June 7, 2018
This week on the podcast, Chief Whaler George Weiner chats with Emily Dulcan, Online Community Experience Lead at Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Joining CFF after 3 years as Digital Director at the Peace Corps, Emily knows from community building.
Emily talks with George about how the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation overcomes the challenge of in-person interaction for CF patients (who generally cannot be in proximity to one another) through the ability to be close-from-a-distance online while ensuring privacy in an increasingly un-private world.
Consider this with your digital strategy: Is it all about building the quantity of your followers? What about the quality? (Spoiler alert: There's room for both.)
June 5, 2018
If you've ever bought coffee from Whole Foods, chances are you've seen the Fair Trade Certified logo. The organization has been helping consumers to make the right choice the easiest choice by identifying thousands of products that are made and harvested in sustainable and ethical manners, protecting land and waterways in nearly 50 countries and improving 8 million lives in the process.
How did they go from making sure coffee beans came from a good home to leveraging $440 million worth of impact to farmers, workers, and fishermen (and women) over the short span of 20 years? Account Strategist Olivia Marlowe-Giovetti asks Bennett Wetch, VP of Technology Innovation at Fair Trade USA, just that. Learn how your nonprofit, regardless of the size, can aim for the same scale in this week's episode of Using the Whole Whale.
June 1, 2018
What is the point of a firewall when you're employees leave the back door open? This short rant from Chief Whaler George Weiner discusses some super simple things your employees can to protect against 90% of the cyber attacks out there.
May 17, 2018
How are we using private information for public good? The General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR) goes into effect in the European Union next week, so now's a good time to be asking that question. This is more than the click of a button: This is a fundamental reevaluation of how we protect and manage our data footprint online.
We talk through the baseline of GDPR with Lucy Bernholz, Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford PACS and Senior Research Scholar at Stanford PACS (Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society).
In addition to being an expert on the impact of GDPR for social impact, Lucy is the author of the annual Blueprint Series on Philanthropy and the Social Economy, Disrupting Philanthropy, and Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution. She is a co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, and writes extensively on philanthropy, technology, and policy on her award-winning blog, philanthropy2173.com.
But first, a disclaimer
We're not lawyers. Lucy is not a lawyer. We can't give you legal advice (on GDPR or anything else). This is an opening exploration of the known unknowns of this new regulation.
May 10, 2018
We talk to Craig Wiroll, the Gigabit Portfolio Manager with the Mozilla Foundation, about the Foundation's work to save the Internet… and maybe all of the people that use it?
If Mozilla is new to you, we won't say you live under a rock, but you live nearby… Their work in the Open Source community to connect and amplify the work that should be done to build a better Internet is unparalleled, and their programs have probably touched you in some way, shape, or form (Firefox? That's them). We talk with Craig about how Mozilla is working to increase connectivity and improve education both in the United States and through their work globally.
May 10, 2018
Bonus episode! George and Olivia talk through some of the highlights from #18NTC, the 2018 Nonprofit Technology Conference, including the state of play for Facebook, what we can look forward to with GDPR, and how we can apply lessons from a digital newsroom for nonprofit communications. We may have also had a few sazeracs.
May 3, 2018
In our final Live from SXSW episode (for 2018 at least), Olivia speaks with Sasha Samochina of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. While everyone else was at Westworld, Olivia talks about the Wild West of VR with Sasha, one of the JPL's Immersive Visualization Producers in Pasadena, CA.
As the former head Media Producer at the Field Museum of Naural History, Sasha joined NASA full of content, GIFs, and videos for both @NASAJPL and @MarsCuriosity, before entering the world of 360 video, VR, and AR, which she has pioneered for NASA while also creating immersive experiences scientists and engineers on Earth to further NASA's work in space. In short, she's Olivia's kind of people, and she's our kind of people, inspiring nonprofits and social impact organizations to think: How can we attach a camera to our own Mars Curiosity Rovers?
April 27, 2018
The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) reported that $101M was raised in 2017 by federal employees, this represents a 40% or $66M decline in funds raised for nonprofits. In 2009, this same program raised over $200M has steadily declined over the past years and Jim Starr, the President and CEO of America's Charities helps us understand why in this interview. America's Charities is a leader in workplace giving and have a true pulse on the details and factors that led to this drop.
April 26, 2018
Science, y'all. Olivia is (at least in podcast terms) still at SXSW 2018, talking with Dr. James Beacham, who was part of the panel Decrypting the Universe: Science and Art at CERN last month in Austin. The Higgs boson particle? The Large Hadron Collider? That's all CERN.
After answering some of the big questions like, "What artistic patterns might data inspire?" and "How do we decode nature's messages?", James sat down to answer our own questions on how he and CERN have been using digital media to answer some of these questions. If you're a science nerd (like most of us here at Whole Whale), this is the podcast for you. And if you aren't a science nerd, spend a bit of time on CERN's social media, and you will be.
April 20, 2018
When we see a conference session titled "Lean Data: How to Use Data to Drive Social Progress," you can bet we're signing up, and that's exactly what happened when Account Strategist Whaler Olivia Marlowe-Giovetti went to SXSW last month.
After a great session co-led by Emma Lalley of New Story and Twisha Mehta of Samasource (along with Yuliya Tarasava of CNote), Olivia sat down with Emma and Twisha to talk about the most pressing data questions asked by nonprofits without data departments and how the site traffic you're tracking in Google Analytics can lead you down the path of quantifying major social change.
Emma and Twisha are using the tools available to them towards finding scalable solutions to end global poverty. No big deal, right? As Global Impact Manager of New Story, Emma quantifies and understands the impact of the housing that the organization builds in the developing world. In her role as Senior Impact Manager at Samasource, Twisha handles a similar role in measurement and evaluation of the organization's mission to outsource digital work to unemployed people in the United States and impoverished countries.
