Social Media: Does It Work For You?

I have a couple Facebook friends whose posts have turned me against causes I was formerly for.  Well, maybe that’s an extreme statement.  But you know what I mean?  The constant picketing, call to arms, re-posts of political articles.  Eh. At the same time, there are nonprofits, a couple that I know and love, whose posts are stiff and uninviting, posts where I can tell that a committee thought long and hard about just how to phrase their next message.  Another eh.

But there’s the opposite, too.  I have Facebook friends that post amazingly well-worded, often funny, sometimes poignant statuses.  And I follow a bunch of nonprofit organizations who also seem to ‘get it’ — they change up what they post from day to day.  Sure, there’s the advertising and organizational promotion, but there might be announcements about community events, reflections on issues, and an occasional splash of humor.  The nonprofits that I think do the best job on Facebook have a little joy and hope in their posts — so it’s not all ‘oh, God, look how bad things are.’

Facebook is just one little piece of social media.  Today, I was talking to a couple of nonprofit folks (Rochelle Dukes Fritsch from IMPACT and Janet Peshek from Cathedral Center, Inc.) who are putting it all together – Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck, LinkedIn – with all the enhancements in between.  How to do this and do it well is the topic of our next Planners and Grantwriters Roundtable – October 13th – at the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.  Sponsored by the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee, the Roundtable brings people together to yak.  Yep, yak.  We organize a panel of experts and then we encourage Roundtablers to have at it.

On October 13th, the topic is social media….yeah, yeah, there’ve been a million social media workshops.  This one’s different. THIS ONE IS REALLY DIFFERENT.

We’re going to ask 100 QUESTIONS.  We’re going to have a dynamite panel and we’re going to bombard them with questions.

So help us out.  Give us your questions.  Use the comment section below and send off a couple of ideas.  What do you need to know to make social media really work for you and your organization?

ASK!

Equal Opportunity Isn’t Always Equal

Or another title could be, “Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes.”  Although I resisted it for years, I have finally become convinced of the wisdom of women and minority-owned businesses seeking designation as DBE’s (Disadvantaged Business Enterprise).  My business, Wilberg Community Planning LLC, has been a DBE for several years.  Initially, I’ll be honest with you, I sought DBE status because a local government official said to me, “It would be a lot less hassle to hire you if you were a DBE.”

DBE Decision.  So I went after the designation really as part of a customer service strategy.  This particular government official was a good and steady client who had to negotiate and finagle my contracts through the bureaucracy every time.  Not in my interest to be a high maintenance consultant, so I filed the paperwork.  This isn’t a simple deal, either.  Obtaining DBE status means #1 – you actually have to have a business that’s real and #2 – you have to be able to prove it with things like profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and lists of clients. 

DBE certification also requires sending the certification agency your personal income tax returns.  And then there’s the signatures and the notary and all that stuff.  They don’t let just anyone be a DBE and they don’t make it particularly easy.  Primary reason is that it’s too tempting for majority companies to set up paper DBE firms and game the system.

The Ethics of It.  At first, I was really bothered by the ethics of seeking DBE.  The primary reason was that I didn’t think I was really disadvantaged.  I thought other people/companies were more disadvantaged and deserved the designation but me, being a white woman, not so much.  This was during a period when I really had come to believe that my education and experience erased sexism, bought me a membership in the Good Ol’ Boys Club, and leveled my little playing field.  Hence, no need for DBE.  Right.

Now my thinking has changed.  The playing field — the big playing field — the one where the pros play – won’t get leveled without a major structural adjustment. Here’s my view — male/majority companies have had decades of implicit preference.  If we wait for the normal course of progress to balance things out, it’ll be the next Ice Age.

So What?  So I understand the complaints of students at UW-Madison who are torqued about UW-Madison’s efforts to admit more minority students.  And maybe it isn’t fair that they have to pay the price for decades of majority preference.  But we just can’t wait patiently for things to get better.  We have to make them better.  Last spring, only 3.0% of UW-Madison’s students were African American, another 3.6% were Hispanic. Not good enough.

“Group says UW-Madison admissions favor minorities,” JSOnline, September 13, 2011.  http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/129773483.html

Out in the Warm: Homelessness in San Diego, Part 1

 This is a small homeless encampment in the park next to the USS Midway, the massive aircraft carrier that anchors (so to speak) a tourist area south of downtown San Diego. Although it’s hard to see clearly, there are people sleeping on the grass or on blankets. Tourists on their way to the Midway Museum stay on the walking path and mostly look straight ahead.

I’ve been working on homeless issues for a long time. I’ve conducted a dozen focus groups with homeless people, supervised two citywide homeless surveys, and worked with the people who run Milwaukee’s shelter system for over ten years. So when I go to another city, I’m always on the lookout for homeless people.

What catches my eye as much as homeless people themselves is how other people react to homeless people. For most folks, the safest bet is to steer clear, give the strange-looking guy and his stuffed grocery cart a wide berth, maybe nod hello as if he was a nice office worker out for a stroll on his lunch break.

In San Diego, there are homeless folks in nearly every park, one or two walking bicycles with baskets full of belongings, small knots of people with their carts and gear, chatting at picnic tables or lying on the grass. Driving by the park next to the Midway and seeing the encampment, I mentioned to my husband how people in Milwaukee always talk about how much easier it is to be homeless in places where it’s warm, as if homelessness was an Olympic sport with degrees of difficulty attached to each location.

Long story short, I decided to ask whether it’s easier to be homeless in San Diego than in Milwaukee. And I did it for two reasons. First, I actually wanted an answer. And second, I wanted to force myself to talk to homeless people face to face without the protection of a focus group under the watchful eye of a shelter director.

I wanted to stop hiding behind my clipboard. I want to be a better advocate.

So I left my husband in the car, and set out to have a conversation.  Scanning the possible options, I aimed for the two women attached to the grocery cart in the picture.

I talked with a woman who described herself as a “true blue alcoholic,” a veteran of eight years on the street, who had quit on the idea of going to a shelter a long time ago because of shelter rules prohibiting drinking. She looked every inch the alcoholic although she seemed completely sober – reflective and detailed in describing her situation. She introduced me to her street daughter, a woman six months pregnant, lying on a blanket in the shade next to their shared grocery cart. Two other people, both men, rounded out the ‘family’. The woman I was talking to was mothering all of them.

In the space of ten minutes, she told me a lot — why she was there, what had happened in her life, how she managed day to day. And she said, in answer to my last question about whether it’s easier to be homeless in a place like San Diego, “Homeless is homeless no matter where you are.” She could not have been friendlier or more open. Once I introduced myself as working on homeless issues in Milwaukee, she talked without hesitation, with no suspicion apparent, a smile – although sometimes sardonic – always on her face. Her street daughter was the same, quieter but sweetly friendly. Our conversation ended when the older woman said she had to help one of her men friends to the bathroom.  She was so clearly the mom of the group, after all.

So for the past day or so, I’ve been thinking that to write about this woman in any detail would be exploitative – that she shared her story with me so freely and was so genuine, that it would be wrong to retell it here in this blog. So the things she told me about her life and how she’d ended up in this park on this day are maybe best summarized by her statement that she never thought she’d end up like this.

Homelessness in San Diego, especially unsheltered homelessness is a much bigger problem than in Milwaukee. A city twice the size of Milwaukee, San Diego has nearly 5,000 people living on the street – at the last homeless census, Milwaukee had fewer than 150. My ‘sample’ of two homeless people felt that being homeless in San Diego was plenty tough, the weather notwithstanding.  (Another blog will delve deeper into the comparisons between Milwaukee and San Diego.)

What I appreciate about my conversation with these two women was that, albeit unwittingly, they  helped me break past my devotion to surveys and focus groups and the safety of professional life to connect in a more real way. It was a little lesson in how to listen to the story without checking any boxes or rushing to the next question.  I hope my colleagues in the world of homeless policy do this now and then but I’m not sure.  Sometimes when I listen to policy discussions, it seems like we’re pretty far away from the day to day of homelessness.  I intend to get closer.  Yes, I do.  Because I need to get smarter and I think that’s the way to do it.

______________________

Here’s a link about San Diego’s 2011 Point in Time count of homeless people.  http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/feb/14/san-diego-countys-homless-numbers-rise/

Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News

I am speaking as someone who has made a career out of bad news.  Bad news has been good for business.  Rising poverty?  Good for business.  More juvenile delinquency? Line up the clients.  Chronic unemployment? Steer here.

I’m done with it.  Like Evilene in The Wiz….

Bring some message in your head

Or in something you can’t lose

But don’t you ever bring me no bad news

If you’re gonna bring me something

Bring me, something I can use

But don’t you bring me no bad news.

I’ve been a bad news monger so long I almost don’t know how to quit.  But I knew I needed to when I read that Wisconsin, with its 17% child poverty rate was below the national average of 20% and I was a little disappointed because having a higher than average poverty rate is so helpful with federal grantwriting.  And it was then that I realized that my view of the world had gotten completedly CRACKED.

(See “Decade saw leap in child poverty,” MJS, August 21m 2011, at http://www.jsonline.com/business/128130438.html)

My cousin, Joan, a mom of six kids, instituted a bunch of wacky food rules in order to stretch her budget.  One of my favorites was “No cheese without bread.” I’m starting that policy here — no problem without a solution.  Don’t fill me up with problems so I’m so overwhelmed and so immersed and so enamored with bad news that I can’t recognize or appreciate a solution when I see one.  You know what I’m talking about here — it’s so easy to be in love with social problems that we don’t even want to hear about solutions.  As if a problem having a solution means that it’s not a serious enough problem. 

How many times have you heard someone propose a solution only to hear, “It’s not that simple.”

I’m for simple.  I’m standing for simple.  I’m looking for simple solutions.

Bring me, something I can use.

And I’m going to do as I ask — find solutions, appreciate them and spread them around. 

You?

Effective Meetings, Part 2: Who’s There?

Fundamentally, the purpose of meetings is communication.  Whatever slick and quick social media exist, the face to face meeting has an essential, irreplaceable quality, otherwise, Hilary Clinton would text foreign leaders instead of going through all the headaches of traveling to meet them in person.

So a group face to face meeting serves an important function – primarily by providing a venue for interaction with people other people might not know they’re interested in interacting with.  (You know that makes sense.  You just have to read it slower.)

But a problem with regular meetings – say, regular meetings of a coalition or a group of funded agencies – is that the same people attend, month after month, year after year.  Often they say the same things at the same times in the meetings, reliably offering the same complaint or suggestion. Other than changing fashions or the weather outside the window, you wouldn’t know it was a different meeting and not just a twisted version of Groundhog Day.

So what changes it up?  New people change it up.  New people have new questions and new ideas.  Because they haven’t been through the drill for ten years, they don’t worry about who usually does what.  They bring new stuff — and it’s valuable.  Yes, it occasionally irks the elders and bends the agenda but eventually it gets the hamsters off the treadmill.

I go to a lot of meetings with directors of agencies – bless them, they’re brilliant and they work hard and they’ve done so much for the community.  But back in each agency, sitting at a desk or running around making home visits, is a staff person who is right in the middle of the issue.  That person is dealing with Mr. Jones’ food stamps getting cut off or Ms. Smith being reluctant to enter AODA treatment.  That person is dealing with the tangled up logistics of getting people benefits and the sweat and aching muscles of going door to door to organize a neighborhood clean-up.

We need those folks at meetings.  So I’m suggesting to you nonprofit and government agency directors our there — EACH ONE, BRING ONE.  You help your staff person get the bigger picture and  help your director colleagues keep their feet on the ground.  If nothing else, that young person brings a sense of urgency that we all need to have about the work of improving this community.

Try it.  Let’s change it up!

Effective Meetings: No News is Good News

Nothing irks me more than a meeting where the agenda consists of one or two people giving reports while everyone else snaps their gum and fiddles with their Blackberries. These meetings remind me of the townfolk gathering outside the telegraph office to hear Old Ben in his suspenders read a message from the next town over.  Really — is this the purpose of bringing great minds together?  To sit and listen to someone ‘read the news’ that could have easily been disseminated via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a bunch of other new social media that I don’t even know the names of yet?

Me, personally?  I think it’s a bad use of time and talent.  Meetings without a problem-solving purpose are a waste of time. Those with such a purpose can be extraordinarily fun, collegial, and productive. 

An Alternative

A few months ago, the Milwaukee Continuum of Care established a special work group to develop a Coordinated Entry system for the homeless services system, including shelters, transitional housing, and homeless prevention services.  Recognizing that work groups can quickly devolve into three people with no better alternative than to show up, the chair (Tim Baack) and I patched together a strategy that has really worked.  Here are some of the elements:

1.  Homework.

Work group members were asked to interview people in other cities about their coordinated entry (central intake) systems.  Someone interviewed the central intake program in Dayton, someone else called Kalamazoo, and so on.  Results were shared with the group in oral and written form.  This dispersed the responsibility for information-gathering and synthesis to the whole group. 

2.  Visioning

A visioning process is really about having everyone say what’s on their mind.  We did this early to try to surface some of the misgivings and apprehensions that shelter operators and others might have about a coordinated entry process.  When their concerns were recognized as legitimate by others, they became problems to solve rather than little land mines that would blow us up later.

3.  Decision List

We came up with a list of questions that had to be answered in order to establish Coordinated Entry.  Every work group member was asked to submit his/her answers to the chair so they could be recorded on a decision spreadsheet.  At each meeting, we tackle 2 or 3 questions, not closing the discussion until there is genuine agreement on the answer.  When a question is answered, we go on to the next, with no circling back (well, so far).  Having the decision list puts the end in sight – essentially when we answer the last question we will have designed the Coordinated Entry system.

4.  Cookies

The work group chair, Tim Baack of Pathfinders, sets the tone for the meeting with his preparation and his presence.  He is there to greet people as they arrive.  He has a fresh pot of coffee and a platter of cookies.  Agendas and meeting materials are at everyone’s place.  He is glad to see everyone and they feel welcome.  He guides the discussion but doesn’t rush it.  People are heard.  That’s huge.

When Coordinated Entry gets established, it will have a lot of fingerprints on it (and a few cookie crumbs). People will look back at the hard work they did and remember it as being challenging and energizing.  They’ll still go to the big meetings and listen to Old Ben read the latest telegram but they’ll be looking around the room for a problem to solve and some fun to have.

No One Wants to Touch It

There is something seriously wrong here.  The latest NAACP report on the state of Black Milwaukee is a yawner.  Same old stuff.  Same old disparities.  Maybe a little worse but, hey, it is what it is.  What’s happened  is that we have gotten used to having leprosy.

Yes, that’s just what’s happened in our lovely city.  We are years beyond caring about the disfigurement, the isolation, and the pain.  It’s enough, isn’t it, that we still have missionaries willing to visit the leper colony and minister to the people we don’t want to see on Main Street.  Keep us safe from contagion but still do the right thing.

The NAACP report includes interesting little facts like:

• African American students in MPS have a graduation rate of around 40%.
• Wisconsin’s African American incarceration rate is 11 times greater than whites.
• Half of African American males of working age (16-65) are unemployed.

More info here in Eugene Kane’s column in the Milwakee Journal Sentinel, “Latest snapshot of black Milwaukee makes the heart sink,” at http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/124547149.html

This isn’t the first time the NAACP has issued a state of Black Milwaukee report.  The first one I saw was in 1987; we used some of the findings to include in a demographic analysis of poverty in Milwaukee completed for the Social Development Commission.  We thought the news that African American male unemployment was 25.9% and the poverty rate was 29.0% would just stop traffic on Wisconsin Avenue.  When policymakers got that information, we thought (wearing our little candy striper uniforms with the “I may look 16 but I’m still really naive” sashes) they will for sure deal with the obvious racism, disparity, and injustice of it all.

Maybe it’s like the frog in the boiling water.  You know, you put a live frog in boiling water and he freaks out….but…..you put a live frog in cold water and gradually turn up the heat and he just floats into a state of being fully cooked.

I guess my question is this — HOW DID THIS GET TO BE OK?   How did we get so comfortable with tens of thousands of young African American men not having a prayer of a decent economic, social or family life?  Who’s mad about this?  Who’s grieving?

There is occasionally a great, impressive community ‘raring up’ of indignation and outrage about a pressing issue.  United Way’s anti-teen pregnancy campaign, especially the latest iteration that goes directly to the heart of the awful phenomenon of young girls getting suckered into sex with older men is an example of a group that decided, “This is completely f**ked up and we’re going to change it.”  Of course, United Way wouldn’t talk like that.  But I am.

This situation with African American males is a DISASTER and it has implications that reach into the next many generations.  We see that frog bobbing around in the simmering water — that’s us.  That’s what complacency has brought us.  We’ve been warned.  We can never say this took us by surprise.

Father’s Day Message to Milwaukee Dads

Here’s my Father”s Day message to Dads, especially young Dads.  You matter.  It doesn’t matter what your wife or your girlfriend says.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to do anything useful or even if you have a job.  You matter.  Don’t buy into any of the junk that you hear that your kids will be fine without you.  They won’t.

Here’s the big news for Dads, again, especially young Dads who think they have nothing to offer because they’re not working and have no prospects.  Three-years olds don’t check resumes.  They don’t care what you do as long as you are decent to them.  It’s a very low bar to be a meaningful Dad to a child.  Would it be better if every Dad had a family-supporting job? Absolutely.  Would it be better if they all took parenting classes and were actually interested in child development instead of faking it?  Sure.

But what matters most to a kid is that you simply show up. Be kind. Be dependable in their eyes.  Put them on your shoulders and walk around the block. Make them feel big and important. Put them first in your heart.

Social service programs spend a lot of time on fatherhood projects.  And that’s a wonderful thing.  But the thing I want Dads to hear is that it is your physical presence that matters most, your strength and protection, your playfulness and your laugh, and the loving gaze that tells a child s/he can do no wrong in your eyes.  It’s no cost – you just got to show up. Not once or twice.  Not on Christmas and birthdays.  Regularly.  Dependably.

Men – if you’ve got a friend who can’t take that step to be with his child because he thinks he’s not good enough, take him by the hand and show him.  And remember sometimes it’s the big blowhard Dads who say they don’t care and can’t be bothered who are hurting the most because they’re estranged from their kids.  Help them out. 

Our town would be an incredibly better place to live if all our kids were fathered well.  Many of the programs we develop to try to fix the damage done by absent fathers would be unnecessary.  It’s the little things that count – in the long run, that’s the big thing.  I truly believe that.

From the Lamppost: Making Proposal Feedback Work For You

Constructive criticism is what you get when your husband tells you, “Yes, those jeans do make you look fat.”  This is separated from regular criticism which is severe eye-rolling and/or covering of one’s eyes.  It’s ok to get mad at the latter but constructive criticism?  Mature people take it in the kind spirit in which it is intended.  Or do they?

As one author noted, “Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.”

One experience that I and many of my peers share is having people review drafts of funding proposals.  Over the years, this has been a painful or productive process, depending on the proposal, how decent a draft I’ve given people, and whether they (the reviewers) know what they’re doing.

I’ve learned some things about the proposal draft review process which I happily put to use this past weekend on a proposal for a very important community project.  Here are my tips for not only surviving, but benefiting from, a proposal draft review.

1.  Start the proposal development process with the group in a face to face meeting.

2.  Review the proposal requirements, paying special attention to significant policy/program decisions.

3.  Get agreement on the major issues at the beginning – don’t let things ride.

4. Share two drafts.  An early draft with a lot of holes forces discussion about critical issues — this draft should be reviewed in a group meeting.  The second draft is the ‘close to finished’ draft – unless there are big issues, getting individuals’ feedback is sufficient.

5. Tell your reviewers when you will be sending the draft out and stick to that schedule — even if you are not entirely happy with your progress. 

6.  Ask people to send their feedback/comments to you directly.  One thing you don’t want in the late stages of a major proposal is outside kibbutzing – where some people in the group are talking to each other but not registering their issues with the proposal developer. 

7.  Take all the comments in before making changes.  Get a sense of where your reviewers are – are they all focusing on the same 3 issues or are they finding things all over the place to change?

8.  Schedule your review so there is actually time to influence the final product.  Asking someone to review a proposal that’s due tomorrow is a transparent attempt to avoid having to change anything.  I say you need to have a close to final draft at least a week in advance of the due date.  Inconsequential stuff can be missing but 90% should be available to solid review/critique.

9.  Alert the group when the concerns of a reviewer are such that the future implementation of the project could be impaired should it be funded as proposed.  This is tricky because you don’t want to disrupt the proposal process but you have to insure core agreement on the design.

10. Advocate only for the competitiveness of the proposal and do that sparingly.  Sometimes ‘regular’ people don’t understand what needs to be done to land major federal money.  However, they still know what will fly in their world.  A good proposal developer strives for balance here.  That’s hard — because it also means the you cannot be defensive or argumentative.  When you’ve spent days and weeks on a proposal, it’s hard not to defend every word.  But that’s a mistake and we all know it.

I used to be very reluctant to have people review my work.  Last minute scenes with supervisors and colleagues ripping the draft from hands were common.  Figuring if I gave them no time to critique I could avoid criticism, I completely missed the boat on the whole purpose of external review.  I had to learn it the hard way — it’s not about me.  It’s about getting the money to make something important happen.  So I have to suffer a little…..

Looks Matter

Every time I go to the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division or Children’s Court for a meeting, I am depressed by the grounds before I even get to the building. 

I took this picture this morning at BHD.  The rain had washed off the dusty, deserted look, and it almost looked pastoral and welcoming.   But the fact of the matter is that many parts of county grounds look like ruins.

Like this 70′s era empty pond.

Planters with no flowers.  Weeds.  Very grim.

Public art?  What’s that?

I think elected officials figured that the fastest way to show people that county government was saving money was to stop caring about how things look.  Why do anything more than the bare minimum? Mow the grass and shovel the snow.

I’m not an architect or a landscaper.  I’m just a regular person who goes to these buildings quite a lot and, each time I do, I wonder why it’s so important to someone in charge to remind me of how busted the county is, that no matter how stressed or anxious I might be as a consumer of services in these buildings, I need to button up my hair shirt and quit complaining.

So as I was walking back to my car thinking this thought for about the millionth time, I saw this.

And it really made me smile.

See what I mean?