Growing and Managing Your Organization with Peoplemovers Community 2.0

The Peoplemovers Community 2.0 website is a powerful operating system for growing your organization, business and community by building relationships between your members, volunteers, customers, employees and residents. Every organization has a need to grow and to manage that growth as efficiently as possible. The Community 2.0 website is an effective way to accomplish this as it harnesses the many talents, skills and resources of the “community” of people and organizations that already interact with and are a part of your organization each day. This community can include your leadership, management, faculty, employees, students, mentors, volunteers, donors, investors, partner organizations, suppliers, neighboring companies, residents and then a host of families and other people (young and old) and the organizations they are connected to, and so on, and so on. The Community 2.0 website is built around 6 basic concepts for building strong relationships that result in an overall stronger organization or community: 1. Care – What do you as a leader, business, organization, association or government “care” about? What issues are important? What is your mission? What are your values? “Care” is our first step in building relationships by helping your organization define and post the reasons for your existence for all to see and support. 2. Connect - Who are other people and organizations that have similar concerns? What people and organizations are out there who focus on different issues where you need help or want to partner with? What events are going on where you can connect? “Connect” helps your people and organizations find others within your organization, surrounding community and world to start or strengthen relationships with. 3. Communicate – What’s going on regarding the issues, people and organizations you care about or are connected to? What’s the latest news? Where are the best resources? What do other leaders think? “Communicate” provides a forum for people and organizations to share what’s on their mind, what they’ve learned and what’s going on. 4. Cooperate – What are your formal goals or “initiatives”? Who can help support them? Who can help with large or small needs? How can you help? Where can you or your people volunteer in the broader community or find volunteers? In the case of non-profit organizations, who can help support your activities financially? “Cooperate” moves your relationships into action with tangible activities and results. 5. Commerce – What other people and organizations need your company’s products or services? Where can you find quality employees or help quality people find quality jobs? In the case of a chamber of commerce, association or city, how can you promote the economic activity of your members or local businesses? “Commerce” is our upcoming area for helping people, businesses and organizations leverage their relationships for creating vibrant economic growth. 6. Celebrate! - Do you recognize the accomplishments of your people and organizations enough? Do you have easy ways for giving “awards” or showing special membership levels or certifications? Do you have an easy-to-manage system for providing incentives to your employees, volunteers, customers, students or citizens? “Celebrate” is a vital and fun way to say “thank you” to those who are helping achieve your organization’s success! As each person and organization cares, connects, communicates, cooperates, engages in commerce and then celebrates successes with each other inside and outside of your physical walls, they will become better equipped to develop, launch, manage and achieve your organization’s goals. This dynamic in effect, begins to shift the burden of building your organization from you – the leader - to the paid and unpaid people connected in one way or another to your operations. You and your core team can then focus more and more resources on just facilitating the process and using your leadership position to attract more people, organizations and resources into your organization’s community. Your Peoplemovers Community 2.0 website helps your organization accomplish this by creating a vibrant community network where your people and affiliated organizations can interact on a daily basis. Important benefits will include: • Increased membership, customer, volunteer and donor base • Increased resource availability for your members • Increased productivity for you employees and volunteers • Streamlined communications • Streamlined software needs and user information sources • New opportunities for strategic partnerships • Improved training capabilities • Improved operations management • Increased economic development • Improved working environment/social conditions. Community 2.0 Features Overview As follows is a simple overview for using your Community 2.0 website to grow and help manage your growth. Additional features and enhancements are coming out weekly to further streamline and enhance your operations! CARE • Post your organization’s values, mission, vision or other issues that are important to you by creating “Care” posts. • Build networks by supporting the Care posts of others. CONNECT • Invite (or even require) everyone you meet, train, collaborate with and know to join the your “Community”! At the very minimum, people and organizations can begin to connect and start networking. Use the Invite feature or just use your regular Constant Contact or other communications. The address to give out is www.(your domain name)/community. • Create groups for each program you run and have participants become “Friends” of each group. To create “sub-groups”, just go to New Account and create an organization. Then become “Friends” of your main organization profile to establish a link. We will have more streamlined sub-group capabilities later in the month, but this will work fine for now. Also, start becoming Friends with all of your participants through “Send Friend Request” on each profile. • Assign official employees and organization participants as “Members” and casual acquaintances, affiliated organizations or prospective members as “Friends”. This will allow you to mark entries as visible to Members Only, Members & Friends Only and Visible to Entire Network. • Post all of your trainings, workshops, First Fridays, etc. using Events. To save time, you can use “Duplicate Event” to rapidly copy, modify and create entries (just be on the Event profile you want to copy). Have all participants RSVP for each Event. This is on each Event profile and is just one click. • Connect with other leaders, organizations and potential entrepreneurs through the Peoplemovers Network. Your Community 2.0 platform has unprecedented interconnectivity with a growing number of other people and organizations that could benefit from or be a benefit to you through the Peoplemovers Network. With the convenience of a single login and password, your community can connect with other communities and further multiply the value of your offerings. COMMUNICATE • Post what’s happening and distribute your press releases using News. • Post links to other programs and websites using Resources. • Get the conversations going between your groups using Blogs and Discussions. Put your “deep” questions up on the site and invite people to comment and share their thoughts. You can control what entries are for friends and members only. Remember that you can use this to get people from outside your online community engaged through the Peoplemovers Network as each person makes a post that is marked “Visible to Entire Network”. • Post Videos and Photos so others can see the fun things going on in your organization. You can even put live training or educational clips up for your internal employee or member use or for promotion to the outside public. • Find out what your community thinks and do quick market research by creating Polls (coming in November, 2009). COOPERATE • Post requests for resources, people or money using Help or post resources, goods or services that you can give for free. • Post your organization goals and objectives for others to support using Initiatives. Support the Initiatives of others. • Post Volunteer Opportunities so people and organizations can support you or help another organization. • If you are a non-profit organization, enable “Donate” and create a link to your PayPal account or another website so people and organizations can make online donations to your organization. COMMERCE (Coming in September, 2009) • Post openings for employment in Jobs. • Create profiles for your company’s goods and services in Marketplace. CELEBRATE! • Give Kudos to each other in a public way. Go to the profile of the person you want to thank and Add a Kudo. • Give your employees, donors, members, students and volunteers Awards! For instance, create an “Award” for your programs and “Share” it with them so they can “Apply for Award”. The Award icon will then appear on their profiles. You can also use Awards to create online certification and membership “badges”. • Encourage your organization community to earn PeoplePoints. Each time they use your Community 2.0 website to Care, Connect, Communicate, Cooperate, engage in Commerce and Celebrate!, they earn PeoplePoints which will soon be able to be redeemed for valuable coupons for food, tickets, entertainment and other fun prizes. Use Community 2.0 and Simplify your Life! Build relationships using your Community 2.0 website and simplify your life! As leaders, we often become so busy with pushing into new frontiers that we forget or just don’t take the time to connect and communicate with the people and organizations we already “have”. Continuing to engage those already in our circle will empower them to take your vision and run with it for you, building their leadership skills in the process. Please take the time to connect and communicate in all or some of these ways PERSONALLY using your own individual profile. If the people and organizations in your online community don’t see the leadership participating, they won’t join or, in time, they will leave. In most cases, they join your organization to connect to YOU so they can gain access to your knowledge, resources and relationships. Your Community 2.0 website makes this easier to do, but it still requires you to participate. The benefit to this though, is that as you slow down and focus on building quality relationships with those in your community, you will be able to relax more and even enjoy the ride! The idea here is to get people connected to each other and to you in order to create stronger relationships. Relationships (in addition to their formal work or participation in your offerings) are what will make being involved with your organization FUN as people start to engage with other members of your community (it won’t be all up to you to either). And from a “business” perspective, relationships are the number one way people make decisions about life in America (Roper). That will take the “buzz” about your organization to a whole other level! More features are on the way, including daily bulletin boards, status updates and “Toolboxes” to make organizing and accessing your other software applications and websites a breeze! In the meantime, please give us feedback so we can help make your organization more efficient and your life easier! Peace, Keith Zendler CEO