A few weeks back I received this invite via email from colleague Duncan Rintoul, of the Institute for Innovation in Business and Social Research (IIBSOR) at University of Wollongong. Given the topic, I thought it was worthwhile sharing here also:

AES tech-eval: A new SIG focused on the intersection between evaluation and technology

These days it is no surprise to see mainstream and niche programs making use of tech-based platforms: web-based self-help tools, mobile applications, SMS-based reminder systems, viral videos, conversations on social media… the list is much longer than this, and ever growing.

We need to develop capacity among evaluators to work confidently in this environment, designing and executing sound evaluations that understand what these technologies are, how they can be used and how their impact can be measured.

There are also great opportunities for using technology in our evaluations — wikis, online forums, online surveys, social media monitoring… again the list is long and growing.

Spilling over from one of the parallel sessions at the 2011 AES conference, a crew of around 15 people has started pulling together a new AES Special Interest Group around this intersection between evaluation and technology: AES tech-eval.

It’s early days yet, but two things you can do for now:

• Join the email listserv
• Check out v1.0 of their resource library of conference papers, published evaluations and other resources for evaluating tech-based programs and program elements.

Go on, join them! If technology freaks you out, swap fear of the unknown with curiosity and see where it takes you. If you’re already working comfortably in this space, help lead your colleagues forward.

We’ve been pretty busy these past few weeks, but seemingly not as busy as the folks at All Together Now, the organisation behind the Give Racism the Finger campaign (also on Facebook). We’ve donated 1% of our profits for the March–June 2011 quarter (did I mention we’ve been busy?) as part of our regular giving program to support organisations doing great work in the community.

Chatting to Priscilla Brice-Weller, founder of All Together Now, it seems that the campaign is going from strength to strength, with a new initiative (that I’ve sworn to secrecy about!) launching soon. But this year has already seen some impressive results.

Over four weeks in May and June 2011, All Together Now worked in partnership with The Body Shop. The Body Shop asked their customers to Give Racism the Finger by dipping their finger in ink and putting their fingerprint on a board in the store. In doing so, they were committing to speak up when they witness racism. During the in-store campaign The Body Shop helped All Together Now to collect 50,706 fingerprints in 83 stores across Australia, which resulted in 150,000 conversations about racism between store staff and customers.

Priscilla also tells me that the annual Social Cohesion report (by the Scanlon Foundation) released in September 2011 showed that 1 in 7 Australians have been a victim of racism in the past year… that’s around 3 million Australians! So it’s great to be able to support organisations like All Together Now in helping tackle such an important issue. We hope you’ll join us and do the same…

I’m really excited to be presenting at the UX Australia conference this year, being held in Sydney. I’ll be presenting on our learnings from our work to date with the FlavourCrusader initiative, including the session we ran at the last Social Innovation Sydney event.

My session is called Eating our 2 and 5: Designing to change food behaviours using mobile devices and will explore how:

• Designing for sustained behaviour change benefits from consideration of additional factors than those found in a purely commercial context
• User experience techniques can be utilised to provide an understanding of “enabling” (and conversely ‘disabling’) factors of behaviour change, as these often present themselves only in context of use
• Novel rapid testing and research techniques can be utilised to simulate such context in a group testing environment
• User interface design choices take on extra gravity when considering behaviour change as an outcome. For example, applied appropriately, game mechanics can be a powerful driver to encourage desired behaviours beyond product use.

On that last point I’ll definitely be interested to attend Paris Buttfield-Addison’s talk Gamification sucks: Lessons from the field, though I suspect from the description we have somewhat similar views on the matter ;)

In fact, I’m humbled to be included in such a diverse and inspiring field of presenters, including contributions from our friends at Digital Eskimo, Rob Manson, and Oliver and Rod from Mobile Experience, among others.

It looks like a fantastic event, which given the feedback I’ve heard from past years’ events is the norm — well worth picking up an early-bird ticket for I’d say…

Another quick note to mention that Amnesty International Australia are hiring – from the AIA team:

AIA is recruiting! We’re looking for an experienced, energetic digital marketing professional to help us with our ambitious growth objectives. The role is responsible for designing and implementing online initiatives to recruit, retain and mobilise supporters. They need to be a whizz at copywriting, e-comms, design optimisation, SEM, SEO and social media — plus a bit of a data geek.

More information about the position is on the AIA site.

Just a quick note to mention that Eventbrite, a popular event organising web application, has announced discount pricing for non-profits and charities – Eventbrite for causes.

The blog post makes mention of the U.S. requirements, but the pricing extends to non-profits in other countries as well.

As mentioned previously, I’m attending the Social Innovation Camp organised by ASIX this weekend – now only one sleep to go.

I was going to write a quick post on my hopes for the weekend, but I read James Dellow’s take on it this morning and he says it better than I could, so head over and have a read of what he said ;)

I, too, will be attending in a “roving ‘mentor’” capacity, and I’m very much looking forward to participating in developing the variety of interesting and inspiring projects that have been invited to the camp. Should be a lot of fun…

Registration for attending the camp is now closed, but for those of you who want to follow proceedings from afar, follow AuSIX on Twitter, or search for the #ozsicamp hash tag.

As I mentioned in my last post, I presented at the Essential Media Communications Summer School last Thursday. My topic was social media for social change – looking at the principles of engagement with a specific emphasis on achieving social outcomes.

As happens with most presentations I do I was tweaking my slide deck right up until the last minute. The Summer School last week was no exception, so the version of my slides that was distributed to attendees at the conference is slightly out of sync with my actual presentation.

Thus here’s a PDF of the slides (6.24 MB) with my associated notes (which are also updated slightly from the distributed version).

From the conversations after my talk, there seemed to be a lot of interest in the diagram about different participation levels. While all this is included in my slide notes, I thought it worth noting that the diagram was conceived by Nicholas Street in response to a couple of reports, most notably the Participate Online research report (PDF 815 KB). It seems the diagram is no longer published on Nicholas’s blog – so I’m reposting it below for reference:

Around the time I came across Nicholas’s post I documented my thoughts, with an emphasis on my experience of Earth Hour 2007 – but have since expanded on them based on conversations with the Social Tech group.

While I still think the concepts are useful to consider, the Participate study is getting a bit long in the tooth now, which is why I didn’t spend a lot of time on that slide in my presentation. Seggr’s post on What social technographic are you? provides some more recent commentary to Forrester’s updated Social Technographics Ladder – both worthwhile references for those of you that are considering different types of participation.

The Pyschology of Influence and Sharing came across my Twitter stream while the Summer School was transpiring, which adds another perspective.

Thanks to everyone who attended the presentation, for the challenging questions at the end of the talk and for the kind words some of you shared with me afterwards. And thanks to EMC for inviting me to talk.

Just a quick note to mention a few up-coming events that I’ll be attending.

Essential Media Communications (EMC) Summer School

I’ll be presenting at EMC‘s “Summer School” program this coming Thursday 18 February. The two-day event is mostly a hands-on practical event, exploring campaigning tactics on a demonstrative campaign. (Disclosure: EMC is one of Zumio’s clients)

My keynote will kick off the event looking at how participatory activism (including social networks etc.) presents great opportunities, but requires a different perspective to traditional tactics to make the most of it.

This is an invite only event, but Gemma at EMC, who is co-ordinating the event, tells me that there are some spare spaces for participants from NGOs and non-profits – so get in touch with Gemma if you are interested: gemma AT essentialmedia DOT com DOT au.

Social Innovation Camp

The team at the Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX) recently announced the successful ideas that will be developed at the up-coming Social Innovation Camp being held in Sydney 5-7 March.

I’ll be attending the event which I hope will be a great couple of days. Zumio is also providing consulting services as part of the prize for the winning idea at the camp – more to come on that front soon.

Enviro 2010

In July I’ll be attending and presenting a short talk at the Enviro 2010 conference in Melbourne.

I’ll post more about the topic a little closer to the date, but in essence my talk, which is scheduled for 22 July, will be looking at how applying the principles and tools of design practice and social networking to sustainability challenges presents opportunities for innovation, along with other benefits.

I’ve just finished reading Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector (PDF direct link – 856KB), a report released earlier this year by La Piana Consulting that looks at emerging trends in the nonprofit sector.

The report examines a number of key trends, including:

• Demographic shifts redefine participation
• Technological advances abound
• Networks enable work to be organized in new ways
• Interest in civic engagement and volunteerism is rising
• Sector boundaries are blurring

It suggests that current funding models need to be revisited, that a strong sense of core values and differentiation is important (I call this values-based branding), that organisational and partnering models may need to be considered, and that technology will play a key role in the nonprofits of the future.

These are the types of organisational challenges that social business design seeks to address. And the all, perhaps to different degrees, require a certain approach that relies heavily on an open and trusting culture. A difficult task for organisations that don’t already have these things in place.

I get a sense throughout the report that La Piana seem to be suggesting an approach not dissimilar to the “integrated flow” approach I advocate in the increasing surface area post from the other day.

It recognises and clearly places social media and network engagement in context and does a good job of expressing some of the challenges associated with it, as well as recognising the benefits including the low-cost nature of the tools themselves.

It also does a great job of presenting mini-case studies of nonprofits and social sector organisations that have successfully embraced some or all of these trends.

I would highly recommend the report to anyone working in nonprofits and NGOs, especially those in leadership/management positions, as I think it highlights many of the challenges nonprofits currently face, trends that are likely to increase in influence into the future.

I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to participate in a number of events over the past few weeks that I thought I should reflect on here – presented below in chronological order. (My attendance at these events partially explains my radio silence around here…)

Startup BarCamp

I wasn’t able to stay for the whole day, but managed to see a number of sessions at the Sydney Startup BarCamp presenting some really great insights and tips to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Kate Carruthers made me realise that I, too, am addicted to startups ;) And of course some great discussions between sessions too as one would expect from a BarCamp.

If another one is organised, I might put something together to present on things like managing cashflow etc. – a bit more around the specifics of starting a business. While not as sexy as the big conceptual stuff, these things can make or break a new business…

Cultivating Sustainability workshop

Behavioural psychologist Tim Cotter put on an interesting day-long workshop for sustainability advocates.

While there wasn’t a huge amount of material I hadn’t already come across, it was a great refresher and was very useful to see a lot of concepts that I’ve come across before wrapped up in something akin to a methodology.

A few key themes threaded throughout the day including tying sustainability behaviours to a person’s values, and that people that are more values aligned and empowered are more likely to participate in sustainable behaviour.

And, again, great to meet folks who are passionate about sustainability and behaviour change.

Australia & New Zealand Sustainability Circle

I’ve attended a couple of events run by A&NZ Sustain over the past few months, so was delighted to be invited to contribute to a 2010 planning workshop late November.

It was great to meet a bunch of folks from a variety of backgrounds all working towards a sustainable future, but also to contribute some ideas for next year’s programme. From what I’ve seen so far it will be a very interesting year for the Circle members…

Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX)

ASIX first popped up on my radar when a friend invited me to a ideas generation workshop for the Social Innovation Camp happening in Sydney, March 2010. I was delighted to be invited to a 2010 planning workshop for ASIX.

It was a great opportunity to find out more about ASIX and its origins, but more importantly where it’s heading. While the emphasis early in the year will be on the Camp, there was a lot of discussion about the core approach of ASIX and how it relates to other NGOs working in the social ventures space.

The dialogue at the workshop was refreshingly open and honest across the tables and kudos to the organisers for being so open to constructive feedback. I think that’s a very good sign for the future of the organisation, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how they respond with a programme for next year.

Sydney Alliance rally

Last week I attended a Sydney Alliance “rally” in Sydney. The best online reference to the Alliance I can find is this one – I’m not sure it’s “official”, but reflects what I heard at the meetup.

The Alliance is a “citizens’ coalition whose vision is to provide our community with a voice to express common values and aspirations for a fair and just Sydney. The Alliance is broadly based across religious organisations, community organisations and unions”.

In contrast to the format of the ASIX event, this was much more a series of presentations with a minimal amount of group interaction within tables. That said, the Alliance vision is quite interesting and I’m looking forward to engaging more over the coming months…