Scenario 3 Notes

From MMTNewMedia

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Blue Group #7:

Primary goals:

• Keep connected with the Somali culuture
• improving integration into Portland's community.

Outcomes:

• Opportunities to improve english comprehension
• Improve homework/academic
• Sharing cultural experience

Strategy:

• Link the volunteer tutor job description to your facebook tutoring group page.
• Outreach to immigrant "groups" via social network resources
• use flickr to capture and collect photos taken at cultural events and stream into website
• Resource Page
• Shared learning resources
• Resource collaboration for staff/community
• Cultural awareness/connection
• Volunteer Tutoring
• Outreach to common issue groups
• Creation/participation in immigrant channel

Audience:

• Primary audience is not the immigrants themselves, but on community and other service providers who are invested in the community.

Staffing:

• Create Wiki to allow community members to keep others informed about resources in the community

Outreach:

• Focus organizations and other provider groups (PGE, Library, etc...) with an interest in engaging Somali community.

Culture:

• Flikr account with common tags streamed onto website
• Youtube videos

Blue Group #8 (Facilitator: Julie)

Goals: • Create understanding between Somali and American cultures • Promote a welcoming, inclusive environment for shared learning

Outcomes: • Opportunities to interact in English • New and ongoing connections • Evolving participants in activities and networks • Community trust

Audience: We understood from the scenario description that the non-profit organization had connections with the Somali community. As a result, our group’s targeted audience was the English speaking community in the Portland metro area.

Plan: Our group believed the key to reaching our outcomes was to hold in-person events for people to meet each other in order to build on in-person connections. Note: every event needed to have a food component. The events could be larger community gatherings, school-based, smaller in-home parties or other activities. Our plan focused on using social media tools for planning, outreach and follow up to these types of events.

1) Research resources: Linked In; Facebook; MySpace; Google: use these tools to identify local people and groups with broad or specific interests in culture, diversity, community-building, countries similar to Somalia, English as a second language, etc: Also use these to connect with national/international groups who have held similar events to gain ideas and best practices.

2) Event planning: Use Facebook “Plan an Event” applications (both internal friends and external function) to engage others in planning; have a “social media” training at every event focused on about two social media tools that the non-profit organization intends to use and staff.

3) Outreach resources: Use email address networking; Evites (frame as informal, personal parties); Idealist; Hands On Greater Portland; Meet Up Portland; create own group on Yahoo; Craig’s List.

4) Ongoing connections: Create wiki to share “food” stories and recipes from events; use email groups for people to follow up and keep in touch; use blogging for different people to share resources, needs and connections made at events (informal tone-Somali and English languages); post video snippets of events on U-tube with tags; use flickr to share pictures of event and create upcoming event invitations.

Metrics: • Increased/higher search results/activity pop up in Google • Number of other groups linked to event website • Website stats • Number of blogs, pictures and video postings resulting from events • Create a unique tag to track ongoing networking activities resulting from non-profit organization’s work (this discussion about using tagging for metrics was very interesting and probably worth further exploration by groups; many difficulties were pointed out but also intrigued us)

Challenges: Difficult to get beyond the need for “personal” outreach strategies and to focus on use of social media tools; both are important for organizations to include.

Feeling of “top down” approach for social service delivery vs. empowerment; need to be thoughtful and deliberate in use of social media tools to achieve empowerment

Nature of the 2.0 environment is viral; need to realize can’t always control it; maybe “framing” only for organization’s issues.