I have blogged on many eyes in the past. It is a useful tool for generating visualizations of data, text and trends. There is a capacity to pull together data sets including twitter feeds or government data to tell a complex story in a single image. The world we live in becomes increasingly digital. Each activity generates a new digital shadow. The challenge to the organizers is to leverage this complex data to learn faster and make the right conclusions based on data trends. This data driven adaptation of strategy will be the key to successful organizing. (It always has been) The tools to do it well are getting cheaper and more accessible. Think about the data you have, the stories the data can tell to your organizing team, supporters, the media or your allies. What are the things you learn from your data .

Clay is on fire. Cultures get what they celebrate! What does your campaign and movement celebrate? Are you setting up a movement culture that celebrates sharing, collaboration, collective action and trust? Or are you celebrating donations, staff size, media attention and individual credit? What are the metrics you celebrate in movement building? Are those different than when you focus on legislative outcomes? There are tons of good riffs in his talk and book. Ways we network the movement will directly position (or not position) civic change leaders to leverage these dynamics. It never happens by accident. In each case it took leaders to build the network, support the network and drive the network to produce. Usually, they were different leaders and each had different skills and focus.

If you are interested in that approach, here's a couple of tips. First, try to show users something as soon as possible. In an ideal world they arrive at your page and immediately see a graph that tells them something interesting about themselves or something they relate too. Typically this isn't achievable, but at the very least have a single step where they enter an email address, twitter name, etc and then within a few seconds get some information. You should also show an example of what they will get on the landing page. These techniques reduced my bounce rate massively, never overestimate people's patience, you constantly need to be convincing them to spend time navigating your site. The second key is presenting your statistics in an actionable way. If you can not only tell a user something interesting, but cause them to do something based on that information, then your chances of a repeat visit shoot way up. Feedburner has an 'Optimize' tab that guides you through ways of increasing your traffic. I found that changing from just showing your most-frequently-contacted friends to sending a report of the people you used to talk to and haven't for a while...

I like these tools to help tell the story. This widget misses a few important tweaks that would make it more valuable for both the user and PBS. 1. Sign up for updates on this story. (Name recruitment for PBS). Thank you emails should have links to charities and actions in them. 2. Donate to news coverage of the gulf coast spill. (short video talking about the cost of covering the story) 3. The logo link to news hour should be all the Gulf spill coverage NOT the homepage. 4. Tell your story of the Gulf like this..link 5. Watch the Mos Def the Gulf Aid track, 'Ain't My Fault.' http://bit.ly/acApvO#mb Oil in the Gulf.

There are big drivers afoot shifting civic organizing again. These forces are going to be as trans formative as the web was and initial email. The forces are mobile and data. You need to be developing strategies today that: a. capture data b. position you to leverage the data you capture to deliver service to users. c. integrate this personalized information product with social and mobile media channels. There are lots of reasons "why". and even more ways "how". It is a process I am working on right now with clients and campaigns I care about. Unfortunately, very few organizations or social movements are working on serious strategies that are going to line up with the coming wave of changes in content will be delivered. I ran across this quote "Organizations should refocus their attention on personalizing content and disseminating news through mobile devices" - Eric Schmitt @ Google. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35649.html#ixzz0nanfhl4Z It is interesting to think about.

Startup Metrics 4 Pirates (Montreal, May 2010) View more presentations from Dave McClure.

This looks like a very cool service that focuses on generating a "newspaper" from the links and stories in a twitter feed and from the feeds of those that follow a feed. It seems like it could have a great potential as a single update on a network of activitity. For groups working on issues this would work well if. a. Main source (twitter account) links to the daily clips, actions and videos on an issue. b. The main source follows all the members in the coalition and regularly retweets their news reports and actions. c. The main source only approves followers that are in the coalition. (can we even do that anymore?) The resulting "paper" would be tight and focused on the issues related to the campaign. With Google ads (grants) the calls to action and focusing on retweeting the videos the page could becomevery useful in coalition work. Just a few small tweaks (allogn others to embed sections, or adding navigation wrapping around the page and it would be a very robust hub for a coalition.

One of our missions at The Community Roundtable is to further the discipline of community management – not just in our own community but more broadly in the marketplace. Our first effort to define the discipline is our Community Maturity Model: This model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization. via community-roundtable.com This is brilliant. I like the elements and the focus on building toward a network. Building networks can be intentional and be defined in a series of steps. I am sure all networks are not "mature communities". I am also sure all functional networks are not "communities". However, the ideas and elements are good and worth looking over. There is one significant failure. The network misses "feedback mechanisms." In other stages, leaders can look at the metrics to shape the direction and learning. In the network phase of distributed leadership, those leaders need "distributed leadership tools" or universally accessible...

9 Tips on How To Run (And Not Run) Social Media Campaigns This is an interesting look into the role data plays in scaling social listening and being attentive to those that you are interested in sustaining the conversations. View more presentations from Rapleaf.

This Side Up Campaign: Products Spread the word that babies are safest from the risk of SIDS if placed to sleep on their backs for nap or bed time. Our adorable onesies are the perfect gift for your friends and have proven an ideal way for hospitals to educate their patients on the risk of SIDS. English and Spanish versions are available. There are so many reasons I like these style campaigns. The right information, at the right time, as a service (free onesies). It gets into the workflow of the people we are trying to connect with and gets them the campaign message right. The only downside is never putting the onesie on backwards in the middle of the night on no sleep.

I am not sure what to make of this. Jamie Oliver is riffing on the importance of school lunches and the importance of nutrition to America's children but somehow the computers have positioned dog food ads above his riff on the food revolution. "every dog wants to be a Cesar dog?" Really? My dog mostly wants to eat whatever the kids drop. What ads really belong here?

Here is an interesting contest of user voice. It generated 1600 Haiku's about Palin getting a million dollars from Discovery. I wonder if twitter and txt culture makes for better Haiku contest? We thought Discovery Communications' decision to give Sarah Palin a "nature" documentary series about the state of Alaska with a paycheck of a cool $1 million per episode deserved a tongue-lashing. So we invited you to join us in delivering Discovery an unconventional response. And we've received an overwhelming response, with more than 1,600 haiku submitted by you in just the last week! Now, we need you to vote for the top haiku. Friends of the Earth staff have culled through thousands of your haiku to bring you the best of the best. These haiku help show how ridiculous the notion of a Palin "nature" show is. via action.foe.org

This is a social club for pugs & their humans! We love our pugs- all ages, all kinds and we want to meet you and yours. The club holds monthly meetups that generally fall on the first Saturday of every month (barring holidays) at Austin local dog parks. We are usually at Bull Creek, but in the winter months we take field trips to other local dog parks! We also host bigger events like The Great PUGkin Fest, a halloween costume contest for pugs in October, the Valentines Day PUG Tuneup in February, the Spring Luau in April and the PUGtucky Derby in May. Some of these are fundraisers for pug rescue, and some of these are just events held to play some games, laugh at our pugs and have a good time. We would love for you to come out and join us- after all, we are all pug people! via www.meetup.com They want to talk to each other. They use technology to cluster. Coordination takes little cost. What things have they done that have nothing to do with Pugs? Are they green space advocates? Did they raise money for a disaster? Discuss politics? March at a Tea Party?...

it’s a losing game to pick winning technologies – instead, we need to use whatever works to put forward a clearly articulated set of values. “Even smart communications folks forget that we have a progression from values to mission, mission to strategy, strategy to tactics.” The campaign was successful because the tech decisions were led by this progression and empowered by the willingness of folks like David Plouffe to be open to innovation action. via www.worldchanging.com Brilliant look inside the thinking behind Obama's team and the way they approached technology. I love this quote... "use what works to put forward clearly articulated set of values."

Game Designers and trying to shift behavior by: This is disturbing in a big brother kind of way. bonus points ... sensors everywhere (DSI, Cell phones) value for points. points = money. tatoogle ad sense...yuk

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness have articulated the benefits of default choices in encouraging positive behavior for workers and organizations. Though those books talk about default choices in the context of retirement choices for workers, the key lesson that's been learned is how efficiencies can be gained simply by offering smart defaults. via expertlabs.org What are the defaults that you have set the wrong way at your organization? What does making it easy mean in the world of activism?

Note... a bunch of sites I like for elements of the design and/or strategy… http://www.whytuesday.org/ http://www.charitywater.org/whywater/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/worldiswitness http://www.livestrong.com/ http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/ http://www.homelessnation.org/index.php?lang=en http://remembersegregation.org/ http://www.walkscore.com/ http://www.savetheinternet.com/ http://www.350.org/ ( I like the twitter integration at the top) http://www.edutopia.org/video

Great service from Convio for sharing this summary and Michael Stein for his work. There are some really interesting trends in here. What do they tell us about the future? How do these trends shape the movement? Online giving grew 14 percent. 69 percent of organizations raised more in 2009 than 2008, while 31 percent saw declines in their online fundraising. 61 percent of all organizations saw their average gift drop in 2009. The average online gift was $80.81, the online revenue per usable email address in 2009 was $11.68. Small organizations grew fastest. Organizations with fewer than 10,000 email addresses on file grew online revenue by 26 percent, and gifts by 32 percent. Email files continued to grow strongly. The total email file grew 27 percent in 2009 to 39,100 constituents. The open rate for email fundraising appeals was 19%. The click-through rate was 1.7%, down from 2% in 2008. The overall performance of online fundraising appeals was 0.15%, a slight rise from the year before. Web traffic growth continued for most, but at a slower rate. 60 percent of organizations grew their website traffic from 2008 to 2009. Web traffic growth in 2009 was in the single digits...

What is the data you want to see? What is the traffic and transactions in your work that reveal patterns? What do you learn from this as a Taxi driver? Police? Mugger? What data services and "maps" should we be thinking about as a movement that will inform our organizers, policy people, communications staff and fundraisers? What is going on at 3am on Friday?