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.

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?