These often-overlooked skills support healthy long-term communication and round out the conversation in the preceding blog entries.
Let’s begin with the premise that adopting effective networking leads to long-term success. What are effective networking habits?
The answer is rooted in healthy communication. Walking around a crowded networking event, you might observe people sharing ideas, eliciting potential partnerships for future ventures, or marketing ideas to contemporaries. Academic institutions, career training professionals, and trade associations have all discovered the impact that networking events have on long-term success. These opportunities to connect with other people in the field have a profound impact on new professional relationships.
Why is this?
Globalism has shifted the view that goods and services, once solely a domestic affair, now amount to a worldwide network of interconnected consumers and merchandisers doing business.
Communication has also shifted with the advent of technology. Once defined by a series of delays in passing messages from one locale to the next, the parameters of business transactions and communication connectivity is no longer measured solely by units of time.
The industry paradigm in the early 21st Century is now defined by a system that transcends physical borders via electronic commerce, email and video conferencing communication and expedited intercontinental travel. The world has progressed into an age of digital media that is marked by the 24-hour news cycle whereby the spread of information is immediate, underscoring the high value of an interconnected network of global professionals represented through social media platforms such as Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter.
A Networking Professional
One of my assigned tasks at Baladna was to uncover opportunities to engage in research collaboration. The director highlighted an interest in maintaining Baladna’s relevance as an NGO at the forefront of Arab youth advocacy by maintaining a current source of publications on the home page addressing Arab youth participation in Israel.
I approached the project by looking into why Arab youth seemed to lack political will in Israel? Before I could delve into evidence to support a conclusion, I needed to understand who in Israel was producing research focused on Arab-Israeli identity. A couple scholars at the University of Haifa surfaced: Dr. Sammy Smooha and Dr. Majid Al-Haj. I sent an email query related to my assignment’s objectives and my position with Baladna and then requested a meeting.
My goal in reaching out to academics researching Arab-Israeli relations in Israel was to better understand how their work might be used in an applied setting, such as youth activism among Arab populations in Israel. The scholars’ individual responses both acknowledged the importance of Baladna’s work.
Attention to detail
My first project with Baladna was to identify short term and emergency funding using a master list of 200 potential donor organizations. One of my last assignments brought me full circle and included identifying donor agencies that provide funding to NGOs working on refugee issues.
Honestly, I rushed through this task as I was more focused on the crowdfunding project. The list I submitted included the names of 10-donor organizations that offered grants ranging from topics that addressed long-term educational refugee programs to short term humanitarian relief. Many of the donors included on the master list had been reviewed previously.
Instead of cross-checking the master list, I searched for donors using keywords to identify related projects. I identified potential donor organizations based on those credited in the project proposals, and I then visited the donor organization’s website to explore current funding opportunities.
