Not if but how:

Strong leaders tip toward courageous intervention. They don’t sit on the sidelines like cowards gloating over failures they saw coming. They turn potential failures to successes.

On the other hand, interventionist leaders aren’t meddling parents who step in too soon too often. People resent quick interventionist and respect leaders who give them space. Successful interventionists:

1. Celebrate progress even if it’s minimal. Celebrate more! Your passion to make things better causes you to minimize progress. Minimizing progress demoralizes by undervaluing small successes, past efforts, and sincere dedication. Celebrating progress, on the other hand, honours and encourages. The best form of intervention is celebration.
2. Fix with, not for, unless risks or costs are high. Deadlines may require fixing for.
3. Make fewer statements.
4. Ask open ended questions.
5. Provide outside resources and connections. You may not have the time or knowledge to intervene but you know someone who can.

Think of yourself as coach and teacher rather than an authoritative leader. You don’t play the game. You enhance the play of others.

Strategic delay:

Withhold short-term intervention for long-term benefits. In this case, the consequences of delay may be painful but temporary. Cheering from the sidelines while others struggle forward – and you could help – strengthens the team as long as:

1. Time allows.
2. The people involved have potential.
3. Incremental progress continues.
4. Costs and penalties are low.
5. Frustration is manageable.
6. Learning and development continues.
7. Learning applies to current projects, untapped opportunities, or future vision.

Intervene when:

1. People max out.
2. Progress stalls.
3. Costs are high.
4. Frustration distracts.
5. Learning stops or becomes irrelevant.

Written by Dan Rockwell
Adapted from Successful Intervention in 5 Steps Ways to Have a Successful Intervention appeared first on SoJo | Ideas into Action.

Even though media practices change and e-mailing may or may not be on the top of the ‘importance’ hierarchy for your audience (make sure you address this when you’re thinking about your audience while building your strategy), e-newsletters are still a great way to send periodic messages to your supporters.

What sets e-newsletters apart

Sometimes, people want to keep up to date about your organisation’s work, but they aren’t in
an audience that checks social media or private websites on social causes. If these people use
e-mail frequently, then e-newsletters are the means to use.

Information about this changes fast, but, as of the time that this toolkit was made, youth in many countries aren’t the ideal audience for an e-newsletter, so consider the idea carefully if you are trying to reach out to youth. Research first if they are avid e-mail users.

Having a newsletter allows you to share content at the pace you prefer (from daily, which we honestly consider as overkill for most organisations, to once every couple of months), which is not something that can be easily chosen on social media platforms where you must post at least a couple of times a week if you want to stay in the loop.

Something to bear in mind: whereas you can find a few options for free, you will most likely have to pay some money if you want a good platform to send your newsletters from. Also, to make the best possible use of your newsletter, you should have other online spaces (such as a website, or profiles on social media sites) where you can share the link for people to sign up to it.

e-newsletter tips

As mentioned, make sure that the people you are targeting are frequent users of e-mail. If they’re not, your messages will not get read.

Also, once you’ve picked the timing for your newsletters, make sure you are consistent. If people start to expect to hear from you at a certain time of the month and they don’t, they may think you are slacking. If you start posting more often, they can get annoyed and unsubscribe.

Since e-newsletters are less frequent than other social media updates, make sure that the content you share in them is always top quality, and that you share all the relevant information you need to
share about your project. If possible, create your (say) monthly newsletters over the entire course
of the month to make sure you’ll be sending out something fabulous.

Written by Mariel Garcia and Gabriela Jaeger and edited by Matt Kimich for Global Changemakers
Adapted from Global Changemakers’ Social Media Toolkit

Image courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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When is the time for you to speak? Let me share three crucial criteria:

1. When it will improve the results of the group. Minority viewpoints have been proven to aid the quality of decision making in juries, by teams, and for the purpose of innovation. Research first published in the Journal of Applied Psychology shows that even when the minority points of view are wrong, they cause the rest of the group to think better, to create more solutions, and to improve the creativity of problem solving.
2. When it gives others permission to speak their truth. An interesting study of conformity put people into groups and arranged for a majority of the group to lie about the length of a line. When the majority lied without opposition, 70% of those tested capitulated and passively went along with the incorrect group assessment. But when a single dissenting voice was introduced, only 30% went with the group majority answer. In other words, when one person had the courage to speak their truth, it gave permission to the others to have and own their truth.
3. When the costs of silence are too high. This final point is more subjective than the first two. Only you know how to answer the question, “Is this worth it?” When do you allow others to determine what you believe and say to be true? If it is an issue of justice or integrity, or when the implication to getting things wrong could affect many, perhaps the cost is too high for silence. In those times, for the sake of your organization and for your own integrity, it’s time for you to say something.

Written by Nilofer Merchant
Adapted from The Three Times You Have to Speak Up, published in Women 2.0

Image Courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Several years ago, I found an Ayurveda herbalist who lives in a rural village in India. I was looking online for an herbal treatment for the son of one of my patients, who had been suffering with severe constipation for 5 years.

This Ayurveda herbalist told me to have the boy drink a cup of warm milk with a tablespoon of ghee each night before bed. It worked like a miracle. I started suggesting other American and European mothers email her for help with their kids. They did and were very happy with her suggestions.

I then suggested she start an online practice in order to get paid for her work with these people. I am a Chinese herbalist specializing in helping women get pregnant and women find me on the Internet from all over the world. I have made a good living like this and knew she could too. She needed money and was thrilled with the suggestion.

I used all of my knowledge in creating a successful online practice. I crated and promoted a website for her. I told her what should go in the email correspondences between the mothers and her. I told her how much to charge and how to ask for a payment. I felt excited and proud of myself for helping her increase her income and went to India to teach her everything she needed to know about maintaining the website and online practice.

When I got there, I found out what a failure it was.

The doctor loved the website but said she felt like a fraud and couldn’t use it. She thought the site looked “American” and that the website made her look more impressive than she felt. She didn’t have the confidence to use the website, even though she had written all of the text, or to ask a reasonable “Western” fee, even though I gave her a script to use when asking. She felt more comfortable plodding alone, promoting her work on the web in a way that didn’t bring her the income she needed and probably never would.

What did I learn?

The failure came from me not taking her personality or cultural expectations into consideration. I had my American “let’s make this venture produce money” attitude and never thought about her reality.

Written by Patricia Karnowski
Adapted from I Thought I Was Doing a Good Thing

The post Case Study: “I Was Doing a Good Thing” appeared first on SoJo | Ideas into Action.

I live in my own studio apartment in LA right now, and do not own a television. I have had some of my most profound thoughts over the past few months in that environment. These ideas have not only improved my life, but are also leading to widespread changes for many others as well.

When I visit family and friends in New York, I get a chance to watch the football highlights on Sportscenter the way I used to when I was a kid. After living without a television for some time, I realized something profound the next morning: having the television on from the moment I woke up was so distracting, that it was drowning out my ability to think for myself. This is something that I’m sure happens to many of us so often, but I was able to recognize it only through the basis of comparison. If watching television and listening to the radio during all of your free time is the norm you have always abided by, you wouldn’t even realize how much more clarity you can have by spending some time away from them. Now it completely makes sense to me why our best ideas come in the shower. There is no one to talk to in there. There are no radio hosts, television shows, commercials, billboards, or other things to consume our mental energy. In the shower, for the few minutes that we are in there, there is nothing else to do except to think for ourselves.

I notice personally that when I spend the first hour or so of my day clearing my mind, meditating, focusing on my goals, exercising, and then listening to certain types of music that I love, I come up with amazing ideas that blow me away. It is quite simple actually: all it takes is a commitment to spend a little bit of time each day away from the distractions, and breaking our addiction to needing electronic devices 24/7 that cloud our minds in this day and age.

When we have the television on all the time, our cell phones constantly ringing, and are running around non-stop, we forget to schedule some time to just relax and reflect on life by ourselves. Sometimes, we have deep conversations with others about life; but most of the time, the conversations we have with others deal with surface level matter: errands we have to run, surface level problems we are having, and gossip that is happening in our lives or on television. Perhaps this is why many people find that they constantly face the same types of problems over and over again in their lives. We spend all of our free time during the day complaining to everyone we know about a certain situation, when we could easily resolve it by simply being honest with ourselves, and trying to figure out what behaviors we are personally taking to put ourselves in those situations in the first place.

What we rarely do is take the time to zoom out, and look at the big picture. It is very beneficial to see things from a different light; to take a look at the path our behaviors are leading us down over the long term, and see where we can change for the better to give ourselves better results.

When we don’t take the time to stop and think for ourselves for at least a little while each day or week, we become victims of our bad habits. The only way to break bad habits that are holding us back from achieving all of the things we deserve is to a) figure out what they are, b) admit to ourselves that they actually do exist, c) figure out why they are there and where we picked them up, and d) then figure out how to set up conditions in life that will redirect our energy to more efficient habits, until we start doing them automatically without having to think about it consciously.

On a higher level: when we don’t stop to think for ourselves, we can never innovate. Innovation is so important, because it is the way to create the life you want. It involves looking at everything the way it is, seeing what you can do better in certain ways, and seeing what should be completely eliminated from your life. It is about figuring out your passions in life, and putting effort into them constantly, until you discover new breakthroughs that allow you to live a life where all of your time is spent doing only things you are passionate about, in a career you are passionate about, around the people you want to spend time with, in places you love. When we don’t take the time to innovate, we are simply following the ideas that are suggested to us unconsciously by those around us; and also through those pesky billboards, mass media, and so on. External influences can get into your mind so quickly that you may have trouble stopping to think: is this idea really in my best interests long term? Do I even know what vision I have for my life in the long term so I can check to see if the actions I am taking on a daily basis are leading me in that direction? Is it possible that there is a much more direct route that I have overlooked?

All of the external sources of information in our lives have their own personal agendas that serve their own purposes. I’m not trying to say that this is a good or bad thing; I’m just stating what is. But there is one purpose that none of these external sources serve – that is to help you get to a place that is ideal for yourself. That is because nobody knows where you belong or what you want better than you do! In fact, several years ago, I found that the reason why I was not happy with my career, the quality of my relationship, and the city I lived in was because I had spent so much time trying to follow all of these external ideas about where my life should go from the society around me, rather than contemplating that I needed to stop caring so much about what others think, to think for myself about what I truly want deep down, and to create my own path.

So obviously, if you are not taking out the time to figure out where you most belong (geographically, career-wise, relationship-wise, health-wise, etc.), no one else is going to grab you by the back of your shirt and pull you to go there! Actually, I guess you could say that is what I am doing right now. I am going to try to wake you up, and introduce some novel thoughts into your mind about what you are capable of and where you would truly be most fulfilled in life. I certainly have innovated in my own life, and I do enjoy sharing the ideas I come up with to allow others to use them if they wish. But I can only provide the spark. Each person has his or her own hopes and dreams – I can help you along the path (and feel free to ask me any questions you may have), but you are the only one who can provide the constant energy to turn that spark into a blazing fire.

Written by Jordan Phoenix
Adapted from How to Generate Great Ideas

Image courtesy of Sujin Jetkasettakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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In our white paper, the Product Accelerators team identified the 9 (nine) biggest mistakes that most fledgling business creators make in developing their ideas into full blown products.

In general, these mistakes come in three stages – mistakes that lie at the product’s foundation, those that plague a product’s actual development, and finally mistakes in leadership. Here they are in a nutshell:

• Foundational mistakes: Entrepreneurs often fail to understand the problem their current idea solves or addresses. They also fail to understand the people who have this and related problems. Finally, beginning inventors and developers often neglect creating a framework for innovation (i.e., one that accepts feedback from the physical and social environment where the product lives).
• Production and development mistakes: It is not uncommon for an early stage effort to fail to develop a road map for developing the idea into a product and bringing it to market. Likewise, there is often no attempt made to create a system for prototyping. Many people in the product development world also fail to plan and execute a pilot project with core early adopters.
• Leadership mistakes: In some ways, these are the most common mistakes made by newly minted entrepreneurs. They often fail to think critically and clearly about building the core team. They do not have a coherent plan for procuring financing. And finally (and perhaps most tragic), they often thoroughly neglect the careful planning and execution of a product launch (the beginnings of success here start earlier than you think).

Done right, turning an idea into a product creates a virtuous cycle of continuous innovation.

Avoiding them almost certainly guarantees that a viable product can be brought to market in a way that is resource efficient and profitable.

Written by Product Accelerators
Adapted from “The 9 Fatal Product Development Mistakes (and how to avoid them)”

Trying to figure out how to take your idea into action with a product? Many would-be entrepreneurs suffer through a messy and expensive transition from good idea to viable product. If they survive this phase of a product’s adolescence, these businesses are often hampered for years by inefficient processes and a lack of powerful innovation. At Product Accelerators, we have identified nine key mistakes that new entrepreneurs must avoid if they want to turn their “pretty cool idea” into a robust, profitable product. Click here to sign up for a free Accelerator membership and access the whitepaper discussing these fatal product development mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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What is Incorporation?

Registered charities are often referred to as non-profit organizations (NPOs). However, while both types of organizations operate on a non-profit basis, the two types are defined differently under the Income Tax Act.

Examples of Registered Charities

Examples under the four categories of charity generally include:

• relief of poverty (food banks, soup kitchens, low-cost housing units)
• advancement of education (colleges, universities, research institutes)
• advancement of religion (places of worship, missionary organizations)
• purposes beneficial to the community (animal shelters, libraries, volunteer fire departments)

Note: 
A charity must apply for charitable registration with the CRA if the charity wants to become exempt from paying income tax and/or to issue official donation receipts. Meeting the definition of a 'charity' (without registration) does not qualify an organization for these advantages.

Examples of non-profit organizations

Generally these include:

• Social, recreational or hobby groups (bridge clubs, curling clubs, golf clubs)
• Certain amateur sports organizations (hockey associations, baseball leagues, soccer leagues)
• Certain festival organizations (parades, seasonal celebrations)

Note:
 If an organization meets the definition of a 'charity', it cannot be considered a non-profit organization under the Income Tax Act, even if the organization is not registered or cannot be registered as a charity. An organization may meet one definition or the other, but not both. The CRA tax services offices are responsible for determining if an organization qualifies for tax-exempt status as a non-profit organization.

This article was paraphrased by a SoJo editor.
Content adapted from Canada Revenue Agency’s Registered charity vs. non-profit organization

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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It’s more important to build hope than it is to cast vision. Hope builds confidence. Confident people dare to act.

The Gift:

Fear rules where hope sleeps. Giving hope is the greatest gift leaders give.

Hope fuels the first steps toward uncertain destinations. Hope enables letting go and pressing forward. Hopeful people persevere. Without hope, safety dominates our attitudes and controls our behaviors; the evil status quo wins.

Giving hope:

1. Servanthood empowers hope building. The moment others believe you are in it for yourself is the moment you drain their hope.
2. Consistency builds hope. Having favorites undermines hope. All the rules apply to all the people all the time.
3. Celebrating failure invigorates hope. When Jack Welch blew up a manufacturing plant (no one was injured), his boss’s boss asked, “What did we learn?” Additionally, Peter McIntyre wisely said, “Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.”
4. Clear performance metrics drive hope. Explain what you expect, clearly.
5. Belief in them makes them hopeful. Your doubts about their competencies and abilities drain their hope. Put people in roles where you believe they can succeed.
6. Feeling understood enriches hope. Few things are more powerful than feeling seen and appreciated by others.
7. Feeling like we fit in protects hope. Avoid negative comparisons.
8. Celebrating small wins affirms hope. Give complements without suggesting improvements.
9. Letting go while extending support drives hope. Trust people to perform. Be there to support.
10. Expressing passion brings vitality to hope. Determine the inner motivations of others and adapt.

More:

More than vision casting, instilling hope is the subtle secret to leadership success. Napoleon said, “A leader is a dealer in hope.”

Written by Dan Rockwell
Adapted from Fixing the Reason Vision Casting Flops

Image courtesy of ~thiagoelias NAME

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What sets Google+ apart

The ability to share things among ‘circles’

When you open a profile on Google+, you can categorise all of your contacts into ‘circles’ (one circle could be your family, another circle could be your best friends, and so on). When you post content on Google+, you are allowed to choose which circles will receive it.

This makes it possible for projects to have only one profile through which they can keep their participants and their volunteers informed separately. Also, if your project deals with different issues and you have followers who aren’t interested in all of them, they can be put in the circles they are interested in to receive those updates only.

Hangouts

Google+ allows users the possibility to have a space where they can have a virtual meeting (or ‘hangout’) with friends. Everyone just needs to download the plug-in on the Google+ page to be able to join group video calls (up to nine people can be on the same call). A bonus: everyone on the meeting could be watching the same YouTube video on Google+ while participating on the call (maybe that’s a tool Matheus from Haiti Music School could use to promote his video).

How does this service differ from Skype, though? Most of it comes down to the contacts – it’s easier to find new people who have something in common with you on Google+ Hangouts than it is on Skype – but the capability to have nine people on a call gives Google+ an extra-useful thing to boast.

Google+ Tips

• Always make sure to double-check your content’s visibility settings, especially if you are managing delicate content that you don’t want everyone to see. Use the tools within Google+ to see what your profile or participation looks like to others, depending on the circle they are in.

• If you are planning on using Google+ Hangouts for a specific project-related activity, it will be a good idea to have back-up plans. Sometimes Internet connections aren’t stable enough, or the sounds on the street can’t be controlled…Having a list of alternatives to get things done if the technology just doesn’t cooperate will save you a lot of time.

Written by Mariel Garcia and Gabriela Jaeger and edited by Matt Kimich for Global Changemakers
Adapted from Global Changemakers’ Social Media Toolkit

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A One Variable Change

When you’re trying to decide between qualitative and quantitative testing for any given change or feature, you need to figure out how many variables you’re changing.

Here’s a simple example: You have a product page with a buy button on it. You want to see if the buy button performs better if it’s higher on the page without really changing anything else. Which do you do? Qualitative of quantitative?

There’s absolutely no reason to qualitatively test this before shipping it. Get this in front of users and measure their actual rate of clicking on the button.

With a change this small, users in a testing session or discussion aren’t going to be able to give you any decent information. They probably won’t even notice the difference. Qualitative feedback here is not going to be worth the time and money it takes to set up interviews, talk to users, and analyze the data.

More importantly, since you are only changing one variable, if user behavior changes, you already have a really good idea WHY it changed. It changed because the call to action (CTA) button was in a better place.

There are exceptions. In a few cases, you are going to ship a change that seems incredibly simple, and you are going to see an enormous and surprising change in your metrics (either positive or negative). If this happens, it’s worth running some observational tests with something like UserTesting.com where you just watch people using the feature both before and after the change to see if anything weird is happening. For example, you may have introduced a bug, or you may have made it so that the button is no longer visible to certain users.

A Multi-Variable or Flow Change

Another typical design change involves adding an entirely new feature, which may affect many different variables.

Here’s an example: You want to add a feature that allows people to connect with other users of your product. You’ll need to add several new pieces to your interface in order to allow users to do things like find people they know, find other interesting people they don’t know, manage their new connections, and get some value from the connections they’ve made.

Now, you could simply build the feature, ship it, and test to see how it did. The problem is that you’ll have no idea WHY it succeeded or failed.

Let’s assume that you ship it and find that it hurts retention. You can assume that it was a bad feature choice, but often I find that people don’t use new features not because they hate the concept, but because the features are badly implemented.

The best way to deal with this is to prevent it from happening in the first place. When you’re making large, multi-variable changes or really rearranging a process flow for something that already exists on your site, you’ll want to perform qualitative testing before you ship the product.

Specifically, the goal here is to do some standard usability testing with interactive prototypes, so that you can learn which bits are confusing and fix them before they ever get in front of users.

You’ll still do an a/b test once you’ve shipped it, but give that new feature the best possible chance to succeed by first making sure you’re not building something impossible to use.

Deciding What To Build Next

Please do not assume that I’m telling you that you should ask your users exactly what they want and then build that. Nobody thinks that’s the right way to build products, and I’m tired of arguing about it with people who don’t get UCD or Lean UX.

However, you can learn a huge amount from both quantitative and qualitative research when you’re deciding what to build next.

Here’s an example: You have a flourishing social commerce product with lots of users doing lots of things, but you also have 15 million ideas for what you should build next. You need to narrow that down a bit.

The key here is that you want to look at what your users are currently doing with your product and what they aren’t doing with it, and you should do that with both qualitative and quantitative data.

Still Don’t Know Which Approach to Take?

What if your change falls between the cracks? For example, maybe you’re not making a single variable change, but it’s not a huge change either. Or maybe you’re making a pretty straight-forward visual design or messaging change that will touch a lot of places in the product but that doesn’t actually affect the user process too much.

As many rules as we try to make, there will still be judgement calls. The best strategy is to make sure that you’re always keeping track of your metrics and observing people using your product. That way, even if you don’t do exactly the right kind of research at exactly the right time, you’ll be much more likely to catch any problems before they hurt your business.

Written by Laura Klein
Adapted from Know Your Users: Quantitative Research VS. Qualitative Research, published by Women 2.0

Image Courtesy of jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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