Today I’m spending the day with leaders of Youth for Christ from across America. They’ve kindly asked me to share my thoughts on how leaders can use social media and other new innovations in media to be more effective in their personal and organizational mission.
Fortunately, the keys to learning to use new media to make the better world a better place are at everyone’s disposal. However, knowing that innovations exist, and putting those innovations to use in your life, work, ministry or non-profit are two different things.
Here’s how I process innovation in new media and filter it through to my work at the Rescue Mission:
1. Personal experimentation: Several years ago I was tinkering with Skype and I had the breakthrough idea that the Rescue Mission should be streaming it’s daily classes from our Challenge Learning Center. While trying out the Ipad a few years ago I saw how it had the potential to be very helpful to shift manager or our directors who were mobile between and around our various campuses. Everything starts with you trying new things and finding what works well for you. Try facebook, twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Linkedin. Take a look at new apps, phones, tablets and programs that may help you in your work, or may help you to share your work in new and innovative ways. If you are not trying new things you’ll be missing valuable opportunities and innovations.
2. Play: Once a leader has a concept of how innovation could possibly be used, then encourage your team to play with the ideas, concepts, and tools. You’ll often find that the innovation is impractical, or in some way gets modified to work better than you could have imagined. Plus, it bring others into the discovery process. After I began to use twitter and FB a few years ago, I encouraged teammates to play with these tools and see how they might affect relationship building with alumni, donors and clients. No conclusions necessary, just play.
3. Share: Once you’ve had enough time to test and play, then start the process of using these new innovations to multiply the affect of your work, interests, opinions and passions. This is where most people get bogged down because play is unfocused, and sharing takes intention and managment. But this is where the power of mutliplication is for the cause of good. For myself and my team, it was easier to post about something happening than to record it and stream it around. But the payoff was well worth it.
4. Leverage: This is a rare stage that few organizations or teams acheive with innovation, but it’s something to shoot towards. Using the new technologies, tools, innovations and methods to make a game changing breakthrough in how your work happens and in it’s effectivenesss.
Those are a few of my thoughts, but what do you think is critical to using new media effectively? What is your organization or team doing that is improved or mutliplied through the usign of these tools?
David Curry
