Networking, connecting, and other modes of meeting people at conferences, functions, meetings and parties are important behavioral elements for activists, organizers, and fundraisers to focus on mastering. As was suggested by Vinnie Lauria and Kristine Molnar at a seminar a few days ago, fundraising (and getting people on board in every possible sense) is at its root level about building relationships. Working as a member of the press for the NetSquared conference, I was effectively able to keep my schmoozing to a minimum, thus I was able to watch many of the interactions between project people (those looking for funding and votes for the best project) and foundation people and onlookers (those who potentially have funding and votes to offer) from the sidelines, through the lens of an armchair sociologist. Based on some of those observations, please take into consideration these following suggestions when networking face-to-face.

Know Your Elevator Pitch

Though it is most-popularly associated with entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to venture capitalists, you should also have an elevator pitch. Simply put, the EP is a lean, fatless concise explanation of your project or campaign. It is known by its name for two reasons:

1. The pitch should be digestible enough to deliver in a short period of time (say, the amount of time it takes to get from the lobby to several floors above by way of an elevator).
2. You never know who you are going to run into on an elevator (or a plane, or a hallway, or wherever), so you should forever be ready to concisely pitch your idea quickly and on the spot (if in a pinch). The pitch should be about 30 seconds long and made up of 100 words or so. Make it a good one.

Instead of sputtering:

It’s snowy where I’m from, you know, and kids suffer from asthma and adults are sick and are depressed. So my friends and I got together and started a non-profit organization and we started to raise money… [ramble, ramble]

You want to concisely deliver:

With high unemployment rates in Illinois contributing to increases in documented rates of adult depression and childhood asthma, our campaign, made up of college faculty members, social scientists, and high school students, aims to cut the rate of each of these negative occurrences in half by providing the Prairie State with high paying contracting jobs through subsidizing the creation of a winterized dome intended to shield Chicago from harsh, in-climate weather.

Further, even if you know what an elevator pitch is, make sure that you have got it down and be sure that you know how to deliver it. Fumbling your own elevator pitch by spitting it out unnaturally is sometimes worse than not having one at all.

Here, the CBC business-reality series Dragon’s Den presents a pretty rad how-to video on putting together an elevator pitch.

Talk To Your Fellow Travelers // Approach and Be Approachable

• Now that you’ve got your elevator pitch, who are you going to deliver it to? It is time to stop being an iSnob; stop shutting the world out of your life by way of your earbuds and start opening up random avenues of conversation. Meet people you’re sitting next to on trains and buses (being conscious, of course, of whether or not they themselves care to be chatty), find out what they do, and talk to them about what you’re up to. Their avenue of work might have little to nothing to do with what you do/are looking for, but it will never hurt you to have another contact, and further, they might know someone to connect you to.
• When in a conference or party setting, introduce yourself to people with your pitch in the very back of your mind (the pitch is like a gun — you only want to use it when it is absolutely time to do so). Find out who you are conversing with is and what they’re interested in. What is there favorite movie, city, book? What are some things about them that you might not have known based on their exterior? These questions seem elementary, but sometimes schmoozing makes us like sniveling, anti-social, predatory vermin, waiting to pounce with our own story and effectively dehumanizing the other. Needless to say, this is not a positive way to communicate.
• Finally, jazz up your name tag to better facilitate random conversation. Write on it a line that expresses your affinity for Neil Diamond. Paste onto it a picture of your dog. Do something that makes you stand out, easier to approach, and more fun to connect with.

Chillax With The Business Card

This suggestion, of course, presupposes you know how important it is to be carrying with you oodles of beautifully-designed business card at all times.

• During a conference lunch, I was asked by a random attendee, “Did you happen to talk to that guy who shoved that business card in your hand?” I had talked to this guy, and sadly, this is the trait that I most remember about him. On one hand, the person in question was offering a service that I could use. On the other hand, at least two people (including myself) know this guy by his bad social skills, not his name. If someone else were to have come along with better, more subtle networking etiquette, they would likely have more positively stuck out in my mind and I would likely be more eager to be in touch with that person.
• There’s no need to be Quick-Draw McGraw with the business card. In fact, doing the exchange operates similarly to the way that you should pitch — slow and steady (and thorough) wins the race. When you do exchange cards, be sure to remember a thing or two about the person and write it down so that you can ask them about or mention these items in a follow-up email. The idea of doing this puts a lot of people off, but I don’t suggest it strictly for shmoozy purposes. I find it helpful to maintain a relationship with someone that isn’t centered wholly on trying to strike up a working relationship, and a positive side effect of doing so is that it leaves a lasting impression of authenticity.
• While some of the business card tips linked here are old-hat, some of them are quite helpful. Check them out.

Be Clear // Hear, Understand, and Maneuver Around “No”

From the sidelines, I watched an excruciating interaction between a chronic pitcher—someone who was pitching his project to anyone and everyone that he met—and a foundation representative. The CP approached said representative, saying, “If you have time, I want to show you that thing I was telling you about yesterday.” The representative asked, “What thing are you talking about?” Perhaps too anxious to understand, the CP asked, “You don’t have time?” A few more lines of confusion were exchanged until the CP’s shot of showing whatever he had to offer, and the representative told him, “I need to do some other work right now.”

Ouch.

The situation only became more awkward when this wasn’t interpreted as a no, and it took another exchange for CP to realize that it might be time to move on (for now). So first, be clear. Don’t fumble. If you do fumble, don’t get so nervous that you get into a pattern of fumbles. Second, understand and maneuver around no by stepping back, regrouping, and returning when the time is right.

It’s All About Relationships

Connections pursued, motivated by the contact, status, and/or potential money alone, reek of insincerity. Further, seeds of insincerity do not reap connections, status, or financial support. Evangelizing your project or goal requires building relationships based on trust, which requires conveying to everyone you meet a sense of:

• Confidence by way of showing them that you know your stuff.
• Respect by hearing them out, reading their signals, and not treating them as targets.

By conveying the strongest possible sense of confidence and respect by sincerely taking the above suggestions into consideration, making connections should be relatively easy (though not effortless), and a little more fumble-free.

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On this day, May 29th, 2008, the news brings to our attention the appearance of guerrilla gardening in L.A., words from the “Libertarian dark horse,” community organization in Kenya, and more.

• Virtual Assassination as a Counterterrorism tool.
• Guerrilla gardening takes root (ha!) in L.A.
• Straight from the [Libertarian dark] horse’s mouth.
• Chinese bloggers go on attack against Sharon Stone.
• Lessons from Kenya’s top organizer.
• Russian Communists boycott Indiana Jones.
• First they were Macs and PCs, but now they’re Yahoo and Google.

-Filed in News

We are liveblogging from the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. Here, you can keep up to date with all of the amazing work and outreach that is being leveraged and imagined with the help of tech-innovation. Stay tuned here for all of our updates from the conference (and be sure to keep an eye on our Twitter feed!

Wednesday, 4:53 PM - Social Actions came in third place. Know More came in second. And the winner of the NetSquared Mashup Challenge was… [drumroll] Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya!

What a great conference. Expect to read more about many of the featured projects and how the folks behind them are engaging volunteers and activists in the coming weeks.

Wednesday, 2:47 PM - I told Billy Bickett that I wish that the American democratic system was much more like the one that NetSquared uses. In exchange for ongoing education, engagement, and eventually voting, the participant is rewarded with networking opportunities, beautiful weather, hardworking facilitators, and ice cream at every turn.

Wednesday, 2:26 PM - Voting!

Wednesday, 1:47 PM - Talked with Rob Miller of Open Planning Project about the importance of effective communication. It is important to recognize the needs of the people you connect with, he says, citing Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of Nonviolent Communication. Even when someone is coming at you aggressively about the things that are annoying or irritating them, being able to hear what they are saying and connecting with them by effectively recognizing your mutual needs makes engagement a more valuable process.

Wednesday, 1:34 PM - The name tag as conversation starter.

Talked for a bit

Wednesday, 11:49 AM - A sage-like Peter Deitz presents Social Actions, an aggregator and API. Social Actions needs an evangelist, he says. He also needs developers. They’re aiming at sustainability: I don’t want to be asking money forever.

The Social Actions interface searches through all of the campaigns across the board of social platforms such as The Point, Kiva, Six Degrees, The Point, and many others. Further, “We want to put citizen sector on par with the private sector.” See our interview with Peter here.

Wednesday, 11:37 AM - YourMapper explains that when it initially decided that they would put crime statistics online, they somewhat expectedly found some push-back from local law enforcement. It took an “in” with the local force and a lawsuit to get their hands on this information.

Wednesday, 11:02 AM - Blair Golson of Participant Media blogs about the Second Life seminar that I was unable to make it to. The best line from his post is this, hands down: “Try to grok the meta-ness of this scene.”

Wednesday, 10:56 AM - Tom Inhaler (left) from KnowMore discusses their Firefox extension. He discusses their precarious relationship with American Apparel, how they hope to keep monitoring corporations balanced, and how sometimes their company profiles (McDonald’s) sometimes mysteriously go missing. He explains that they don’t exist to facilitate specific sorts of activism, but to provide the opportunities for people who might then be inspired to take action. An audience member: “When I take a look at your site, all of the ratings make me feel bad about participating in the economy. How do you avoid perpetuating feelings of disenfranchisement?” Joe’s joking response: “I just want to start out by telling you that I am a huge fan of disenfranchisement.” The audience bursts into laughter.

Wednesday, 10:54 AM - Justin Massa discusses how MoveSmart likely won’t be used to further perpetuate gentrification - “People have been doing a pretty good job gentrifying neighborhoods without us.”

Wednesday, 9:27 AM - Ben Drexler talks quite articulately about the Genocide Intervention Network, Darfur Scores, and how they are working to use web tools, lists, and widgets to put pressure Congress-people to get tough on genocide. On their second year as an organization, he says in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion: “The terrible twos are worse for nonprofits than they are for little kids, let me tell you.”

Asked why they don’t use a pre-existing scoring tool like Capitol Advantage, Drexler suggests that it is because Genocide Intervention Network needs a greater scope of analysis than is available on Capitol Advantage. Goldbeck says that branding is very important to them. They would like to attain political clout similar to that which is held by the NRA or the Sierra Club. Herein, to increase capacity and care about anti-genocide, they find it necessary to build their own infrastructure.

Wednesday, 8:40 AM - Milling around, waiting for the conference to start back up. Justin Massa of MoveSmart introduced me to the DJ-duo The Hood Internet and some other table is talking emphatically about Stuff White People Like.

Tuesday, 5:15 PM - Funniest moment of the day:

Speaker - Who here is working with a non-profit that has a Facebook page and a strategy? Attendee - We have a page, but we have no strategy.

Tuesday, 3:41 PM - Vinnie Lauria and Kristine Molnar lead a fantastic discussion about how nonprofits can use the Internet to leverage and increase donations. Check out a longer recap here.

Tuesday, 1:39 PM - Over a terrific lunch, I had a great conversation with Jamie Hartman of the Taproot Foundation, Greg Baldwin from VolunteerMatch, Ben Rattray of Change.org, and Vince Stehle about facilitating/concentrating on different paradigms for matching volunteers with organizations (converse to doing so the traditional, other way around). How do we match people who want to volunteer, but don’t know when or how? Is it possible to archive/categorize skills and match those with organizations accordingly? How do you make folks who don’t have bigger skill sets feel like the only kid in the sandbox when they are not picked to participate in seemingly dynamic projects? Thoughts?

Tuesday, 12:05 PM - Janessa Goldbeck, Director of Membership at the Genocide Intervention Network, presented the Anti-Genocide Action Tracker, which scores members of Congress based on their position and action on Genocide issues. One might be surprised to find that former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo received an A+ on his stance/voting record.

The point system is gathered by several workers who are based in Washington DC, monitoring each Congress-person’s stance. They have made available a widget that processes a user’s IP address and informs them of their congressperson and also informs users on their social platform(s) of choice when important legislation is pending. It is interesting, she says, because it is a product that is applicable to almost any issue.

Also, see great interviews with Goldbeck at blogher here.

Tuesday, 11:58 AM- Nicolas Kardas of Microsoft gives a speech, but it sounds much more like a commercial for Microsoft products. Need to attract new visitors? Use this product!

Tuesday, 11:18 AM - Michael Metz of Cisco talked about the popular resistance to corporate/nonprofit media and outreach in his address to the conference. 137 million households have put themselves on do-not-call lists. They believe in their peers before anyone else. 81% of the people buying our products aren’t listening to our messaging. When they’re ready, however, they’ll engage.

Some approaches that have worked for Cisco include options to IM with company representatives and providing short videos for folks who come to and use the site. Don’t bother and pester people, he suggests, but be ready when they want to engage. Stop bombarding them with outbound marketing. And when they’re on the site, take a look at their cookies and what they’ve been looking at online and then market accordingly.

He explains that his wife says that it is sort of creepy, what the company does with user info. She feels like someone is looking over her shoulder at what she’s looking at. When he tells her that it is simply like listening to his users more closely, this puts her at ease.

Tuesday, 10:04 AM - Representatives from each project just gave a 2 minute synopsis of their presentations. Each project appears to be unique and interesting; many are utilizing mapping in new and useful ways. There are also a few projects focused on holding Congress more accountable and there is one interesting eco-rating project. Michael Metz from Cisco is awestruck by the range and scope of projects, he says.

Tuesday, 9:50 AM - Vince Stehle opened the conference by speaking about how NetSquared and the projects here are representative of the importance of working to more efficiently democratize philanthropy. Technology is generated with user-generated content. Organized philanthropy will play an important role in the development of the social web, he said, but sustainability is contingent on an organization’s/individual’s/campaign’s ability to support donors.

Tuesday, 7:32 AM - Being in Santa Clara for the first time is very much like strolling a walk of fame for dorks. You find yourself excited to see the offices for Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Ebay, and all of these other companies whose products you grew up immersed in. It feels silly to admit this, but with these corporate brands having been so omnipresent in my young life, it’s hard not to think that being here, as late as it is to finally make it out this way, is really cool.

Talking with the guys from Squarepeg (pictured above) about who—corporations like Nike or small software folks on the ground—will ultimately have say over kinds of information (shoe sizes/styles and/or willingness to volunteer) will be shared in a post-2.0 is surreal. The conversations happening here are helping to shape the scope of how people will use the web to make good things happen in very near future.

It has been amazing to talk with various folks and representatives of various Mashups who are tackling the ways in which information is now stored and used. The stages of understanding this whole point-o transition will only be graspable in retrospect, but watching the stages unfold from the point of the “2.0″ declaration is watching evolution in action. How will we better motivate people to move forward, organize around issues, and leverage their consumer practices against corporate irresponsibility? We hope to have a better sense as the day unfolds.

Monday, 9:32 PM - Having already spoken with Laura Welcher of the Long Now Foundation, Justin Massa of MoveSmart, Tom Inhaler and Eric Cooper of Know More, Blair Golson of Participant Media, Isaac Holeman and John Wagner of Squarepeg, and many other folks in the field of making stuff happen, I already feel exponentially more enlightened than I was when I arrived to the conference a few hours ago. From challenging corporate messaging to archiving every known language, the ways in which these people are leveraging the Internet is both inspiring and constructively challenging

Monday, 5:46 PM - Today I arrived in San Jose. Rather than finding and paying for a hotel room, I hunted a room down using Couchsurfing, where I found a great place downtown. This is my first time using the site, and I have been looking forward to using it since friends told me about their admiration for the service over a year ago. I am staying a big house with a handful of students/sustainable farmers who have been generous enough to share their space/car with me. The experience is already much better than one based at a hotel, as when I arrived, one of the housemates had his parents over and they were blackening sardines on the grill. We sat outside and drank homemade wine and ate and talked about how things were for them back home, back in the day.

-Filed in Ideas, Uncategorized

On this day, May 28th, 2008, the news brings to our attention Weezer’s celebration of the meme, the NAACP’s look at new forms of community organizing, researchers’ hunt for email chainletters, Bill McKibben’s new home on the web, and more.

• Internet terrorists target—who else—My Chemical Romance.
• Weezer celebrates the Meme.
• Bill McKibben now helms a new global grassroots, internet-based campaign called.
• Relatively unknown actor and former Scientologist joins Anonymous.
• The NAACP looks at new forms of community organizing.
• Community organizing works well for security guard.
• And finally, researchers want your chain-letters! Seriously.

-Filed in News

Jerri Chou from All Day Buffet asked the following in the comments section:

In the comment section, Would love to know more about what you learned from Jamie Hartman, Greg Baldwin, Ben Rattray, and Vince Stehle. I’m super curious about what they found worked and didn’t, outcomes, lessons learned, how to organize etc. as far as matching the right volunteers to organizations. Any elaboration would be amazing.

Thanks so much for the question.

We discussed breaking sometimes-traditional paradigms of volunteerism and engagement. Rather than nonprofits and campaigns relying solely on recruiting volunteers who can work on specific dates at specific times, how is it possible to make folks’ cataloged abilities and skills work for further recruitment? For example, rather than relying on a volunteer who is willing to work at a Food Not Bombs table on Wednesdays and Thursdays at noon, a volunteer who can file papers for an immigration law nonprofit every Friday, or an activist who can canvass every other Wednesday evening, how can we better streamline this process to work better for the volunteer and for the organization/campaign?

A suggestion was put on the table that potential volunteers outline their availability and skills to organizations/campaigns, which would then aggregate potential opportunities and send them to potential volunteers accordingly. This is not dissimilar from what I was doing when I was an Americorps volunteer, working to recruit volunteers at the University of Southern Maine. The school, heavily populated by commuter and non-traditional students, did not have a large bank of students/staff who could regularly and consistently volunteer their time. This was remedied by putting their names on a listserv, which was indicative of their willingness, and they were then connected via newsletter of one-shot opportunities. This is also not dissimilar from the way that the American Red Cross operates. The volunteer (blood-donor) makes their willingness and skill (ability to give blood) available to a database and they are then contacted accordingly.

For this to work more effectively, organizations will need to create a comprehensive inventory of skills that they need to utilize so that they can ask for them. Can the organization use monthly legal help? Do they need a day or two of physical labor to maintain quarters? Do they need to provide child-care for employees? Do they need a digital projector once in a while? Etc. When this comprehensive list is compiled, it can then be the basis of a questionnaire made available to potential volunteers. The questionnaire, in addition to tracking potential availability (versus asking for commitment to a certain date or time), might ask for skill-sets (so that lawyers don’t spend all of their time lugging stuff around rather than helping with legal work or so that labor-interested folks don’t end up filing) and what possessions they are willing to lend. The organization/campaign could then reach out weekly to willing volunteers and make potential opportunities/needs available that the volunteer could effectively respond to and offer.

This conversation came out of the suggestion that social networking sites might be tailored to filter this information for volunteers/campaigns. Perhaps when filling out a profile on a social platform concerned with volunteerism or activism, these questions would be built into a public or private profile and then users could opt in to sharing their information with organizations, so that the organization could see the user’s willingness (anonymously, so as to not take their other information) and use the platform as a middle person to facilitate potential volunteer opportunities. From what I understand, Squarepeg, who we will be talking with for an interview later, is already addressing some of these connections. I look forward to featuring what they have to add.

-Filed in Ideas

There was a 5.1% drop in donations to nonprofits from 2006 to 2007. With the economy facing a downturn and this being an election year, nonprofit organizations very well might see another drop in 2008. How can nonprofits proactively engage donor bases by using tools available online? At their workshop “Getting the most out of the community supporting your organization,” Vinnie Lauria and Kristine Molnar offered some suggestions to a packed room. It isn’t about money, they stressed. It’s about building relationships.

Firstly, they advocate putting an end to boring thank you emails. Molnar used a standard American Red Cross thank you note, which was bland and several apologizing to anyone in the audience who might be affiliated with the organization. “I’m sorry. Some of your emails are great. But this one sucked.” She suggested shorter emails with links that bring people back to the website to do cool things there. Many of those cool things include shedding some light on donors.

Speaking of emails, people don’t really care for e-mails. Or more clearly, quoting Seth Godin, Molnar suggested that people don’t want emails, they want me-mail. This is to say that donors want to see themselves mentioned in organizational correspondence. Feeding narcissism works; donors respond well to being recognized. The speakers suggested to reward user in a unique way, offering perfect “attendance awards” for consistent givers. Give awards to top 10% donors per year. Do member spotlights. Mention the donor accordingly and excited, reinvested, and enthused, they will very likely share links to the site (and opportunities to give) with their friends and family.

-Filed in Ideas

Eleven ways that moms are leveraging social media to pursue the mom agenda.

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On this day, May 27th, 2008, the news brings to our attention the ascent of the youth vote, Roger Cohen on Obama’s knack of leveraging networks, writing as a bomb, a short list of Arab political bloggers, organizers getting “Konnected,” and more.

• The anti-Ayan Hirsi Ali blogger.
• Roger Cohen on Obama, Generation Y, and networking.
• An interesting short list of interesting Arab bloggers.
• The Internet makes the youth vote relevant.
• Internet protestors decend on Ottawa for “Internet freedom.”
• And finally, organizers Get Konnected.

-Filed in News

On this day, May 26th, 2008, the news brings to our attention mavericks of “Internet freedom,” a wiki approach to finding a business plan, the power of bloggers in the Minnesota Senate race, more on Joe Lieberman’s demands to Google, and more.

• A recap of Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008.
• Are you a “Maverick of Internet Freedom”?
• Need a business plan? Try wiki-ing one up.
• Autism rights activist are finding their niche online.
• Time on The Politico on how the Internet has changed the news
• Al Franken and power of bloggers.
• And even more on Lieberman and Internet terror.

-Filed in News

The Poverty & Race Research Action Council’s Guide to Community Organizing.

-Filed in Ideas