AAUW NC has had

• a mailing list open to all members since 1997 or so with more specialized lists (for branch presidents, state leaders) for several years. These are set up as “discussion lists” but only a few people ever post.
• an RSS feed since about 2005  aauwnc.org/feed, which (theoretically) offers a way to subscribe to the news
• a twitter account since 2007 or so (originally set up as a to retweet web site posts marked as “announcements” and encouraging folks to “subscribe via your phone”), twitter.com/aauwnc
• and a Facebook page since ?? (maybe late 2008 or sometime in 2009). facebook.com/aauwnc

These are integrated in the following ways

Tools:

• twitterfeed.com used to read the RSS feed from the web site and repost to twitter
• ping.fm used to post items to Facebook and Twitter at the same time
• tweetree used to read/post as @nes49  – a browser based client that doesn’t have the advanced “listening” features of something like tweetdeck or hootsuite but does have “real names” and threaded discussions which really help me understand the messages.
• twirl used to manage “organization” twitter accounts, making it easy to be both @aauwnc and @ncwu
• The website posts are imported to Facebook using the notes application — doesn’t always work correctly (and seems to be particularly problematic today, sigh).

An  earlier part of the conversation mentioned using Facebook to reach college/university populations. AAUW NC uses it to reach Facebook members in general, and doesn’t gear it for C/U communication in particular. There are many nonmember fans of the page, but few of those are on campuses. They are mostly friends of fans or come from connections through our allied organizations.

None of these communication avenues have a broad reach, and I don’t spend much time on analytics. From anecdotal evidence, I have to believe that the Facebook page is doing a better job of reaching our members. On the other hand, since we’ve set up the page we’ve cut back on our “e-newsletter” publications, and I’m sure we’re missing some people who haven’t “liked” the page, don’t use Facebook at all, and never check the News page on the web site. So we’re going back to basics and looking at better use of a mailing list, which is still the way many people prefer to get their news.  As for nonmembers — twitter and Facebook both reach folks who might not have heard about us otherwise — but we’ve not been  as intentional about the outreach as we might have been.

For more on the general topic of setting up a marketing plan and using new (and old) media, I’d recommend Kivi Leroux Miller’s new book “The Nonprofit Marketing Guide”  (amazon link). It has a number of practical tips, some of which are aimed at larger organizations. But I found it useful to read in the context of a branch/state marketing plan, most of which fall into her “marketing department of one” target audience. See www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com for more. [I'm rereading it now -- let me know if you're interested in a virtual book discussion.]

See also www.aauwnc.org/subscribe.

I’ve seen three different ways branches and states start their presence on Facebook:

• Profile. Someone uses an e-mail address and registers the branch/state as an “individual” in Facebook. That entity has “friends”, posts show up on friends’ walls, and in general it behaves like anyone else on Facebook.
• Group. Someone creates a Group in the branch/state’s name and becomes the “administrator”. The Group has “members” who can see each others names. It can be configured with places for discussions, wall posts, uploading photos, etc. The Group administrator’s posts show up as coming from their “real” name.
• Page. Someone creates a Facebook Page in the branch/state’s name. The Page has “fans” who have said they “like” the Page. Fans can see a few other fans, but can’t browse through them all. The administrator’s posts show up as coming from the Page, not the individual. The Page can be configured to allow fans to post — or not.

I’d recommend against using a Profile for a branch/state Facebook presence. While this may no longer be explicitly counter to Facebook’s terms and conditions, there are just too many places where Facebook assumes that a Profile is for a “person.” It gets confusing to publicize a branch/state with a Profile. For instance, when you (as the branch Profile account) ask someone to be a friend, who, exactly, is doing the ask? Would you be apt to respond to such a request without being able to “see” the real person?

So should you use a group or a page? It depends -

• Pages are better for reaching out to new people and posting public information (say things that appear on your web site — or would appear there if you had a web site). “Liking” a Page is a low risk action for new people: they aren’t giving the Page any additional access to their Profile. However, it does mean that information posted on the page will get into the news stream that they see when they login to Facebook. They will also get messages from the Page — but these will go to the “updates” section, not the “normal” Facebook inbox.
• Groups are better for sharing information with a committed group of people who will “go” to the Group periodically to see what’s new. Group administrators can send messages to the Group members and these will go directly to the main Facebook “inbox” as coming from the Group. You may see your friends’ activities as they post to the Group, but, in general, things posted to the Group stay in the Group.  It’s possible to control access to a Group so that only those with an invitation can join — so a Group could be used as, for example, a virtual yearbook where only members of the branch are allowed access.

So just as you wouldn’t set up a web site when you really need an e-mail list or vice versa, Pages and Groups can have very different niches in your social media strategy. You may want one or the other or you might have reasons to set up both. Multiple people can be named administrators of either: check them out and see how they can improve your AAUW communications both to the public and to current members.

• AAUW Dialog is runing on wordpress.com
• A few state sites (AAUW NC, AAUW GA, AAUW OH) are running software from wordpress.org
• Branch sites (AAUW Tar Heel, AAUW Tucson) are running on both wordpress.com and self-hosted.

We’re talking about a “special interest group” of AAUW web managers who are interested in WordPress. If you’d be interested in that, please post a comment (and/or contact me if you’d like to take a leadership role.

In the meantime, you can find the links I took away from WordCamp on Delicious (with more to be added).

Having just come from the NTC and spending some time working on the “mini-NTC” NCTech4Good conference, the large number of women at this conference didn’t seem odd at first — but I had to agree when someone pointed it out that for a fairly tech conference it was good to see so many women (though the % dropped off dramatically in the developer’s track).

I had noticed that there were only two women on the speakers’ list, despite efforts nationally to encourage women to speak up at such events (e.g. womenwhotech.org threads and the local example of the remarkable Rebecca Murphey and triwebwomen.ning.com).

So I suppose it wasn’t surprising that at least one slide slipped through with some offensive content. I wasn’t at the talk. I don’t know the speaker’s style and he may have been able to use the slide in a way that made it marginally acceptable. I do know that at 11:00 last night, it distracted me from the content I was reviewing on SlideShare, and that removing the one slide from the deck could help other women concentrate on the meat of his presentation. [He has a lot to say and I have ordered his book.]

For others who want to think about such issues, I’ll have some copies of Why so Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Science at this morning’s WordCamp Raleigh session. The report, funded by the Natiional Science Foundation and published in March by AAUW, is available for free download and in hard-copy at www.aauw.org/whysofew.

I’ll be wearing a blue T-shirt and a blue/yellow plaid jacket. Twitter is @nes49, but I don’t normally check it in real time (though if I follow you, I can get your DM’s on my phone).

• The icons to access various Facebook applications have moved from the lower left to the left hand column (where they used to be). They replace the “quick links” to show the news from subsets of friends.
• The “notifications” icon has moved from the lower right to the upper left (and is now almost invisible). I’ve yet to see any notifications come in, so I don’t know if it will be move visible when it’s active.
• The only thing left that uses the bottom of the screen is the chat application (which also appears in the left hand menu). I don’t use that, so I’m not sure if there are other changes.
• The confusing News Feed/Live Feed options are still there — but can now be accessed on the upper right of the main content window as “Top News” and “Most Recent”.  By default, as before, Facebook shows the “Top News” chosen by some proprietary algorithm that no doubt uses some metric about how “close” you are to a particular friend and how many other friends have commented on the post. If you want to see everything, click “Most Recent”. [There used to be a way to make “Most Recent” the default. If I find out what that is, I’ll post here.
• Access to your list of friends has changed from the top menu to a topic in the Account menu (at the top right). That’s where you’d go to search for new friends, edit your friend lists, etc.
• The friend lists that used to appear in the left hand column are now a click or two away under the Friends link in that column.

With gajillion Facebook users feeding data to the Facebook developers, I have to believe that these changes were based on usage patterns. For instance, it’s possible that few people “found” the icons at the bottom of the page, and that few people actually used the prominent access to friend lists in the left hand column.

Obviously, change is unsettling — we all have other things to do with the energy it takes to adapt to these changes. But since all gajillion of us do use a single interface, our choices are to adapt as Facebook solves problems that no other company has ever had, or go off and start our own networks where we have more control (and have to spend considerably more energy on the information architecture, user interface, recruiting participants, and other issues). My choice is to stay here — where there’s a much greater probability of finding the folks I’d like to talk to.

For more on the reasons behind the changes, see the Facebook blog.

If you want to help update that “Facebook for AAUW” document, please contact me or one of the other folks listed in the document.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-better-engage-facebook-fan-page-fans/

[I]f you are fan of a lot of Pages, the ones you never made a comment or a “like”, there are good chances you never see the updates in your News Feed

In my experience, this is at least plausible.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you are coming to depend on Facebook for updates on your friends and family, you can also start getting information about organizations, businesses, candidates, and more that interest you. What are the steps?

1. Find a Page and click the “become a Fan” button.
2. Then, engage, people: If you see a post that you like, simply click the “like” link underneath the post. If you have something to add, make a comment!

In other words, in this brave new world we call web 2.0, you have a vote as to what information you see. The way Facebook implements it (analyzing your actions even after you subscribe to content), you can continue to say “yes, this really interests me” even after you make the initial “subscription” decision. It can tell what content “grabs” you and it tries to show you more of the same. This is so much better than the old “check back often to see what’s new” and I encourage you to make the effort to see how it can simplify your information gathering life.

[Of course the pages I'd like to see you engaging with are the ones for AAUW and AAUW NC.]

While this makes sense in some cases, as a branch treasurer and former membershp vp, I’ve come around to thinking of the half-year dues program as counter productive. A new member pays dues,  barely gets connected to the branch, and just starts figuring out which of the national programs are of most interest, and wham! there’s another invoice for the next fiscal year.

The Tar Heel Branch (the North Carolina Branch without Borders, serving the entire state), handles this by offering instead an 18-month membership for new members joining in January and February. The way it works is:

Assuming annual dues are $49 for national, $11 for AAUW NC and $5 for the branch ($65 total).

1. We advertise a “best value” membership as $49 + 1.5x(11+5) = $49+24 = $73.
2. When we get a check, we send in an at-large membership application with $49 from branch funds. [We use the FAX application and debit card to make the payment, so this is almost as easy as the online dues payment that is normally used.]  The MAL expiration date will be January or February of the next year.  We connect the member to the branch and start treating them as a branch member, but they don’t have access to the aauw.org member center resources or the branch roster at aauw.org.
3. In a couple of weeks when the new member shows up on the national rolls, we do a transfer to a branch member, and at that time the national system changes the expiration date to June 30 of the next year. We pay the state the 16.50 they are owed (partly through the online dues system at aauw.org, and partly through a manual process).
4. We’ve now got more than a year to make sure the person understands the benefits of AAUW membership before we send them another invoice.

This worked fine last year for a handful of members (before the branch signed up for online dues processing). There may be a glitch or two this year, but we expect all to go well.  Over the years, I’ve submitted the “18 month option” a few times through channels, but since nothing has changed in the dues processing at AAUW, we’re handling it in this somewhat awkward way. It seems better than the alternative, though.

What about the month of March? Well, since it can take a couple of weeks for AAUW to get the new member fully processed, and dues for the next fiscal year can be paid starting April 1, it makes sense to us to just start accepting checks for the next fiscal year beginning March 1. We hold them in the branch account (with our financial report having a record in the accounts payable section) until April 1 when we can submit them for the new member.  There’s some risk if we accept payment before getting final notification of the next fiscal year’s dues amount — but that’s relatively small.

While we use this for the branch without borders, it would apply for other branches as well. The main requirements are to make the new member feel welcome while the national membership is pending, and to handle the processing accurately and quickly. On the other hand, for states that do have a “branch without borders,” then if that branch understands this convoluted proceess, it could handle it for the entire state. Once someone is member of the “branch without borders” they can transfer to any other branch without paying additional dues. This can simplify recruiting new members at, say, statewide events, though your state policy may want to be more specific about how the ultimate branch’s dues are actually handled, particularly if, as in the case of AAUW NC, the branch without borders dues are kept very low.

See http://tarheel.aauwnc.org for more info on the NC branch without borders.

Comments? Questions? Post here (at change.bbvx.org) or on Facebook.

• We know that in domestic violence situations, the time around the escape is the most dangerous — the time when there’s a loss of control. In the public arena, there’s also danger at times when one party is losing control — there is danger now, but we won’t stop.
• Our country is profoundly affected by the notion that we are “the best” — even in areas where’s there’s evidence that it’s simply not true. We must fight “bestism”.
• We must move towards attributing value to caregiving.
• Look at family violence as linked to all violence. What would the world look like if one generation could be raised without violence in the home?
• Gratitude never radicalized anybody. Her experience differs from that of the suffragists and from the young women of today. Young women may not “get” the passion around the right to abortion — but she never went around saying “Thank you for the vote.” [Note: this talk was before the events of Saturday night.]
• The reason we are still fighting for reproductive rights is that it is the whole ball game — the root of control.
• Think of history “vertically” — who lived in this particular place and how did they live? Matrilineal cultures of the Native Americans controlled their own fertility as well as other aspects of the community.
• Let’s declare the last 500 years of patriarchy an experiment that has failed.
• There is no way to be a successful feminist without being anti-racist and vice versa. These inequities are intertwined and can only be uprooted together.
• Feminists, antiracists and LGBT activists have always come together — with the crux of sexuality as a form of expression challenging control, defending the principle of bodily integrity.
• In any movement we need people in jobs they cannot be fired from.
• Wish for a global series of meetings like AA — where those doing this work could check in, get support, and be re-energized.

This was more than a lecture — though the group was nearly 400 people, there was an extensive Q&A segment. During that, a member from the audience recommended Miami of Ohio’s work linking domestic violence to foreign policy issues, work that Steinem said she’d been unable to uncover in her numerous visits to campuses across the country.

However, with recent posts about “where are the women?” in the tech discussions in general and the fortieth anniversary of the Internet in particular, I just want to list some of the women who’ve been beacons during my journey through the open source world.

My role has always been on the support/administration, not the coding, side of the world. I’d like to give a shout to these women who were important leaders in that area than more than 20 years ago. [Check Google or USENIX archives for details of their contributions, many in areas that were not visible to me,  and "where they are now".]

• Evi Nemeth
• Debbie Scherrer
• Elizabeth Zwicky

Who would you add to that list? or put on a list of “women tech leaders” in a field that’s important to you?