Tonya Hall Show: Thursday, May 10, 2012

[Updated]

I had the honor and privilege of guest-hosting the Tonya Hall Show today.  The show is all about embracing the power of social media, everything happening on the world wide web and how the internet is changing our lives.

On today’s show we talked about two topics: 1) sports and society — and what digital and social media are doing to help extend the impact that sports is having on our culture, and 2) the evolution of sports media — and how the role and impact of journalists who cover sports, and related issues, is changing in the digital age.

My guest was Tom Farrey, a veteran investigative journalist, Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ESPN, and the author of Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children. Tom’s work over the years has explored the connections between sports and the largest themes in society — education, globalization, technology, race, gender, poverty and ethics, among others.



In 2011, Tom also became director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society program, a vehicle for convening leaders and fostering dialogue around topics of critical importance. The program helps inspire solutions to major issues so that sport can best serve the public interest, starting with the health needs of children and communities.



you can follow Tom on Twitter: @TomFarrey

Some notes/thoughts from the show…



The way we view sports is changing.  Clearly there are a lot of people using digital and social media to access information about sports - watch games, follow teams and athletes, discuss happenings (81% of people prefer the Internet for their sports news over radio and other traditional sources, during a televised game that they are watching, 83% of people will check game updates online…).  The sports media world is changing — there are more voices, more noise as well.  But, Tom noted that there is also a new appreciation for investigative journalism related to sports, and interest in the connection between sports and society, because of the range of ways people can get information and connect to different issues.  

For more  substantive issues to gain traction, Tom suggested, the focus needs to be right.  The issue of steroids in sports, for example, wasn’t of immediate interest to most casual sports fans.  But something like concussions, which has a more direct impact on people’s lives, has generated significant interest and discussion online.

Title IX. As a part of the Sports & Society project, Tom is organizing an event (May 31 - Washington, DC) focused on Title IX, the landmark legislation that greatly expanded access to sports participation opportunities for many girls and women, Title IX celebrates its 40th anniversary in June, but most girls still do not play sports. The deficits are most pronounced in urban and other low-income communities. And Tom suggested that addressing the participation rates is a matter of national consequence for reasons that include social development and public health.  Check out hashtag #T9andbeyond for more information.

Must-reads: At the end of the show I highlighted a few must-reads related to the discussion, including:




There was so much more discussed on the show that just can’t be adequately summarized here, but if you want to listen, the archived recording is available here.

Notes from #ActivateNYC12

I am spending the day at the Guardian Activate Summit. 

Here are a few observations/thoughts from the morning sessions:

Publicness. There are lots of different to describe the idea of being open and connected.  Jeff Jarvis uses the word publicness, by which he means you operate in public, for the public, and with the public.  Jarvis suggested that the internet is our greatest tool for encouraging and advancing publicness, but cautioned that both publicness and the internet require a lot of experimentation.   He argued that we, as a society, are experiencing a lot of change – most believe that change is happening at a very rapid pace, but Jarvis argues the opposite, believing the actual change is happening very slowly. “We are at the very beginning,’ he said, and “we still have a lot of work to do to figure it out.’


Attitude isn’t enough.  When Jeff Jarvis interviewed Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a clear theme emerged: Openness is not just an attitude, but a reflection of your relationship to the world. Hoffman noted there are still verticals (and thus, inevitably some information won’t be shared, some people won’t interact) but they exist on top of platforms.  So the key to openness and sharing, and thus collaboration and progress, is to make the platforms more open.  As the platforms open, the different verticals have more opportunity to exchange ideas and interact with different people and ideas.  In the end, Hoffman suggested, the goal of organizations/institutions the opportunity is to make the information we need to lead our lives easier to find, easier to make sense of, and easier to work with.


Responsibility to provide. G. Edward DeSeve, the president of the Global Public Leadership Institute and a former special advisor to President Obama, gave a brief talk about how government could become more open, and the role that tools and data play in supporting that transformation.  His message: data and tools don’t solve problems on their own, but the availability of data and more tools ultimately can be used to help government do a better job serving its constituents. I raised my hand and asked whether we were likely to see the social norms and behaviors that people in government bring to these conversations update, or how to accelerate that change in thinking.  DeSeve acknowledged that the people within government are not thinking openly enough, and that change will be difficult and slow to realize.  Then he told a story about the CIA and how that they now operate under a mindset of ‘responsibility to provide’ – the idea that intelligence and data should be open and shared, as much as possible, unless there is a legal or security reason for keeping it closed.  Interesting.


NOTE: The CIA has a long, detailed overview of how information sharing with Congress has evolved over time but the timeline stops in the 1990s, so I’ll have to do some more digging before I can make sense of this concept.


More later.

Think before you give

The New York Times cites a study that challenges the business model of some nonprofit organizations.  Here is a blurb from the article:

Giving used eyeglasses to poor countries may please the donors, but it is not worth the high delivery costs, a new study has concluded, and a $10 donation would do more good.

The study, led by Australian scientists and published in March in Optometry and Vision Science, found that only 7 percent of a test sample of 275 donated spectacles were usable. That raised the delivery cost to over $20 per usable pair. A simple eye exam and a set of ready-made glasses from China can be provided for just $10, the authors said.

The rejected glasses in the study had scratched lenses, damaged frames or prescriptions so specifically aligned to the original owners’ pupils that finding a match was unlikely.

Used glasses also must be cleaned, assessed and shipped, adding to the cost. Then potential recipients often reject them as castoffs, dirty, unfashionable or designed for the opposite sex.

I recognize that this is just one study and the research only applies to one type of organization/charitable model.  Still, there is an important lesson here as we start to think differently about how to address serious issues in a connected society.  All actions are not created equal.  All donations are not good donations.

Overall, the idea of recycling used goods to serve another societal need seems to make sense.  It certainly sets up a great story — and, as the study cites, makes donors feel good about their simple actions.  But a good story and a happy donor base aren’t the goal, or shouldn’t be the goal.  The goal is to give people access to quality eyeglasses… and if that goal isn’t being achieved, or could be achieved in a more efficient and effective way, then the organization is failing at its mission.

I routinely counsel organizations not to seek contributions — to not ask for money. Why not?  Because money is probably the least interesting thing that someone can offer - compared to their time, expertise, access to their network, and so on.  But in this case, it seems clear that raising money can more towards helping address a societal need (the lack of access to eyeglasses) than anything else.  In that case, dollars trump everything else.

Just because we have established that organizations whose goal is to provide eyeglasses to people who don’t have them should seek financial contributions instead of donations of used goods (that was easy!), doesn’t mean our work is done. We still have an abundance of used eyeglasses.  That begs the question: what other ways might old eyeglasses be used to solve a societal problem? 

Answer that…

Lessons from a Pitch (It) Competition

[Cross-posted at WeMedia]

I didn’t win the big prize at the We Media PitchIt! competition, but I walked away with something potentially more valuable: honest and constructive feedback that will help to shape the future trajectory of my project. Here is a quick recap and some lessons learned:

Eight minutes is awkward

Each of the eight finalists was given eight minutes to present their project, plus another four-or-so minutes for questions from the judges. Of course, eight minutes is more time than you would need to provide a simple elevator pitch, but not enough time to get into sufficient detail about a platform or plan. If you think that preparing for an eight minute pitch simply requires adjusting your cadence, or offering more/less detail, you are wrong. A specialized deck, and script, for that length of a pitch is required. I
settled on 15 slides and finished with 5 seconds to spare – managing mostly even pacing through my key points and still time for a quick back-and-forth with one of the judges.

Questions have many answers

I prepared for the Q&A portion of the competition by anticipating questions that might be posed by the judges and preparing and practicing some stock answers. Still, when my moment in the hot seat arrived I found myself scrambling. When one of the judges asked how I would integrate an existing platform into my plans, I assumed he wanted me to explain how I would make that work. I had an answer for that, as well as an answer for why my plans were superior to the existing options in the marketplace. I mis-read the tone of his question and provided the wrong answer, thus missing an opportunity to clearly distinguish my plans. I didn’t harm my pitch significantly, but I didn’t do myself any favors either.

Eight minutes is awkward

Each of the eight finalists was given eight minutes to present their project, plus another four-or-so minutes for questions from the judges. Of course, eight minutes is more time than you would need to provide a simple elevator pitch, but not enough time to get into sufficient detail about a platform or plan. If you think that preparing for an eight minute pitch simply requires adjusting your cadence, or offering more/less detail, you are wrong. A specialized deck, and script, for that length of a pitch is required. I
settled on 15 slides and finished with 5 seconds to spare – managing mostly even pacing through my key points and still time for a quick back-and-forth with one of the judges.

Questions have many answers

I prepared for the Q&A portion of the competition by anticipating questions that might be posed by the judges and preparing and practicing some stock answers. Still, when my moment in the hot seat arrived I found myself scrambling. When one of the judges asked how I would integrate an existing platform into my plans, I assumed he wanted me to explain how I would make that work. I had an answer for that, as well as an answer for why my plans were superior to the existing options in the marketplace. I mis-read the tone of his question and provided the wrong answer, thus missing an opportunity to clearly distinguish my plans. I didn’t harm my pitch significantly, but I didn’t do myself any favors either.

[Cross-posted at WeMedia]

Chief Asshole

Earlier today, as a part of a plenary discussion at the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference, I was appointed ‘Chief Asshole’ as part of the effort to drive innovation in the social impact space.  It is an honor to hold this title.

How exactly did it happen?

We were talking about the need for innovation in the nonprofit/social impact sector — both in terms of changing the way organizations think and operate, but also with regard to how we focus on finding solutions to the complex problems that we face as a society (these are, of course, the themes that I take up in my book, Shift & Reset).  I suggested that brands, technology companies, and others on the for-profit side were, in many cases, doing more harm than good by pursing socially oriented efforts without fully understanding how to drive the kinds of meaningful, measurable change that is needed.  The partnerships that exist between brands and nonprofits, under the banner of cause marketing for example, do little to identify solutions — instead providing marketing and corporate social responsibility benefits to brands at the expense of real impact.   

I challenged the nonprofit/social impact community to call out efforts that were not helping to drive innovation or pursue solutions to the most pressing issues we face.  I suggested that nonprofit/social impact organizations needed to collaborate with companies in ways that allow for their expertise and experience to more fully and appropriately utilized. And I told the crowd that we needed to do a better job standing up for ourselves, our knowledge, and our work — and as a part of that we should be holding corporations accountable for prioritizing their own reputation at the expense of achieving real outcomes.

I finished my rant by saying… “look, if I need to be the asshole who says those things, and calls people out, and makes that case so others don’t have to do it… I will.”  And then Beth Kanter (@kanter), one of the leading voices in the nonprofit technology space and the moderator for our plenary, officially gave me the title of Chief Asshole.

As I said, it is an honor to hold this title.  But I am not the only person who is willing to be a part of this conversation.  This will be a team effort.  We’ll be a team of assholes.  And together, we will shake things up.

End Malaria could have been so much more…

I bought a copy of End Malaria this week. You should too.  It is, as promised, a great book. And it does, in fact, benefit a great cause. 

Still, as I poured over the 60+ essays submitted by leading business thinkers and innovators, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the biggest opportunity of all was simply missed.  End Malaria could have been a true game changer.  Instead its just a great book that benefits a great cause.

Before I get to that… let me just put in a plug for the book itself.  The description on Amazon.com reads as follows:

End Malaria is more than a book, it’s a great cause.

At least $20 from each copy sold by us goes directly to Malaria No More to send a mosquito net to a family in need and to support life-saving work in the fight against malaria. Malaria No More, an international advocacy organization, is on a mission to end malaria related deaths by 2015.

In addition to saving lives, buying this book means you can enjoy essays by 62 of American’s favorite business authors, including Tom Peters, Nicholas Carr, Pam Slim, and Sir Ken Robinson. Organized into three main sections—Focus, Courage, Resilience—and eight subsections—Tap Your Strengths, Create Freedom, Love & Be Kind, Disrupt Normal, Take Small Steps, Embrace Systems, Get Physical, Collaborate—all essays in End Malaria share a desire to inspire readers to look within themselves for solutions to their everyday dilemmas and for motivation to realize their desires.

Editor Michael Bungay Stanier envisioned End Malaria as a book that would marry the best writers of the business world to a deserving cause. Michael assembled and edited this collection with a goal to leverage that breadth of expertise these writers represent for an issue of global importance.

At its core, End Malaria is about doing great work including the hard work to save lives. All of the writers in this collection and all of the partners involved have waived fees in order to raise the maximum amount of money.

To summarize, by purchasing the book you will help to raise money to support a very important cause… the effort to end malaria around the world. 

Why is that so important? 

Seth Godin, who contributed an essay, and whose alternate publishing concept, The Domino Project, published the book, explained the benefits of buying a book where the proceeds are donated to the cause of ending malaria are simple: “A child wouldn’t die from malaria, a disease that causes more childhood death than HIV/AIDS.” 

His post continues:

It’s that direct. Malaria bednets are simple nets that hang over a window or a bed. They’re treated with a chemical that mosquitos hate. The mosquitos fly away, they don’t bite, people don’t get malaria.

Every single penny spent on the Kindle edition goes to Malaria No More, giving them enough money to buy one or two bednets and to deliver them and be sure they’re used properly. Low overhead, no graft, no waste. Just effectiveness. And if you buy the beautiful paperback edition, you can easily give it away when you’re done and the same $20 donation gets made. None of the authors or anyone at the Domino Project sees your money, there’s no ulterior motive, just the fact that a kid won’t die.

Again, I think its a terrific project.  The essays are smart.  The money raised has the potential to be significant. The buzz surrounding the book will surely generate even greater awareness, and the potential for more fundraising and action.

So what’s my complaint? 

End Malaria could have been so much more than just an interesting book.  End Malaria could have been so much more than just a collection of essays from smart, innovative thinkers.  End Malaria could have been so much more than just a tool for raising money. 

What could it have been? 

A collection of essays about business and innovation from some of the world’s leading thinkers doesn’t have anything to do with ending malaria.  Giving readers an understanding of how to improve productivity, pursue excellence, embrace systems, collaborate and more — all of which are areas of focus in the book — won’t actually change anything.  Well, it won’t change anything in the context of helping them to understand and stay deeply involved in the work needed to end malaria. 

Imagine what would have happened if you had pressed the dozens of brilliant marketers and strategists for answers to really difficult questions about ending malaria, or addressing causes generally?  Imagine what the book would have delivered had the contributing authors had been asked to apply their intelligence, experience, perspective and energy towards truly solving this cause, instead of just serving it with greater awareness?

Some possible examples:

  • Mitch Joel is a brilliant digital strategist who writes in the book about the importance of developing and maintaining a personal brand.  He could have explained how working to end malaria enhances your brand and creates connections to others who are committed to important causes, creating all sorts of powerful personal and professional opportunities.
  • David Allen is an absolute genius when it comes to organizing and prioritizing how you spend your time and focus on your work.  He could have explained how to find a little bit of time each day, with everything else happening in your life, to commit to recruiting more people to support this cause.
  • Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology and has written several best-selling books about how to make better choices, and create better choice environments for customers. He could have written about how to expand the number of options for how people could work to end malaria, instead of limiting them.
  • Nancy Duarte knows more about how to create compelling presentations than anyone I have ever encountered.  She could have written about how someone reading End Malaria could have passed the lessons contained in the book (assuming they related to ending malaria) along to others, so they resonated and inspired action.

I could go on, and on, and on… there are 58 more authors.

Ironically, Jonah Lehrer writes in the book that “When we’re faced with a difficult problem, the most obvious solution - that first idea we’re focused on - is probably wrong.”  Fundraising is quite possibly the least interesting potential outcome from an impressive project of this kind, but it has become the primary focus of the promotional efforts around the book.  The big message is that by purchasing the book you will help to end malaria around the world.  In reality, by purchasing the book you will accomplish two things: 1) get yourself an excellent collection of essays and b) contribute money to a worthy organization.  Everything beyond that is a bit more fuzzy in terms of meaningful, measurable outcomes to the effort to end malaria. 

Was creating an inspiring book to raise money to support this cause was the most obvious solution that the organizers could develop?  If so, that’s exactly why it was the wrong one.

Greater awareness will always help to advance a cause.  But if the cause of ending malaria suffers from a lack of awareness, this book won’t solve that problem. Most of the people involved, or who will end up purchasing or reading the book, are already part of the community that is aware of this issue.  This is a convenient new way to raise money.  Those who are new to the cause won’t find enough in the book to keep them engaged with the issue, or committed to the work necessary to end malaria. More celebrity authors and innovators won’t change that.  No amount of money raised will ever be enough.  And perhaps most frustrating of all, when people see lots of books sold and money raised, they’ll think that we’ve settled on a model that can be used to address other issues.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a book next month that raises money to support breast cancer, and the following month to support education around multiple sclerosis or chronic fatigue syndrome.  And so on.

But this project, the collected intelligence and insights, experience and perspective available from these incredible authors, could have changed the way we think about this important cause, or any cause.  So much new and better thinking is needed.  The authors could have provided real solutions that individuals and organizations around the world could have used to tip the balance towards truly ending malaria.  But they didn’t.

You should buy the book.  You should celebrate the project and the contributors.  But you should also feel just a little disappointed that such an incredible opportunity to truly address this serious in a meaningful, measurable, and sustainable way issue was missed. 

I write about how we need to move beyond simply generating awareness for causes in my new book, Shift & Reset: Strategies for Addressing Serious Issues In A Connected Society.  The proceeds from my book don’t benefit any particular organization, but I hope the insights will help every individual and organization committed to changing the world think about things a little differently.

Revolutionary Transformation?

Technology has changed the way we get and share information.  In the context of education — in this case I am referring to the education system, the whole going to school thing — the established methods for teaching and learning are being disrupted.  In some cases technology is providing new and better opportunities for people, of all ages, to make sense of complex subjects and learn new skills.  In other cases, the technology is serving as a distraction, an unnecessary add-on. I can argue both sides. 

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a fantastic story about technology in schools, and more specifically about the fact that the investment that school districts have made in technology has not resulted in noticeable/significant improvements in test scores.  The promise of technology as the solution to the educational challenges that exist in the United States, and around the world, simply has not yet been fully realized.

There are so many different issues wrapped up in this one article.  Education is a huge and important issue.  I wrote a whole chapter in my new book, Shift & Reset about education, and how our approach to teaching/engage, not to mention the ways we use technology to support both formal and informal learning need to be reconsidered.  For now, let me offer two thoughts:

1) Technology is not the solution to our educational problems.  Technology is not the most serious problem either.  Successfully getting technology into, or out of, classrooms is not going to significantly change anything - not unless the underlying problems are addressed.  We don’t have enough qualified teachers.  Many teachers don’t have basic supplies to support their interactions with students.  Too many young kids don’t have access to books, and enter school without the basic literacy and social skills necessary to succeed (organizations like Jumpstart, are focused on this challenge specifically). The organizations focused on addressing education challenges at different levels aren’t coordinated well enough, aren’t sharing their data and resources, or doing enough to support kids throughout their educational life. 

I can keep going.  But the simple point is this: fix the analog problems first, and look at technology as a way to help speed and scale the delivery of information or facilitate other efforts that support learning.  When you assume that technology can solve the problem, the underlying issues will persist.

2) A key requirement is that content must be present, across many different platforms. There is a powerful role for technology to play in supporting and enhancing education, but you can’t fix a person’s ability to learn to a particular tool - a smartboard, an iPad, a calculator, nothing.  Just the same, you can’t teach someone in a classroom environment only and expect them to have a full understanding and appreciation for a subject.  Their experiences in life are part of the overall learning process.

NOTE: You can get a little more insight into my views on this subject from this thinking paper I wrote last year for an event with Former First Lady Laura Bush about the global literacy challenge (it was delivered at an International Literacy Day event hosted by the UN).  You can also go buy Shift & Reset, which talks all about it. 

In the meantime, go read the article. Then let me know if you start to think a little differently about technology and its role in education.


Challenging Arts Organizations To Shift & Reset

My friends at the National Arts Marketing Partnership (a program of Americans for the Arts) invited me to share some thoughts about Shift & Reset and how arts organizations can better adapt to the challenges of the digital age.  My post appeared earlier this month.

Here is an excerpt:

Given that the public is more engaged than ever before, more capable of collecting and sharing information with a wider audience for free than at any point in our history, we can draw on a larger audience in the shaping and supporting of organizations and innovations than ever before. As a more diverse, interested, and interesting culture emerges, we will have unprecedented opportunities to engage, to drive participation, and to mobilize people to act.

Very few organizations have yet to fully embrace the potential that technology and the Internet have created. There haven’t been many organizations making the kinds of necessary changes, like swapping out their existing talent for fresh perspectives or restructuring their organizations to permanently remove existing silos. Even the largest and most highly regarded organizations are barely scratching the surface of what is possible.

Put another way: everyone is failing at something.

Arts and culture organizations are spending too much time trying to contain and control all facets of these new conversations, but it’s the content of the messages—how they relate to their audience or the ways that an individual or group’s ideas might fit with the rest of the information experience—that really motivates action and drives outcomes. Indeed, it is the individuals—real people, the audience, the community—that have greater potential for influence than any one organization controlling a conversation can even begin to imagine.  Arts and culture organizations aren’t alone in facing these challenges, but they are behind, in many ways, in pursuing real solutions.

My suggestion: focus on supporting and enhancing the interests of your audience, engaging them in the conversations, and listening to what they are saying. I suspect you won’t like everything that you hear. Still, the willingness and ability to meet the needs of individuals who have demonstrated interest will be the litmus tests by which organizations succeed or fail in the future.

Go read the entire post — and let me know if you think the challenges today are different for arts organizations.