathering of minds, and allow it to be shared as widely as possible, I put a shout out to everyone before the event to submit one slide capturing an idea, a thought, an observation, a question or an example related to nonprofits' use of Twitter.  This was the result:

NFPtweetup Collaborative Slideshow

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: collaboration socialmedia)

Brilliantly, this collaborative effort was even featured as Top Presentation of the Day on Slideshare which took it to an even wider audience than that for the event itself.

As you might expect of a gathering of nonprofit geeks, there was also plenty of content generated during the event that we've shared across the web.  Here are some links for those interested:

You can access much of the content via this search of hashtags.org.

Tweets including NFPtweetup can all be seen here, too (this would usually be the case at hashtags.org, but the service was down for development when the tweets for NFPtweetup started, and the team at hashtags.org say they are not intending to backdate to aggregate what they missed during this time, because it would take them too long!).

Blog posts (known at time of writing):

• Post by Damien Austin-Walker, from Timebank

• Post by Amy Sample Ward, from NetSquared

• Post by Howard Lake, at UK Fundraising
  (Howard says this was the UK's first NFPtweetup. I think that's true...)

• Post by Ed Walker, from UCLAN

Photos:

• Photos on Twitter tagged NFPtweetup.

Videos and more are being listed here on the wiki as they are created and shared.

With content still being posted, and conversations - having been started on Twitter - moving to other social sites, including The Charity Place, I hope that this event has acted as a catalyst to open up the area of social media a bit more, make it more accessible and unleash its potential for charities and nonprofits.

Thanks again to Just Giving for supporting this event, and to everyone that attended, contributed and participated.

So, should we have another one in a couple of months? Perhaps to explore the burning issues that came up this time that we only had chance to scratch the surface of? Any feedback greatly appreciated...