Acronym

Welcome to another edition of Quick Clicks. Thanks to all the association bloggers who give us so much great stuff to link to!

- On the SmartBlog Insights blog, Rebecca Leaman wonders whether it still makes sense for nonprofits to attempt to drive traffic back to a single website "home base." Her question started a great discussion in comments.

- Andy Sernovitz has some thought-provoking comments on how you can take advantage of changing customer expectations (even if they might seem threatening at first glace).

- Jeffrey Cufaude has started a new series of blog posts he's calling "Wednesday What Ifs?". So far, he's tackled paying for dues and other programs and services in multi-year increments, giving implicit rather than explicit permission, and focusing on consistent quality rather than on the big breakthrough.

- Cindy Butts responds to some recent Acronym posts with her thoughts on the pursuit of perfection.

- Kevin Whorton has a great post at the College of Association Marketing blog on the surprising disconnect between the words and actions of one focus group.

- Jeff Hurt has great advice for pumping up the networking potential of your face-to-face events.

- If you're an "emerging leader" and you've ever thought, "When do I just emerge already?" Rosetta Thurman has a post for you.

- Shelly Alcorn at the Association Subculture blog has launched an interesting series of posts applying the rubric from Jim Collins' new book "How the Mighty Fall" to associations.

- Six is apparently a big number this week: A guest post by Mack Collier on Lauren Fernandez's LAF blog shares six truths of building successful online communities, and Aimee Stern shares six great ideas she got at a recent Super Swap.

- The Nonprofit University blog has some thoughts on the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and its implications for nonprofit organizations.

- David Patt has some interesting observations about behavorial differences he's seen with older and younger colleagues. What do you think?

- Jeff Cobb at the Hedgehog & Fox blog has four questions whose answers might predict your future success. (And at his other blog, Mission to Learn, he has a post I loved on learning lessons he's gleaned from watching his toddler.)

At an education session on day one of ASAE’s Legislative Fly-in, Amy Showalter, president of The Showalter Group, offered an interesting observation on the power of passion in pleading a case—and just as important, when passion gets in the way.

Talking passionately about something is the perfect strategy when it puts your audience in the position of being on “the side of the angels.” That is, if there is clearly a right side to be on.

That’s not always the case. In fact, it’s not often the case. Usually, there is an opposite argument to be made. Showing excessive passion in such an instance can actually turn off your audience. If the topic has the potential to create enemies for them—or less extreme, if they’re likely to face resistance from at least someone else or some other constituency, it’s better to dial down the passion a notch, acknowledge that there are no absolutes, and explain why your position benefits the audience.

Showalter framed this observation in the form of a Hill visit, but I think it’s just applicable to any situation in which you’re championing a position.

ASAE & The Center’s headquarters will join thousands of other organizations, businesses, cities, towns, major historic landmarks, and other sites in 84 nations in shutting off all non-essential lights during the second annual Earth Hour Saturday at 8:30 p.m. EST.

Sponsored by World Wildlife Fund with support from the United Nations and myriad global leaders, the one-hour event aims to be a call for action to address harmful global climate change. The event has attracted massive support, with everyone from the World Organization of Scouts to Hollywood celebrities signing on as a participant, sharing commentary and self-shot videos on social network sites, and detailing to others what they plan to do during their hour of darkness.

Earth Hour 2009 has special meaning since the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and leaders will meet later this year to discuss the issue.

Kudos to World Wildlife Fund for coming up with so many social network tools and outlets for its promotional efforts. For instance, you can download an Earth Hour iPhone application, upload a YouTube video, blog, and more. Go to www.earthhour.org for details.

President-elect Barack Obama continues to tap leaders from the association and nonprofit sectors for key appointments and advice during his move to the White House and the start of an aggressive plan to boost the faltering economy, address a range of social and environmental ills, and strengthen the ability of Americans to respond to his national call to service.

Obama announced Tuesday that he was appointing William Corr, executive director of the well-known nonprofit Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, to the number two position at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Long a part of efforts by the Obama transition team to examine the inner workings and impact of that important health agency, Corr will now serve within the latter under yet-to-be-confirmed former Sen. Tom Daschle.

A partial list of members on an Obama transition team of nonprofit representatives from philanthropic and nonprofit organizations appeared in a mid-November 2008 article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Now, the number of people Obama is inviting to slide from that group into the actual structure of federal entities continues to grow as the swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday nears.

In addition, The Los Angeles Times has a short article about an “unprecedented step” under consideration by Obama’s political staff: creating a permanent “service organization that would use the vast corps of its grassroots campaign supporters.” The nonprofit may be independent but run from within the Democratic Party’s structure, says the article. Its focus, according to an unnamed Times source, would be natural disaster assistance.

“The prospect of a president being able to guide a service or relief agency outside the framework of his government is a unique development,” writes reporter Peter Wallsten. Read more about the controversy that this proposal is already generating.

This is how it read on The Washington Post website:

"Online social networking sites, or socnets, are changing how people get their political news."

First, and most importantly, I think everyone will agree that the term "socnet" should be banned with perpetrators subject to slow torture.

With that out of the way, the article is interesting in its underscoring of the changes in the ways people get and provide information. It's not really a new idea, and the fact that it is especially true for political information will surprise no one reading this blog. What the article made me think about was that it's one thing to believe that change is occurring, it's quite another to be doing something about it — what are associations doing about it?

If political advocacy is a major part of your mission, do you know the quantity and quality of the involvement of people affiliated with your organization in social media? Are they pushing forward ideas that synch with your organization? How are you training members to get involved in these areas?

If you think social media is just a bunch of navel-gazers — a group of people all blowing hot air at each other — I tend to agree with you to a point. I think it's probably ok if you can't answer the above questions right now. However, I do think the time for ignoring it is past. The circle of people who are engaging in these online communities has grown too large, and the circle who read without engaging is also larger still. The 2000 presidential election was dominated online by The Drudge Report. In 2004, Dean's fundraising and major media (perhaps most notably ABC's The Note) were the major signs that political news and ideas were traveling differently than before. In 2008, it's too numerous to count in both large and small ways. The next page is already beginning to turn; you need to make sure your organization has something to say about what is written on it.

Sick leave. Child care. Eldercare. Health care. You can now tap into notes from several conference calls about work-life issues with policy leaders from the presidential campaigns of Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. Hosted in September by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute (FWI), the calls incorporated questions posed by business leaders in the work-life field and enabled business and community leaders nationwide to listen in.

"We consider it very significant that both campaigns have taken work-life issues seriously," says Ellen Galinsky. "This is the first ever Presidential campaign in which both nominees have formally articulated their positions in this arena.”

Among the questions addressed were the following:

- What are the work and family life issues the candidate feels are most important to address?

- What is the candidate's position on workplace flexibility? What are the roles of the government, employers and employees in providing workplace flexibility?

- Should the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) be changed and, if so, in what ways? Should it be paid? By whom? Should sick leave be established and paid? By whom and for whom?

- How would the candidate address issues of the time famine that so many employees experience?

- How does each candidate plan to address the impact of the gas crisis on commuting employees?

- How can work life issues help address the spiraling cost of health care?

- What if anything, does either party plan to do to support the 45% of employees taking care of our growing elderly population?

Many people at the Global Summit for Social Responsibility last week asked me about coalitions and industry-wide efforts that are underway and how they can learn more about them. I’ll be blogging more about such efforts in response, and anyone can access an ever-growing list of association and nonprofit coalitions working on a wide range of social, environmental and economic issues on ASAE & The Center’s Social Responsibility website.

One joint effort I’m hearing about relates to voting—not the usual voter recruitment campaigns but the access to and ability to cast your vote. In this week’s North Carolina and Indiana primaries, for instance, a Voter Protection Hotline created by the Election Protection Coalition—the largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition in the U.S.—took almost 800 calls about voting problems from residents in both states.

The coalition also uses hundreds of volunteers to monitor polling places during primaries, answer questions from confused residents, and most recently paid close attention to problems related to Indiana’s controversial new requirement that a voter produce a government-issued photo identification. The group is especially concerned about voters who were turned away by undertrained poll workers giving incorrect information, voting machine problems, and outdated or wrong voter registration rolls—the most common problems found in numerous state primaries, according to the coalition.

Participants in the coalition vary state-to-state, but national partners include the nonpartisan National Campaign for Fair Elections of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Right's Voting Rights Project, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Just a warning, this post is based on a political poll, though Acronym remains an apolitical blog. I ran across the survey and thought other organizations who have as part of their missions the influence of policy would be interested in how 17-29 year olds answer several dozen political and policy questions. A PDF of the full results of the study conducted for The New York Times, CBS News, and MTV are available on the New York Times site, as well as other places.

Here are some of the results I found most interesting or are different than what I would have thought they'd be:

• 50 percent say their job opportunities are excellent or pretty good -- more than 15 percent more than three years ago.

• 56 percent say "the government in Washington cares about people of your generation" either a lot or some. Cynical me, I thought that number would be much lower.

• 58 percent say they have paid a lot or some attention to the 2008 presidential campaign. I realize the campaigns are in full swing and its great to be a political racehorse junkie right about now, but I didn't think anybody else was paying very much attention at this point.

• 48 percent say they expect to be worse off than their parents' generation -- 25 percent say they will be better off and 25 percent say they'll be the same. I'm just surprised the outlook is that pessimistic.

• 23 percent say the economy will be most important in determining who they vote for; only 20 percent say Iraq.

Another series of questions asked if government policies on specific issues were important. The issue with the most "very important" answers was trying "to reduce gas and oil use by consumers." The issue beat out such notable issues as "job training and job opportunities for younger workers" (a no-brainer high score based on who was being surveyed), "provide insurance coverage to people who don't have it," and "loans, grants, and student aid that helps pay for college."

Finally, since I am a bit of a political racehorse junkie, I have to slip in one political observation. It would appear that younger democrat-leaning people are more passionate about the leading presidential candidates than their republican-leaning counterparts. When asked if they are likely to vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate, they lean democratic 54 to 32 percent (that's a bit more left-leaning than all adults, which are split 49 to 33 percent according to a different recent survey). But when asked if they were enthusiastic about any of the candidates now running for president, Obama leads the list with 18 percent, followed by Clinton at 17 percent. The next name on the list is Giuliani, who is only backed enthusiastically by 4 percent.

I recently had the rewarding experience of attending ASAE's American Associations Day Legislative Fly-in. Wendy Kavanagh, the executive director of the Georgia Society of Association Executies, let me tag along with the Georgia contingent on four of their meetings.

It's always fascinating to see the First Amendment — the right to petition government — in practice. In our case, we saw the staffs of two senators and two representatives from Georgia. Our three main objectives in the meetings were to talk about association (or small business) health insurance plans, ethics reform, and jumping in front of any possible legislation dealing with spam and associations' ability to email their members. (For more on ASAE's public policy initiatives, see the public policy web site.)

Perhaps more interesting to a wider audience was one of the sessions led by Amy Showalter, president of The Showalter Group. Amy's presentation was called "Why Winners Win — Best Grassroots Practices from TSG's Fortune Power 25 Grassroots Benchmarking Inventory," and looked at the success and failures of some of the top lobbying groups as listed by Fortune magazine. Her conclusion is that five factors seemed to really make a difference when it comes to persuading an undecided lawmaker to vote the way your constituency would want them to.

1. The legislator's margin of victory in his or her last election. If it was close, then letting them know how many voters you have and how influential they are counts for a lot.

2. Having a "left-leaning" staff. That's the case with the Fortune 25, because most of them advocate for issues that generally fall to the right of the political spectrum, so having someone who lenas the opposite way on many other issues may be able to connect better with an undecided lobbyist. A better way to think of this finding may be to say having a lobbyists that leans toward the opposite side of the political spectrum than what your organization is typically labeled may help you.

3. Number of face-to-face meetings. Contacts count a lot.

4. Number of key influentials. Can you document the reach of your group in a convincing way?

5. And, like it or not, money matters. If you max out your PAC contributions to a candidate, Amy's research suggests they are more likely to move from undecided to your column. It's likely that the contributions help get your organization noticed — your message still has to resonate with the legislator, but getting noticed is a significant part of the game.

I have a relative (by marriage) who is an American citizen living in Turkey. Ever since September 11, 2001, he has been writing essays on American foreign policy, and emailing them to his entire address book. His essays have have been not too kind. In the years since Operation Iraqi Freedom, his essays have become more and more critical of American foreign affairs. His most recent essay, which I received yesterday, was entitled "Thank You," a gesture of appreciation to American voters who ousted the Republican majority on Tuesday. His glee over the change in leadership at the Capitol is not at all uncommon.

Perhaps the most difficult to address trend identified in Mapping the Future of Your Association, ASAE & The Center's most recent environmental scan, was the Counter-Americanism trend. I led a 16-week online exploration of the eight super-trends identified in the study, as well as helped to lead a session on five of the super-trends at ASAE & The Center's Annual Meeting in Boston last summer. In all of my reading and discussing with colleagues about the super-trends, nobody had any concrete suggestions on ways to defend their association against, or take advantage of, the Counter-Americanism super-trend. The only apparent solution was to change our government.

Today, a few days after the election which has seen the balance of power in our legislative branch shift dramatically, I can only hope that our predicament changes for the better. While the election falls short of a full regime change, I will be very interested to see how the international reaction will manifest itself. Will Counter-Americanism wane?