I continue to be baffled by how long it's taken nonprofits to catch on to blogging. In 1998, I was teaching web strategy workshops in which I described a number of strategies for failure on the web. The main advice that I offered was for nonprofits to adopt a news page format, with reverse chronological entries linking to deeper content on site and elsewhere online. It's such a simple concept, but very few nonprofits adopted it.
In my communication workshops, I still find that nearly every nonprofit organization is rather afraid of the idea of blogging. It's threatening to them to have their staff blogging, it's too much work to have their leaders blogging, and it seems irrelevant to have their stakeholders blogging. Obviously, I support all three of these blogging strategies and I think that together they represent a resurgence of a community based form of organizing, whether in support of social service or social change. But I think the vast majority of the sector isn't there yet.
The people who are paying attention are the nonprofit techies, which represents an important change. A few years ago at conferences I started asking my colleagues in the nonprofit technology field if they had a weblog. I guess I thought it was time, but people looked at me strangely, so I stopped asking. Sometime in the year or two after that, they started blogging. This is really rewarding for me personally, because among this wave of bloggers are some very thoughtful people who take a systems perspective to nonprofit technology. The online conversations that are starting around those issues are exciting.
There are a great many different possible models for nonprofit blogging. Right now, I think the highest payback for individual nonprofits is to...
For the full article:
http://news.gilbert.org/clickThru/redir/5801/15131/rms
I could not agree more.
Jack
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