The report states that as of May 2011, “40% of U.S. residents still did not have broadband Internet access at home.” Many felt broadband was too expensive, including those in communities that are low-income and have higher concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities, the disabled, immigrants, and others. Despite this, “more than 86% of adults in the U.S. own a mobile phone and more than 50% of these are smartphones that can browse the Internet.” Through chapters including “How Communities are Making an Impact with Mobile Strategies” and, “Keys to Success for Mobile Programs by Underserved Communities,” the true power of nonprofit mobile engagement for those who could otherwise not participate is illustrated.

If your nonprofit desires to be successful in reaching larger and more diverse audiences, having a comprehensive mobile strategy is a necessity. Fission knows this through our work with organizations such as Reform Immigration for America. This led us to publish our own report, “Reform Immigration With Your Cell Phone,” which was used as a key resource in the new ZeroDivide report.

Download the full ZeroDivide report here to learn about how your nonprofit organization can make the most out of mobile outreach today!

Why should you grow and expand your presence on social media?

Deepening relationships and engagement: The leading (and somewhat obvious) reason to grow your social media presence is that it is a great PR tool that also allows you to connect with your target audience. The main goal of nearly all nonprofits is to raise awareness to their cause and mobilize people behind them with a somewhat limited budget. Social Media can be a low-cost, high potential tool that can help you spread your message across the world. Today, 4 out of 5 people using the Internet visit social media and blogs. Moreover, while raising awareness about your organization through social media interaction, studies have shown you will also see an increase of traffic to your website and create a more favorable perception of the brand. Through social media people can identify with your nonprofit through the trusted voice of a real person rather than through the cold, sometimes distant or formal traditional communication process. Positioning your organization as an expert that engages in constant interaction with your audience should help to build trust and keep supporters committed to your cause.

Social media is here to stay: Social media in some capacity is an inevitable part of our and future generations’ daily lives. A lot of people use social media because they want to hear and share stories about topics that touch them, and it is important to build a strong online presence as soon as possible in order to make sure you benefit in the long run. According to Amy Southerland, social media “is good news for nonprofits because the ethos and etiquette of the social media sphere is a perfect fit for nonprofits. But you have to be in the sphere to reap the benefits!”

Empowering your supporters: Through the power of the Internet, it now takes organizations less time to grow communities and focus on a cause. Social media empowers supporters to take action on their own, which should expand your reach and spread your message. Simple actions like reposting a blog post, giving supporters a voice online, or allowing them to self-organize can help your engagement and fundraising process. For example, Fission Strategy capitalized on this aspect of social media when we created the Story Tool for Define American. The tool empowered the target audience to share their stories, spread Define American’s message, and increase the conversation around the American immigration system.

Facilitating collaboration and crowdsourcing: More than just empowering your supporters, social media can also empower your own members by breaking institutional barriers. Social media helps create a sense of community within the organization by helping to facilitate communication between your staff members. This quick and informal communication method across the various nonprofit organization boundaries allows for improved collaboration, enhanced decision making, and an overall more efficient use of resources. The National Wildlife Federation is great example of a non-profit organization that understood this early on. Using the tool Yammer enabled the staff to cross-promote ideas and programs across the organization. Fission Strategy also uses Yammer internally, and it has helped us create a highly cohesive and connected team despite having team members around the country.

Better understanding of customers perceptions: Social media tools allow you get insights about your audience in order to better understand who they are and what drives them to your organization. It is not uncommon for nonprofit organizations to create monthly, quarterly, or yearly insight reports about their social media. Depending on what the organization is looking for, it will be able to improve its insights about target markets, develop more targeted marketing campaigns, measure the frequency of the discussion about the brand, and much more. Monitoring conversations around your brand will be crucial for your non-profit organization. Not only will it assist in counteracting false accusations and negative comments, but it will help to focus efforts that maximize audience engagement.  

Great for fundraising: Once you understand all of the benefits above, you will understand why it could help your fundraising process. There are a lot of tools available to directly facilitate the fundraising process online, but the increase in awareness, trust, and engagement toward your organization will make people that much more likely to financially support the mission. This is not something that happens overnight, but with a good and complete online strategy, you will get there.

Social media use by nonprofits is nothing new, but it is still new enough that many do not know how to fully utilize the power at their fingertips. There is a lot of room for innovation and creativity, and the sooner your organization fully commits, the more effective the outreach will be. Stay tuned for next few blog posts, where we will look at simple things that you can do to make sure you fully optimize your social media potential!

• Some of them have bigger networks than the bloggers and journalists you’re courting.
• Some of them have bigger networks than you.
• More importantly, people trust them more than they trust you. Studies show people trust people, not institutions, more all the time. Some organizations resolve this by having strong public figures -- Van Jones is really “out” as the face of Rebuild the Dream -- but for most, having evangelists outside the organization resonating their message, sharing their actions, is revolutionary.

• who are the communities of people on our “supporter” lists -- soccer moms and college students and the retiring boomers may all respond to an outreach about healthcare, but they click and care for totally different reasons
• what are they talking about -- literally: what phrases and hashtags they’re using
• who do they trust and listen to, what URLs do they share

The twelve innovators were awarded in four categories, which included campaign innovators, advocacy innovators, Capitol Hill innovators, and nonpartisan innovators.

The campaign innovators category featured people that had been the most influential in Democratic, Republican, or nonpartisan campaigns, and included Serenety Hanley, the Vice President of Grassroots Targeting; Jason Rosenbaum, the Senior Online Campaign Director for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC); Tom Serres of Rally.org, and Stuart Trevelyn of NGP VAN.

Roz Lemieux, a founding partner of Fission, was announced as one of three Advocacy innovators alongside Charlie Harper, editor of Peach Pundit, and Katie Harbath, the Manager for Public Policy at Facebook.

Helping to drive Roz’s announcement as an advocacy innovator was the beta release of Attentive.ly, Fission’s new social media platform that “allows organizations to turn their static email lists into dynamic online communities” by targeting and engaging their most connected supporters on social media.

The one Capitol Hill innovator was Republican Seamus Kraft, the Digital Director at the Committee on Government Oversight. Nonpartisan innovators included David Binnetti of Votizen, Kahlil Byrd of Americans Elect, Tom Hallaran of IB5k, and Tracy Russo, the Director of New Media at the Department of Justice.

Please take some time to read about all of the great CampaignTech Innovators here, and congratulations to Roz on her recognition!

The aim of the challenge is to build a community of developers designers, and data analysts who can turn the raw data of “civic health” into beautiful, useful visualizations, enabling our communities to be better understood and made to thrive. Excellent, eh? Read on!

Kristen Cambell, Chief Program Officer of NCoC, and Jake Brewer (in photo, speaking at Data2.0), Chief Strategy Officer of Fission, took the stage to announce launch, while remote audiences watched via livestream.

The Data 2.0 Summit hosted thought leadership discussions on cloud data — how companies are building on top of a long-term foundation of social data, open gov data, business intelligence data, and customer data. The summit provided an ideal launching pad for the challenge, since those we addressed are passionate proponents of using data for a purpose.

Leading up to the launch we were thrilled to have a super quick retweet by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Craig Connects, who is a big proponent of open data and technology for social causes. And on launch day, here’s a sampling of the awesome tweets that reached hundreds of thousands of people:

Some key organizations contributed significantly to the challenge’s outreach on launch day, with the Case Foundation leading the way:

It’s always fantastic to get smart suggestions from the experts out there, and here is one from Lucy Bernholz:

We’ve promoted other challenges in the past, such as Apps for Communities, supported by the FCC and the Knight Foundation, and were extremely grateful for support from #opengov and #gov20 proponents. So in that vein it was fantastic to get a retweet from @GovFresh:

Feeling inspired and intrigued? Then a good next step would be liking the challenge on Facebook and following on Twitter! Then, if you’re still fired up, go to http://civicdatachallenge.org and join the Google group to get started with the call to action.

Please join us!

From left to right, we have some of the challenge’s team members with new friends ... Daniel Tunkelang (Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn), Kristen Cambell (Chief Program Officer at the National Conference on Citizenship), Michael Silberman (Global Director of Digital Innovation at Greenpeace), Jake Brewer (Chief Strategy Officer at Fission Strategy), and Adriana Dakin (Strategist at Fission Strategy).

In support of Summer Jobs+, several high profile leaders, including former White House Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra and musician Jon Bon Jovi, launched SummerQAmp, a nationwide initiative to train a new workforce in high-tech skills and help create tech jobs for American youth. SummerQAmp’s greater mission is to keep the U.S. at the forefront of technological innovation by creating tech jobs at home. Furthermore, the initiative aims to promote awareness of Quality Assurance (QA) as a career option by inviting leading U.S. software companies to offer QA-centered internships this summer to youth without formal technical training. SummerQAmp has set a goal of creating at least 1,000 QA internships for the Summer of 2012.

Since the Spring of 2011, Fission Strategy has hired interns to provide support in the development and implementation of our online outreach and advocacy campaigns. Interns are provided with the opportunity to gain hands-on, direct experience with online campaigning, web development, design, and operations projects for a broad variety of non-profit organizations working on a range of issues. Fission looks forward to sharing this internship experience with SummerQamp participants during Summer 2012. Applications are still being accepted, but get them in quickly! 

With over 10 years of experience partnering with nonprofits and progressive organizations, Kien has helped some of the best achieve their visual communication goals. Former Yippa clients include Energy Service Corps, Raise Your Hand (a Planned Parenthood Campaign), ACLU, Environment Colorado, OpenEngage, Pathfinder, Heal the Bay (California), Nest, and the Restaurants Coalition. He has also worked as the lead designer for Avaaz. Kien’s previous work for Fission includes designing for clients such as MomsRising.org, Voices for America’s Children, and Reform Immigration FOR America.

Fission is extremely honored that we’ve been able to expand in order to accomplish our objective of helping nonprofits, foundations, and social entrepreneurs reach their goals! From the whole team: We can’t wait to work with you in the future!

One of the examples mentioned was a Fission Strategy client, Voices for America's Children. Scharpnick writes that Voices "has created basic infographics that do a good job of bringing personality to topics such as health, education, and government spending." The series of infographics, created by Fission's design team, focused on the impacts of cuts to children's programs that were proposed by the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. Over a dozen of these infographics were created and helped Voices for America's Children build a complete picture of the investment our country needs to make in order to support our future citizens.

Other organizations mentioned in the Chronicle of Philanthropy article were Product (RED) and Architecture for Humanity, and it was explained how infographics and visual representations of data were successful in brining attention to an important cause that "is far more engaging and efficient than what could be conveyed with words alone."

Click here to read the full article, and check out the infographics for Voices for America's Children today!

Update: Voices For America's Children and their powerful use of infographics has also been mentioned in a second Chronicle of Philanthropy article, "Visualizing Data Helps Charities Get Attention." The author spoke with Voices chief executive Bill Bentley, who said, "The biggest challenge is finding the data that will convey a charity's message in the simplest, clearest way possible." 

The Voices infographics campaign was also discussed in the Child Advocacy 360 article, "An Infographic Is Worth Many Thousands of Words: Voices Campaign Wins Plaudits and Platform." This article discussed how the federal budget debates of last fall put children at risk, and how Voices' campaign helped to send more than 12,000 messages to members of Congress. 

The infographics have also been shown in Socialbrite.org's article "How nonprofits should use infographics" and in Community Organizer 2.0's post, "Infographics For Nonprofits: The New Storytelling."

Fission is proud to work with Voices for America's Children and hopes this exposure will help in their mission to helping America's children succeed!

For those of you who have never heard of Rapportive, it is a sidebar for your Gmail that displays social media information from your email contacts while you are responding to them. The tool is very simple to install and easy to use. Its main purpose is to allow you to see a full cross-network profile of your email contacts, including latest posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and let you friend them directly from your Gmail account. In other words, you can keep your network growing by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more without even having to leave the comfort of your Gmail page. In a world where we constantly need to stay connected, this tool can help save you time (and they say time is money).

Rapportive allows you to see what your contact looks like, establish a rapport by mentioning shared interests, retweet their posts, and record important thoughts for later by leaving notes. Users get that and more in an intuitive sidebar where the ads are currently placed (did we mention you don’t need to look at ads anymore?). Check out the free service today.

For those of you who are already using Rapportive, fear not! This acquisition should not derail Rapportive from its original mission to make you brilliant with people. As Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra mentioned in his blog when talking about LinkedIn “we got to know them very well”, “We found a great overlap between our visions” and “We found a high-calibre and extremely driven team.” LinkedIn and Rapportive are both “members-first” companies with the main goal to make their members more successful. Therefore, we expect these firms to complement each other well and to deliver an even better end product. Rahul Vohra seems confident that this partnership will be successful as the transition was made “Slowly, but surely”.

The news became official on February 22, after weeks of rumors that a deal was going to be reached. Even though the financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed at this time, we do know that Rapportive will be fully integrated into LinkedIn.

So far it is hard to tell what will come out of this, but we believe there is a lot of potential. Fission Strategy is looking forward to see what this partnership has to offer and we wish them both the best of luck. 

Baratunde on stage at SXSW 2012. Photo from NY Times Wire.

@baratunde is a @jjpolitics colleague of my @FissionStrategy colleague @ch3ryl, but I hadn’t grasped the extent of how quick witted and awesome he is. Now I’ve got it.

Today to talk about the power of satire, he put into action his prowess in storytelling and visuals to share his beliefs and experiences about transforming the world … with as much use of Twitter-type communication as possible  such as hashtags and usernames.

First of all, a story about going to a bar when he only wanted a relationship with a whiskey, not good conversation, but sat next to an overly enthusiastic woman who peppered him with questions, to which he responded with one-word answers (like you do when your parent has gone 20 minutes too long on a phone conversation) that didn’t deter her. When he said he’d gone to Harvard and worked at The Onion, she exclaimed, “You’re the whitest black guy I’ve ever met!”

Well, Baratunde’s grandfather taught himself to read in the days just after slavery ended, and his grandmother was the first black employee of the US Supreme Court. Since grandmother worked so much, his mother went to boarding school at age 8 — but didn’t like it. To visualize that, Baratunde showed a handwritten letter from the 8 year-old saying she had no one to play with and wanted cookies and dolls sent to her, and there was a note on the back in better handwriting from a Sister saying her spot could be gladly taken by a child anxious to be at the school. She didn’t last long at the school.

For a time his mom conformed to expectations … then started hanging out with dudes like this, “look at him again,” Baratunde said and showed a double image (El Dorado, essence of cool in ‘64 … sorry the iPhone photo is fuzzy):

Baratunde’s mom started marching for liberation. His neighborhood was like The Wire TV series but in 3D, and it had everything The Wire had … except for universal critical acclaim and the acclaim of white people who saw it.

In his career, Baratunde started helping to make fake news. He spoofed as Obama, a black mayor, and others … “I am all the black people I know.” The Onion, where he’s Director of Digital, headlined last year: “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex,” and the story resurged last month during the Komen debacle when a Senator thought it was real / current news. When someone put the Abortionplex on Yelp as a place in Topeka, KS, hundreds of people reviewed it (the most ever for a nonexistent business). It became a platform for other people’s expression of comedy!

And the point is … it’s powerful to communicate truth indirectly through comedy. Check out Laughter Against the Machine for comedy in politics. “Comedians are #SacredClowns.” In this age, everyone can create. There’s magic in our towns, Baratunde said, which is generally a good thing, but the internet of crap is emerging with lots of noise and confusion — an abundance of information and a scarcity of attention.

In this internet of crap, there’s opportunity for creating clarity and trust. Big institutions such as government are coming up short.

In Egypt Bassem Youssef is doing comedy send ups about the media and military, and says, “We’ve become so tense about so many things so dealing with issues through laughter and sarcasm is a good thing.” In Iran, the journalist Saman Abbabi of the Parazit TV show about Iranian politics says, “When you make fun of yourself, people are more receptive to what you have to say.” The Iranian government is removing satellite dishes from building walls and roofs so people can’t watch comedy. An audience member who works with the Ford Foundation gave a shootout to the political satire by Gado, a longtime cartoonist in Kenya, which also has the comedy troupe Ridiculous.

“A cultivated wit,” wrote Horace, a Roman satirist (whom I had the pleasure to enjoy in high school Latin), “one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.” Go to CultivatedWit.com to sign up for news from Baratunde to find out more about how comedy can help us understand the world.

Baratunde wants to see more users of tools become co-creators of tools — to be inclusive of the “architects” as well as the “residents of the building.”

When a member of the audience asked how to include more people, he thought of a couple incentive ideas: bring a friend of a different race and get a 50% discount on a ticket, and give tax breaks …

Ending his talk, answered a Canadian audience member about sorrow and tragedy in comedy — Baratunde said his mom’s passing triggered a deeper relationship with his stories. The night she passed, he wrote a sad and funny letter to friends, because hospitals are terrible and funny places. He thinks about how far into darkness and tragedy one has to go to find light. Are any topics off limit? Not in general, he thinks. It depends on the way you choose to talk about something — the intention and respect you have for the material you approach.

Wanna read more? Here is the Huffington Post article on his keynote talk at SXSW.

And definitely buy his book How to be Black.

Adriana buying the book How To Be Black at SXSW 2012.

Baratunde signing his book How To Be Black. Photo by someone at SXSW 2012.

You can read the original blog post here.