Note... a bunch of sites I like for elements of the design and/or strategy… http://www.whytuesday.org/ http://www.charitywater.org/whywater/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/worldiswitness http://www.livestrong.com/ http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/ http://www.homelessnation.org/index.php?lang=en http://remembersegregation.org/ http://www.walkscore.com/ http://www.savetheinternet.com/ http://www.350.org/ ( I like the twitter integration at the top) http://www.edutopia.org/video

Great service from Convio for sharing this summary and Michael Stein for his work. There are some really interesting trends in here. What do they tell us about the future? How do these trends shape the movement? Online giving grew 14 percent. 69 percent of organizations raised more in 2009 than 2008, while 31 percent saw declines in their online fundraising. 61 percent of all organizations saw their average gift drop in 2009. The average online gift was $80.81, the online revenue per usable email address in 2009 was $11.68. Small organizations grew fastest. Organizations with fewer than 10,000 email addresses on file grew online revenue by 26 percent, and gifts by 32 percent. Email files continued to grow strongly. The total email file grew 27 percent in 2009 to 39,100 constituents. The open rate for email fundraising appeals was 19%. The click-through rate was 1.7%, down from 2% in 2008. The overall performance of online fundraising appeals was 0.15%, a slight rise from the year before. Web traffic growth continued for most, but at a slower rate. 60 percent of organizations grew their website traffic from 2008 to 2009. Web traffic growth in 2009 was in the single digits...

What is the data you want to see? What is the traffic and transactions in your work that reveal patterns? What do you learn from this as a Taxi driver? Police? Mugger? What data services and "maps" should we be thinking about as a movement that will inform our organizers, policy people, communications staff and fundraisers? What is going on at 3am on Friday?

There are strategies that really think about data and there are strategies that don't. When you think about your advocates and allies. When you think of all the thousands of transactions that reveal intent, interest, need or solutions. Do you have a strategy that focuses on using that to make things clearer? Do you have a strategy that leverages the most formative trend of modern culture? It is not easy for organizations to make this shift. However, good organizers have always known about tracking activists, campaigns, votes, neighborhood support, grant performance, etc. Making the leap with the new data trends is as essential today as basic organizing efforts were 100 years ago. Being a good organizer is not just communication at scale of mass media but organizing at that scale. We need to update our thinking, planning, tools and concepts of data management to fit this new world. From the NOI review of the Obama campaign... Transparency of measurable outcomes across a greater audience creates accountability and actionable data - sorely needed measures for many campaigns. When data is shared from volunteer to volunteer, volunteer to staff, and staff to senior management, institutional culture shifts. Outcomes become incentives for self-motivation...

I just read an interesting paper called measuring user influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy (Miyung Cha , Hamid Hadadi , and Franbrecco Benevito ) The most interesting thing in the article was the theory that the strength of influentials came from two areas... 1. The interpersonal relationship among users. (Which is consistent with work and planning we do in Network-Centric Advocacy) 2. The readiness of society to adopt innovation. (Which is not something I have really focused on in the past) The first idea is not radical, the idea that relationships among users really dictate the influence of each user. But the second concept, that the "readiness of the society to adopt innovation" is a large driver of the power of influentials, is something worth thinking more about. You could be the most connected person among a group of stubborn and entrenched individuals and you will have very little influence. You could be a very loosely connected leader among a group of early adaptors and you will have great influence. This begs the idea of what activities can you do consistently to enhance your networks willingness to adopt innovation. What are the steps you need to plan to...