Anne Gentle and I attended two popular panels devoted to the challenges facing non-profits, and there was urgent talk about how to increase this to a distinct track in future conferences. The attendees seemed evenly split between those working in non-profits and those providing technology and support to those organizations.
The Future of Volunteers: Adapt or Die!
The first panel tackled how non-profits must harness the new social web to attract and maintain volunteers and donors. From accepting inspiring user-generated content to high-tech recruiting technology in the classroom, these non-profits shared how they're adapting to today's volunteers and donors.
National Geographic: (http://mywonderfulworld.org/) This venerable organization changed its mission in response to the web. No longer seeing itself as a disseminater of geographical information so much as an advocate and educator (for natural world and cultural preservation), it now seeks to be a platform for the world community to publish, share, and vote on authored content. They run camps to educate youth in the photographic and videographic technologies needed to produce original, publication-worthy work, and they're focusing on supporting public school teachers, whose funding and bandwidth for geography and cultural studies has shrunk. They're joining forces with related organizations, such as the National Park Service, especially as government institutions are more constrained in what they can do per advocacy. They're also engaging the public with scientific initiatives, such as allowing public participation in a genome mapping project, by which people can submit cheek swabs and information to the study and receive back a mapping of their ancestral journey across the globe. Facilitating personal engagement, coupled with the emphasis on authentic storytelling about minority culture experiences, seems to be the thrust of their new focus.
March of Dimes: (http://www.everybabyhasastory.org/) Storytelling, here, too, is the breakthrough change. The March of Dimes built a special bus with two filming booths inside, which it sends around the country and parks in family-friendly places to capture stories about difficult pregnancies and infancies; the website captures even more of these stories, and the impact on engagement and involvement in their fundraising events has been tremendous.
American Cancer Society: (http://www.sharinghope.tv/) Storytelling by survivors has been just as compelling for the ACS; they have built a new portal for story sharing because of its huge impact on participation. The challenges they listed were mostly on the side of the non-profit: fragmentation in volunteer handling, inability to list all opportunities comprehensively, and the lack of a volunteer strategy on the national level. Much of new media awareness they stumbled into, such as through the wildly successful grassroots “frozen pea” (http://frozenpeafund.com/) phenomenon: http://susanreynolds.blogs.com/boobsonice/ .
Specific advice:
Go micro: “micro-volunteering”, “micro-donations”: Allow people to make very small commitments of time and money, repeated on a regular basis.
Analytics: Advised to change approach to web analytics: downplay page views and emphasize the time spent on the pages and the resulting engagement you can document.
Facebook: Advised to build causes, widgets, badges, applications, and let your base do the rest.
SecondLife: Advised to do the work on weekends if necessary, until you can show success via metrics and establish the project.
Pimp My Non Profit - Real Non-Profits Kicking Ass with Online Technology
The follow-up panel shared stories of how non-profit groups have had huge impact on- and offline by using the latest web technologies - for pennies on the dollar. Participants:
World Learning: (http://worldlearning.org/)
Tech Soup: (http://techsoup.org/)
Beth's Blog: (http://beth.typepad.com/) - specifically, how she used technology to win Parade Magazine's “America's Giving Challenge”, fundraising for impoverished Cambodian children
Schipul: (http://www.schipul.com/)
Common Knowledge: (http://www.commonknowledge.org)
Successes and sites:
http://ilovemountains.org/ : interactive tool to show impact of your own power company on mountain-top removal and take follow-up action
http://processing.org/: open-source platform to program images, animation, and interactions
IFAW.org, http://www.animalrescueblog.org/ : user-uploaded content; advocacy + donation + community
Brooklyn Museum: free podcasting of lectures, repurposing of content, FaceBook application to share slideshows of artwork collection
http://maplight.org/ : rolls up data from multiple other organizations and lets users visually drill down on campaign spending, special interest money, and legislative impact.
Why student blogs failed at WorldLearning.org: the students didn't know each other before venturing out, they were too busy to blog, and internet connections were often too slow, even in developed areas.
Networking success 3 R's: Relationship-building + Rewards + Reciprocity
http://austinprobono.org/ : Helping businesses and organizations hook up
http://hub.witness.org/ : User-uploaded videos related to human rights crises, organized by region and issue
Just published: Mobilizing Generation 2.0
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