• De La Salle Hall Hagerty Lounge, Saint Mary’s College of California, 1928 St. Mary’s Road, Moraga, CA [Google map]
• Thursday, May 24th, 2012, 6:30 P.M. – 8:00 P.M.
• RSVP: https://wwws.stmarys-ca.edu/forms/alumni-and-friends/alumnievents/rsvp/index.html?event=815
• More information can be found on the flyer (click here)
• Members Free Non-members $5.00

In this article, we will introduce social media, and explain why entering the social media arena should be done planfully, as a strategic step and part of an overall communication strategy for your organization. Used wisely, social media is a powerful tool, capable of expanding your reach, fostering goodwill, and even – important for the nonprofit space – establishing credibility in key areas.

What is Social Media, Anyway?

Social Media is a term encompassing all the many ways that people are communicating as a two-way street on the internet. Traditional media – newsprint, radio reports, advertising, press releases and the like – can be seen as a train traveling on a track, in one direction.  The train is part of an organized system, a railroad. Those who “tune in” to the message, to listen, or read, or watch, are “passengers.” The train travels the course, with little passenger involvement. It takes time to build a train and plan its route, and similarly there is generally a time lag between the development of traditional media and the time it is made available. Yes, a passenger can get on or off, but the passenger cannot change the direction of the train. The reach (or number of passengers) is somewhat predictable. And these passengers have little chance to share opinions about the matters discussed on board. Not so in social media.

Social media, on the other hand, is very different.  From the organization’s point of view, any travel metaphor fails. Social media is more like an open conference call, or short-wave radio, where many can chime in on a certain frequency, and there is no centralized media hub, no barriers to entry, and no real skill or training required to jump in, and very little cost involved in doing so. This is this kind of media that allows organizations and individuals to reach out to one another and to connect, as “friends” and then gives “friends” the ability to submit thoughts and opinions.  It is a platform that makes this possible. Common social media platforms are: personal and organizational blogs, RSS feeds, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Reddit, Digg, Bitly, Slideshare…  Each of these platforms and tools has a different purpose. For example, because there are so many Facebook users, many organizations use Facebook as a web presence, and then update the world using tweets via Twitter.  One characteristic of social media communications is the hashtag, which allows people to include a subject or an event, allowing others to follow a particular thread of conversation. For example, the tag #ihh2012 could be added to posts about the Elfenworks’ 2012 In Harmony With Hope^sm  award.

Because the social media landscape is constantly changing, and each of the key players in social media has different visions and purposes, you need to adapt your own social media strategy so that you can benefit from their use.  Not every platform may be suited to your own vision of media marketing. It is important to evaluate what your purpose is, and how these various interactive media can help you obtain your goals. For example, LinkedIn’s website touts its “trusted networking” aspect, while Facebook and Google+ offer various levels of trust in relationships. All three allow the control of data display and sharing. Because the landscape changes so quickly, it is important to review platform strategy almost on a monthly basis.

How to Create your Social Media Strategy

To effectively use social media, it is important to develop goals and create a strategy to obtain those goals. Directionless social media will get you nowhere. Be sure to put thought into your voice: how do you want to come across? Consider your audience: who do you really want to reach? As you gain friends and followers, remember to engage them. One thing we have made it a practice of doing is thanking anyone who adds us on Facebook or follows us on Twitter. It is a nice gesture that helps to solidify the friendship and relationship, encouraging them to become engaged in your social media.

Of utmost importance as you strategize about social media is developing your rules and regulations. Without guidelines and rules in place, you can put your organization at legal and security risk.  This article is not intended to cover Intellectual Property issues. But, it is important to note that IP concerns should be factored into your strategy.  To illustrate this social media strategy development concept, here is an example of our twitter policy:

Example Twitter Policy – Elfenworks “In Harmony With Hope”

• Tweets are always “in harmony with hope” – positive and not negative.
• Tweets are non-partisan and a-political.
• Content is valuable, not simply re-messaging others’ messages or messages “just because”

Social Media security

Social media use creates privacy control issues which can cause irreversible damage if not taken seriously. Many instances of identity theft, cyber-bullying, targeted scams, stalking, and child solicitation have been linked to social media. If you choose to contribute to social media content, you should be mindful and cautious about disclosing your own personal information. The safest way to prevent security breaches is to say no more about yourself than you would tell a stranger on the street.

It is also important use extreme caution and discretion when opening a link. Opening links—even if they appear to come from a friend–can make you susceptible to phishing; and before you know it you could have a virus which may be passed along to your friends and followers. So, be wary of anyone posting suspicious links to your page or wall, because if you aren’t, you may become victimized by social engineering.

The Drawbacks of Social Media

There are definitely drawbacks to entering the Social Media scene.  The first, is that social media requires maintenance. Without a plan and the right people in place to implement it, your social media ‘face’ or ‘front door’ looks unkempt and it reflects poorly on your organization.  Better not to enter the space, than to do a bad job, or to fail at simple security, and burn up goodwill, if any avoidable harm befalls others.  The simple fact is this: if you halfheartedly and neglectfully enter the social media space, you can do yourself damage, harming your brand or your organization’s image.

The Benefits of Social Media

Because Facebook alone boasts more than 845 million users, the advantage of Social Media marketing is reach.  With a plan, and with the commitment to dedicate resources, you can inexpensively promote your organization, and get to know your support base better, and speak directly to them.

Clearly, more organizations are embracing social media daily.  We hope our little article will help you be successful, as you jump in, or help you review your current policy. Below, are our “Top 10 Tips for Successful Social Media”

1. Know what your goals are and have a strategy about how you will achieve them
2. Have a stated policy about what is, and is not, acceptable in the social media sphere
3. Assign the right person to the social media task. Allow them time to understand the space, and to run the social media effort, regularly (daily).
4. Hold a simple training, to be sure the policy is known and understood by all
5. Set up consistent social media accounts with a consistent naming convention
6. Keep scanning the landscape for changes, and stay on top of them
7. Be mindful of security, using a strong password and keeping it known on an as-needed basis
8. Make a practice to thank your new followers
9. Recognize the hard work of your social media crew
10. Bring up social media at your Board of Trustees meeting, and have examples from the previous few months. The knowledge that this will be happening will help ensure guidelines are followed, and the Board can provide critical oversight and feedback to those running the social media.

The Elfenworks Foundation is proud to partner with the Lasallian Volunteers of America, The San Damiano Foundation, and Campus Moviefest on the LVSRide film, premiering in 2012.

Our process design with LVSRide

Putting the power of film at the service of the poor…

This project was a win-win project for all participants: Campus Moviefest and the filmmaker are happy, because it was involvement in Campus Moviefest that led to this professional opportunity for a young filmmaker.   The San Damiano Foundation is happy, because the film is in keeping with their motto “putting the power of film at the service of the poor.”  We’re happy, because this project proves the power that student filmmakers can have, making a real difference in the world of social justice.

Documentary Details

Release Date: 12/4/2011
A Nishant Gogna Film.
An Al Cassidy Production.

In association with:
Lasallian Volunteers
Elfenworks Productions, LLC
San Damiano Foundation
Christian Brothers Conference
Countless other supporters and volunteers.

Follow the rest of the quest at:
www.LVsRIDE.com

Director’s Note:
This was one of the best filmmaking experiences I’ve ever had in my career.

Whatever your winter celebration, we wish you peace and joy!

We mean it when we say ‘help one, help many, cause a ripple.’ By helping one child, you just can’t predict in what interconnected way you’re changing the future of the entire world… just as a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can change the weather in another, helping one child can change how the world unfolds in ways we cannot know. That’s been called the ‘butterfly effect.’

Our process design with The Butterfly Project

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1. Hammerfald, K., C. Eberle, M. Grau, A. Kinsperger, A. Zimmermann, U. Ehlert, and J. Gaab. “Persistent effects of cognitive-behavioral stress management on cortisol responses to acute stress in health subjects – A randomized controlled trial.” Psychoneuroendrocrinology 33 (2006): 333-39.
2. Dimsdale, Joel E., Paul Mills, Thomas Patterson, Michael Ziegler, and Elaine Dillon. “Effects of Chronic Stress on Beta-Edrenergic Receptors in the Homeless.” Psychosomatic Medicine 56 (1994): 290-95.
3. Hammerfald, K., C. Eberle, M. Grau, A. Kinsperger, A. Zimmermann, U. Ehlert, and J. Gaab. “Persistent effects of cognitive-behavioral stress management on cortisol responses to acute stress in health subjects – A randomized controlled trial.” Psychoneuroendrocrinology 33 (2006): 333-39.
4. Ranjit, Nalini, Elizabeth A. Young, and George A. Kaplan. “Material hardship alters the diurnal rhythm of salivary cortisol.” International Journal of Epidemiology 34 (2005): 1138-143.
5. Newcomer, John W., Gregg Selke, Angela K. Melson, Tamara Hershey, Suzanne Craft, Katherine Richards, and Amy L. Alderson. “Decreased Memory Performance in Healthy Humans Induced by Stress-Level Cortisol Treatment.” ARCH GEN PSYCHIATRY 56 (1999): 527-33.
6. MacLean, Christopher R.K., Kenneth G. Walton, Stig R. Wenneberg, Debra K. Levitsky, Joseph P. Mandarino, Rafiq Waziri, Stephen L. Hillis, and Robert H. Schneider. “Effects of the transcendental meditation program on adaptive mechanisms: Changes in hormone levels and responses to stress after 4 months of practice.” Psychoneuroendrocrinology 22 (1997): 277-95.

PLEASE NOTE: if you are a shelter volunteer, it’s important for you to check with your the shelter director before enthusiastically jumping in… with proper permissions and training, you avoid unintended problems in areas that are intending to bring only help and healing.  Please let us know your results, and how we can make this a more helpful page!

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Founder and CEO, College Possible

St. Paul, Minnesota
2011 In Harmony with Hope® Award winner
[Press Release IHH 2011] [About IHH Award] [Live Streaming]

As a kid growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jim McCorkell set up a lawn-mowing business, going door to door and politely stating that he would “be happy to take on your lawn this summer.” Showing an early appreciation for enterprise, he promptly sub-contracted out all the manual labor. McCorkell has applied that same enterprising spirit to his remarkable nonprofit venture called College Possible. Just over 10 years ago, McCorkell established a college prep program for low-income youth and was the first in the nation to use the enthusiastic and idealistic labor pool of recent college graduates serving as AmeriCorps to provide the highly personalized support needed to ensure the program’s success. The results are dramatic. Ninety-eight percent of College Possible’s students earn admission to college; and nearly 80% of enrollees have earned their four-year degrees or are on the path to do so.

McCorkell’s abiding mission is to make a post-secondary education a reality for the 200,000 at-risk kids each year who graduate high school prepared for college but who, thanks to cultural and functional barriers, aren’t able to get there. The need is real: college participation rates in low-income families are 32% lower than those of wealthy families. That gap remains virtually unchanged since 1970, not long after President Johnson announced the war on poverty—and is symptomatic of our country’s continued, indeed, growing inequality.

McCorkell knows of what he speaks, as he was one of those kids. Neither of McCorkell’s parents finished high school, though they did later earn their G.E.D.’s, and he grew up poor. But he was lucky. His family was stable and his parents supported and encouraged the pursuit of higher education. Additionally a few key teachers and friends recognized his enormous potential and gave him the support he needed to achieve his college goal. McCorkell earned a scholarship to Carleton College before going on to get master’s degrees, first in political science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and then in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He earned extra money during those student years as a tutor for the test preparation company Kaplan, giving him experience that would prove valuable in subsequent years.

McCorkell entered Harvard intent on studying the interplay of poverty, race and gender, specifically as it related to housing, and with the goal of starting a nonprofit after getting his degree. As he dug deeper and deeper, he became convinced that education was the fundamental piece of the puzzle. With education comes a greater degree of economic security, health improves, and housing becomes more stable. He started to wonder, what if the kind of fee-based test preparation Kaplan students received could be geared towards low-income students? The seed was planted, and it began to germinate during his year-long stint with the national service organization City Year.

In 2000 McCorkell returned to Minnesota, and filed for 501(c)3 status for the nonprofit he always knew he’d start. In this new organization, he married his enterprising spirit with his call to serve the greater good. Naming his new venture Admission Possible, its mission is to make a college education a possibility for low-income students, like himself. The organization, now called College Possible, uses AmeriCorps members to serve as coaches to students; McCorkell was the first person in the country to leverage the AmeriCorps service infrastructure for college access, and it is essential to the model’s success. College Possible is able to provide intensive intervention and a strong mentor relationship—the two elements that are fundamental for success in this space, according to research—for students in the program, and to do it in a way that is affordable. It costs only $3,000 for a student’s two years in the high school program. That is one-seventh the cost of similar federally funded programs. An independent social return on investment study conducted in 2005 estimated that College Possible offers a 500% return on investment to society through higher contributions to the tax base and a reduction in rates of incarceration and utilization of costly social services.

Everybody wins. Through College Possible, low-income students are given the social support and the educational tools they need to effectively compete for admission to colleges and universities. The universities also benefit: College Possible provides them with an effective mechanism for identifying and recruiting a more racially and socioeconomically diverse student population. And with an increasingly competitive global economy, the United States—with a 300,000-person annual shortage in post-secondary educated workers through 2018—benefits by having a more highly educated workforce. Finally, through its relationship with AmeriCorps, the program incubates hundreds of passionate, committed young changemakers who will take the skills from this first role and apply them throughout their careers. “I couldn’t have imagined a first position to have out of college that could be any better than this. It has blown things wide open in terms of what I can do in the future as I pursue my interest in education,” said D.J. Erickson a first-year Corps member who’s coaching juniors at the Twin Cities’ St. Louis Park High School.

Juniors and seniors who have been admitted into the program meet twice a week for two hours after school with their coach. Each group is comprised of 10-15 kids, who find in each other, kindred spirits. Over the two years they work together, a deep bond is forged—both between the students and between the students and their coach. The coaches serve Monday through Thursday at their assigned high school. There they coach up to 40 students each. On Fridays, the students don’t meet but the coaches do, back at the Admission Possible office to take part in a weekly assessment and ongoing training.

Coaches use College Possible’s copyrighted curriculum, created to engage the students and guide them through the two-year access program. On average, each student will spend 320 hours in College Possible’s program. The students and their coaches work first on test preparation, to improve student ACT/SAT scores. Most students take part in summer enrichment programs, which their coaches help them find. Next the coaches introduce the students to college life by taking them to visit a number of nearby campuses. They help their students work on their applications, including all requests for financial aid and scholarships. Finally, College Possible ensures that the transition to college is successful by fully preparing students. Upon completion of the high school program, students join College Possible’s college program where they continue to be supported by a college coach supporting students using a technology-based toolkit of supports.

Infusing everything they do at College Possible is a culture of positive idealism—so important to the organization that its central tenets are spelled out on their Web site (among them: strive to be delightful, challenge cynicism, be grateful, have fun…). It works: the Princeton Review recently named College Possible one of the best entry level job offerings in the country. The staff culture makes its way through the coaches to the students who, energized by being surrounded and supported by other college-bound students and strong adult mentors for perhaps the first time in their lives, are eager to spread the program’s gospel. They happily do community service and practice tests on weekends and they share their enthusiasm with freshmen and sophomores through formal college planning workshops at their schools.

Always striving for perfection, McCorkell has inculcated a results-focused agenda at College Possible: he uses data and feedback to review every aspect of his program, tweaking a little here, a little there…would it make a difference to take the ACT test on a different date, for instance. Real-time intervention is possible thanks to a web-based tracking system that monitors student outcomes. That data is analyzed every Friday by the staff to make sure everyone and everything is on track. Larger studies of the overall effectiveness of the program have also been conducted by outside groups. Most recently a 2011 Harvard historical analysis demonstrated College Possible students were 140% more likely to attend a four-year college and 75% more likely to attend any form of post-secondary than their similar peers.  Earlier evaluations like that in 2010 by ICF International released these findings: College Possible students raised their ACT scores by an impressive 22% and college acceptance rates were actually 99%. Another external evaluation is taking place now: a Harvard University researcher is undertaking a two-year randomized, controlled study of the program.

Eleven years after the first group of 35 students, College Possible has helped 15,000 students through their programs—taking that first, crucial step out of poverty. Each year, College Possible enriches the lives of 7,400 low-income students. In 2010-11, there were 1,650 juniors and seniors enrolled in its core high school program; 3,000 freshmen and sophomores took its college information seminars; and 2,750 program graduates took advantage of its college programming. In a short time, College Possible has made its impact felt; it is so successful that there are 15 schools currently on the wait list in the Twin Cities area alone. More than 500 recent college graduates applied for the 100 AmeriCorps and VISTA spots that Admission Possible needs to fill next year. Natalie Rule Burns, the organization’s Director of External Relations, said, “The rate of our replication is limited only by funding.”

The College Possible model undeniably works—better than any other college readiness program—and it is replicable and scalable. Additionally, McCorkell has molded an efficient, effective model that works equally well in his absence. For these reasons, the College Possible board voted to start a careful national expansion, first with an expansion pilot launch to Milwaukee in 2008; then with an aggressive national expansion plan launched in 2010 to reach 20,000 low-income students annually in 10 sites by 2015.  Growing at a rate of one to two new markets per year, College Possible announced its third site in Omaha, Nebraska, in Summer 2011. Jim McCorkell may have had the business sense to innovate a model that can do without him but there’s little question that he can’t do without it—this is his life’s work. Every step he has taken has deliberately guided him down the path to College Possible. Rule Burns calls him “impressive and inspiring” but also entirely earnest and up-front: “You’ll never get spun by Jim. He’s doing this with a vision that the future of America’s children should be determined solely by their talent, motivation and effort, not their parents’ socioeconomic status.” It’s just that simple.