Last week, Reed Millar and Rosy Kalfus headed to our nation’s capitol for NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC).  As frequent conference goers, we at grassroots solutions are always on the lookout for innovations and bright ideas that will help us to propel our clients’ grassroots engagement work to be more effective, rewarding and fun.

This year at NTC, our itinerant conference travelers felt that a common theme quickly emerged, which we wanted to share with you.  [No, it was not penguin spotting; although, see if you can spot the penguin in this shot of the Saturday plenary with Donna Edwards and Moira Gunn.]

Penguins aside, here’s the theme that was re-played in session after session:  core ideas about engagement that we’ve long been familiar with are being repurposed, repackaged and given an updated twist.  Suddenly, everything old is new again.  Here are some of the refreshed ideas that stuck with us:

• There’s nothing new about securing major donors to match gifts for a fundraising drive (especially those of us who listen to NPR).  It’s a proven way to increase small donor donations and to leverage the money raised.  The folks at Blue State Digital (BSD) are turning this concept on its head.  During the “Stop Chasing Rainbows” session, BSD co-founder Jascha Franklin-Hodge talked about a new grassroots matching program in the BSD tool box.  By taking the matching gifts concept and personalizing and authenticating it, BSD allows organizations to leverage fundraising by contacting previous donors and getting them to participate in an inter-organizational fundraising drive to attract new donations.  New donors are welcomed into an authentic community of other donors, and real connections and accountability are made across the organization.
• Dan Heath, co-author of the new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard was the opening keynote speaker at NTC this year.  During his address, Dan likened the difficulty of effecting change to an elephant and its rider.  The elephant represents emotion and the rider represents logic.  As logical beings, we try to appeal to the rider when attempting to effect change, but the truth is, the elephant (our emotional side) carries more weight.  Dan’s new angle on this idea prompted us to think about how it applies to our organizing work.  For example, finding the bright spots – focusing on what’s working well instead of what isn’t.  If you leverage those successes, rather than giving all your focus to fixing the weaknesses, you build more success and spur more change.  We apply the same “bright spots” idea in the cycle of engagement: celebrating victories – even the smallest ones – with volunteers and organizational partners.
• The whole notion of engagement as a ladder or pyramid (or moving sidewalk!) is one that has been in the field for a long time. List segmentation, customized communications and action opportunities are the cornerstone of effective supporter and volunteer engagement.  Our friends at Groundwire have taken the engagement pyramid concept a step further and added their own special sauce: they’ve created a CRM add-on that allows organizations to manage their members and move them up the engagement pyramid automatically based on the data input, streamlining the way organizations can view and manage their member base.  Check out Groundwire’s NTC presentation here.

• The work of many public interest organizations revolves around a theory of change, a power-building concept that we use every day with clients, and one that has influenced organizing and social movements since their inception. The folks at the New Organizing Institute have taken the tried-and-true theory of change concept to a new level, creating cool and compelling video-based training tools (with trainer notes and participant guides) to help organizations and campaigns define their theory of change and lay the groundwork for innovative and effective organizing work.  Their NTC presentation on the theory of change breathed new life into this important concept, and they extended their reach by posting these tools for free on their website.

• When you think “nonprofit technology conference,” you might not immediately think of the Girl Scouts.  Young girls selling cookies in an 80s-designed package while wearing 40s-style uniforms? – not exactly 3.0.  Talk about refreshing the familiar!  “Rebel in a Polyester Sash” was a session about how a Girl Scouts regional CEO changed the culture of her organization and turned a shrinking chapter into a growing group using techniques from a book written by two Best Buy HR executives: Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. The book is about a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) – a level of freedom in work environments that isn’t too far from how we like to think about our own workplace, especially on grassroots campaigns where rigid work environments aren’t even possible.  The session was a great reminder that how we manage employees can have as big an impact on our organizing as what we post on a website, or write in a script, or anything else.

Last but not least, we wanted to thank everyone for coming out to our NTC Super Fun Times Party of Awesomeness on Friday night, which we co-hosted with our friends at EchoDitto, Fission Strategy, Free Range Studios, PROVOC (formerly Joint Concepts), Sea Change Strategies, and Watershed.  In our opinion, parties will never go out of style, and the old will always be new again!