I'm just back from this year's NTC (Nonprofit Technology Conference) in New Orleans. The most striking and welcome thing for me was the richness of experiences in organizing campaigns and building constituency on the web today. Lots of detailed, honest sharing of experiences in blending email, one's own web site, and the social media to accomplish meaningful goals. By social media, I mean public resources such as FaceBook, mySpace, care2, blogging, social tagging.
Eve Smith's study of the Easter Seals' use of FaceBook fascinated me. She described getting started on its Act for Autism awareness campaign. Large, traditional organization, with significant chain of command, but acting experimentally and nimbly. This was an experiment and it met with modest success, but laid a foundation for good stuff to come. Please check out and join on facebook. Her central message for me thinking about folks we work with getting started with this realm was focus on fundamentals and do those things exceptionally well.
Beth Kanter organized that session and then in another one, gave her own account of winning the fifty days America's Giving Challenge raising money for Cambodian orphans. Beth is at the other end of the spectrum because she did this as an individual, but is about as connected and savvy about social networking and new media as anyone I know. Much congrats to Beth, and we all have stuff to learn from her. What made her talk so valuable was hearing her experience over those two months using and blending her blog, social networking sites, twitter, as well as traditional email and direct contact in her vast network. And it was a campaign, which entailed emphasizing and deemphasizing different ones tactically as the days flew by.
When asked how much time she put into it, I imagined her saying about half time, but she did it all in 1-2 hours work each day, outside her paid work. (Read about it on her blog. Geez, I wish I had paid more attention, but I can at least congratulate her here.
I could keep going, but I will mention just one more. Damir Simunic attending from Switzerland and describing an intensive multi-year process of developing a community of practice among researches involved in World Health Organization. Unlike the others, this was not a public awareness or fund-raising campaign, but the discussion brought out the same issues of tailoring the right combination of tools to motivate and organize effective involvement. His concepts of understanding who is at the edge of the network and how to extend collaboration among them were most useful.
What is striking is that organizations still need a web infrastructure as their home base on the Internet. This may be more extensive or less, more data driven or less. But to operate strategically today means blending that home base with the public, social media. If not today, then certainly tomorrow.
Most of these social media tools are free or near free for the scope of technology you get to use. The real challenge is understanding how and when to use them. The hours of work are not free even if the tools are. And that's what made this NTC so positive: an incredible spirit of sharing lessons learned just in the last year or so in how to do this work practically. There was a sense that the whole NTEN extended family is in this together to go beyond now empty slogans of a couple years ago to really make this all work and become comfortable to the communities we work with.
