Netcentric Campaigns Fellowships

Netcentric Campaigns has been working since 2000 to bring thought leadership, experience, skill, guidance, and professionalism to the networking challenges that key movement leaders are facing.  Our work starts with understanding the vision of those seeking change, revealing the people who need to engage, reimagining the necessary alliances, and envisioning what a robust network could do together. In each case, we focus on how to implement concrete actions to build meaningful connections.

We help recognize and give value to other voices (sometimes easy, sometimes quite hard) and design practical and feasible ways to build new networks and network power that produces results.  Netcentric Campaigns new chapter focuses on cultivating skills, understanding, capacity, adoption, and diffusion of netcentric strategies and strategists.  To accelerate this, we have launched the Netcentric Campaigns Fellows Initiative.

The Fellows Initiative is designed to support and convert more people to work on Netcentric Campaigns mission to "transform the advocacy work of organizations and foundations by mobilizing networks of people to move change forward effectively and efficiently."

The Fellowship Initiative places experienced professionals with technical, policy, organizing and other expertise to do specific work in social movements to advance network building and upskill the Fellows. It consists of three components: Work in service of a network; Talent development; and participation in a supported and self-selected network learning program that provides network management education and skill development.

The Fellowship training will be based on modules we have developed in conjunction with our Field Guide for Network Managers which is an exceptional tool for networks to enhance and optimize their efforts to render social change.  The strategies shared in this guide have been field-tested by Netcentric Campaigns. The guide presents the Netcentric Campaigns methodology and provides a foundation for discussion and more in-depth work on network strategies.

Fellowship training and support helps to create opportunities to share the “how to” experiences and share skills advancement with others.  Over several sessions, the goal is to support the participants in gaining skills like these:

• Building understanding across the teams critical to the value of effective networks and how others use networks to create change.
• Producing clear and compelling language that can be shared with key stakeholders and staff.
• Developing and supporting a framework to evaluate and improve networks so that they drive ongoing progress and learning.
• How to provide help to critical partners to devise goals and scope for a longer-term, locally lead partner support program for their networks.
• Assessing a network and developing a network value proposition for users.
• Defining the network, the boundaries of the network, and steps needed to clarify the uses and limits of networks you are working on.
• Build essential practices, tools, and rituals into the operations to produce more network building.
• Clarifying the roles and responsibilities that individuals have in network operations and success.
• Setting up an evaluation and reporting framework for key stakeholders and investors.
• Collecting feedback and providing service support for the use of the materials
• Connecting practitioners to drive ongoing field progress with network skills and learning.

The Field Guide for Network Managers provides the framework and critical elements of a network.  It also details in many ways what to look for to support managers develop clear and effective work plans.  However, how to build the needed capacities among people is always contextual.

The Fellowship training and discussions will focus on developing context, insights and sharing “how to” lessons learned.   The training also focuses on skill-building and network practices that managers need as they work to connect people to support a social change movement.

Activities include:

• Fellowship Kickoff and Setup
• Conducting an online meeting to introduce the guide. Validate training and support needs with Fellow and key stakeholder teams.
• Working to support participants with interviews and training process design for designing & testing the Network Assessment survey in contexts of their work.
• Defining the needs and learning objectives and developing pilot ways to meet these needs
• Exploring pilots and methods for engaging Fellows in work including setting up Instructional Rounds
• Supporting Network Communications
• Project Management
• Reporting, Project and Business Review, Team Support

Netcentric Campaigns Fellowship Initiative provides training that reflects our fundamental driving principles and is focused on capturing perspectives and lessons learned from network building for advocacy for nearly two decades.   Netcentric Campaigns commits to working with Fellows and creating a network among them to advance the following goals:

1. Strengthen the civil society sector and each individual Fellow’s capacity to work in a distributed network and advance network building practices within nonprofit and social campaigns. Support network collaborations on complex important and widely distributed projects or campaigns.
2. Push power and funding out to new allies and new Fellows who not only want to build their network skills but also in some cases need funding to be synergistic with their personal missions and passions. Our goal is to drive network-centric models and successes ever outward by training and building skills among our Fellows, making the netcentric work part of their careers and spreading the influence of their skills into the organizations that hire and depend on them.
3. Embed the network approach to advocacy and essential network skills across key movements rapidly spreading the skills and lessons much farther than our organization can achieve alone.

Netcentric Campaigns staff and Board operations are rooted in five core values: (Supportive | Professional | Innovative | Cheerful | Empathetic). We integrate these values into our work. It is essential that all current and future Fellows understand our values and can operate in accordance with these values in order to maintain a conscientious and purposeful work environment.

The Fellows Initiative helps us attract more people from within movements to work on movements. The skills developed during the nine-month course develops a set of skills in our Fellows which in turn helps them to spread network organizing skills and advance the work of network building in social movements.

Each Fellow represents an important investment for our organization which improves Netcentric Campaigns’s practices to continuously attract, improve, and distribute the perspectives, skills, and insights needed to advance network-centric approaches to social change work.