"Week Ten: Paczki Day," by Chicago Geek, from flickr

Emily Culbertson is just starting her Social Media Need to Know for Managers workshop this morning–her icebreaker: what are you looking for out of this workshop and what did you have breakfast? Listening to the intros, I had two reflections.

First, that what folks are here in need of is probably a decent slice of the nonprofit sector writ large:

• American Institute of Architects: Is social media for us?
• Barnabas Foundation: We’re exploring if social media is right for us.
• Family Institute at Northwestern University: we’re getting bigger and need to communicate in new and different ways.
• Bowerbird Communications consultant: I want to continue learning and educating myself on this topic.
• Respiratory Health Association: we do online fundraising, we have a dormant but reactivated Facebook page (just got the new FB plan going a week ago) and interested in new ideas and strategies and quantifying Return on Investment, ROI, for our CEO.
• Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law: we have all sorts of social media going on right now—Facebook, Twitter, a blog, etc. We are a little frustrated with effectiveness, maybe because we’re spread too thin, and want to streamline our work.
• Lakeshore Area Regional Recovery of Indiana: We’re seeking to use social networking to reach people who could give donations of money or in kind, to help our clients recover from the Lake County Northwest Indiana floods of 2008 and to identify new clients we can help; also, to identify how to make our existing media networking sites more effective.
• Midwest Palliative and Hospice Care Center: We’ve been doing Facebook for a year, recently launched Youtube channel. But I’m not sure we’re doing anything that’s making a great impact and reaching our target audiences. As we’ve cut funding to other work, we’re looking to get more bang from our social media work.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions (your thoughts? comments welcomed). In case you’re wondering why the paczki picture,  John from Barnabas Foundation said that’s what he had for breakfast … looks good, doesn’t it?