Teaching Skills Is Easy; Inspiring Future Mentors, Less So

The number of entrepreneurship programs offered by colleges in the US quintupled from 1975 to 2006, and the number of classes on entrepreneurship offered increased twenty-fold in the same period. While some contend that entrepreneurship can’t be taught, John Warner of Inside Higher Ed argues the opposite.

Regardless, any startup founder knows that mentorship is incredibly helpful, if not necessary, in the quest for success. Incubators, for example, are increasingly in demand in part because of the support networks they provide.

Many of Switchboard’s most active users are in the tech community, and that’s a good thing because the communities we serve are heavily interested in tech and startups in particular. These communities use Switchboard because it connects mentors to mentees in a public and inspiring way. Tools like incubators, if they can be loosely defined as tools, and Meetup and Switchboard help communities foster cultures of mentorship.

Changing curricula to meet demand—that’s easy. Inspiring people to help others—that’s hard[er]. But it’s exactly what we aspire to do.

Turn First Generation Alumni into Mentors for Students Who Are in Their Old Shoes

Nancy Cantor, chancellor of Rutgers University’s Newark campus, recently called on colleges to work to cultivate talent in prospective students rather than merely select for it. She proposed that institutions establish “farm teams” for high school students to help prepare them for college.

Syracuse University, where Cantor worked previously, is already working to diversify its campus racially and socioeconomically. Further, their Working Orange project connects alumni with current students. It would be great to see something like the Working Orange initiative connect first generation college students with alumni who were once in their shoes. Statistically, it could help increase the graduation rate of these students just as administrative and peer-to-peer initiatives are already. On the human level, it would ease the burden of being the first in one’s family to go to college and give alumni a powerful way to remain involved in their alma mater’s community.

At Switchboard, we’re deeply invested in making these connections possible. We’d love to see a college or university use Switchboard to help meet the needs of first generation college students.

Finding Direction with Help from Your Community

On Switchboard, users post “asks” and “offers”—they ask their community for what they need, and offer their community what they have to give. But when you post an ask, it can be hard to know exactly what you’re looking for. This success story is about Stephanie, and how her community helped her find direction even when she didn’t know quite what to ask for.

Stephanie posted on Switchboard because she felt more comfortable contacting members of her community, even if she didn’t know them, than she did contacting complete strangers on LinkedIn. “I’m not great at talking to people, and I find contacting and possibly bothering people I don’t know to be extremely difficult,” she says. “Switchboard is home to a community that I love and am familiar with, filled with people who are either just like me or expressly looking to help people like me, which is immensely reassuring.” Switchboard provides a space online where members of the same community can feel at home.

In her ask, Stephanie wrote that she was interested in everything from library science to law. She didn’t know exactly what to ask for, but she reached out to her community with faith that someone would be willing to help. “When I posted, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect,” Stephanie says. “I knew my ask was a bit vague. After all, my whole problem is that I’m trying to find direction.”

Stephanie’s ask paid off—two people, Lauren and Steve, contacted her through Switchboard and offered her advice. “The really excellent thing was that they both helped me with what they personally could share while also directing me towards my next step,” Stephanie says. “It’s a pay-it-forward kind of situation, and it carries on way beyond just that initial post and response exchange.” Now that Stephanie has found direction, she is not only in a position to post offers for her community in the future, but invested in giving back to her community by paying it forward.

Stephanie has become a Switchboard evangelist within her community, and every new Switchboarder she enlists makes her community’s Switchboard more useful. Stephanie recommends Switchboard to her friends “not only to get them started in meeting people and practicing making connections, but for selfish reasons as well—the more people who get involved in Switchboard, the more information, and the more useful it is to everyone.”

Complementing Your Online Presence with an Offline Presence

A strong online presence is vital to any attempt to get a community to adopt a new platform, but an offline presence can make the connections users form online tangible in a more powerful way. Some community managers use meetups to build community. We insinuated ourselves into our college community’s daily routine with public “office hours” held twice weekly in the library lobby.

(That’s Brent holding office hours. Note his positive demeanor and our tasteful sign.)

In our ongoing quest to convert community members into Switchboard users, office hours were a must. They projected the message that, no matter what the time or need, Switchboard is there to help.

We also regularly used our office hours as the staging ground for larger efforts, like the Valentine’s Day project pictured below. (We took on Valentine’s Day as the adopted holiday of our Switchboard. Grounding our Switchboard in the community calendar well complemented our efforts to ground it in our community’s space.) It’s a lot easier to get someone’s attention when they expect you to be there.

Most importantly, our office hours made Switchboard a part of the landscape, so to speak. Our community’s Switchboard wasn’t abstract anymore; it wasn’t only a website. It was present in the real world, and members of our community could ask us questions and make recommendations. Our being there to help and receive feedback helped the community feel ownership of Switchboard. We weren’t administrators—we were public servants.

The face-to-face interactions we had with members of our community, the traditions we founded and relationships we forged, taught us that Switchboard is less about interface than it is about love. (The two, of course, aren’t mutually exclusive, perhaps even the opposite, but you get the point.)

Liking Is Not Caring: Slacktivism and How to Combat It

A recent study out of the University of British Columbia in the Journal of Consumer Research has some insightful findings on the phenomenon of “slacktivism” or “clicktivism.” (The words are perhaps best defined by this UNICEF ad.) We think the study’s findings are important for anyone who manages a community in any medium, online or off.

Based on the outcomes of five studies, the authors, Kristofferson, White, and Peloza, conclude that individuals who engage it an act of token support (e.g. pinning a flower to one’s shirt, liking a post on Facebook) privately (e.g. taking a flower but not pinning it on one’s shirt) are more likely to engage in a later act of meaningful support than those who engage in an act of token support publicly or do not engage in an act of token support at all. However, their analysis offers a means to combat the negative effects of public token acts of support, that is, to prevent the onset of slacktivism: aligning institutional values (or perceptions of institutional values) with individual values.

That is, when an individual’s values align with those of an organization, that individual isn’t less likely to engage in acts of meaningful support after performing token acts of token support—shared values inoculate people against the onset of slacktivist tendencies. Common sense, right?

Of course, concerns remain about the weaknesses of public token displays of support. Publicly wearing a pin or sticker, or liking a post on Facebook, often satisfies one’s drive to contribute. People who make public acts of token support are less likely to follow up with acts of meaningful support later. The trick lies in fine-tuning calls to action to avoid this problem.

This is especially important to us at Switchboard. On Switchboard, meaningful acts of support manifest mean members of a community helping one another. Ask and offer, give and receive—generosity and meaningful interactions are the lifeblood of Switchboard. We find that cultivating a community culture of giving, in Kristofferson, White, and Peloza’s terms, aligning individual values with institutional ones, is the best way to encourage meaningful support.

Sharing Fast and Slow: It's Time to Stop Whining about Social Media and Start Caring Again

Sonya Song recently detailed the differences between impersonal, quickly-digested content and content that takes deeper thinking to understand in an article for Nieman Lab. She discusses how links with “BREAKING” in them get more attention, but not more engagement, and how certain language and styles are more conversational and thus engage more people. The title of her piece concisely defines this distinction: “sharing fast and sharing slow.” Under the umbrella of fast sharing fall lolcats, BREAKING NEWS, and other content that, like clickbait Buzzfeed headlines, attract unconscious attention but little else. Song argues that the category of slow sharing is composed of more human, direct, conversational content that requires more than a fleeting glance and offers more than a brief smile or moment of shock.

Given Facebook’s recent decision to privilege “high-quality” posts and news over mems and clickbait, it appears Song isn’t the only one thinking in terms of fast and slow sharing. These terms should resonate with anyone who has been frustrated with newsfeeds and timelines full of “listicles,” lolcats, sensationally inaccurate headlines, and doges. So content. Much traffic. Get this off my Facebook feed.

Perhaps it’s time to have a discussion, as much as we can have one on existing platforms, about what we expect out of one another when it comes to sharing content. We subtly define the limits and direction of conversations we have on the physical realm—no one wants to talk in hashtags or about kittens all the time—so why can’t we do the same online? In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx argues that money has become the mediator of all human interactions, with other humans and the world itself. The rest of Marx’s ideology aside, that point should resonate with anyone who has lamented the state of the world or been told to follow their passion rather than high earnings. Fast sharing has taken on a similar role. One meme is exchangeable for another, and hashtags blur the tone of different remarks into a sarcastic grey or self-promoting beige. Just as for Marx capital has estranged human beings from one another, fast sharing estranged us from our friends by subsuming meaningful conversation.

But Song’s article doesn’t leave us feeling all gloom-and-doom. She posits an alternative: slow sharing. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Robert Pirsig writes “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.” That is, holiness, humanity, reality, can be found in Facebook just as much as it can in the physical realm. It’s just a matter of recognizing how to use the medium properly. “Real life,” after all, can be a shallow cocktail mixer or a heartfelt one-on-one conversation.

Rather than spend all our time lamenting the deleterious effects of Facebook et al. on our social lives, we should look for ways to share slow, to establish meaningful connections and have real conversations with other human beings. At Switchboard, we’re trying to move away from pessimistic outlooks on social media and toward a workable solution. Where Facebook gives us an opportunity to tell our friends we “like” what they have to say, we hope Switchboard is a space to say, “I care.”