Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

This actually was a post to the Progressive Exchange discussion list.

I love twitter, which in some ways surprises me, and in some ways doesn’t. It provides for me a sense of community, and a sense of what people I know and care about things I care about are talking about (in a certain realm, on other realms, not so much). I think that Twitter is, in many ways, a harbinger of the future - I think eventually, a lot of things that happen between people over the net will work a lot like twitter, even if it’s not actually twitter - social networks carrying short snippets of people’s thoughts, ideas and events.

But right now, at this moment, twitter’s demographic is both tiny and highly nonrepresentative of the population of the world. It is made up of people who are techically-oriented, largely affluent, and largely spend inordinate amounts of time in contact with electronic devices. We are still in innovator phase here, not even early adopters have signed on.

There is no question that you will get out of twitter what you give. And, wow, yeah, you can be highly successful in twitter. And so what on earth does that really mean?

If your organization’s mission will be greatly benefited by making connections with the twitter demographic then, yeah, twitter makes tons of sense. And organizations and movements can certainly use twitter to organize - I think that’s a great strategy - as long as the majority of those to be organized are on twitter - which is quite a stretch for most orgs or movements.

But there is no way on earth that I am going to suggest that a client of mine whose demographic is mostly women over 50 that they even spend any time on twitter in trying to accomplish their mission, or even get the word out about what they are doing. Should the communications person use twitter to connect with other nonprofit communications professionals? Heck, yeah, I could easily argue it will help them in their work. Should they spend a bit of time tying their RSS feed (if they have one) to a twitter account? Sure, why not. But should the organization as a whole put resources into a “twitter strategy”? Or even a social network strategy? I’d be really hard pressed to suggest that they spend much of their meager resources on that.

I know that people are doing fantastic work around the ways in which social networks can be powerful tools. And there are, for sure, some interesting case studies. And there are also some organizations for whom this makes sense, and who have the resources, and are ready to take good advantage of all of these tools, including twitter. But from my perspective, working with organizations that are sometimes having a hard time moving from a static website to a CMS, social networks in general, and twitter specifically, are a long way away.

I feel like what happens all the time is that we nptechies grab onto a new technology, and the first thing we think is that we gotta get organizations using it. And people in orgs hear all this buzz about this thing or that thing, and feel hard pressed and stressed to get on the bandwagon. And I feel like we don’t spend enough time thinking about whether or not it is appropriate - whether it makes sense, whether it really is going to benefit the mission of the organizations we work with.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Nonprofit Tech, Web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.