Loving this quick slide deck showing some stats of the most popular presentations on Slideshare this year. Looks like slides are definitely moving away from Powerpoint Hell… yay!

We don’t normally post press releases here, but this grant opportunity sounds amazing.  Please share with your networks!

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For immediate release
January 31, 2012
For more information:
Nadine Hoffman
(202) 496-1992
newmediagrants[at]iwmf.org

The International Women’s Media Foundation Seeks Applications for the 2012 Women Entrepreneurs in the Digital News Frontier Grant Program

WASHINGTON – The International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) will award three $20,000 grants to entrepreneurial women journalists proposing to use digital media in new ways to deliver the news.

The Women Entrepreneurs in the Digital News Frontier grant program, first offered in 2011, is diversifying the digital news media landscape by expanding the voice and role of women entrepreneurs.  In addition to seed funding, grantees will receive pro-bono coaching, and will participate in a monthly call series featuring leading entrepreneurs and digital news media experts.

Applicants can be full-time, part-time or freelance women news media professionals based in the U.S. 

A successful applicant will pitch an innovative digital news media enterprise with a well conceived plan for sustainability after initial funding has ended.  She will clearly demonstrate how her proposed enterprise advances women in the field of news media.  She will outline tangible benchmarks for her success as a digital news media entrepreneur.

Funding is available for start-ups only.  Personal blogs and documentary projects will not be considered.

Applications will be accepted until Friday, March 2, 2012. Late applications will not be considered.  Winners will be announced in April 2012.

2012 grantees will be selected by an advisory committee comprised of IWMF Board Members, digital news media experts and entrepreneurs.

Read about the IWMF’s 2011 Women Entrepreneurs in the Digital News Frontier grant winners here.

View the application FAQ and apply here.

The Women Entrepreneurs in the Digital News Frontier grant program is made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation.

Founded in 1990, the International Women’s Media Foundation works to strengthen the role of women in the news media worldwide. The IWMF network includes women and men in the media in more than 130 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.iwmf.org.

I pointed out in November that one of the ultimate points in Humanize is that our organizations need to change. As I’ve been saying in my talks and interviews about the book, Maddie and I are activists. It’s not enough (for us, anyway) for you to read the book. We want you to do something about it. Use the book to change your workplace for the better. Make a change.

But as we’ve been talking to people about how they are using (or plan to use) the ideas in the book for change, we are reminded of an important point. The change people are starting is always unique, and it doesn’t tend to be very overtly about becoming “more human.” For example, when people read the chapter on being courageous and they look at their own organization, they will (we hope) understand the basic points in the book. They may see the importance of building a learning culture. Or they may be frustrated that their existing structure and processes are not very good for supporting experimentation. Or they may realize that as an organization they give lip service to supporting real personal development, but in practice they occasionally send people to training and that’s it.

But they don’t take that insight and then develop a “humanize the organization” action plan, necessarily. They develop a “let’s make this a kick-ass organization” action plan. Or they develop a “let’s finally make innovation real here across all divisions” action plan. Or they develop a “We need to get serious about our role as a management team” action plan. Learning, experimentation, and personal development will likely be woven into all of that. In the end, they’re pushing for a more courageous organization. But it’s not critical that you label it that.

Change is personal. Change is unique to you and your situation (even though, paradoxically, the change all looks quite familiar when you step back a bit). So when you read our book, please take that next step and start changing things. Make it yours. Make it personal. Make it meaningful. Make some change.

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Humanize: How People-centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World takes on the topic of change in great detail.  Buy the book today.

The people who inspire us the most are often quietly changing the world each and every day. They’re not on the front page of the newspaper, and they’re not mingling with the Gates and Buffets of the world. They’re everyday people like you and me who have shown extraordinary commitment to making this world better than when they found it.

The CTK Foundation “Heroes with a Heart” Grant Award asks YOU to nominate a “Hero with a Heart,” and give them a chance to win $5,000 – a simple thanks for the hard work that they do.

What are the details of the “Heroes with a Heart” Grant?

Here’s an overview of awards the CTK Foundation will offer and details on how you can nominate your Hero:

• $15,000 for Three Heroes One Hero with a Heart from each of the three categories of Health and Human Social Service, Animal Rights and Environmental Protection and Arts and Literacy will be awarded $5,000 USD and a professionally produced video about their affiliated nonprofit for use in public awareness or education.
• $1,500 for One Hero The CTK Foundation will also be offering a $1,500 (USD) President’s Choice Award (the Susan Lee Winter Grant Award) for an individual working to provide creative and innovative approaches to HIV/AIDS education or prevention.
• Blogger’s Choice Award Lastly, there will be a Blogger’s Choice Award of $1,000 (USD). The CTK Foundation will choose a blogger (hopefully me) who will hand-pick one winner from any category.

Applications for all Heroes with a Heart grant awards open today and close Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at midnight. Finalists will appear on the CTK Facebook page for public voting during April and winners will be announced on May 1, 2012. This award is open to registered nonprofits or charities of all types and sizes, worldwide.

Go to communitytech.net/foundation to nominate your Hero with a Heart today!

For regular updates on the Heroes with a Heart Grant, check out the CTK Facebook Page.

Good luck, Heroes!

Register before February 17th to save $100:

 Event Details

We hope you’ll be able to join the more than 1,500 passionate nonprofit professionals who, like you, want to use technology effectively to advance their missions and bring about change.  Join us – we’ll be there and we can’t wait to tell you what we’ll be up to!

Ignite Social Media has an interesting post showing some demographic data on Pinterest (which, unsurprisingly, skews heavily towards women aged 25-54).  Most telling for me though is their analysis of lifestyle segments – Boomers and Boomerangs (Boomers and the kids who live with them), Babies and Bliss (Gen-Xers having kids but mostly still working full time and interested in anything they can do online rather than offline)…

The key here is – are any of these groups describing your members?  Just something to think about.

An example from the post:

Boomers & Boomerangs

Boomers & Boomerangs in detail

Who are they?

• This two-group segment includes baby boomer adults and the teenage/young adult children who live in their home
• Both groups are heavy internet users and account for more than 10% of Pinterest.com visits

What would they pin?

• Online habits include domestic travel planning
• They also tend to live in houses ~15 years old which suggests to me they would be interested in discovering and sharing DIY, remodel and home improvement style projects

Their boards might look something like this:

As you can imaging, those in the travel industry (domestic) or craft and home improvement stores should see this as a potential opportunity should Boomers & Boomerangs fit within their target audience.

Just in case you  missed them, here are some more truly thoughtful responses to my meme, How Are You Going to Change the World in 2012? (More posts are here.)

Challenge Accepted: Make the World a Better Place (Lowell Aplebaum)

1. For the association world: Collaborate.  No, I am not talking about the ASAE social network platform (though it is a great place to connect with colleagues and get involved).  I am talking about associations working together to work together.  There are so many of us out there, and each association has the things it is REALLY good at, and those areas where we are constantly struggling (and pouring resources) to just tread water.  In 2012 I am going to identify those models I have that are the top 10% of what I see out there, and find corresponding associations that excel in other areas for the potential of collaboration.  If my association can help them with our model of success, and they can help us with theirs perhaps neither would waste so much time or resources in reinventing the wheel.

Why Change the World in 2012? (Eric Lanke)

Elevate the conversation.

Across the board–whether it’s an interaction in the association that employs me, in one of my growing list of volunteer commitments, in my relationship with my family, or even in the activities I choose to fill my reflective time with–I can more consciously be the agent that elevates the conversation one level above where everyone else is focused.

Too much of the time, you see, in all of the circles I’ve described above, we seem so consumed by what needs to be done that we consistently lose sight of why we’re doing them in the first place. And yet the why has to inform the what, or the what begins to lose its meaning.

Meme Time: Changing the World in 2012 (Elizabeth Engel)

How *are* we doing on D&I in associations? Short answer? Not well.

And I can’t change that by myself. And neither can you.

But I can light one candle. And so can you. So that’s what I’m going to do: do what’s in my power to shine a spotlight on diversity and inclusion and where we fail and how we can pick ourselves back up and try again.

I Will Stop the World From Ending in 2012 (Maggie McGary)

Embrace change–or at least shake hands with it. It’s hard to make changes, especially when a situation is comfortable and works well enough. But sometimes comfortable isn’t actually comfortable. It may work and it may pay the bills, but is that really all we want to ask of life? Is ok good enough, or is amazing out there waiting to be had? And how will you know if you don’t try something different? So this year I’m going to go beyond my comfort zone and see if I can’t find amazing, or at least beyond comfortable.

How Will You Change the World in 2012? (Geoff Livingston)

During Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington, I had the privilege of creating a training program that touched more than 350 nonprofits. Teaching and showing others how to use these tools is the best way I can positively impact the world. In 2012, I’d like to personally train or speak to more than 1,000 nonprofits about online marketing best practices.

Wow!!!  Have I missed any posts?  Let me know in the comments – and thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has participated so far.  Nothing will ever get better without each of our individual commitment to do something.  I’m not going to sit around waiting for the world to get better all by itself.  And why should I, when there are so many great people with great ideas for what they can do?  The buck stops with us.  Thank you!

Just saw this post from Edelman: Why Your Company Needs to Structure Properly for Social Media… Right Now.

From the post (my bold):

Yesterday morning in London, Richard Edelman unveiled the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer. It’s the twelfth year that we’ve conducted the study, which tries to answer the seemingly simple question: “Who do you trust?”

One thing is clear from this year’s research: It isn’t your CEO.

Globally, only 38% of informed publics think CEOs are credible spokespeople. That’s down from 50% last year.

On the other hand, trust in a ‘Regular employee’ showed a dramatic rise from 34% last year, to 50% this year. ‘Regular employee’ trailed only academic, technical experts in the company, and person like yourself as the most credible spokesperson your business could put forward. You can view all of this data on slide 21 our global trust presentation.

I’ll be posting an analysis of the updated report in greater detail but this is significant so I’m posting it now.  Watch this space for more.

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Humanize: How People-centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World takes on the topic of trust in great detail.  Buy the book today.

I have a confession: one of my least favorite things to do is public speaking. I had never done it at all until three years ago when Debra Stratton of Stratton Publishing & Marketing asked me if I’d present with her at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference, which just happened to be in Miami in February. So I said yes. I was terrified, and incredibly relieved when it was over. I figured that if I forced myself to do more of this dreaded public speaking it would get better in time, so over the past few years any time someone has asked me to speak or wanted to collaborate with me to submit a proposal to speak, I’ve said yes. While it’s gotten a tiny bit less intimidating, for the most part I still dread it, but I continue to do it, both out of desire to overcome my fear and, more importantly, because I do like to help others and share the knowledge I gain being immersed in social media on a daily basis. I figure if I’m going to spend countless hours online, reading and learning and doing, others may as well benefit from my compulsive information gathering.

At any rate, last week I presented at an Association Foundation Group  lunch about association social media. They were super nice and it was a good incentive for me to collect my thoughts on the state of association social media right now. The presentation is below. I based my thoughts on a recent comScore report “It’s a Social World: Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed.” I won’t reiterate everything I said in the presentation, but basically my top points were:

1. Social networking is HUGE now–people are spending a very significant portion of their online time on social networking sites. So  not being there, or not at least knowing which sites your members are using, is a huge missed opportunity.
2. Google+ is potentially changing SEO, so at a bare minimum, educate yourself about its implications. Here are two good articles about it.
3. Email is still effective now, but digital natives’ use of email has plummeted while their time on social networking sites remains significant. What does this mean for your association’s marketing tactics over the next decade?

88% of consumers are less likely to buy from a company that ignores them on social media sites.  Check out the full Conversocial study here.  I know I notice – very strongly – when my tweets go unanswered.  If it’s a technology company of any kind? Even worse. Instant fail, and I’ll happily tweet my irritation and vow never to use them again.  Fair? Maybe not – but that’s the truth.  It’s not all bad, though – this unscientific but cool SBOSM poll says we’re doing a good job.  How’s your social customer service?