Overcoming Resistance to Change & Latest News

Event Recap

Our last event featured yours truly and Elana Levin talking about ‘Overcoming Resistance to Change – for Online Organizers.’ It was a recap of our Netroots Nation session, so it should have been even better. For some reason though, it felt just a teensy flat in comparison. I wonder if it’s because the NN crowd had some built in intimacy/trust and they were all ‘online organizers’ in a way not true for our NYC audience.

Not that anyone complained. We even had Scott Heiferman, the CEO of Meetup drop-in for a bit – and he stayed for like, twenty minutes! That’s our new metric for success – Scott Heiferman minutes, or SHM. Can we beat 20? He’s a real interesting guy and y’all should follow him @heif.

Resources and Takeaways

We won’t repeat the content of the session, but the highlights are drawn in part from three excellent resources.

Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath. This book outlines very concrete strategies for creating change when you don’t have command and control power within the organization. Most of us techies are serving various departments, as opposed to running them, so the strategies are immensely helpful.

The Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine. Written explicitly for the nonprofit world, these two superstars we know and love pretend to be writing about how to succeed with social media and online organizing. But they are really writing about organizational change management. Shhh! Don’t tell.

The Webthinking Manifesto by Tim Walker and Michael Silberman. This is a wonderful document – not necessarily because it breaks new ground. But it’s short, it’s a list, and it fostered a great discussion in the community. And the points are right on. Print it, think of your own organization, and weep.

Coming up

Our next event is Measuring Social Media with Harish Rao – Wed., August 25^th, 6-8. Rao is the former CEO of EchoDitto and the former Tech Director for Howard Dean. We’re lucky to have him discuss the latest on the social media front.

Dan Heath (co-author of Switch) is the keynote speaker at the next Nonprofit Technology Conference, the annual NTEN event. This is amazing! I’m going again this year, and you should join me.

Beth Kanter and/or Allison Fine will be guests at a future meeting of the 501 Tech Club NYC. You won’t want to miss this.

An article in the NY Times alerted me to a brilliant kind of event – the FailFaire. It was created by Katrin Verclas (currently of MobileActive). Some of us really want to have one in New York. Want to help?

Overcoming Organizational Resistance to Change – for Online Organizers

Details
Many organizations are led by old school leaders unfamiliar with new media and online organizing. But that doesn’t stop them from asserting authority over staff with more expertise! The result is ongoing tension, where the organization fails to develop it’s online muscles while staff (often newer and younger) languish, waiting for a chance to show what they can do.

RSVP: https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/1285/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=18508

Online tools are destabilizing factors for many organizations – and bosses. Movement techies with online skills are caught in the crossfire. Elana Levin and Charles Lenchner will be leading the same training offered at the recent Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas. Attend this Organizing 2.0 event and you’ll get:

• Language and resources for understanding workplace conflicts around online tools
• Insights into workplace culture at nonprofits, political and labor organizations
• Information about the role consultants can play in organizational change
• Strategies for staff without power to create change and manage up

Overcoming Organizational Resistance to Change is cosponsored by GrassrootsCamp and Grassroots.org.

When
Wednesday, August 11, 6:00 PM

Where

Meetup HQ
632 Broadway, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10012

RSVP: https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/1285/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=18508

Netroots Nation vs. the US Social Forum

This is a follow up to The US Social Forum vs. Netroots Nation.

Back from the recent Netroots Nation in Las Vegas. Good job everyone! It was great, I feel very lucky to be one of the 2000 folks in attendance. I’m also finding it hard to summarize my thoughts for a follow up post. So I’ll just do bullet points, ‘k?

Reminder: I’m comparing the US Social Forum held in June in Detroit with Netroots Nation, held in July in Las Vegas. Both events attract folks to the left of President Obama interested in organizing for social and political change.

Most pertinent observations:

The Social Forum (USSF) was much more diverse. Not only in terms of race (Netroots Nation gets a passing grade) but in terms of age, class, out queers, locals and politics. The backstory is that the USSF simply isn’t interested in attracting a whole slew of NN’ers, as this conflicts with the emphasis on mass based organizations of people of color and the poor. Similarly, NN isn’t a great place for introducing newcomers to politics in general, and they don’t pretend otherwise.

One of the highlights of NN was when Lt. Daniel Choi gave his West Point ring to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as a way of encouraging him to advance the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. (I strongly suspect Get Equal was part of that….)

It was a touching moment that highlighted how NN organizers and attendees are using the event itself to push for change at the highest levels. More generally, having sessions where everyone was experiencing the same content helped bring us together as a group and create a shared conversation. This was sorely missing at the USSF, where the big hall looked about 5%-10% full for peak events. As a political moment, NN was huge, and USSF was weak.

What are the important issues? Interestingly, NN and the USSF were quite similar. In both cases, unemployment/the economy and immigration were featured prominently. I was pleasantly surprised to see Tim Wise speak about the racial dynamics behind the policy debates. He wasn’t alone. The point was made that while the right wing uses racist code language while supporting ‘colorblind’ policies that privilege the wealthy, progressives often opt for genuinely colorblind thinking that fail to account for the very important racial dynamics that need to be upfront in the policy debate.

USSF has a particular focus on the marginalized of this country – the poor, people of color, immigrants, etc.) but I felt like I learned more on those topics at NN.

NN celebrated the primary fight against Blanche Lincoln. True, she won anyway, and our guy Bill Halter lost. But ‘we’ raised $2.5 million from tens of thousands of small donors around the country working together with the labor movement. She barely won, even with Bill Clinton trying his best to do to progressives what he claims never to have done with Monica. What exactly did we celebrate at the USSF? I can’t remember…. Just having it felt big at the time. Now it feels like not enough. I think… I’m demanding short term political gains that the movement can celebrate.

Democrats. I heard DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas mention dispassionately that the Democratic Party is corrupt and dysfunctional. It echoes a frequently heard sentiment at the USSF: that Democrats suck and no one should have expected much from a centrist Democrat like Obama anyway. The difference is huge. NN folks operate within the limitations of our political system to push hard and get more. Lots of Forumistas feel and act the same way, but there’s a strident, separatist undertone more interested in peeling off a few more radicals for a hard-left world view than in actual organizing.

Labor. Why was labor better represented (it seemed) at NN than at USSF? Seems strange. Why would Rich Trumka and Liz Shuler think that 2000 bloggers are a more important audience than 15,000 movement activists? Instead of answering that, I’ll pose the question another way. Is it possible that 2000 bloggers are actually, in the real world, a more potent force for change that 15,000 movement activists?

Skills training. The series of NN training sessions organizing together with Democracy for America was great, for newbies and veterans alike. Many will be online soon. There were skills training sessions at the USSF, but it wasn’t a major focus. Generally, Forumistas were more interested in the political implications of ‘X’ than in how do ‘X’ better.

This list might appear to favor NN over the USSF. But NN is organized by a tight, highly organized group with funding and love from some not-insignificant factions of the power elite. The Social Forum better reflects where the oppressed and marginalized of America happen to be at this moment. It’s not a group amenable to thought leadership from the DailyKos community.

The USSF has other things going for it. A stronger focus on international solidarity, lower costs for attendees, greater ability for folks to connect around specialized interests, and stronger connections with on the ground, membership based organizations rooted in local communities. All good; but I still think that the Forum suffers from a strong disconnect with our existing political culture, indifference to ‘free agent’ activists who play an essential role, relative absence of world class speakers (Celebrities! Experts! Heroes! Leaders!), and greatly dispersed focus.

Netroots Nation and the US Social Forum were the seminal conferences of progressive political season. If I had one wish, it would be for more Forumistas to attend NN in 2011 and 2012, and then bring some of it back to the USSF of 2014.

What do you think?

Organizing 2.0 at the US Social Forum – The Young and the Bleak

Libera Della Piana

At the recent US Social Forum in Detroit, three experienced organizers and communications pros collaborated on a workshop dealing with on and offline organizing. Carlos Jimenez spent four years with Jobs with Justice, Libero Della Piana is former editor at RaceWire (now Color Lines)  and currently the communications director for the People’s World. (I was the third.)

The heart of the training was brainstorming around a previously prepared scenario, which appears below. Before describing the ideas we came up with, a word or two about what felt special in this workshop.

All too often, the folks in charge of communications or new media are brought in at the tail end of the campaign planning process. While it’s not true we just apply lipstick to pigs, many times a random new media element (Survey! Contest! Video! Web app! Facebook ads!) is thrown up as a side dish. The very act of adding something at the tail end, instead of baking it in, robs a big chunk of meaning out of the whole effort.

Carlos Jimenez. Photo by Carlos Fernandez, YES! Magazine.

For that to happen, the right people need to be in the room at the early stages when ideas are welcome. Not only that, but the metaphorical room should be safe space where ideas can bounce around for a while. If the boss still thinks that new media is an add on at the end, she might reject the thought of testing messages with Facebook ads before the official launch. If the organizing director thinks managing volunteers with cell phones is far to complex, he might push back on easy to use texting efforts. Good ideas wither on the vine not only because of poor presentation, but also because of weak reception.

Our little group brainstormed away without any special flashes of brilliance. But unlike so many times in the past, there was no one around pretending to be the adult who explains why certain things can’t be done. This happens all to often – and it’s a shame.

Organizing the Unorganized – Online and Off

Our scenario involved a demographic that has no name, no organized voice and no recognized group championing its priorities. You might know one of them. They are:

• Between the ages of 22-35
• College graduates with student loan debt
• Unemployed, anxiously employed, under-employed, and/or work in jobs not relevant to their desired career (like Starbucks).
• Wondering if and when they will have to move back in with their parents (‘boomerang kids’).

Where I live in Brooklyn (Bed-Stuy) these are all routine concerns. Worse because of the recession, but not newly widespread as it might be for many departing from the middle-classes.  Unemployment for young black men is as high as 40%. What’s happening is that the economy is trapping millions who never expected the rug to be so rudely yanked from under their feet. Welcome to the club, folks.

Only… who is welcoming them to the club? Is this a club of youthful social justice activists, or a club of daytime television watching depressives? Does this club recognize that the impacts of the current situation are not temporary? Wake up, people – polishing your resume will not solve this problem!

It’s tempting to think that the problem is simply the lack of jobs and the current recession. No such luck. Studies show that being unemployed after college creates an impact that lingers for a lifetime. With high official unemployment likely to last for years to come, the absence of well paying jobs in industry and the public sector, and an overall shift in the economy towards freelancers, independent consultants and career switching – we are looking at life/work patterns radically different than those of today’s retirees. Simply put, millions of us aren’t just workers without jobs for a few months here and there; we are workers without jobs for an increasing fraction of our overall working life, perhaps 24 months over the next five years.

Depending on how you slice the data, there are probably 3 million Americans for whom the story of youth, lack of career opportunities, debt and housing insecurity resonates. The question before our group was: how best to organize this group? More specifically – how could we get a list of 100 folks from a cluster of zip codes in Brooklyn interested in this issue enough to meet us for a 1-on-1 meeting?

Participants had great ideas involving online ads, Facebook, video storytelling, distributing flyers at strategic locations, using Catalist/VAN data to identify geographic clusters of this target demographic, asking existing groups/allies to spread the word on lists, and holding a town hall. But the best idea of all was not trying to divide organizing, artificially, into online or offline departments.

What are your ideas for organizing the young and bleak?

The US Social Forum Vs. Netroots Nation

The US Social Forum represents one pole of the progressive movement and Netroots Nation represents another. I just got back from the Forum (which ended on Saturday), and I’ll be attending Netroots Nation (July 22), and it got me thinking: what do these two gatherings represent when viewed as two estranged parts of a complete whole?

Attendees of the Forum generally consider it to be one of the most important national gatherings of the last few years. It’s a staging ground for forces that rarely get to experience their own collective strength. But to the rest of the movement, especially those who define themselves in relationship to some wing or the other of the Democratic Party, it’s more like ‘the US Social what?!’

The gap between the two tells us a lot about the challenges facing change activists to the left of the Obama Administration. Nearly everyone I know who is active on an issue falls in that category – supporters of immigration reform, financial regulation, a strong jobs program, opponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, climate change activists, and more. The gap between what we want and what we get is might be related to the gap between the Social Forum and Netroots nation.

The Social Forum vs. Netroots Nation
In a nutshell, the Social Forum represents a broad swath of people organizing for change in membership-based organizations that represent the poor, people of color, queers, immigrants and other marginalized constituencies. As one observer notes, these groups have

“literally taken over the organizing process right from the beginning, consciously excluding and marginalizing the traditional civil formations who otherwise normally dominate such processes (including – as I understand it – progressive organizations from the civil rights world, the labor world, the world of feminism, the environmental world, and so on.”

Jai Sen, 2nd issue of the USSF Magazine

What a contrast from most conferences I attend, where VIP’s and salaried staff of organizations mingle with folks eager to become next year’s VIP’s and salaried staff. Where Netroots Nation serves in part as advanced training and brainstorming for internet fueled political campaigners, the Social Forum is all about offline organizing and coalition building among the have-nots.

One aspect of the Social Forum’s mandate is that the agenda was being set by folks who are often feel left out and disempowered by the political process, and in return don’t give it much faith. No one I met was disappointed in Obama’s first year accomplishments – people didn’t expect that much to begin with. A lot of them see electoral politics as a kind of diversion from the “real” organizing work. On one panel, organizations involved in civic engagement were clear that they did electoral work to base build; they did not do base building to help win elections.

What Influences the Mainstream?
My disappointment in the Social Forum was in the relative absence of high level strategizing and information sharing on how we intervene successfully in the ‘real’ political life of the United States. Few workshops addressed nuts and bolts issues like targeting, messaging, polling, open rates, super-activists and donor acquisition – all hallmarks of what makes Netroots Nation such an important event.

By way of example, I encountered very emotional testimonies from Arizona immigration activists fighting against SB1070, the recently enacted law that, more or less, declares all brown people to be potential enemies of the state. It just wasn’t connected to an educational strategy that might persuade supporters of SB1070 to change their minds, nor to a legislative strategy, an electoral strategy or event a Congressional lobbying strategy. All of those exist, wonderful people are doing this work, but – based on my own experiences – it’s work that takes a bit of a back seat at the Forum.

Some months ago at the Left Forum, I asked one of the leaders of the Social Forum process about the tendency to ignore political strategy. She explained that the level of organization and political education among marginalized people is so low at the moment, that the main task is shifting consciousness. Looking back at the Forum workshops I attended, it looks like many agree with her.

Social Forum vs. the Netroots
The netroots movement inspired by Howard Dean has been superseded to an extent by the web-enabled organizing carried out by the Obama campaign. There is now a literature articulating the benefits of ‘web-ready’ organizing models. Many of us believe that the rise of web-based tools and practices has revolutionized organizing, advocacy and political campaigning. Unfortunately, it was hard to see the impact of such views at the Social Forum. Not that attendees there aren’t online; but there are strong countervailing forces seeking to keep all that new fangled stuff in its place, as though it was a threat to be managed. (A major exception is the focus on open source  technology and a DIY ethic.)

Among my online organizing peers, there is a bias towards working with organizations large and well funded enough to have access to certain tools. In parallel, they often pursue agendas limited enough to have ‘play’ in Congress or a state capitol. The folks using these tools and working for those organizations are often more white, more male, more formally educated and from more privileged class backgrounds than the pool of change activists comprising the sector as a whole. Good people all; but there are excellent reasons why leaders from marginalized communities would seek to prevent that demographic from dominating their spaces. We can’t separate the potential impact of new tools from the political power of the demographics wielding them.

An illustration of this is the conflict one experiences when hearing about the great online work done with the Basta Dobbs campaign or the great text messaging work done by Fair Immigration Reform Movement. It is great work, but very little scales back down to the work of grassroots organizations with fewer resources. If a goal of your movement is to avoid dependence on ‘the industrial-nonprofit complex‘ it’s just frustrating to be directed to strategies forever out of reach.

Despite the obstacles, I wish there was more high-level sharing of ideas between these two communities. The cost of tools continues to go down. Less specialized training is needed. What we need are more tables at which organizers, community leaders and online strategists are working together to take advantage of every new innovation to build power.

What Should We Do?
What we need are 10,000 more online strategists with an emphasis on practitioners who are people of color, not in DC/NY/SF, women and veteran organizers already embedded in leadership positions. These newly minted strategists might not be able to code a single line of php or build a single email template, but they will know what we mean by CRM, CMS, SMS, the VAN, ROI and of course, Netroots Nation. Every one of them will be one degree of separation away from the vibrant community of new media activists and online organizers that is taken root over the last decade.

It won’t be easy. We’ll know we’ve succeeded if, the next summer when the Social Forum and Netroots Nation are both taking place (2013?), more of us choose to cross over to the other side.

What do you think?

Campaign Baking: How Local Election Campaigns Can Win with New Media – May 12

Join Organizing 2.0 and GrassrootsCamp for an exciting strategy event in preparation for the 2010 election season. Our goal: identify the best practices for local campaigns in using new media and online organizing.

When: Wednesday, May 12, 6-8 PM
Where: Merc Bar

https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/1285/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=17304

Why are we calling it Campaign Baking? All too often, online strategy is an afterthought or a set of tactics divorced from the ‘real’ business of running a campaign. These are mistakes Scott Brown didn’t make, and progressives shouldn’t let our candidates suffer like Martha Coakley!

Baking with new media means thinking about online strategies holistically, including it in the campaign budget and timeline, establishing benchmarks for success and making superior technology choices.

We’re pleased to have Emily Williams, Senior Account Executive with MSHC Partners, a DC based political consultancy with a strong interactive practice. MSHC Partners has taken advantage of new media for local elections, helping to set the bar for how local campaigns should be baking it in.

With us to welcome her is Brian Keeler, Executive Director of RebootNY and owner of BK New Media. Many of us know Brian for his work on The Albany Project. He’s a well known champion of better government for New York, and better campaigns for progressives.

This event is free, but only those who RSVP will get last minute venue changes or receive materials distributed to the audience. As always, the event will start at 6pm. We expect a full house – so don’t be late!

RSVP: https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/1285/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=17304

Advice & Resources for Your Online Organizing Career

Our event ‘Online Organizing – Career Night’ was a smashing success, judging by how long folks stuck around to talk with our panelists. Thank you panelists for coming out to support our community! If you didn’t attend, here’s who you missed:

Tate Hausman – Tate Hausman Consulting, Studio Guild
Rebekah Spicuglia – Women’s Media Center
Daniel Atwood – Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
Errol King – 1199SEIU (Healthcare union local)
Benjamin Yee – NY State Senate and Manhattan Young Democrats
Elana Levin – Writers Guild of America, East and Organizing 2.0

Tate Hausman kicked off our panel by talking about the evolution of online organizing from his days working at Alternet.org during the first tech boom, when the phrase ‘Content is King’ was, well, king. Compelling storytelling will never be out of style, it’s essential to holding an audience’s interest. However, what was less clear a decade ago is that the network is queen. Content surfs the waves, and those waves are made up of the people willing to pay attention and promote it to the networks they belong to.

He also challenged the audience by asking two questions: do you want to change the world? And do you want to accumulate power? Almost everyone nodded to the first question, but only a few asserted proudly that they wanted more power. Yes, the essence of being an online organizer is getting networks of people to work together to advance change in accordance with your (or your organization’s) agenda. Online organizing is about accumulating power. (To be used only for good, of course.)

His advice to online organizing careerists: focus on your skills and developing relationships with people you know.

Rebekah Spicuglia talked about the journey that she and her organization went through. She joined in 2007 as an intern. She then became an administrative assistant, and by advancing in her skills and credibility, she and the WMC began to do more online work. The real leap forward took place when they began to use Salsa (a popular advocacy/fundraising tool), but this merely accelerated an existing trend. Her story resonated with many of us. The phrase ‘accidental techie’ used to refer to folks who became experts at keeping the PC’s running and the internet up. Rebekah became an ‘accidental online organizer’ who in the space of three years, with very little formal training, rose to become a ‘7 or 8 on a scale of 1-10’ in terms of expertise.

Her advice to online organizing careerists: don’t be shy about putting yourself and your skills – new and not yet acquired – forward. Be willing to push gently at the boundaries of what your organization already does while expanding your own role.

Daniel Atwood considers himself lucky. He joined IAVA four years ago as someone who was responsible primarily for posting content to the website, and also for occasionally fixing a broken printer. But as a young organization with open-minded, entrepreneurial leadership, he was empowered to help build something bigger. In that environment, Daniel was able to work closely with other departments in the organization to develop and implement integrated campaigns that combine offline with online, staff with volunteers, online supporters with highly committed super activists.

That’s not all; as a relatively new organization working with younger people (recent veterans) IAVA never had to worry about legacy roles, departmental silos and veteran staff protecting turf. Still, it makes a lot of sense to think carefully about the nature of the organization you are joining, not just what the job description is and the compensation.

His advice to online organizing careerists: see yourself as constantly developing new skills and talents, and be a good team player, and a constant problem solver.

Errol King has been with 1199, SEIU’s East Coast healthcare union local for seven years. In that time though, he’s shifted jobs every year or two, often moving up to positions that he had a hand in crafting. Much of his work has been related to web content and web development, which he has mostly learned on his own.

It was clear listening to Errol how much he enjoyed tackling new problems. I know he is one of the first folks to purchase an iPad, not to prove he’s cool (we knew that) but to figure out if there’s a future for future iPad applications that assist organizers in the field. Much of his presentation was about the importance of navigating the organization before trying to push anything. Organizations can be very complex and political, forcing the online organizer to specialize in the practice of organizational change management.

His advice to online organizing careerists: understand your organization and its culture and master the art of communicating technical concepts to the non-technical.

Elana Levin is fairly new at the WGAE. But her path as an online organizer began (along with so many others) with the Howard Dean Campaign for President in 2004. Since then she’s served in a variety of communication roles including doing traditional press relations and became known for her expertise in working with bloggers. The organizations she’s worked with were the kind that needed to change to incorporate online tools effectively. The best way to make those changes is to focus strongly on how some new tool will achieve a goal set by the boss – but better, faster, and more of it.

Remember, in many instances the boss doesn’t understand this brave new digital world we live in, and doesn’t have much inclination to start now. So make it easy – do something small that builds your case to generate permission to do more. Just don’t fall into the trap of explaining how things work…

Her advice to online organizing careerists closely matched Rebekah’s and Eroll’s: pursue opportunities to innovate, but be very mindful of staying in your boss’s comfort zone. Develop skills in organizational change management – from below.

Benjamin Yee was last. He told the story of how he rose from volunteer in the New York Obama campaign to become ‘the go to guy for new media in New York’ according to his current employer at the NY State Senate’s CIO office. He described how staff on the campaign increasingly relied on him to figure out how to make technology work for the campaign. This meant grabbing on to specialties he hadn’t mastered yet, and running with them. It also meant making sure he was recognized for it.

Benjamin pointed out that all political campaigns are a mess. But within that mess, there’s often a chance to occupy some niche and build on it, just be being the one person who cares enough to focus it. As a volunteer, you just might carve out a role of real responsibility that you can leverage into something bigger down the road.

His advice to online organizing careerists: don’t be afraid to live with your mom and collect unemployment while working on a political campaign. Find a place where you can show initiative and get recognized for it.

Of course, there’s a lot more we covered, which you know if you were there! Check out our two related posts:
Sub Specialties of an Online Organizer
Resources for Online Organizing Jobs and Training

Thank you Green Spaces NY for offering discounted space for our event. They offered one day of free workspace to all attendees. Check out the amenities here.

This event was a co-production of Organizing 2.0 and GrassrootsCamp. We have events scheduled for April 28, May 12, and May 26. Join our mailing list to learn more.

Job Opportunities
Our good friends at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America are looking for an online strategy associate. They are one of the most innovate, strategic and successful nonprofits doing online organizing. And they treat employees well. If you’re looking for work or hate your boss, visit http://iava.org/content/jobs-and-internships#onlinestrategy for more details.

New York Jobs with Justice and Urban Agenda are hiring as well. They need a talented and committed Communications and Online Associate to join the NY JWJ / Urban Agenda team! This is a great opportunity for someone looking to use their creativity and technical skills to help build and win campaigns for social, economic and environmental justice. See the full position description and apply here: http://www.idealist.org/if/i/en/av/Job/374525-104/c. They also need an administrator.  And our friends at the National Employment Law Center are looking for a Communications Director.

Jobs and Training for Online Organizers

As part of our online organizing career event, we collected some fantastic resources – mostly free – that might serve online organizers looking for work or training opportunities.

Jobs listings:

• New Organizing Institute http://neworganizing.com/resources/jobs
• http://groups.google.com/group/noi-jobs
• Change.org   http://jobs.change.org/
• Idealist.org  http://idealist.org/

Professional Associations and Community

• Nonprofit Technology Network http://www.nten.org/
• Progressive Exchange www.progressiveexchange.com

Training

• New Organizing Institute http://www.neworganizing.com
• Bar Camp http://barcamp.org/
• Epolitics.com http://www.epolitics.com/
• Network for Good http://www.fundraising123.org/
• Netroots Nation http://netrootsnation.org/
• W3 http://www.w3schools.com

Additional Resources

• M+R http://www.mrss.com/publications.html
• Gilbert Center http://www.gilbert.org/
• Idealware http://idealware.org/
• Beth’s Blog http://beth.typepad.com/
• Progressive Technology Project http://www.progressivetech.org/
• Tech President/Personal Democracy Forum http://techpresident.com/

Did we miss any? Add them below.

Online Organizing Skill Set

What does an online organizer need to know? Here’s a list we compiled as preparation for online organizer career night. Did we miss any? Add them below.

• Community Organizing
• Data Management
• Use Constituent Relationship Manager
• Web Content Management
• Social Media Strategy (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace)
• Web Development
• Coding for Apps, API’s, integrations
• Writing for Web/Email
• Electoral Data/Mapping (VAN, Catalist)
• Field Organizer (Electoral, Canvass)
• Trainer
• Video/Audio Production
• SysAdmin/IT/Hardware+Software
• Graphic Design
• Campaign Strategist
• Legislation Advocacy
• Fundraiser
• Blogging/Blogger Relations
• Media Relations
• Managing Consultants
• Best Free Resources

Career Night: Online Organizing and Online Organizers – April 14

Online fundraising. Online organizing. Online politics. New Media. Who actually does this work? Many of us use the catch-all description ‘online organizer.’ And many of you would like to join our ranks, or learn more about advancing. This is your chance.

Our speakers, professional online organizers with from different parts of the nonprofit and political worlds, will talk about how they entered the field, recent and upcoming changes, advice for young ‘uns and aspiring career changers, and the sub-specialties you might want to become familiar with.

Featuring:
Daniel Atwood, Director of Online Strategy for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA)
Elana Levin, Communications Director for the Writers Guild of America, East
Tate Hausman, Studio Guild and Dot Organize
Rebekah Spicuglia, Program Director for the Women’s Media Center
Errol King, Director of Web Services for SEIU 1199
Charles Lenchner, Program Manager – New Media/Labor, New Organizing Institute

Join Organizing 2.0 and GrassrootsCamp to hear senior online organizers in New York City discuss their career paths and offer advice. We will also hand out resources for free and low cost training and networks for job seekers.

We’ll start the event at 6:00pm promptly, with networking/shmoozing time after the formal panel.

This is a joint project of GrassrootsCamp and Organizing 2.0.
RSVP here:
https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/1285/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=16506

When: April 14, 6-8pm
Where: Green Spaces NY, 394 Broadway, 5th floor
Cost: Free, donations will be solicited to pay to pay for expenses