To succeed on the web, Be like the web

We live in times of great systems change, and a lot of what organizations have done in the past isn’t working so well anymore. But while many are re-trenching, treading water, or tentatively trying small experiments (while keeping everything else the same), some innovators are realizing amazing results by embracing entirely new, network-centric business models.

This is the first of a two part series, read the second on network organization structures here.

We think the web is a major force driving these bigger cultural changes. and since the web is a network, organizations that think and move like a network are seeing the most success – online and in the real world. Two colleagues of mine, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, just published a great book “The Networked Nonprofit”, based on this very phenomenon. While it’s written for nonprofits the model applies to all organizations who are struggling to adapt to this new world:

"Networked nonprofits are simple and transparent organizations. They are easy for outsiders to get in and insiders to get out. They engage people in shaping and sharing their work. They engage in conversations with people beyond their walls to build relationships that spread their work throughout the network."

What does a networked organization look like? I’ve recently had the chance to work intimately with three high-performing ones operating on a global scale:

• 350.org – This tiny nonprofit organized 7,300 people-powered climate change events in 188 countries on October 10 2010. They also did it in 2009 and made "350" – both their brand and the scientific target of safe carbon in the atmosphere - the biggest media story on the planet for a day.
• Avaaz – In just three years, Avaaz has attracted over 8M members, becoming the world leader in online mobilization. Using people-powered petitions, direct pressure with politicians, and strategic advertising they seize moments and have moved major political issues on issues ranging from ocean conservation to rainforest protection to the recent challenges to stop “Fox News North” in Canada
• TckTckTck– another small organization (who we worked for) helped align over 200 of the biggest global NGO brands and through them grow the world’s biggest movement. In 2009, TckTckTck’s 250 NGO partners aggregated over 17M supporters pushing for a strong climate deal in Copenhagen.

But operating like a network is not limited to the NGO sphere. There are exciting and innovative campaigns happening in the corporate and government worlds as well:

• Pepsi Refresh – has crowd-sourced a $20M advertising budget into a hugely successful open philanthropy experiment. They have had more votes than the last US election, and over 2.2B earned impressions, earning Pepsi the highest ranked cause brand in a recent Edleman study.
• Talk Green to Us – the staid City of Vancouver engaged over 4,000 people in the real world and 3,200 in meaningful ways online as they empowered citizens to share their ideas for greening the city. Featuring a unique collaborative voting campaign, this was their most successful education and consultation program in recent years.

Why do these stories matter?

In our society, big social institutions have concentrated a lot of resources, power, and influence. We’ve basically outsourced many community responsibilities to them. Many are doing great work, but is it moving the needle on the biggest challenges of our time? I recently heard a story about New Haven, CT, where despite having the highest proportion of NGO’s in the US, has seen every major social indicator plummet in the last 20 years. Are we making the impact that these times demand?

Today’s complex issues are too big, too hard, and too, well, complex for single institutions to solve on their own. No one organization is going to solve homelessness, get a global climate deal, or transition our economies away from fossil fuels on its own.

And, in our new networked world, they don’t have to, others are ready to help if we can just find a way to plug them in.

Big companies want to do more, and while they are ultimately limited by financial pressures, they are well aware of shifting consumer preferences – particularly globally – towards companies aligned deeply with causes. Many are aligning major resources behind the same social change efforts NGO’s typically try to solve on their own.

At the same time, more and more individuals – those Kanter and Fine call “free-agents” - are looking for more meaning and involvement in bettering the world. They want to offer time and talent, not just their treasure. According to the Edleman global goodpurpose study, 63% of people want brands to make it easier for them to make a difference, and 71% believe brands and consumers could do more to support good causes by working together. The business case for collaboration.

Many of today’s social institutions aren’t agile enough to connect the dots between these trends and the new energy of people and companies wanting to help out. These institutions who fear and resist change are not only limiting new solutions, they risk becoming irrelevant. Worst of all, the problems they were trying to solve still remain.

This is where networks, and the web come in. The web is a decentralized medium by design. It’s a network, it’s organic, it has no central control unit. It’s probably the most democratic thing humanity has ever invented. And digital and social media are making relationship building, communication, engagement and mobilization on a mass, global scale, easier every day.

These stories may indeed be small in the grand scale of all our work for social betterment. But they point to new models, using web values of listening, storytelling, collaboration, and participation to drive not only our online strategies, but our very structures for how we do social change work.

The second post in this series is about how network organizations are structured and staffed in fundamentally different ways from what we’re used to.

Photo Credit for '350' image: David Gravina/Digital Eskimo (art direction) and Elevated Aspects Photography. Special thanks to Donna Firth from VegPledge for the ringed 350 idea.