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First published in the May issue of Nonprofit Business Advisor, available electronically to current subscribers in April.

On March 30, 2012, your organization’s Facebook page automatically switched to a new design. Now is the time—if you have not done so already—to visit your page, review the new layout and utilize those features that put your organization in its best light.

Facebook emailed users ahead of the change to Timeline and provided them with a preview, so many nonprofits have already made the switch to the new profile. The company also set up a step-by-step tutorial that walked page administrators through the new features, including: adding a cover photo, editing the organization’s profile picture, highlighting important content at the top of the page—such as Photos, apps and “Likes”—reviewing the organization’s Timeline, managing the admin page and receiving messages.

But while the swap may appear relatively harmless to Facebook users, Amy Sample Ward, speaker, author, facilitator and membership director at NTEN, said that there are important changes that organizations should be aware of, because the new design can significantly alter how your page engages visitors, where content is posted and the message your page can display.

Whether you have already converted to the Timeline, or you’ve just learned about the switch, Sample Ward suggested these steps to help you make the best of Facebook’s new design:

• Keep users engaged. “We really care about the community posting to our page,” said Sample Ward, “and not just where we’re posting content and hoping that users comment back to us. We want people to come to the NTEN page, post content and have other community members respond to them.” The facilitator said that the new Facebook design aggregates all community content into a side box and primarily features content from the organization. Organizations that have a goal around community engagement will need to think about this change.

“We make sure we go in to ‘Like’ or engage users right away,” Sample Ward said, “so that content can show back up in the newsfeed, since it isn’t given very much prominence on the page.” Be sure to develop a plan or policy so that an administrator goes in regularly to engage users and thank them for posting, she said.

• Put your best boxes forward. If your agency created custom tabs, they will no longer be available, said Sample Ward, and they’ll be replaced with four boxes under the organization’s cover photo and to the right of its profile picture. These boxes should showcase your organization’s most important content, she said. You’ll also need to consider how to rearrange these boxes for any visitor—fan or not. For instance, a page administrator who chooses not add new boxes or rearrange them can leave the “Like” box as a default, said Sample Ward, but any random person—such as a marketer—can look into your organization’s Insights information, including how many people are active on your page. She suggests using photos, videos, programmatic causes, fundraising campaigns—any content critical to your mission—to reorganize those boxes as soon as possible.
• Revisit the past. Unlike personal page users who may want to remove old content, Sample Ward said nonprofits should go back in time to “create a rich historical experience” for the user. Add benchmarks and organizational successes in order to provide a history of the organization, she said. “Go back further than the two years ago when you first joined Facebook,” said Sample Ward. “An advocacy group may want to go in and mark all of the major mileposts or steps it has taken.”
• Add photos to posts. Facebook prioritizes the kind of content that goes into a given user’s newsfeed, and content that has an image link is prioritized above posts with only text or links, said the facilitator. “At NTEN, we regularly update for a conference and we add a photo that says, ‘Here we are getting ready for the conference.’ People engage because they like the photo, and because it’s getting comments, it gets placed back at the top of users’ newsfeeds,” said Sample Ward.
• Develop apps. Applications should represent important content you want your users to access such as presentations, webinar recordings, RSS feeds, blog posts, surveys, and petition applications, the facilitator said. Creative applications might include a custom button on an animal rights organization’s Facebook page for a volunteer that is organizing a picnic. The organization could customize the application so that picnic participants—or those that couldn’t be there but wanted to donate—could go to the nonprofit’s page and help raise funds with the click of the button.
• Manage your admin box. The admin panel offers a snapshot of information and is now at the top of page, said Sample Ward. There, administrators can find information such as recent notifications, comments, and a new message feature that allows users to communicate with the page. “If you’re running a page that gets a lot of engagement, you may have turned off your email notifications a long time ago,” Sample Ward said, “so this is an easier way to quickly see what’s going on or if there’s anything you need to respond to.”
• Follow the rules. Sample Ward said NTEN has fielded questions from page administrators concerning Facebook’s content rules and what you can and cannot place on your Timeline. For instance, the facilitator said you can no longer include URLs or any direct calls to action on the page. This has left many activists confused, wondering exactly what sorts of information they can post. Sample Ward suggested reviewing the Facebook Pages content at www.facebook.com
  /help/pages. “It may appear counterintuitive to the way you may be used to producing content,” Sample Ward said, “but you don’t want to get turned off by Facebook.”

For more information

NTEN is a membership organization of nonprofit professionals who put technology to use for their causes. To learn more, visit www.nten.org/. Amy Sample Ward is dedicated to supporting and educating organizations and changemakers in the use of evolving technologies that cultivate and engage communities and is the membership director at NTEN. To find out more about the changes Facebook has implemented through the new Timeline design, go to www.facebook.com
/help/pages.

First published in the April issue of Nonprofit Business Advisor, available electronically to current subscribers in March.

In the Nonprofit Blog post “Red (or Pink) in the Face,” the Director of The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University’s School of Business, Laura Otten, wrote about The Susan G. Komen (SGK) Foundation’s recent missteps and the questions that came to light concerning its operations. She shared some of her concerns in an interview with Nonprofit Business Advisor and provided best practice strategies that other nonprofits can use to avoid the donor outrage and the frenzy of media coverage facing SGK.

“One mistake might have raised an eyebrow, but each of these mistakes compounded the last until you couldn’t help but ask, ‘What is going on in this organization?” Otten said. “Donors realize that there are other organizations that do pieces of what Susan G. Komen does, and they’ll have to ask themselves, ‘Is this organization a trustworthy steward of my gift?’”

Otten said that the mistakes SGK made had nothing to do with politics or being pro- or anti-choice, but instead were caused by a lack of attention to basic policies and procedures—and poor judgment:

• A lack of board diversity. The director said one of the most critical mistakes the foundation made was to fill the board with family and friends instead of thinking strategically about building a board with diverse perspectives and skills. Nancy Brinker is the “Ambassador” or Chief Executive Officer of the Susan G. Komen Foundation and her son is a board member. Assuming that Brinker was allowed to build the board, the director said, the foundation broke one of the first rules of governance: the employee never hires the boss.

“When we build a board of people who are alike in terms of background and thinking, we don’t get the serious dialogue and due diligence needed for a diverse and successful board,” Otten said. “It tends to be more about affirming what someone else wants, not about asking the serious questions or having a thorough discussion.”

• A lack of policies and procedures. Much like organizations create a gift acceptance policy, the director said that SGK should have developed a clear, concise gift giving policy. Creating policies introduces organizational efficiency and effectiveness and reduces subjectivity, said the director. These processes guide how staff members, the executive director and the organization behave, Otten said.

“They didn’t have a set of guidelines as to what they looked for when assessing a grantee once they got beyond the surface—to the extent that one person could come in and get everybody to undo what had historically been done,” Otten said. “A clear policy would have let them say ‘nay’ or ‘yea.’”

• Lack of mission focus. SGK hired Karen Handel knowing about her anti-choice position and in doing so, they lost sight of their mission, the director said. This was poor judgment on the part of SGK, because the foundation didn’t pay attention—wasn’t mindful—of its intrinsic values or the lightning rod of controversy that Handel would become, she said.

“[Planned Parenthood] wasn’t a new issue within the organization, so the fact that they hired a person so publicly clear on where she stood on the choice issue says they were asking for trouble,” Otten said. “That makes me question every other decision the organization has made.”

SGK has unwittingly opened the door to all sorts of questions, the director said. “The onion still has to be peeled back, and there are probably layers we haven’t seen yet,” Otten said. “Nonprofits need to think these issues through. Nobody can afford to lose a donor.”

For more information

The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University’s School of Business enhances the management, operations, and governance of nonprofit organizations across the Delaware Valley through educational programs, consulting, leadership development and information sharing, with the ultimate goal of enabling nonprofits to meet fully the needs of their communities. To learn more, go to www.lasallenonprofitcenter.org. To contact Laura Otten, email, ulmer@lasalle.edu.

First published in the March issue of Nonprofit Business Advisor, available electronically to current subscribers in January.

Imagine that a nonprofit or international nongovernmental organization (NGO) sends an employee or volunteer and his entire family—a young couple with young children—to a remote country bereft of infrastructure, political stability, and standardized medical facilities to dig wells and/or provide latrines for the country’s rural citizens. While in-country, one of the children contracts diphtheria and becomes dehydrated. Adequate medical care may be hundreds of miles away, the roads may be treacherous and the local doctor may not speak the volunteer’s language, or have sanitary medical supplies and equipment. A call comes into the nonprofit or NGO’s home office detailing the volunteer’s predicament.

The health and well-being of that child and family now rest on the attention the organization gave to its duty of care.

“Roughly 25 percent of executive level management that I have called are unaware that they have people in-country,” said Suzanne Garber, COO at International SOS, who described the scenario above. “Whether it’s in a university, NGO, or a corporate environment, knowing beforehand can prepare the organization and the individuals traveling, so that help can get to them in a timely manner when something happens.”

International SOS partners with NGOs throughout the world to safeguard the health, safety, and well-being of their affiliates and associates worldwide, the COO said. These NGOs are in very remote places, so it is imperative that organizations prepare or bring in a consultant like International SOS, in order to do the proper analysis and risk mitigation to help prevent accidents or other injuries, she said.

Garber likens preparation efforts to a puzzle with many pieces.

“Many different partners in an NGO community—senior management, project managers, PR managers, medical directors, and travel directors—all of these people have a place at the table, and the communication in and amongst these teams is absolutely critical when identifying risks and rolling out a plan to mitigate those risks, as well as responding when disaster does strike,” said Garber.

In 2008–2009, International SOS commissioned Dr. Lisbeth Claus, a world-renowned, foremost expert on duty of care, to perform research that led to the first-ever study on duty of care, Garber said. That white paper—which put duty of care on the map—led to the recent release of a ground-breaking benchmarking report “Duty of Care and Travel Risk Management Global Benchmarking Study.”

“I have always been doing duty of care as an academic and my specialty is the employee crossing borders and the role of human resources,” said Dr. Claus, Ph.D., and professor of Global Human Resources at Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management. “The role of human resources to the duty of care is to protect the health, safety, and security of that employee—not only as a human aspect but as a legal and moral responsibility,” she said.

According to Dr. Claus, the study focused on how companies accomplished their duty of care responsibilities and who was responsible.

“These NGOs were sending employees to very remote locations, often to conflict zones and very high risk countries that have been labeled as the ‘Bottom 60 countries,’” said Dr. Claus, “meaning countries with very poor infrastructure, health care, roads, and rule of law—truly some of the very most dangerous locations in the world.”

NGOs often used to take a more “go native,” approach, she said, meaning they had a tendency to rely on the local population, but more recently this method declined as employees increasingly confronted political unrest and higher crime, leaving them vulnerable and unprotected.

Yet for all of the mistakes NGOs have made along the way, they’ve made tremendous strides where their corporate cousins have until recently feared to tread, said Dr. Claus.

“The corporate world can learn a lot from NGOs, because they are the first ones operating in-country, and they are using fewer resources,” Dr. Claus said. “We can learn their lessons; NGOs work in very difficult environments, conflict, remote, high-risk environmental areas, and they can be a little more aggressive in partnering with corporations and governments to share what they know.”

Garber agreed. “A nonprofit may ask itself ‘Why should I care about duty of care?’ It comes down to the issue of people. Each NGO has its particular mission—whether that’s to assist women and children in developing countries … or assist children in the United States. That mission is impossible to achieve without people, so beyond the moral, financial, and legal obligations of duty of care, people are the most important asset, and without them nothing could be accomplished. Employees know when an organization is concerned about their health, well-being and safety, and then there is no limit to what they can do—it will be reciprocated,” she said.

For more information

International SOS provides integrated medical, clinical, and security services to organizations with international operations. To learn more, email inquiries@internationalsos.com. Dr. Lisbeth Claus is professor of Global Human Resources at Willamette University and author of “Duty of Care and Travel Risk Management Global Benchmarking Study.” To contact Dr. Claus, email lclaus@willamette.edu.