Social Media in Service-Learning

Written by: Brad Lewis, (Program Officer for Learn and Serve America at the Corporation for National and Community Service)

Learn and Serve America (LSA), at the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) funded 10 Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) and six Institutions of Higher Education in 2008 to pilot the implementation of social media in service-learning programs.

Several years later, we learned some valuable lessons.

At the outset, CNCS recognized that with a small budget and a large country, we had to work through intermediaries to get things done. Therefore, this strategy was to test the use of the web as the ultimate vehicle to meet the masses. It had to do with reaching out to meet Americans where they were – on the web.

“93% of teens go online, as do 93% of young adults. Also, 74% of all adults go online. Further, nearly

three quarters (73%) of online teens and an equal number (72%) of young adults use social network sites.” (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2010)

There was little adoption of these strategies in community-based agencies and schools, while institutions of higher education were a bit farther along.

“When we started, there was zero support for using social media. We have learned so much…. Now it is integrated into our communication strategy and is helping us connect across streams of service.” (Angelia Salas, Michigan Community Service Commission)

The funding seeded innovations in connecting tools such as blogging, Facebook, wikis and Twitter with service-learning work in order to increase youth engagement, community collaboration, and best practices for high-quality service-learning.

What does this mean for the field?

· Using social media tools, appropriately customized, supported by skilled workers who have adequate time, and combined with training modules, can boost civic engagement and strengthen the organizations that use this strategy.

· Developing new tools or platforms is difficult, slow, and full of unexpected challenges. Yet many people express the need for new tools and are critical of the existing ones. The development cycle in private industry involves failure and restarting or revising original plans, so that is to be expected.

· It is important to use social media strategically and for a purpose. The way to start is not to say, “Students use Facebook, so we’d better do something with it.” The starting point is to ask, “What do we want to achieve? What tools do we need to accomplish that goal?” Then: “Are social media tools among those we need?”

Our CBOs summed it by saying:

Social media presents many exciting opportunities for community organizations to communicate about and advance service-learning, even with the obvious start-up challenges being champions for new ways of doing business.

They also found unanticipated positive impacts. One grantee noted, “Our intention was to engage youth; the unanticipated impact was how excited adults were.”

Last words:

“Just don’t jump on a social media site because it looks cool. Really think about your goals, your purpose, and your audience, and if that site will do for you want you want.”
- Erica Ricker, Heartland Foundation

Trends to come:

Scanning the horizon, we see: (this came from our Higher Education folks)

· Very heavy use of social media by young Americans, and positive correlations between social media use and volunteering. Declines in young Americans’ use of earlier media, such as newspapers and television, as social media has revolutionized.

· The “other revolutions”: Social media and youth have been important themes in, for example, the Arab revolutions of 2010-11 and the Obama campaign of 2008.

· Evidence that important service and service-learning organizations are not well served by the tools that the market provides. (E.g., The Phoenix Project’s focus groups found universities dissatisfied with web tools for service-learning.)

· Technological change is rapid--consider the widespread growth of smart phones and tablets--yet important populations are still stuck with old technology. Schools may only have computers sold in 2001.

· There is no breakthrough technology, no “killer app,” for civic engagement or service-learning.

The list of CBO social media grantees and a description of their Web 2.0 projects can be found at the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse (NSLC) website: http://servicelearning.org.

Learn and Serve America Community-Based Organization Social Media Grantees/Lessons Learned document - http://www.servicelearning.org/2008-cbo-social-media-grantees

Learn and Serve America Higher Ed Social Media Grantees/Lessons Learned document - http://www.servicelearning.org/2008-he-social-media-grants