As social media becomes increasingly embraced by mainstream employers, how can you write a social media policy for your organization that both celebrates the positive side and addresses the negative side of social media?  The March Net2 Think Tank asked for examples of effective social media policies and this round-up has some great examples to get you started creating a social media policy in your organization!

Today, over 800 student activists converged on Capitol Hill for the largest lobby day to prevent genocide in history. 

 

A day or two ago I wrote about social networking and the Development 2.0 challenge.  Actually, I had something bigger on my mind, but I needed to try a small bite first. The positive responses suggest that there's a hunger out there for something bigger.  Well, maybe this could fly with enough help...  

Whenever a new administration comes to Washington, a cottage industry springs up to produce briefing documents, sometimes called white papers, to advise the government on priorities.

Hi. I just submitted a proposal to the USAID Development 2.0 Challenge called "Social Networking to Improve Advice on Development Priorities to Incoming Administration".  USAID rightly champions the principles of good governance as fundamental conditions for successful development - principles of transparency, participation of stakeholders in decision making, and access to information, for example.  I want your help to turn the spotlight back on USAID and give it the chance to bask in some governance goodness.  I think that social networking tools could help heighten the dialogue on priorities for foreign assistance in the US.

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New York, NY

Some people know so much about so many things that you could talk to them all day. Arnold Chandler is one of them. He is a Program Associate of PolicyLink, and author of the report "Click Here for Change: Your Guide to the E-Advocacy Revolution". It's a 34-minute interview which you can listen to on the NetSquared Podcast, or read the transcript of below.

Enjoy!

Arnold Chandler: My name is Arnold Chandler and I'm a Program Associate at PolicyLink, which is a nonprofit research and advocacy institute. We focus on an array of policy issues that I won't go into now for brevity's sake, but you can definitely visit our web site at www.policylink.org to find out more about that.

The report "Click Here for Change" we got into primarily because as an advocacy organization, also as a capacity building organization, we wanted to see what the options were out there for social justice organizations doing advocacy to utilize the Internet more effectively.

There's a large gap between what is the knowledge of nonprofit organizations, and what their goals are as an advocacy organization, and what the leading edge of internet technology applications are. So this report was in part an attempt to fill some of that gap. Of course we can't do everything, but we feel like we've made a dent in that by trying to bring together as much as we could gather about both the technology tools and about how strategy combines with these tools, meaning advocacy strategy independent of the use of technology, and to try and identify case studies that show these things in play, to illustrate to organizations how things could be put to use in their advocacy campaign.

So the report is in part, in some sense, a survey of what all the technology tools are that are the nuts and bolts, the things that are probably the basic toolbox for nonprofits doing advocacy. It's also a deeper look at the nuances of the strategy decision-making. In some cases organizations may not prefer to use the Internet for certain things that it could be used for because from an advocacy or political strategy standpoint it's ineffective, or it doesn't fit into a larger strategy. So that was the overarching approach that we came to it with.

The primary strategy was to interview a lot of nonprofit advocacy organizations in order to gather insights about what their state of electronic advocacy capacity was, and what the challenges they saw were to put into perspective what the issues were that were most important to them, and then after that we went out and we tried to do our best to find answers to those questions. So the report, there are lots of nuts and bolts things.

Some of the key findings or the key takeaways from the report that run throughout is the importance of integrating online and offline approaches. As you look, we've framed that as a key issue in the beginning of the report, but we've used the case studies to really highlight that. We have four case studies in the report. They look at four different campaigns with different goals, very different objectives, and different types of organizations working on different issues.

One is the Sierra Club's virtual phone banking strategy, which is essentially the get out the vote strategy in swing states during the presidential election of 2004.

We also have a campaign that looks at the Free Schuylkill River Park campaign in Philadelphia, which is a local community organization. Actually it's comprised of residents. There wasn't really a central organization involved. The organization actually emerged out of the success of the online strategy. We wanted to demonstrate how the offline components preceded and were key to making the online strategy effective.

We also have a case study, the "Yes on 63" campaign which was a ballot initiative in California in 2003. In fact, the only ballot initiative that passed that year. In this case study we looked at how this campaign very effectively developed a very effective online strategy, but they were challenged by the fact that they had to adopt an under the radar approach because they were concerned about generating an opposition campaign. It was a unique situation that actually runs counter to most circumstances that organizations and campaigns find themselves in, in terms of building online awareness, or using the web and email as a communication tool to broaden their visibility as much as possible.

This campaign was faced with the challenge that they didn't want to generate too much visibility, but they still wanted to get out the message to the people who would be supportive of them. So because media at that time was paying a lot of attention to how much online visibility that organizations were generating using the Internet, this campaign opted not to do that, and they actually hired organizers across the state who they used to help support the fund raising.

The case study really demonstrated, I think, more than any other case study in the report, that a hybrid strategy of online and offline organizing is critical for both the fundraising, and getting out the message for that campaign. That really emphasizes that point.

The fourth campaign, in 2002, a ballot initiative campaign called the "No on Prop. 54" campaign, was opposing the Prop. 54 ballot initiative then on the ballot that would have eliminated the collection of racial identifying data by the state government in California and most of its operation. A coalition of civil rights organizations came together, and one of the key issues about their online strategy, as it evolved, was they really wanted to get out the vote to communities of color.

The challenge with that is that the campaign itself had its email lists, they had people they knew cared about the issue, but they wanted to figure out how they could generate some viral dissemination that would get to the communities that they wanted to communicate with. So their strategy was to partner with many, I believe it was almost 100, civil rights organizations and various social justice organizations with ethnic constituents and ask them to forward specific videos to their email lists hoping that viral dissemination would occur along ethnic and racial lines in terms of the voters in the state of California.

It was remarkably successful. In fact I received, as an African-American, I received an African-American video in my email box, and fascinatingly a colleague in our office who is Filipino received an Asian-American video in his email box. So that illustrated that the networks, the ethnic and racial networks that these organizations had created through both their email lists and through their personal networks, that the campaign was able to piggyback on those networks and target their messaging in a viral way. A very compelling use of the online and offline targeting mechanisms, by using these partnerships, with the viral dissemination of a video strategy that was very compelling.

So those case studies bring that together. They really illustrate the idea of the importance of the online and offline component.

Britt Bravo: What is the finding that surprised you the most when doing research for this report?

AC: What surprised me the most? Honestly, the case studies and how innovative they were surprised me the most. They were hard to find, and in some respects I was kind of surprised at how difficult it was to locate case studies of what people were doing and what was successful. But when I did find them I was amazed at how evolved the strategy making in some campaigns was that actually did use the Internet, and how far along the strategy side of things is. I think there's a big gap out there in terms of how organizations--first of all, organizations have a low awareness in general of what the technology tools are, what their functionalities are, how to choose among them, what capabilities they actually afford. But then the strategic side of things is a whole other ballgame. I think that's the deepest gap in terms of the non-profit sector on the whole and particularly the social justice organizations.

In studying these campaigns, I was fascinated to see how much ingenuity was involved in implementing strategy. That's really what I'm hoping this report will try and bring out in much more nuanced detail how the technology played a pivotal role in an advocacy strategy that wasn't necessarily technology-driven, an advocacy strategy that may have not necessarily needed technology or may not have incorporated it, but when they did incorporate it, they found amazing successes.

BB: Some of your research is on the digital divide in public policy. Are there new issues in terms of the digital divide and the social web? And what does that mean for non-profits who serve or want to reach these populations?

AC: I absolutely think that there is a huge gap there and I think that gap is going to be existing for at least a few years, primarily because, in the initial introduction to this report, we wanted to reverse or challenge the theory that communities of color and low-income communities are not online. The evidence suggests that they are online, and in some cases, they're online in a big way. So we wanted to re-frame the thinking about whether or not it's useful to use the Internet to target these groups.

The problem is, in many instances, their experience online and their familiarity with the array of tools that any online user can have available to them, just the sheer number of things that Google provides the average individual with, is astonishing. People who are new to the Internet don't have a deep familiarity with those things.

I think the social web is something that is even further down the road (and by social web, I'm taking that to mean things like MySpace or Web 2.0 things that incorporate individuals as not only the consumers of information, but actually are producers and shapers of that information). I think that it is going to be some time before the audience is savvy enough, or the online population among people of color and low-income communities are savvy enough to be able to effectively make use of that medium in massive numbers, enough for non-profit organizations to be able to take advantage of them effectively as advocates.

However, I think it's a matter of time and they'll get there, but I think the digital divide is no longer an issue that is fundamentally about access. It's really about the lag in the ability to use the Internet, the ability to use these various tools to be able to post a video to YouTube, or to be even familiar with YouTube. I think those types of applications and their effective use are down the road more for communities of color.

Right now, I think the core is using the nuts and bolts, the stuff that's tried and true, using email effectively, building websites that are effective. I think podcasts and videocasting offer some compelling opportunities, only because they're so similar in respects to mediums that we're used to: television and radio. I think that those will be effective in terms of communicating with these audiences.

In terms of their participation in a big way, in terms of shaping the information, shaping the agenda, shaping the political discourse, becoming bloggers, I think that's definitely down the road.

BB: What do you think can be done to change or accelerate that?

AC: Well, I think in some respects, what's necessary is for big websites to target these groups in a big way, for example, there's a website called covenantwithblackamerica.com, and I believe it is .org as well, which was created following the publication of a book called The Covenant with Black America which was compiled by Tavis Smiley, who was the editor of it. Every year, he hosts an event called "The State of the Black Union", which is aired on C-SPAN, and it actually has the largest viewing audience of any show on C-SPAN. I believe it had something like 13 million this year. These are African-Americans who tune in and view this and watch the issues. It's precisely because of, not only that show, but because of Tavis' celebrity and so forth, that a book that came out of "The State of the Black Union", called The Covenant with Black America hit the New York Times best-seller list, and it was on there for quite some time. In fact, it was the only book by an African-American publishing company that has ever reached the New York Times best-seller list.

Because of the success of that book, Tavis and some staff here at PolicyLink, and partners at Grassroots Enterprise and some other folks wanted to put up a website that specifically talked about the issues that were covered in that book, and then engage people online.

Now that website is online, and it hasn't evolved to the form of being a big social web media yet. It's got a blog and it invites people to comment on and engages them. But I think what you need is something like The Covenant with Black America, or something like another website that generates a big audience, that has a big following that invites people to come there and share their commentary, put information up there. I think if there's a big splash with a major success like that, I think you'll find these audiences more susceptible to these much smaller advocacy organizations down the road.

I think the need to create the critical mass that shows that participation in the social web in this way, is very compelling and that it satisfies people's personal need to be political participants and civil participants, shaping not only how their issues are talked about, but what's done about them.

BB: I read your blog post on The Covenant with Black America blog. I thought it was great that there were so many comments.

AC: I actually made a deliberate effort to make sure that I responded to as many as I could, and to be thoughtful. Interestingly, what came out of those conversations is that we need more stuff like that. We need more vehicles to be able to communicate like this and share our ideas.

I thought that that was one of the key messages of this report, and I think that that was one of the key messages of The Covenant with Black America, as a book, as a concept, and almost as a political philosophy, in the sense that we should take a much deeper role, not only in engaging outside of the electoral process, or outside of party channels, or Democratic party politics, in terms of participation in politics, shaping the issues, talking about the issues and having the town hall types of discussions.

We should not only engage, deepen, and improve those discussions so that we can take a better handle on the politics that affect our lives, but we should be empowered in new ways to take action, to actually do something about things, to organize each other. Self-organizing was a fascinating thing that came out of this report that I gained an understanding of that I didn't really understand before.

I had some small understanding of it based on my initial interviews, but the case study, the "Yes on 63" case study, really brought it home that people are willing to, if they believe in a campaign, if they're supportive of its goals, to go out and actively organize their friends using an online vehicle, to raise funds, to keep people informed, to organize meeting and get-togethers offline to talk about the issues, and really engage people in new forms of civic participation that haven't been around for a long time.

I think that the blog posting that I had on The Covenant with Black America website began to re-catalyze some of that thinking. People really responded to the idea of, "Let's talk." Let's find a way to get us all together and get us to talk about these things so that I can feel like I'm not consuming the advocacy agenda of others, that I'm not consuming the political message of others, but that I'm creating and shaping them myself.

BB: What tools do you think still need to be developed to help non-profits with e-advocacy?

AC: One technology area that emerged in my interviews and discussions about coalition campaigns and campaigns involving multiple organizations was--and this is kind of a back-end technical issue this is not a front-end thing where supporters and constituents are directly interacting with the technology--this is a back-end thing that allows organizations to manage the technology partnership of an online campaign when each of these organizations have their own audiences, their own individual agendas.

One issue that emerged was that in coalition campaigns, you have a bunch of organizations that come together. They build a website that represents that coalition, they sign on, they organize their members, they do a lot of activities online, offline, media work, everything, mount a speaker's bureau, participate and all that. To build this audience online, usually in the form of email addresses, they develop these large lists of email addresses for the campaign and various other things, donor lists, and so forth.

The problem is, at the end of the campaign, what happens to those lists? What happens to the data? Who gets the lists, who gets the email, who gets this stuff? Most of that issue is being dealt with right now in terms of memorandums of understanding. Organizations are coming to agreements about, "OK, we're going to take this list. Everybody gets to email to it twice. You get the opt-in, whatever you take out of the opt-in is yours," and then the email list is kind of disbanded, so then the email list goes away.

But that was a group of people who came together around an issue, in terms of the audience, they cared about this issue, they came together around this issue, and they have a lot in common. It's almost that, when you disassemble that audience in some respects, when you don't carry on that message or evolve the meaning of that campaign into new issue areas, to create almost an identity for that audience that moves to other areas of policy concern, then you lose momentum. Organizations lack the capacity to continue to build on those successful efforts over time.

So, what I would like to see (and this may be a pie-in-the-sky-type scenario) is a technology solution that allows those websites to exist and remain, those email lists to exist and remain. That the organizations agree that they are going to re-frame the agenda now that the campaign is over, or even deal with other issues that arise in that arena.

For example, on the "Yes on 63" campaign they dealt with mental health issues. I'm certain there are a number of mental health issues that will arise in the future. How does that campaign evolve as almost an informal PAC? Of having these groups of people who are willing to donate their money, willing to donate their time, who become a kind of networked advocacy organization. What is the technical solution that allows all of these organizations to still participate in that? Still send emails to have, say, their email messages or their content tagged, or different things, so that you can preserve that online audience and preserve that issue committee moving forward.

I don't have the outlines of what that technology solution would be, but I know there are great minds out there who invent stuff like this all the time. I would like to see how we could imagine some technological platform that could help move us along towards developing that stuff.

BB: Can you talk a little bit about how you use Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, for your policy work, and how the social web fits into that work?

AC: As an organization, GIS, Geographic Information Systems, are very important to our work primarily because maps, in a very compelling way, can frame issues much better than analysis or even data can. When you present a map, it almost has this unassailable quality because when people look at it, they understand it intuitively. It presents a number of issues together in a very compelling way. When people see it, they immediately respond to it. You don't have to be savvy, you don't have read it, or understand data analysis to understand it.

We use GIS maps because one of the primary issues we work on is affordable housing. We become, as an organization, PolicyLink, as an action institute, in the sense that we've been referred to as a "think tank" because we do a lot of research, we stay abreast of what the best practices are around a particular policy strategy, or in response to particular policy issues. We identify what we see as the best solution, and then we try to help different coalition campaigns working in different cities apply those solutions, and to push for those solutions.

We'll do all the aspects of advocacy work; we'll assist in a capacity-building way with all the aspects of advocacy work. We usually produce reports as an advocacy tool. For example, we did a campaign in the District of Columbia, Washington D.C., which has a very booming housing market recently, in the past six years. Prior to that, D.C. didn't have a booming housing market. It didn't have explosive growth in housing prices, and so because of this, there was a lot of displacement of poor people, gentrification. There was a lot of increase in the concentration of poor people in certain parts of the city where the housing was affordable. The problem is, those places were invariably dominated by poor people. They were ghettos in the sense that the majority of the population living in that particular neighborhood was poor. The housing was in disrepair. The neighborhoods were, in general, declining, experiencing increasing crime rates, and so forth.

We wanted to tie together the issue that housing was unaffordable, increasingly unaffordable, and that the social consequences of its unaffordability was that poor people were being increasingly clustered together in neighborhoods that weren't neighborhoods of opportunity, that promoted their well-being, that promoted their access to schools, jobs, and so forth.

So, when we used GIS in this report, and this report is online [Expanding Housing Opportunity in Washington, DC: The Case for Inclusionary Zoning] one thing that we did was that we showed where housing development was occurring in the city. We showed where affordable housing development was located in the city, and we showed where poor people were living in the city, and where the numbers of poor people were increasing in the city, and we put that all on one map. When people looked at that, they could clearly see that the housing that was affordable to poor people was put where poor people lived, and the housing that was market-rate housing, or that was unaffordable to poor people, was put elsewhere in the city, was put elsewhere in neighborhoods that were of improving quality, of neighborhoods that were experiencing gentrification and driving the poor people there out.

So, our proposal for a solution to that problem was inclusionary zoning. Inclusionary zoning requires that when new housing development takes place, that they set aside a certain proportion of that housing for poor people, for people whose income, measured against the median income for the metropolitan area, is below a certain threshold. That's to make sure that as the housing boom takes off, as more and more expensive housing is created, that affordable housing is also attached to it, so that poor people can live in that housing and that they're not permanently displaced, much like what happened in San Francisco with massive displacement of African-Americans during the dot com boom, who migrated back south into different parts of California.

In D.C., the primary argument was that, where they're building this market-rate housing, you should build affordable housing there too. You should distribute the affordable housing all over the city, and not just in poor neighborhoods. And we used maps to show that. We used maps to show that here's where the affordable housing would be located if we had an IC policy. Here's where we can distribute the units across the city, and it was extremely compelling. When we displayed that in the media, and when it was used in presentations, when it was displayed to the zoning commission, the city government got behind it in support of it. Both the mayor and the Office of Planning were in support of it, primarily because those maps created such compelling messages, that people were drawn into supporting it.

Now, in terms of the Internet, that's not primarily Internet-based, in terms of use of the Internet. But it's clearly a use of technology and a use of data to make the case for change, in this case, in D.C.

But what we found with later work that we've done is that we did a project in collaboration with the Urban Institute and in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Massachusetts. We looked at online GIS systems that include data that can be used to create analysis, like this, that can be used in cities across the country for people to be able to look at their communities, to look at where poverty is located, to look at where housing development is taking place, to look at where issues of abandonment are occurring, to look at issues where there's code violations, and to begin to be activists in protecting their neighborhoods and to asserting some influence over policy-making that relates to where money is spent by the city government, to how policies are implemented that impact certain neighborhoods to the detriment of others.

We did a survey of the 100 largest cities in the United States to find out how many had GIS systems that could allow this analysis all the way down to the property level, all the way down to a single piece of land or a single house in a city, and we found that there were 72 cities that had this. We were fascinated by that because we didn't realize there was that extent of these types of systems available online.

We did an intensive analysis of these systems to identify what they were capable of supporting, what type of information they provided. And some of the more remarkable ones we found were way ahead of the pack in the sense that they were already integrating things like Google Maps into their systems. So they were taking all this city government data and making that city's government data accessible and overlaid on Google Maps, which is a very user-friendly mapping system.

One of those is portlandmaps.com. It's actually created by the City of Portland, and they've got the whole 3-D thing there and you can look at all kinds of information, down to a local neighborhood, down to a block, and do all kinds of analysis in terms of census and demographic data, and be able to frame issues. You can print up those maps.

Another one, a very effective one I believe, is in Akron. There were about a dozen that were very innovative and they were all in our report, that showed that the capability out there to support the ability of individuals, even neighborhood groups, organized advocacy organizations, community development corporations, health groups, to be able to take this data, be able to create the maps, to do the analysis, and to be able to print up those maps, and very often walk into a public meeting with them, show those maps and make arguments in support of a policy proposal.

It kind of goes back to that theme of integrating the online and offline, in the sense that the tools, the power and the data are all available via the Internet. But really, in terms of the policy impact, you have to walk in with a map and show it to everybody and explain why they should support the policy proposal.

So our GIS work is kind of continuing to understand how this data and how these maps are being used for policy advocacy and where the successes are. And we're actually continuing our work with another report that's coming out, probably next year, exploring deeper how organizations are using GIS maps for advocacy.

BB: Have you ever come across a project where people are helping to create the map by adding their information themselves, online?

AC: Unfortunately, the social web dimension hasn't quite really bled into the GIS use in terms of what city governments have created and what non-profits and academics have created. But that's definitely down the road. Especially with Google Maps and its flexibility, I see that as definitely not too far in the future, in fact. Because when we wrote the report looking at what cities had been doing, we did the research in, I believe in early 2005, and those systems have already evolved quite significantly since that time.

And so I would imagine that that social web incorporation is not that far down the road. But one thing that the GIS system have begun to incorporate, and there are some systems online. one focused in California called Neighborhood Knowledge California, and there's soon to be a national one that is going to be improved that allows this functionality that I'm about to explain, called DataPlace, which is national, covers down to the census track for the entire country and covers and provides a lot of data that can be used in analysis.

Those systems are coming online to allow you, or at least Neighborhood Knowledge California already does allow you to do this, DataPlace will soon allow you to do this, to upload your own data. So you can upload your own information, whether it's your constituency list. If you batch email addresses, then you can key in addresses for all those folks, where they actually live. You can map all that information relative to different demographic information and get some sense of what the census tracks for those communities look like.

So that capacity already exists with the Neighborhood Knowledge California site in this state. But it's going to exist for all states fairly soon with the DataPlace improvement. I think the evolution of that system beyond just the ability to upload your data, which is a massive leap in terms of the capability, that is, in my opinion, a major social web innovation, allowing you to put your data over a bunch of publicly available data sets. That can allow you to enhance your understanding of your community, of your potential opportunity.

I think that's going to even evolve further to incorporate what you just talked about in terms of social web, of allowing people to say, "Here I am. Where's your community?" and actually interact with each other through the medium and not just use it for analysis.

BB: Is there anything else you want people to know about PolicyLink's work or this report?

AC: In terms of PolicyLink and around this work, specifically related to electronic advocacy, I think that this report is our first foray in trying to fill the gap between what are organizational capacities at the moment and what are the nuts and bolts tools that are needed for advocacy. I think down the road, as more, I guess, not the bleeding-edge technology, I think the bleeding-edge technology is still too far out there, but some new innovations, more around the use of podcasting, like you're using, and videocasting and other communication vehicles that integrate media that people are familiar with, like radio and television with the Internet.

I think we're going to keep a close eye on those and how the costs come down in putting those out and what innovative strategies develop around using those. Because I think that they will really create the critical mass that will change the game in a lot of respects for the social web for engaging people in advocacy by using the media that they're familiar with, and twisting it in new and innovative ways to get them engaged in issues they care about.

So we're going to pay close attention to that evolution in our work going forward, and try and figure out how we can add insight to what's in this report and build awareness on it.


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Check out this cool site, genderIT.org.  They monitor ICT policies that affect women around the world.  You can browse the site by issues that interest you (i.e. education, health, cultural diversity), or by the part of the world that interests you (Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific).  They also have site guides tailored to Beginners and Policy Makers.