How do you learn? When you want to acquire a new skill or apply some new knowledge, do you learn by passively sitting and listening to an expert lecture for 90 minutes without a break and 150 PPT slides? What do you actually retain? And, what do you actually apply? Or do you learn better when you get a chance to process the content every 15 minutes by thinking about it quietly or talking with a peer? Do you concentrate better when you move around versus sitting for too long? I know for … [Read more...]
Archives for May 2013
Trainer's Notebook: The Art of Good Openings and Closings
I've just returned from an amazing trip of facilitating workshops, discussions and master classes as well as a keynoting a conference on "Measuring the Networked Nonprofit" in Australia and New Zealand. It made me very happy to be teaching non-stop for almost two weeks. I'm always learning as I help others learn. Here's a couple of reflections from my "trainer's notebook." I started with a full-day workshop outside of Auckland called "The Networked NGO in New Zealand," this workshop … [Read more...]
#datanerds: Six Steps to Great Graphs and Charts
Source: Gemma Correll - I Love Charts Note from Beth: I just knew that I was going to start obsessing about charts and graphs after my Excel spreadsheet obsessions started. I thought if I set up a tumblr blog curating great nonprofit spreadsheets, but the next logical step is create visualizations of your data. What better way than in Excel. I got into a wonderful conversation with Stephanie Evergreen, another nonprofit datanerd who loves spreadsheets who offered to write up this guest … [Read more...]
Transmedia — Making Change Across Mediums
Note From Beth: I'm on my way to Australia and New Zealand lead a series of workshops on Networked Nonprofits and Measurement, culminating with a keynote at this year's ConnectingUp Conference in Australia, so expect to see a few interesting guest posts. I caught up with Danny Alpert at the NTC Conference in Minneapolis, MN where he briefed me on how he is using a "Transmedia" strategy to raise awareness and funding to support homeless services. He graciously agreed to pen this … [Read more...]
The Networked NGO in Australia and New Zealand: Te Ao Maori
I'm headed to New Zealand and Australia to facilitate workshops in both countries and to keynote the ConnectingUp Conference (Australia's version of the Nonprofit Technology Conference). I am excited for a return visit to Australia. I delivered the keynote there in 2008 and taught a workshop, "Take Me To The Social Web." One of the workshop participants was Stephen Blyth of Common Knowledge - a long time nonprofit capacity builder and trainer - who invited me to come over to New Zealand … [Read more...]