While institutional philanthropy is in a boom-time, foundations have not monopolized such growth. The renewed interest in donor advised funds (DAF) since the pandemic has triggered meteoric growth in the amount of assets stored in DAFs, with recent figures showing over $229 billion stored across 2 million DAF accounts, receiving roughly $86 billion in annual contributions, and granting nearly $52 billion in 2022.
The use of generative AI (GenAI) tools is becoming increasingly prevalent in marketing, particularly for smaller organizations or nonprofits seeking innovative ways to engage audiences and improve workflow efficiency. This article dives into data collected through a survey that was sent out to museum professionals in Pittsburgh and Cleveland to better understand how and if they are utilizing generative AI tools in their marketing strategies.
This month, music and film are at the forefront as each battles with the future uses for burgeoning tech. While AI-generated film visuals seem to be coming up short, progress toward realistic AI-generated music is starting to send shockwaves. On the consumer side, music streaming tools are being released to allow more listening experience customization. Across the industry, artists are celebrating ways that some these new tools can enhance their work, while speaking out against potential impacts on jobs, compensation, and creative freedom.
Generative AI (GenAI) has become increasingly integrated into marketing and communication careers, and even our daily lives, with the rise of various text-to-image, text-to-video, & text-to-text tools. As digital marketers find new and innovative ways to keep up with the trends, and specifically GenZ in a quick-changing popular culture scene, how are they reacting to the rise of GenAI?
Arts and cultural organizations are becoming increasingly aware of their climate impact, and many are taking action to reduce harm. Tracking, reporting, and offsetting emissions may seem like an overwhelming feat for small or mid-sized organizations, but emerging blockchain technology may help make the process more efficient and reliable.
Social media platforms and their users are constantly changing, making it difficult for managers to create a comprehensive social media strategy that lasts for more than a year. Still, certain guidelines for engaging your audience through social media are becoming standard. This week’s TBT takes a look at how social media concerns, techniques, and strategies have evolved in the last five years
Digital Identity is a topic that, like Digital Identity itself, cycles through period of seeming quite important (take the Twitter hack) and others when it seems like something toward which a person can take a very hands-off approach. It is easy to fall into the false sense of security offered by social media's seeming self-management; it can appear harmless to just allow it to so do. As individuals and representatives of organizations, it is valuable to periodically take stock of what the organization and its employees are doing to represent themselves online. One of the first posts I wrote for this blog was about the blurry line between professional and personal identities--and that gets even blurrier across the online/offline divide. Additional posts covered social media handbooks that urge organizations to come up with an identifiable plan; these handbooks touch on the importance of digital identity, but none exclusively addresses the matter as Nancy White does in her "This is Me" Digital Identity workbook.
As social media handbooks encourage dialogue (including being open to negative comments and interactions), White urges users to consider that an overly-groomed online identity may be just as detrimental as one left to morph, unfettered, into an amalgamation of unflattering photos, inappropriate comments, and obvious political affiliations. There is a balance, and the first order of business to achieve this is considering what your offline identity is, and what you want to convey via social media.
Ultimately, for both organizations and individuals, I think that social media--and any web presence--needs to take into consideration this post on the Social Media Today blog: know yourself before you start reflecting it online. Just as you do when you get dressed in the morning, or attend a public event, or a private house party, rent office space or write a grant proposal, you must stop and consider with great care what it is that you will be saying with your clothes, conduct, conversations, location, shared information and goals. Figure out who is looking for you online, and what it is they will find--try searching for yourself, your organization's name, and see what "just anyone" can find out about you. Remember--you may not be leaving a "paper" trail, but often the items that you post to the web have an even longer shelf-life, and the fingerprint that you develop digitally grows more comprehensive over time.
Just because you have begun to move your organization firmly into the world of social media doesn't mean that you can step back and let it run itself. Do regular searches for yourself and your organization, perform routine maintenance on your personal and organization's profiles, and don't get lulled into the sense that, simply because you've built it, it's good enough. Your online identity will grow, but remember that its growing pains may be as accessible as those photos of you when you were thirteen that your parents insist on keeping framed on their mantel. Proceed with honesty and integrity, and consider the long-term impact that your choices may have. Approach your Digital Identity with a critical eye, and imagine how it may be perceived and received.
Remember: if you put your name on it, you must be willing to own it, even if it's "only online."
Photo by Sarah G.
The American Red Cross has issued a comprehensive Social Media Strategy Handbook, which Beth Kanter rightly lauds as excellent.
The ARC's slideshow notes that the Handbook "is not just for communicators and marketers it's for anyone who: spends online and is a Red Crosser." To make that transition, the Red Cross encourages its associates to play around with social media personally, and then make the leap to representing the ARC online. It's telling that the ARC social media page says, "The Red Cross belongs to the American people. You fund it, you donate your blood, you prepare for and respond to disasters, you take and instruct first aid classes. You make the Red Cross what it is today, and you hold the keys to its future."
So for the ARC, an organization that defines itself as being BY and FOR you, it makes sense that social media would be the same. Is this a practice that more non-profits should adopt? An 87-slide presentation (with additional links), the Handbook contains a complete outline of the who, how, what, and why of the ARC's social media presence. It strongly emphasizes serious contemplation and hard work developing a solid, organization-wide social media strategy. It then goes on to outline how the most popular tools can best be employed, and what interacting with (on? through?) them looks like. It also, very explicitly, gives "fundamental principles" and states in no uncertain terms that, "we’re a 501(c)(3) organization, so you must not join any political or religious advocacy groups."
I think that what the ARC's Handbook does so well is that it combines the practical advice that newbies might need as they venture forth into the world of social media while still including solid, program-specific information that more advanced users will need when creating sites that conform to the ARC standards. I think it very clearly addresses issues that I raised before about the fuzzy area between a personal and professional online presence, and the importance that a person managing social media to be invested in the NPO's mission. It leaves very little wiggle room on the basics, but encourages individuals to find ways to be creative within the ARC's expectations.
One thing that could be emphasized at greater length, however, is the time commitment that such a project can be, and what this might mean for someone who already has a full plate. (Slide 85: have someone dedicated to checking your photos once/day.)
As anyone who spends a portion of their workday dealing in social media knows, social media can be fun, engaging, and has an uncanny ability to sucks hours out of a day. It is both constantly, easily accessible (on your phone, iPod touch, laptop, home computer, work computer...) and, sometimes, frighteningly inescapable. It becomes easy for things to slip through the cracks (an email checked on the fly, a couple of days working on the road, a misplaced note-to-self to update a page and approve new fans), and, conversely, easy to get pulled into in such a way that suddenly half the workday has gone by and your non-social-media responsibilities have suffered. I found this out firsthand, when I took a self-imposed four-day Independence Day Holiday from my technological tether, and felt both refreshed and vaguely alarmed that there were discussions, tweets, articles, emails and so forth that I wasn't getting to. Just because I took a break didn't mean that there wasn't someone, somewhere, expecting a response.
Thus, I would recommend that any organization pursuing a guide like the ARC's consider what I feel to be the two most fundamental components to social media presence: WHY (see slides in the 30s) and WHO. Who is going to do this? And what are the time commitments and expectations are of those developing their presence? If you are going to build it, you need to maintain it, and you must have a clear idea of what that maintenance looks like. I find few things as frustrating as outdated NPO sites, or unmonitored NPO-associated accounts. It can be difficult to separate your personal social media activity from your professional, and a person's social media presence can become inextricably connected to their professional work, meaning that s/he can no longer just "pop on Facebook" for a minute to check in on friends without getting caught up in page maintenance. How many people are going to contribute to the online presence, and how much communication will they have with one another?
As the Handbook cautions, there is a lot that is out of your control, but what is within your control is something you must be willing to keep up with. Creating a clear, written-out guideline can be a great help for getting everyone on the same page and enabling constructive social media growth.
