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"There are two sides to every story," my mom used to say to me when I was growing up. It was hard for me to understand as a kid. How could it be possible that other people might see things differently from the way I did?

Of course now I realize she was right. More and more, I see this in every area of life. It's a central principle of communication. You and I have different viewpoints, so even with a simple statement, what I say (ergo what I think I am communicating to you) may be different from what you hear (ergo what you think I am communicating to you).

Add to this body language, tone of voice, context...
Plus the fact that you didn't necessarily hear my words correctly (remember the "telephone game"?)...
It's a pretty complicated picture.

If I understand you and your viewpoint, then I'm more able to articulate my message in a way that you can understand and retain.

How do I understand your viewpoint? LISTEN.

The same thing applies to nonprofits as we're trying to change the world. For example, I care about climate change, but right now I'm focused on my kids. If you want to motivate me to act on climate change, there's a good chance you'll reach me if you talk about how my action can make the world a better place for my kids.

How can nonprofits listen when there's so much noise out there? Amy Sample Ward gives great and simple instructions in her post How To: Create a Listening Dashboard for your Organization. A listening dashboard is a central place you can easily aggregate all of the conversation you want to follow -- using Google Alerts, Twitter, blog searches, etc.

Personally, I was getting overwhelmed with some things coming to my email by RSS/FeedBlitz/Google Alerts, reading other things through Google Reader, and seeing tweets pop up on my computer screen every 2 minutes. How can anybody get their work done in that environment?! Now I can take a break a few times a day to check my listening dashboard and participate in the relevant conversations. This has helped me stay in the loop AND retain the ability to focus on my work when I need to.

Thanks, Amy, for this great idea and tutorial!

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Drupal 6.15 and 5.21, maintenance releases which fix issues reported through the bug tracking system, as well as non critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement

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