Category Archives: Weblogs

Friday round-up: audio, aggregation, and alltop

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It’s been a while since the last round-up, and lots to link to and write up.

– Will write more about this shortly, but the Ambassadors have started to blog….and there is an uber-feed you can sign up to for all of them combined (http://feeds.feedburner.com/SocialEnterpriseAmbassadorBlogsFeed). Early days, but starting to happen….

– Details of the next Social Enterprise Research Conference announced

– Free audio file from Stanford Social Innovation Review from their Social Entrepreneurship Day, which I shall be listening to on the way home…

– Podnosh has an interesting post on "Why should leaders blog?"; check comments also…

– SSE graduation in London on March 14th (a week today); if you haven’t got an invite, and think you should have, then get in touch.

– US article about entrepreneurship and social change (in the Tennessean, no less)

– Updated research from CAF on Social Enterprise in Practice; haven’t had a chance to read, but looks very interesting both on the challenges to the sector (quote from PR: "Social enterprises are unlikely to achieve financial sustainability and it is unreasonable to expect them to do so") and on what is needed in terms of measurement and support. Will follow up on this……

– Sally Reynolds is held in high esteem in the sector for her work leading Social Firms UK, and they continue to take an approach focused on quality and delivery; new trade directory of social firms is now online, and their Star Social Firm quality mark is also taking hold. Interesting to hear her discuss the other day how they could develop quality standards for social firms because they are more tightly defined / structured (see definition of What is a social firm?) than the diverse and varied spectrum of social enterprise.

– Related to that spectrum-like nature, NCVO are "unhappy with the government definition of social enterprise", according to this Guardian article on their new ‘civil society’ approach. I do hope we’re not entering a period of definition debate………

– Social Enterprise Magazine has relaunched (more developments on website to follow), and, IMHO, looks a country mile better in design, focus and content. Massive congratulations to all involved in making it happen and promoting it so effectively: Tim, Claudia, Deniz and the team. Look forward to encouraging our students and Fellows to read and get engaged with it….

– Greed offsetting. Really?

– Interesting Business Week article on the profits (social and financial) of CSR

– And finally, for all your non-profit blog needs, here’s Nonprofit.alltop.com; single page aggregation is the future?

Have a great weekend, one and all….

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Top 5 most popular posts and other stats

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A navel-gazing blog post: I was a late convert to Feedburner, so it took me 6 months in to sign up to it, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Also a fan of MyBlogLog, but Feedburner is great for keeping tabs on subscribers, posts, reach and all sorts. Scarily, I realise I’ve been blogging since April 2006 for SSE, which means it will be two years worth’ of blogging some time soon. So, some stats:

– 252 posts
– 26,000 page views (according to Typepad); average c. 40 per day since the start (though currently 70)
– c. 350 feed subscribers or so (according to Feedburner).

Check out the graph of slow, organic, audience growth (the big spike was a glitch, sadly):

Feeds

 

Piechart

And here’s how the subscribers break down (click on the image for more detail). Google, followed by e-mail (FeedBlitz), followed by Bloglines….etc…

Which is all heading in the right direction, though I think I need to pay more attention to Beth Kanter’s advice on How to build your blog audience.

Finally, a list of the top 5 posts on this blog (drum roll please):

1) Social entrepreneur and social innovation blogs
2) Corporate social responsibility and inflection points
3) Why the third sector shouldn’t fear blogging
4) Virtual social networking: a blessing or curse? (score one for our intern, Thor)
5) Measurement and scrutiny of the third sector

I’ll be tyring to group and theme some of the older posts in coming weeks (bit of retrospective indexing).

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Nonprofit blog exchange: King Jason

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Sporadically, I take part in the Nonprofit Blog Exchange Virtual Event, which basically involves nonprofit / third sector blogs writing about each other to create networks and promote the movement more generally. This time I’ve been allocated King Jason’s blog. No, not a little-known monarch operating as a trustee, but a web designer and IT specialist working in the nonprofit sector over in Australia. Called Jason King.

It appears that Jason used to be in London, not unlike myself, and given that SSE is also looking Australia-wards currently, this seemed all too appropriate. Having overseen the redevelopment of SSE’s website last year, these types of resources can be invaluable…particularly when there is little resource / capacity / knowledge within a (relatively) small organisation. It’s amazing how important IT is to an organisation these days and yet, how often little attention (and money) is given to it. Jason has a good example on his blog of an organisation whose website went down overnight: Quick decisions when a charity’s website went walkabout. I’ve seen even large organisations in our sector be undone by things as simple as domain name renewal, never mind the complications of DNS, MX records and the rest (which I seem to spend half my time sorting out).

But there are some great resources out there, if people get to know about them. Primarily, I’d mention the ICT Knowledgebase in the UK, and Idealware and TechSoup in the US. But it’s useful to get a more grassroots-y, personal view of things, which is where blogs like Jason’s can come in. Particularly as the format lends itself more to interaction and asking questions. If you’re working on a third sector website, or on a redesign, then checking out Jason’s post on Give your website a health check is a good start to ensuring accessibility and its status for search engines, for example. And commenters have left some extra tips as well.

Certainly I’d recommend it to anyone with responsibility for their charity or social enterprise’s website, especially if they are in Australia, as he’ll inevitably be more connected to events and resources in that location. Keeping informed and keeping connected are what it’s all about in this sphere, and anything that helps you do that has got to be valuable.

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Podcasts and Pendolinos

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For some reason, no matter the amount of forethought and planning, my travel around the UK (to support existing SSEs or to develop new ones) tends to come in batches. So this week was Manchester and Liverpool back-to-back, and next week is Belfast and Cornwall back-to-back. Apart from taking the outstanding pile of reading with me, and the ubiquitous laptop, I tend to load up on relevant podcasts for some (hopefully) interesting listening to pass the time.

Over the last couple of days, whilst leaning with the Virgin Pendolino round corners, I’ve listened to the following:

– Evan Davis’ The Bottom Line: simple, but effective: talking to 3 CEOs each week about their business, and business in general. Recommended

– A few episodes from HBR’s IdeaCast, which varies for me, both in terms of sound quality (phone call interviews are tough to hear) and becoming overwhelmed by its own jargon (“so what we’re talking about here are ways of hedging companythink?”) but there are good bits, including one professor on the CEO within and succession planning (mp3).

– The Times’ Twelve Business Ideas that are Changing the World, which this week featured Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer talking about their Plan A CSR strategy. OK-ish.

– A couple of episodes from Grassroots Channel from Podnosh, which were both great and put the others largely to shame, considering (I assume) the budget and support is that much smaller.

I listened to the Grassroots episode on lobbying advice in preparation for my workshop on the same subject with social entrepreneurs in Manchester (see my powerpoint here), and it was well produced and structured. Loved the subtitle: “the dark arts demystified” (I got an image of Dumbledore telling Harry Potter, “Right. Now we’ve done spells and broomstick technique, it’s time for the hard stuff: lobbying”). I ended up incorporating elements of it in my session, particularly around calling lobbying another form of persuasion, just planned persuasion of those in (or with) power.

I also enjoyed the session from the launch of the Big Green Challenge, because it didn’t just act as glorified PR (or greenwash) for the event, but questioned it and reflected some dissenting voices. It made for an interesting dialogue and conversation between those involved. The same couldn’t be said, for example, of Stuart Rose’s quasi-lecture which, whilst informative about some of the numbers to do with M&S’s Plan A, suffered from having no challenges to it. It sounded over-prepared and scripted, and I learned little that I didn’t know already; demonstrates how the medium is suited to dialogue and conversation. I was longing for Podnosh’s Nick Booth to chip in with some questions about his private jet, continued overpackaging, shareholder reaction and so forth, but longed in vain. The campaign for the interview, or a better conversation, starts here.

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Virtual Social Networking, a blessing or a curse?

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Here at SSE we find the internet quite useful and employ our blogging skills quite routinely, as you can see. There are countless tools to choose from, web 2.0 or not: along with the blog, we utilise e-newsletters, the facebook group, online resources, an extranet, and more recently an online bookstore. As Brett Bonfield reported recently however, virtual social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc) can both be a blessing and a pain to non-profits. Bonfield gives some hints…

Who is likely to get the most value out of social networking sites? To
answer this question, Idealware spoke to a number of nonprofit
technologists working with social networking tools. We searched beyond
the success stories to discover tales of only middling success, or even
of disappointment. What resulted were two sets of guidelines: first,
how to know if social networking isn’t right for you and second, some
of the ways that social networking might benefit your organization.

Bonfield provides a quite useful check-list to go through if you are in doubt if using the web is valuable to your organisation. It should come as no surprise that not all social entrepreneurs find networking sites online helpful, as using the resources correctly is a skill-set that constantly needs updating and development. More importantly perhaps, not all groups that social entrepreneurs target have access to the internet nor find use in online features.

While online sites are good for networking and information sharing, it is sometimes hard to see the obvious benefit a social entrepreneurial organisation can gather from the web. Some SEs base their whole operations online, while others ignore its usefulness completely, finding other ways to get by. As a whole though, it is hard to get away from the fact that tools like blogging, e-news letters, resource sites, facebook groups are very convenient for the social enterprise sector, with their low cost and high (potential) reach.

Could virtual networking work to you org’s benefit? I recommend you take a look at the check list!

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