This is Seth Godin at his disruptive best – speaking at last year’s NextGen:Charity conference on the topic of “Embracing Risk & Failure in Philanthropy”.

Most charities are part of the charity industrial complex, he says.

Ouch.

This is not an opportunity for you to put some “cool internet toppings on your factory-based charity mindset.” The internet is a connection machine, and charity:water, Kiva, Kickstarter… they are getting into the connection business.

Clever ways to interrupt people are fine, but it’s not the future. This is “not about pouring money on top of your traditional system.” This is about your desire to make connections.

Do you care enough to put it out there and have it not work? The changes that we’re looking for are impossible to imagine… until they work.

Listen to Seth for sixteen minutes. It is worth every second.

#ngc11 will take place in NYC on 17th and 18th November.

In my talk I said we had designed our organisations for divisions, rather than for connections. Think about it; not only have we built silos, but we still call them ‘divisions’. I also repeated a line from my post last month:

Loyalty to a charity brand is being slowly augmented by a closer affinity with charity employees.

I’ve observed how it helps to develop the thread between a charity’s values and my own experience of that organisation – as I learn a little more about the individual daily contribution of those charity people I follow on Twitter (and who I might then meet). These ‘weak ties’ become stronger over time – more textured – and many eventually form bridges that connect us. But as Anne McCrossan (with whom I am fortunate enough to collaborate) writes in her post reflecting on this week’s event, charity leaders have been slow to appreciate how this connective tissue can create a compelling point of difference:

Job descriptions remain fixed, corporate reputations struggle with how to accommodate and integrate personal profiles into their own, the scope to build on the kind of affinity that can reshape organisational structure so it’s more fluid is limited. Hopping over the walls of internal departments to contribute to initiatives is often regarded as too provocative and challenging to the status quo.

Zappos – the online shoe and apparel store – expects each employee to “develop and cultivate the brand,” and shy away from any formal written guidelines, since their CEO, Tony Hsieh believes these are “too limiting and not aspirational enough.” We need to convince people that what they are doing has value. Of course some people – like Euan Semple – appreciated all this a long time before I did.

HCL Technologies in India has created the employee passion indicator – an instrument to establish what employees get most excited about. It might be financial reward (for less than half), recognition, advocacy, and so forth. Each employee gets a ‘traffic lights’ report indicating green, orange or red for the ‘fit’ between their own motivational factors and the requirements of their role. This helps them and the company to find the best match.

At Foviance, my friend Richard Sedley had the idea of sharing the business ‘lifestream’ on a blog. Elsewhere, SAY Media use employees’ images of their extra-curricular passions to start a conversation. I love what ihmmedia have done here on their ‘people’ page (thanks to @RobmDyson for this one), and I smiled with Heather Taylor as she shared her excitement at receiving her BBC staff pass.

So far these examples are all from the corporate world (but you get the idea).

Here come charity:water (who else?) to the rescue. They ’big up’ their people (including interns) via a meet the staff category on their blog, and use photos to capture the heartbeat of their young and dynamic organisation – such as when sharing the delight of receiving a poem or a visit from a young fundraiser in the office.

One last one. Now I have no idea whether the stunning new visual identity of the MIT Media Lab carries over into practice, but the intent is breathtaking (you really need to follow that link). Translate this to your charity: passionate and creative people from all kinds of backgrounds coming together, inspiring each other and collaboratively making change. Now imagine that branding extending out to those not on the payroll.

All this goes way beyond ‘employee engagement’; I’m thinking more ‘employee emancipation’.

What do you think?

I’m now about to jump on another train to try and persuade a group of Big Charity Finance Directors that this is something worth focusing on; that there is value in the ‘who’, as well as the ‘what’.

Anyway, here’s my presentation from Monday.

where key figures in charity communications have teamed up to produce a snapshot of the most significant communications trends of the coming decade.

So, these are my five ‘future practice’ trends:

• The term ‘social media’ will sound just as dated as ‘information superhighway’ does today
• Fragmentary movements of citizens – some global, some local – will mobilise around single-issues, seeking alliances with social change organisations, which they believe can help bring the change they want
• In the web of ‘flow’, charities will catch people ‘in motion’ – when they are ‘goal orientated’ – and will give them the tools to reproduce messages through their own networks
• Websites will become much slimmer, with the focus switching to curation, aggregation… and amplifying the 000’s of ‘small actions’ of others
• Smart organisations will evolve their workforce for a networked economy and will trust a passionate community of employees to build relationships online using different platforms for different objectives

Here’s the deck.

Thanks to Joanna Juber – the charity’s Digital Engagement Manager – for inviting me to speak on a range of topics I will be blogging about over the coming months. Fundamentally, how technological innovation has always necessitated institutional innovation and how charities need to learn to be agile (the technology won’t slow to their pace).

Here’s the link to the presentation on slideshare for those of you picking this up in your feed reader, with the caveat that one or two slides make less sense without the narrative.

On my way back to Somerset on the train, I read that E. L. Doctorow once said writing a novel is like “driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

It struck me that this is much like the journey we’re all making with social media. Charities need to learn to be agile enough to get into driver’s seat, and brave enough to take the wheel and move out of second gear. It’s going to be an interesting ride. Baggsy be the co-driver.