Third Sector Connector Blog

I woke up thinking about Tinker Toys this morning. Those little wheels, spokes, connectors, and green fans were “the bomb.”  Often, my sister and  I would build fully-loaded little farms complete with animals, trucks, windmills, and barns. Or sometimes we created huge cellular-looking blobs with random hubs and spokes, together sculpting a funky abstract nexus of modern art.   Whatever emerged from our play, it always had its own “je ne sais quoi” of connectivity.

The creation of the Internet and the emergence of Web 2.0 has filled me with the same sense of wonder about its potential for connections. For those of us who are web-connected (or web-addicted), the world is now flat and our degrees of separation continue to shrink. We routinely connect globally with colleagues on LinkedIn and Twitter, and we swap stories, pictures, and videos on FaceBook. We StumbleUpon, Digg, Buzz, and Wave.  Hand-written letters and cards were first replaced by email, and now are down to cheery 140-character tweets and text messages.  Brief repeated encounters with an amazing variety of people now pepper our online days and nights.  Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has diagrammed his network of global friends and I find that it looks like the string art I made in my post-Tinker Toy days.

While we find new ways to connect globally, the very essence of our humanity also draws us nearer to each other. As social beings, we live, love, and work in communities.  Whether in rural communities of farmers, small towns populated with multi-generational families, or large urban cities surrounded by suburbs, we still rely on local connections for much of our day-to-day lives. Connections, that for many of us, are forged by nonprofit community-based organizations.  They are:

• The local hospitals and clinics that provide us with medical care.
• The free-standing libraries where we research and read, and access the Internet if we can’t afford access at home.
• The performing arts organizations that foster our love for music, dance and theatre.
• The advocates that preserve our local habitats and protect our waterways.
• The day care centers and the after-school programs that serve our youth.
• The adoption centers where we find our furry family members.
• The helping hands that provide us with emergency food and housing assistance and keep us safe during disasters.

These organizations don’t work in isolation, though.  Together, they form a network of resources that allow all of us to remain fully participating and thriving members of our communities. They inform and refer us, provide critical services, and collaborate  in ways that benefit us all. They are the neurons that are the basic building blocks of our communities.

So, Tinkers Toys took me to string art and neurons, and I now find myself thinking about the tapestry of humanity:

• How can we take our global string art and weave it into our local neural networks?
• How do we find ways to benefit from this new tapestry?
  
• And, what does that tapestry look like?
  

Would love to hear your thoughts.

–Laura

p.s. Thanks to @askdebra for a comment that she made yesterday during the #NPCons twitter chat about, “Humanity opening doors.”  It was part of my day residue and inspired some of my thoughts.

At the beginning of the new year, sector guru Beth Kanter posted her three words for 2010, and invited her blog readers to post theirs in response.  I violated the rules by posting four, but it was only three concepts so I still think it’s legitimate: “Challenge, Change, and Collective Co-Creation.”

Challenge: When we launched, we invited you to join us and help us build a site that would be valuable for community-based nonprofit organizations and those who serve them. You took us seriously, and almost all of your feedback was focused on improving access to our Nonprofit and NGO tips.  Here’s a list of the top requests that you made:

Can you make it easier to navigate to the tips?
Can you break out the tips by categories/subject matter?
Can we get email notification every time a new tip is posted?
Can we subscribe to comments on tips so that we can follow the dialogue?
Can you make it easier for us to share the tips with others?
Can you give us guidelines so that we can contribute tips ourselves?

Changes:

• There’s now a “Tips” tab built into our site navigation on every page.
• When you click on that tab, you’ll find our detailed categories and subcategories.  We’ll add to this as we go.
• Members can now receive notification of new tips by email.  Here’s how.
• Members can now log in and subscribe to comments in individual tips. It’s as simple as checking a notification box at the bottom of each tip.
• Sharing a tip is easy!  Each tip has a “share” button that makes it easy to share via popular social media sites, and other locations on the Web.
• New visitors and folks who haven’t logged in can also click a “like” button to let us know the tip is a favorite.
• Read our FAQ for members who want to submit tips. Even if you have your own blog or website, there are several advantages to being a Third Sector Connector Tipster, too.

Collective Co-Creation: Here’s where we’ve been spending the most time, although it’s been mostly under the hood.  We’ve been working closely with the members of our first Get Local community in Coastal South Carolina to improve and expand our services before we roll them out to other communities.  What started as a separate website that was a matching service for community-based nonprofits and the businesses that serve them has taken on an entirely new dimension.  Our programmers have integrated the first version of our local service into our global site, and it is now easily scalable and replicable within other communities.

Within our Get Local communities, our nonprofit members can now:

• Interact with other local nonprofits in private local-only forums set up just for nonprofit leaders within a specified geographic region.
• Post to a shared calendar of events and trainings that can be viewed by the general public.
• Reach out to the community via our local nonprofit directories.
• Easily find and hire nonprofit-friendly businesses and service providers.
• Access Third Sector Connector’s global news, tips and forums from one integrated Web interface.

Read more about the benefits of having a Get Local community and how to get one.

We’re still working out some minor nits and bugs, and we hope you’ll let us know if you find any problems. In any case, we hope you’ll take a look around, share some tips, help us spread the word, and join us if you haven’t already done so.  After all, we’ve still got more than half the year to go, and plenty of room for more challenges, more changes, and more collective co-creation!

What is the best way for donors to choose a community-based organization to support?

“Charity Rating Systems”? BUZZ! Wrong answer.

• According to a recent comment by Ken Berger from Charity Navigator, “…60% of all the revenues in the sector go to 2/10ths of 1% of all the 501(c)3s.” Berger says, “That is about 2,000 or so organizations. In addition, about 94% of all revenues go to 6% of them.”



• That means that the vast majority of the nonprofit organizations that are at work in your community won’t show up on ratings or top 10 lists even if they are producing outstanding results. For instance, Charity Navigator only reviews ~5,000 of the ~ 1.1 million charitable nonprofit organizations in the United States. In order to be listed, Charity Navigator requires organizations to have more than $500,000 in public support and total revenue of more than $1,000,000 in the most recent fiscal year.
• Most experts agree that the use of “overhead ratios” as an indicator to guide donors has resulted in a mistaken belief that funding “lean” organizations is a better investment than funding organizations who invest in their infrastructure. Yet, most of the existing nonprofit/charity rating systems are still based, in part, on these ratios, and use of these ratios continues to mislead donors and harm the sector as a whole.

What about “Nonprofit Expert Evaluators”? BUZZ! Also wrong.

• In fact, some so-called “evaluation experts” at a new “independent, nonprofit charity evaluator” have only a few years of work experience within the hedge fund industry and have limited experience within the nonprofit sector.
• This can lead to poor advice and reliance by donors on incorrect and uninformed information. For example, this same new evaluator recommends a specific healthcare organization to donors while at the same time saying it has, “little formal evidence regarding the quality and outcomes” of the organization’s programs and believes that they are outside of a reasonable range of cost-effectiveness.

In fact, most rating systems and expert evaluators do not evaluate actual program outcomes produced by the organizations, but instead look exclusively at financial data that is reported on nonprofit tax returns.

There are better ways to choose a nonprofit or NGO to support.

The data points above are included in Ready to Choose a Community-Based Organization to Support? Look Beyond “Charity Rating Systems” and “Nonprofit Expert Evaluators“, a new “tip sheet” designed to help guide donors to better ways to choose which organizations to support. The document is still in draft form, and is being circulated for public input, review and feedback before finalization. Since Third Sector Connector is committed exclusively to helping local community-based organizations thrive, we’re pleased to be part of the growing group of “Supporters of Effective Community-Based Philanthropy” that created the draft and is seeking feedback at our Facebook Group.

Here are some of the current tips for donors who want to support local community-based organizations that are making a difference:

• Reach out to community leaders. Contact program officers at your local United Way or community foundation and ask them which organizations are doing innovative work in your areas of interest (e.g. arts, basic needs, education, employment, environment, children and youth).
• Review nonprofits’ websites, annual reports, and other materials. Locate information about their visions, missions, goals, and programs. Check their rosters of Board members and directly contact any that you know.
• “Google” the organizations that best match your interests. Get on the Web and look for positive press and discover any concerns that have been publicly raised. Do a general web-based search and also search for recent news.
• Make direct contact with organizations. Once you have a few organizations identified, contact staff leaders and ask to be put in touch with one or two current donors who are giving at the level that you intend to give. Ask them what their experience with stewardship has been. Have they received timely acknowledgments of their support? Do they get updates on how the funds were used? Is the staff team responsive?
• Take a field trip. If possible, visit the programs and services provided by the organization to experience their work directly. If it is a direct service program, speak directly with people who have received services to understand their experiences with the program.
• Look for evidence of community engagement, collaboration and impact. Ask for copies of any public planning documents, results from community surveys, and outcome measurement reports. Contact partner organizations and other community collaborators to ask about their working relationships.
• Ask for a copy of the organization’s most recent budget and financial data. If you are making a substantial gift, consider asking your financial advisor to review it and share any questions or concerns with you.

What would you add to this list or change? Either comment below or join the Supporters of Effective Community-Based Philanthropy Facebook Group, and provide your input there.
Further Reading

My worst nightmare is now true: sloppy ratings of nonprofit effectiveness in Haiti by Gayle Gifford (which catalyzed this current initiative)

Beware The Nonprofit Watchdog – Charity Navigator by Don Griesmann

The Overhead Question: The Future of Nonprofit Assessment and Reporting – A February, 2010 conference call sponsored by NTEN. Get the recording here.

Charity Navigator Fixes Its Compass by Dan Pallotta (make sure and read the comments, too)

Do you ever have moments where all of the signs, arrows, and flashing lights keep pointing in the same direction no matter which way you turn? That’s what happened to me recently, and they were all pointing toward the flashing neon sign in my brain that said (blink-blink, blink-blink) “Servant Leadership.”

First, I received a ton of great feedback on my recent post about “18 Traits for Successful Nonprofit and NGO Leaders.” Some folks thought that the list set the bar too high, but most of our site members and social media pals thought that the list could still be further enhanced so they added even more traits like compassion, empathy, and humility, just to name a few. Upon reflection, I realized that even if executive search teams aren’t specifically identifying these additional traits in job postings, it may be because there is an assumption that nonprofit and NGO leaders already possess the common characteristics of “servant-leaders,” a term first-coined by Robert Greenleaf in the late 1960s.

Next, I read an interesting post by John Copps on the New Philanthropy Capital blog called,”Are charity CEOs too powerful?” , that expressed worries that if shared governance is not present, then “it risks a situation where the CEO is the undisputed top dog and doesn’t receive enough challenge to his or her decisions.” It left me wondering about how the nonprofit shared governance model impacts the concept of servant-leadership, and how to cultivate servant-leaders, not just in our CEOs, but also in our Boards so that this fear simply becomes unfounded.

The third arrow in the quiver was a delightful phone conversation yesterday with Michael Kumer, who is the associate dean of the School of Leadership and Professional Advancement at Duquesne and is also the Executive Director of Duquesne’s Nonprofit Leadership Institute. Every word spoken during our entire conversation reminded me that I choose to teach for Duquesne because of their emphasis on cultivating authentic, capable leaders who are committed, excited and prepared to serve in their communities. How do they do it? They intentionally model servant leadership at an organizational level…no small feat within a large educational institution.

Since the neon sign in my brain was now blinking at strobe speed, I dusted off my copy of Robert Greenleaf’s seminal essay, “The Servant as Leader,” which was written in 1970 and which strongly influenced me during my early days as a young nonprofit leader. Although something new stands out for me each time I read it, the most well-known quote from the essay always has the most impact on me time and time again (perhaps that’s why it so well-known, huh?):

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”

10 Characteristics of Servant-Leaders

In the many other works that followed Greenleaf’s first essay, these traits and characteristics of servant-leaders were further fleshed out. They include:

1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing
4. Awareness
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship
9. Commitment to the growth of others, and
10. Building community

5 Cross-Sector Servant-Leadership Questions
Anyone who knows me also knows that I believe that asking questions provides a powerful opportunity for introspection, reflection and learning. So, Greenleaf’s questions and a refresher on the 10 characteristics above stimulated yet another set of questions from me about servant leadership across all sectors (government, for-profit, community-benefit/Third Sector, and the emerging 4th sector).

• What if every local community made it a priority to identify, cultivate and reward true servant-leadership in businesses, government, and the nonprofit/NGO sector?
• What if local nonprofit leaders (both Board and staff) had a safe “place” to gather to talk about how best to serve their communities collaboratively, without the defensiveness and territoriality that frequently comes with such meetings?
• What if local foundations, business leaders and human services coalitions joined forces to provide ongoing training to existing and next-generation leaders in all sectors about servant-leadership?
• What if, alongside Math and English, Servant-Leadership became part of the core curriculum for all middle-schoolers, high-schoolers and college students?
• What if servant-leadership became the norm in our society?

Wouldn’t servant-leadership lead to stronger, healthier, more vibrant communities? Couldn’t servant-leadership connect all of our sectors with a shared leadership agenda? What do you think?

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead

Since our launch in September, 2009 (was it really just five months ago?), we’ve gathered your suggestions and feedback so that we can improve the site. We’ve listened, and within the next few weeks, we’ll have a new-and-improved Third Sector Connector site to accompany the launch of our Nonprofit Local 2.0 service for communities. Alongside the many creative ideas for site enhancement, we’ve also been fielding some additional questions about why we’re focused on local, grassroots and community-based nonprofits and NGOs. We realized that we had shared our mission and vision, but that we hadn’t yet articulated our shared values, not only for our site, but for the sector as a whole. That stimulated this post and the creation of our “Third Sector Connector Creed,” which you’ll find below:

Third Sector Connector Creed

• We believe that local nonprofits and NGOs are capable of creating amazing outcomes within our communities, and that we don’t do it alone or in side-by-side silos.
• We believe every local organization is part of an interwoven network of organizations with unique-yet-related missions that together act as a “connection and communication backbone” within neighborhoods and communities.
• We believe that with a strong backbone to support them, every local organization stands shoulder-to-shoulder and on the shoulders of others who are also serving the community.
• We believe that strengthening one organization also benefits every organization in the network, and ultimately benefits the community as a whole.
• We believe that one way to strengthen organizations is to put information and resources in the hands of Board members, staff, and program volunteers so that they have a “capacity-building toolkit” at the ready.
• We believe that there is an amazing, yet overwhelming body of information, advice, and collective wisdom already “out there” and that new resources and tools are being created every day.
• We believe that Third Sector Connector can help get those resources and tools into your hands so that you can use them to drive change.
• We believe that the World Wide Web and social media have “flattened” our world and that nonprofits and NGOs can reach across the globe to learn new ways of thinking and doing, and to simultaneously strengthen governance, leadership, and infrastructure.
• We believe that local connections and collaboration are critical to building strong community-based programs and creating healthy, vibrant communities.
• We believe that as we grow and add new members we can collectively create a resource that has increasing value, reach and impact for local organizations over time.
• We believe that we’re just scratching the surface of finding new ways to connect and build capacity for the Third Sector, and that it is an exciting time for coming together.
• We believe that together we can change the world.

Dear members, visitors, and early supporters -

Just a little more than two months ago, we put up the beta version of the “Nonprofit Local” website and, thanks to the early support of members like you, we’ve had more than 13,000 global visitors from more than 100 countries and our traffic numbers continue to grow every day.

As members began to join our site, we realized that we had an unexpected challenge which could also be an opportunity (see our blog posting back in October). Since then, our international base has continued to grow, with almost 18% of our site visitors coming from countries outside the U.S., many of whom don’t use the term “Nonprofit” for community benefit organizations, and instead use a variety of terms like “Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)” or “Civil Society Organizations.”Since the site was in “beta” and hadn’t officially launched, we still had the opportunity to be responsive and to encourage and acknowledge our global visitors. As a result, we will officially be moving out of our “beta” phase and launching this coming week, with a new name, “Third Sector Connector.”

Why “Third Sector Connector” you ask?

The nonprofit, voluntary, and community-benefit sector is considered to be the third sector in most countries, providing the necessary complement of services to the private (commercial) sector and the governmental sector. It is a term recognized not only in the U.S., but also in the UK, in Asia, and throughout the European continent. See Wikipedia for more. The “Connector” part of our new name demonstrates our continued commitment to connecting nonprofits and NGOs with high quality resources and information, with other organizations within local communities, and with like-minded organizations across the globe.

Thanks to all of you for your early support and for being our cheerleaders as we went through our beta phase. We are grateful to each and every one of you.

Warm regards,

Laura and Mark Deaton, Co-Founders

Third Sector Connector

http://www.ThirdSectorConnector.org

P.S. You’ll still see “Nonprofit Local” used in the Get Local section of our website as we roll out version 2.0 of our local community services in May, 2010.

Our last blog post about 21 burning questions for the Nonprofit/NGO Sector left us – and many of you who read it – wanting answers. So, we’re asking you to gaze into your crystal ball and help.

What trends do you foresee or predictions can you make for the nonprofit/NGO and philanthropic sector in 2010?

Whether your thoughts are about partnerships, social media, programs, volunteerism, fundraising, or other topics, we want to hear from you. We’re asking more than 5,000 people this question, not only here, but via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. You can be as general or specific as you like.

Here’s a small sampling of our early responses just to get your “predictive juices” flowing:

“I am hoping – actually I’m praying – that nonprofit organizations have learned some lessons and will be steering clear of trends and returning to the basics, emphasizing sound systems and comprehensive donor appreciation. I would love to see organizations begin to focus the same commitment to their development efforts that they show their mission (perhaps then they’d have the funding to SUPPORT their missions!).” From Pamela Grow, President, GrowConsultingPA and Pamela’s Grantwriting Blog

“The current recession will impact the voluntary sector in deepening ways – funding organizations will have less resources as they try to bounce back from losses, United Ways will be pressed with fewer donations as corporations pull back and governments are facing unprecidented deficits – this will call to us to be creative, strategic and to look for those opportunities which will ensure our resilience – those organizations that resist this – will be left behind. It seems bleak – but in every challenge ~ there is opportunity.” Liz Weaver, Lead Coach, Vibrant Communities Canada/Tamarack Institute

“I see an uptick in non-profits of all sizes losing valuable leaders and having great difficulty replacing them. Two reasons at least: 1. Revenue and good salaries will remain hard to come by for the NP and for the home of the leader. 2. Many leaders are ill-equipped (or too tired) to make the changes necessary to survive/prosper in this environment. They’ll move on to more fulfilling opportunities.” Tim Deuitch, Senior Consultant, Strategic Enhancement Group, Inc.

Won’t you pull out your own crystal ball and add your voice?

I recently posted a question to some colleagues on a members-only discussion group, “Does the nonprofit sector need a re-boot? If so, what questions should we be asking?” I received many thoughtful responses and thought I’d share the list of questions that came from that posting here:

1. How can we convert meaningful conversations into actions that produce strong and timely results for the entire nonprofit and philanthropic sector?
2. Are we truly meeting the needs of those we serve, whether it be a soup kitchen or a museum?
3. What is our impact and are we measuring it? Which leads to… how do we raise our bar higher?
4. How do we avoid burn-out and tap into the talents of the next generation of leaders? How much training really is needed?
5. Do we need to rethink compensation at both ends of the spectrum?
6. What is nonprofit ethics and how well do we walk our talk?
7. Why does our sector continue to rely on business modeling and imagery for solutions to our problems?
8. How can we enlist and sustain executive and trustee leadership who see their roles as serving not just their organizations but the sector as well?
9. How can we advance the sector’s identity as a place for those who seek meaning and purpose in life and work and who are rethinking, if not rejecting, acquisition and accumulation as goals for their careers?
10. In the spirit of “never waste a good crisis”, is it possible/wise to promote some rationalization rather than letting social Darwinism dictate the shape of the sector and the strength of its “place at the table” five to ten years out?
11. Accepting that the governance model for the sector might itself require a “reboot”, what role should directors play in any move toward rationalization?
12. Many nonprofits — and their boards — inadvertently sacrifice business basics to mission and service delivery. In the spirit of rebooting the governance model, how can boards better serve to balance stewardship of mission with sustainability of operations?
13. How do we address what our members/consumers/recipients really need not only from a local or personal perspective, but also with a global vision?
14. How do we remain inclusive [bring together stakeholders, maintain and honor diversity, respect many voices] and sustainable [revenue, best practices, and stewardship of resources]?
15. How do Boards stay “honest” and ethical in their stewardship to those they serve?
16. What stops us (as a nonprofit sector) from embracing our value and our power for affecting and effecting positive social change?
17. How can my nonprofit help another nonprofit to advance its mission while also achieving something to help mine move forward?
18. How can we enhance our capacity to talk and think more deeply together about the critical issues facing our communities, our organizations, our nations, and our planet?” (from The World Cafe, (c) 2005)
19. How can we access the mutual intelligence and wisdom we need to create innovative paths forward? (also from the World Cafe)
20. How do we work together to build sustainable infrastructure that will allow us all to flourish?
21. How do we build cross-sector partnerships that are designed to create and drive a new future, not only within individual communities, but regionally, nationally, and across the globe?

Note: The final two questions are ones that I asked in my recent blog post about the blurring of the private, nonprofit, and public sectors.

What strikes you about the questions themselves? What questions do you have to add to this list? Or, what answers do you have to contribute?

Most of us already know that if you’re a serious professional, you need to have a profile on LinkedIn. What you may not know is that you can use LinkedIn as a powerful tool for building your organization’s brand. Below is a list of 21 ways that you can maximize LinkedIn to:

• Connect with existing donors and leverage their networks
• Prospect for board members, volunteers and donors
• Promote your nonprofit’s brand

Out of the Gate

• Set your public profile to full view so that even those who are not on LinkedIn can find you. (LinkedIn is indexed by all major search engines.)
• Add all former employers so that former colleagues can easily find you.
• Create a custom url for your profile with your name in it. Hyphenate your first and last name to make it more easily searchable.
• Bring your profile to 100% completeness so that it is ranked higher in searches. LinkedIn walks you through how to do this.
• Make sure your organization’s website is listed on your profile.
• If it doesn’t already exist, create a profile for your organization so that people can link to the organization’s profile directly from yours.

Weaving Your Web

• Upload your personal address list and invite those contacts who are already on LinkedIn and those who are not to join. Sending individual invitations and adding personal notes is most effective.
• Encourage all of your staff to join and build profiles.
• Ask your board members to make sure that their board role is listed on their own LinkedIn profiles if they have one and that it links to your organization’s profile.
• In addition to your personal contacts, import your major donors, your volunteers, and your vendors (like your web designer or your attorney). Invite them all to become linked.

Prospecting for Gold

• Look at the networks of each of your connections. See who they know that you don’t yet know but that you would like to have in your network. Important: Ask them to make a personal introduction for you, either face-to-face or via email. Once you’ve had some interaction with them, then invite them to join your network.
• Check the status updates of your contacts on a regular basis. If something changes, it gives you a reason to give them a call or send them an email and quickly connect.
• Use the advanced search feature. You can search by geography (especially useful if you’re a local organization with a limited service area), company (if you are targeting corporate support), industry (if you are recruiting volunteers, staff or board members), and more.

If You Build It, They Will Come

• Ask for recommendations from your contacts. Reporters often use LinkedIn to identify sources, and those with the most recommendations often appear at the top of their searches.
• Join groups and post interesting news, start a discussion or chime on others’ posts. Set your group notifications to “daily” and scan each of them for interesting news or discussions.
• Use LinkedIn’s “Answers” function to answer questions in your area of expertise or to get free advice from others.
• Always add your full email signature (web, phone, etc) to any of your posts.
• Use LinkedIn’s Slideshare or Google Presentation applications to add any significant presentations you’ve done recently. If you have a general organization or major donor presentation, be sure to add it.
• Use the Blog Link or Word Press Application to connect your blog or your organization’s blog to your profile.
• Use LinkedIn’s Box.net application to share content like FAQs about your organization, e-newsletters, and more.
• Update your status when you want to share great news from work. If you use Twitter for business, you can easily link your tweets to your status update in LinkedIn. Or you can use a service like ping.fm to update multiple social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook simultaneously.

How else is LinkedIn helping your organization?

I’m usually so immersed in the community benefit/nonprofit/NGO sector that it was fascinating for me to spend the entire weekend with leaders from the American South’s public/government sector. Coordinated by the Charleston-based think tank Center for a Better South, the non-partisan invite-only conference was held at Davidson College in North Carolina and included longtime Southern progressives, current policy wonks, media, academics and others who work not only in the general policy arena, but also in diverse areas such as budgeting, energy, governance, poverty, taxation, and service learning.

We kicked off the weekend with a panelist discussion from Winthrop University’s Adolphus Belk, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Ferrel Guillory and Governing magazine’s Richard Greene. You can see the live tweets from several of us, but I’ve pulled out a couple of the messages that resonated the most strongly for me and that are important guideposts for the nonprofit sector as well:

• Poverty is a common theme for all Southerners, with an average annual income of $32,000.
• High school drop-out rates are high. Only slightly more than two-thirds of Southern Whites graduate from High School and this drops to only 40% of Southern Latinos.
• Rural areas are particularly struggling as young generations of all races head to the more metropolitan areas.
• Thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost and not yet replaced with a knowledge-based economy.
• Religion plays a critical role in Southern ideology and behavior both for Southern Blacks (83.6%) and Southern Whites (69%).

I must say I was surprised at how much it felt like I was sitting in a room filled with nonprofit/NGO leaders. Increasing poverty. Lack of education. Rural crisis. Disappearing jobs. Religion. Racial disparities. Just think about how many community benefit organizations are also focused on those issues, not just in the American South, but across the globe!

Next up was a panelist discussion on the topic, “Can the South lead today?” by former U.S. Congressman Glen Browder, Hendrix College’s Jay Barth, and policy consultant Mac McCorkle from Chapel Hill, NC. McCorkle mostly spoke about the history of Southern leadership, but the answer to the leadership question from Browder and Barth was a definitive “No.” According to the panelists:

• The South has resisted embracing diversity, and that’s reduced the South’s capacity for creative leadership.
• Authoritarianism fueled by resistance to change and the “politics of emotion” results in insular decisions that are community-specific instead of regionally focused.
• This authoritarianism means that not only can’t the South lead the nation; the South can’t lead the South.
• According to Browder, the South’s political brand is broken and tainted. “Having an “S” behind your name is worse than having a “D” or an “R.”

Hmmm. Anything sounding familiar? Barriers. Resistance. Reputation. Branding. Leadership. Same topics as we nonprofit folks discuss, with just a slight twist. In fact, for the entire weekend, I couldn’t help thinking of the “Sector Blur” trend that was highlighted in the just-released monograph funded in by the Fieldstone Alliance and the James Irvine Foundation. I should note that Browder and Barth later disclosed to me that they were intending to be provocative to spur us to action, and that the firm “no” was really intended to be a “not-right-now-unless-we-kick-it-into-gear-and-begin-by-looking-in-our-own-backyard” message.

So what to do?

Following thought-provoking lunchtime perspectives shared by H. Brandt Ayers from the Anniston Star and Warwick Sabin of the Oxford American, we set to work to design an “Agenda for a Better South.” Although not yet completed, we spent a full day drafting key recommendations for Southern leaders in the following areas: Job Creation/Employment, Education, Wellness, Energy, Taxes, Infrastructure, Governance, Social Justice, Community Safety. Once completed, the Center for a Better South is going to stamp those recommendations “draft” and broadly circulate them for feedback via a quick survey. Then once finalized, these recommendations will be widely distributed to Southern leaders, and likely will form the basis of the ongoing work of the Center for a Better South.

As I gathered my own thoughts following the weekend’s intensive session, I realized that regardless of what sector we focus on (including the private sector), we all have the same key priorities:

• How do we work together to cultivate and grow our next-generation leaders?
• How do we work together to improve education, health and job prospects?
• How do we work together to build sustainable infrastructure that will allow us all to flourish?
• How de we build cross-sector partnerships that are designed to create and drive a new future, not only within individual communities, but regionally, nationally, and across the globe?
• How do we lift each other up and support each other to become all that we can be?

Although I don’t pretend to have the answers, I can tell you that I was both honored to be part of the dialogue this weekend, and am excited about the possibilities, not only for the South but for all of us as the public sector and community benefit sectors continue to focus on what we need globally. I also find myself energized by the recognition that to truly build healthy, vibrant communities, the public and community benefit sectors need to link hands with the private sector and answer these questions together.

–LD