I’m heading next week to present at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in New Orleans. One of the sessions that I’ll be participating in is the Interactive Strategy Forum, which features more than 20 discussion tables, staffed by nonprofit technology leaders, offering timely discussions and Q&A on a wide spectrum of topics. My discussion topic is “Creating an Action-Ready Online Tribe by Getting Personal.” This is really a discussion about creating personal organizations; getting the organization out from behind the logo and creating relationships personally online. I’m really looking forward to talking about why organizations must create personal connections online, and discussing how to implement this concept.

One concept I’ve discussed before is that of The Social Media Funnel. It is simply the idea that, in order to move people to take an intended action online, you have to start by engaging with them personally and building trust. Nonprofits invest in social media so that they will see a return on engagement. Online fans will share, donate, and create something on behalf of an organization because they feel connected to a person or a cause – personally.

A huge question for implementation is: can the organization bridge the divide between logo and person? In other words, how can an organization be personal enough to create online friendships and meaningful relationships with individual fans and enthusiasts? The concept of The Personal Organization emerged from this consideration.

I’ve coached a lot of nonprofit organizations on how to use social media, and I’ve implemented social media for organizations. The implementation is never as effective as when it’s done personally. Most organizations are afraid of getting too personal. However, there are a wide variety of choices available and implementation examples. There are nonprofit CEOs that tweet, organizations where much of staff blogs, organizations that create private Facebook groups for online evangelists, and organizations that encourage staff to spend time participating in Linkedin groups. Florence Broder, formerly of The Jewish Agency, wrote a guest post for this blog on the difference it made when the Jewish Agency got personal on Twitter.

Each organization must decide how to be personal, and who within the organization will be doing that. Will the executive director tweet? Will the entire staff tweet? Should staff members “friend” online Facebook fans? Will each department head blog? The answers depend on your goals and where you want the entry points for personal connection to be located. The truth is that organizations make it much harder on themselves by forcing their logos to act like a person on their behalf. There is a reason why the UN High Commission on Refugees has Goodwill Ambassadors that are the public face of the refugee agency.

A critical factor in organizational success on social media is making the organizational presence personal.

For the Interactive Strategy Forum, I’ve prepared a handout of ideas for making the organization personal on Linkedin, Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. I also prepared a supporting slide deck that participants will be able to view and download from slideshare, and a shared Google doc that summarizes tips and ideas for how to create a personal organization. I am embedding it here, prior to the conference, because I know I have not captured all of the ways that organizations are already personal online. There are so many choices and iterations! I look forward to hearing about them in the ensuing discussion and comments.

Should Dunbar’s number inform the way organizations act online?

As explained by Wikipedia, “Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.” Within online social networks, Dunbar’s number is seen as the upper limit of the number of people with whom one will converse regularly and meaningfully – this could be daily, weekly, or more often. Taken very simply, it means that I can maintain real, meaningful, online relationships with a finite number of people. For me, that number is far less than 150 – it hovers around 75. For others, it can be as high as 290.

On a social network, a corporate entity or organization can create a profile and “act” as an individual. (There are exceptions, such as Linkedin.) The reach of the internet allows a freedom of interaction with customers that is difficult to create offline. Organizations have a duel purpose online: business objectives and creating loyal relationships. These can be in conflict. However, common wisdom holds that the engaged stakeholder will also act on behalf of the organization (volunteer/donate/take action).

Many nonprofits do a great job of creating personal relationships online with their fans, while others provide a fertile environment to allow their fans create relationships with each other online. In light of Dunbar’s limited number of meaningful relationships, which is the preferred approach to an organizational online presence?

Two noteworthy contributions:

In his book Trust Agents, Chris Brogan argues against mechanizing your online presence and instead giving back with personal gestures in order to create “cafe shaped experiences.”

Whitney Hoffman wrote an insightful post about Dunbar’s number that mentions two relevant points: it is hard to classify the degree of  friendship online, and the more connected a site becomes the less intimate the relationship becomes. Given that organizations want a large online following – and we want all of those fans to work for our organization enthusiastically (or at least give/act/volunteer/contribute) – the challenge seems to be scaling intimately.

So here are my questions for you:

• If organizational fans can only create a finite number of real relationships online, according to Dunbar’s number, does this change how we would approach creating an organizational presence on a social network?

• Can a fan have a stable, meaningful relationship with an organization?

• Do you want to be the organization that creates a community of fans and/or the organization that has a meaningful/personal relationship with its fans?

• Should it be an organizational goal to create a corporate presence that becomes part of someone’s inner circle of relationships – within the sacred 150 Dunbar’s number?

• How can an organization scale up its number of followers while still trying to be within each fan’s “inner Dunbar number?”

I look forward to your input and thoughts!