Last year during the Leadership Learning Community board meeting we experimented with the idea of a ‘networked board’.  We wondered, “How might governing in a more networked way help us to fulfill our mission of promoting leadership approaches that are more networked and collective?” And to test the idea in real time we invited several members of the LLC community, including Renato Almanzor from LeaderSpring, Beth Kanter (author of the Networked Nonprofit), and Kathy Reich from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to join the conversation during the board meeting.  The discussion was inspiring as we started to imagine what it would be like to encourage a higher level of engagement from our community.  One of the key take-aways for me was the fact that there is an incredible wealth of information in our community, and that asking people to share can go a long way.  With this in mind, we started to think of initiatives that would greatly benefit our community and that would be feasible to implement based on the resources that we had.  And that is when the LLC Nonprofit Leadership Webinar Series was created.

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The Bush Foundation recently sponsored a learning community meeting of leadership development investors and practitioners in Minnesota, where I had the opportunity to learn about a very interesting read more »

When developing a leadership program one of the most important decisions to make is who to recruit to the program.  Yet too many are tempted  to first rush into program design.  Deciding who to serve requires a thorough understanding of the problem being addressed, what has limited progress on the problem to date, how work with a specific target population will make a difference, and what kind of support the participants will need to produce the results you are hoping to achieve.  This may seem like common sense but it can be far more complex than we realize.  To demonstrate this complexity we want to share two examples: one that defies conventional wisdom about who can mobilize resources; the second, an example showing how different programs working on the same problem have different ideas about who they need to recruit.

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By Claire Reinelt, Natalia Castaneda

Looking to increase your reach and influence in the social media space? Social Network Analysis (SNA), a research methodology that focuses on “mapping and measuring relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities,” (Orgnet.com) may be the answer. We recently partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore how to effectively apply social network analysis to public health online communications strategies, how communications networks operate in Twitter and the blogosphere, and how to identify strategic and influential connections that can be nurtured over time to extend the reach of public health messaging. This was an innovative project that produced detailed and insightful information about how to use SNA to strategize communications campaigns, and we wanted to share some of these insights with the community – including specific recommendations for identifying key messages, influencers, and engagement strategies.

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