Category Archives: teachers

How the Fair Trade Movement Got Started

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This is a great piece about the history of Ten Thousand Villages in Forbes.

I lived in Ethiopia on a volunteer assignment with Mennonite Central Committee and visited quite a few of these artisans in both Ethiopia and Kenya.  During college I studied Spanish in Guatemala and got to visit more small artisan shops in the countryside there that sell their crafts through Ten Thousand Villages.

I have way too many amazing baskets, jewelry, scarves, cups, and platters, and have given away even more items from them, as gifts.  This is an amazing store, the one that started the fair trade movement.

Take a look at the write-up to learn more about its history and how economic development changes lives by connecting small businesses around the globe to fashionistas like me who make themselves feel and look better through social buying.

The 2 Jobs of School

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One of my favorite teachers, Seth Godin, recently spoke at the Acumen Fund‘s Student Leadership Workshop.

In this video he inspires you to re-think what and how school taught you.

He says the 2 jobs of school are to:

1.  Train you to work in a factory
2.  Train you to want to buy things made in a factory

Now that the factory is dead, we need to re-train our brains.  The only way to do that is to try something, fail at it, learn from it, and do it better/different, and repeat.

Watch the video below to learn from Seth about what he wants you to do.

Debunking Myths About the So-Called "Developing World"

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Hans Rosling proves that development organizations should focus on health before anything else.  Watch his video below and test yourself on your own pre-conceived ideas about global health statistics.

This picture shows that Turkey has a higher child mortality rate than Sri Lanka, Poland higher than South Korea, and so on.  Did you know that?

How to Read Faster: 10 Days to Faster Reading

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Gen Y is great at handling information overload.  One of the ways we handle this is by scanning material to read it faster.

If you are not quite there on quickly scanning info on the web and print, this interview will help you.

I recently interviewed Abby Marks Beale of The Corporate Educator about how to read faster.

Here are the highlights from her book, 10 Days to Faster Reading.

I thought I’d share the tips with you so you don’t have to read the whole book.

Here is my audio interview with her if you’d like to listen to it, but otherwise check out my presentation below.

10 Days To Faster Reading: My Fast, Favorite Tips
View more presentations from Roxy Allen.

Women Who Tech and Social Media ROI

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Do you need a fantastic tech guru?  Who’s a woman?  And knows non-profits?

InterAction recently hosted a roundtable on the ROI of social media.  The presenter, Allyson Kapin, was excellent.  She founded Women Who Tech, which brings to together and empowers women in technology, which is absolutely necessary right now.  I want to go to their next event!  If you want to take your organization beyond interns on Twitter, hire her.

The most important thing I learned from her at the roundtable was that nonprofits should be involved in social media (Facebook, Twitter) for branding purposes only at this time.  Social media does not have enough results on return on investment to prove the time invested will get you volunteers or fundraising dollars.  Just set up your accounts on the services and get started to get your name out there and in front of the next generation of volunteers and donors.  That is all you can expect at this point, but it is necessary.  It’s about presence and branding.  Also, don’t build your own SM network on your site – go where the people are, like LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, whatever SM site may be popular internationally where your partners are, etc.

She did get us started on Social Media Metrics 101:

  • Measure Click-Through Rates: On links to action alerts, online fundraising campaigns, blog posts, latest studies, etc. You can track CTR’s by setting up unique urls/landing pages back to your websites or calls to actions.
  • Review your website referrals through a web stats package such as Google Analytics. What percentage of traffic is coming from social media sites you have an active presence on?
  • Number of friends/fans/followers on a particular social network.

And for the more advanced:

  • Bit.ly: A URL shortener that tracks information such as number of clicks, traffic sources, and even at what time clicks occur. http://www.Bit.ly
  • Xinureturns: Provides a dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media.
  • Run a report and you will receive information on Technorati, Google, Diggs, and links back to your website. http://www.xinureturns.com/
  • PostRank: Provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s best for blogs and websites with a lot of content. http://www.postrank.com/
  • SocialToo: A comprehensive tool for creating social surveys and tracking social media stats. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows on Twitter. http://socialtoo.com/
  • Summize.com: Tracks topics and hashtags, twitter user names, and top trends on twitter.
  • RSS Feeds: You can setup RSS feeds on social networks like Twitter, Digg, Flickr, etc.
  • Yahoo Pipes: You can create your own monitoring tools using Yahoo Pipes which lets you quickly set up your own RSS tracking, complete with filters. http://www.pipes.yahoo.com/