Power from the People: Assessing the New Online Participatory Tools for Your Organization

By Colin Delany, December 2006

From
A very valuable resource for non-profits on the web.


New online participatory tools like blogs, YouTube, and MySpace can be powerful and valuable – if they mesh with your goals. Colin Delany walks through the benefits and costs of common participatory tools and suggests which are likely to be useful for you.



A few years ago, nonprofits and advocacy groups only had a handful of online tools to spread the word about themselves and their issues: if you had a website and an email list, you were pretty well covering the bases. Since the end of the dot-com boom, though, a whole new batch of applications has been simmering, and many have come to full boil in the last couple of years. From social media to blogs to viral marketing, these tools offer organizations entirely new avenues to find and interact with supporters and get their message out to the world.

full story>>

The Permeable Nonprofit

By Michael C. Gilbert, February 2006

from Nonprofit Online News <http://news.gilbert.org/>

(This is a timely article considering our workshop on Wednesday)

There is a set of related pressures and ideas converging on nonprofits, including collaboration and mergers, ASPs, Web 2.0, network centric advocacy, blogging, social bookmarking, and so on. Although mainstream commentators of the sector are not on this yet, this convergence foretells a radical restructuring of the nonprofit sector. Read this article for the big picture and consider our upcoming online seminar, of the same name, that will dive into the immediate and useful implications for nonprofits today.



The boundaries of traditional nonprofit organizations are under relentless assault by new patterns of communication and association that are stronger than the corporate model of governance and stronger than nonprofit brands. The media of this assault are social software and the network on which such software flourishes. The assault is fueled by the very passions and people from which the organizations themselves once emerged. Ironically, although it threatens to dissolve their boundaries, this assault is very much on the same side as most of the organizations themselves.

Unless the neutral, end-to-end nature of the Internet is destroyed -- which is hardly an idle threat, given the current political alliance of the venal and the clueless -- the network assault on nonprofit boundaries will fundamentally change the form and function of our organizations.

How nonprofits choose to respond to these forces is profoundly important. Changes are going to happen. Nonprofits can deny them, resist them, be damaged by them, embrace them foolishly, or embrace them wisely. We may look back on the coming ten years and see them as a period of evolution in the structure of civil society organizations matched only by the rise of the corporate model itself. It's incumbent on the leaders of every organization to make the most of these years.

full article >>

Golbal Microbrand by hugh macleod

Here is a very timely posting from gapingvoid by hugh macleod

October 11, 2005
the global microbrand rant



Since I first used the term here in December of last year, I have been totally besotted with the idea of "The Global Microbrand".

A small, tiny brand, that "sells" all over the world.

With the internet, of course, a global microbrand is easier to create than ever before. But they've existed for a while. Imagine a well-known author or painter, selling his work all over the world. Or a small whisky distillery in Scotland. Or a small cheese maker in rural France, whose produce is exported to Paris, London, Tokyo etc. Ditto with a violin maker in Italy. A classical guitar maker in Spain. A commercial sign maker in New England. Or a sheet metal entrepreneur in the U.K.

And with the advent of blogs this was no longer just limited to people who made products. We saw that any service professional with a bit of talent and something to say could spread their message far and wide beyond their immediate client base and local market, without needing a high-profile name or the goodwill of the mainstream media. People like Jennifer Rice, Johnnie Moore and Evelyn Rodriguez come to mind.

Nonprofits and Weblogs

By Michael C. Gilbert


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

2005 CCIR Conference presentation

Simon and I had a great time doing our presentation. We were both pleasantly surprised by the very good attendance, considering we were the last presentation on the last day of the conference. Our attendees were engaged and full of questions and comments, a pleasure to work with them.

I have posted the Powerpoint slides on my site here.. We will continue with this blog for a short while to give people a chance to try it out.

Jack