the costs of blogging for NGOs
Posted on | September 30, 2009 | No Comments
There’s no charge, or very minimal charge, to start and maintain your own blog, but of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s free for a nonprofit to blog. There are significant staff time and opportunity costs to consider. However, I argue that those costs are worth it, not because of any eventual benefit to the bottom line, but because of the chance to achieve the organization’s goals. Let’s be honest: even if you get someone to be a loyal blog reader, the chances of converting that person to a donor, especially a donor of any significance for an NGO’s budget, are extremely slim.
I am particularly focused on non-local advocacy organizations here: organizations for which a large part of the mission is to improve laws and policies, and for which the supporter base is relatively disperse. The opportunity, then, is to reach those people who are going to contact their elected representatives every time you ask them to do so. Even a small group of very dedicated people can show staffers that citizens are paying attention to these issues, and can add pressure to sponsor a bill or take action on an issue. NGOs are public servants for a particular cause, not companies selling products. They are only as good as the service they provide.
Don’t blog because it’s good for the organization: blog because it’s good for the cause.
part II: blogging is for us
Posted on | September 30, 2009 | No Comments
Nonprofits typically take one of two approaches to blogging, as many have noted: they either shy away from it because it’s out of their control and they don’t understand how to make it work for them, or they set up a company blog and begin posting press releases. Neither is effective, and neither takes full advantage of the power of community on the web to catalyze action.
Many before have written and spoken about this with more authority than I. Lately, I have been promoting Seth Godin’s excellent thoughts on the subject as captured on his blog in this post and others; his blog is often highly informative and useful for multiple sectors. Another recent example is Jeff Jarvis’s recent post about “Googley philanthropy,” which he says should be “transparent, networked, collaborative.”
Here’s my take: the web (and blogging in particular) offers a tremendous opportunity to motivate a small group of people who would otherwise be extraordinarily hard to reach – because of limits of time and physical space – and to make them feel personally engaged and empowered to do something about the problem a nonprofit is set up to tackle. But the only way to engage people as a small, relatively unknown organization is to make them feel like they have a personal connection to the organization. Press releases never do that.
Smart, talented people in small organizations should have blogging in their job description, and not extended, well-researched pieces, but short pieces about the work the organization is doing, why they’re excited about it, and how people can get involved. Someone who is organizing a conference can talk about the fantastic speakers with whom they’re collaborating. Someone who is researching for a policy report can talk about the importance of the topic and the potential conclusions. This should be an expected, regular part of the organization’s work, and not because it in itself will bring donations or grants, but because it allows you to become a voice in the community of people who care about your issues. Those people will seek you out.
More than that, though, provide a place for those people to talk to you and to each other. Because platforms for your message are no longer scarce, but attention is, so cultivate it, and then use it wisely. Don’t take for granted the wisdom in the informal community.
When you empower people, value them, and enable them to engage with the organization in a concrete way – by hosting a local event, meeting with their elected representatives, or serving as evangelists for your message – they will work with you to make things happen.
part I: blogging is for me
Posted on | September 30, 2009 | 1 Comment
Today, kids, we’re reading Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters,” by Scott Rosenberg. Most of the book is about the first two parts of that subtitle, but the really interesting stuff is in that third part, about why blogging matters for us as individuals, organizations, institutions, companies, and societies as we move into a new digital age.
The first part is why blogging matters for us as individuals. Rosenberg argues that the web, and specifically blogging, is a tool for personal satisfaction on the individual level. My previous blog about my experience studying abroad in Bolivia was definitely an instance of personal satisfaction from blogging, but it’s not just the satisfaction of putting thoughts to keyboard: it’s connecting with people.
My point here is to debunk the idea that communication online is not legitimate, “real” communication. Rosenberg’s thesis in the early part of the book is that the point of the web, and particularly the culture of the web that later developed into blogging, is about “opening a channel between yourself and the world,” as he quotes Jesse James Garrett as saying. Basically, blogging matters because it gives us another way to communicate with the other people on the web, who are, after all, real human beings too.
Lots of people like to talk about how the web shuts down “real” communication by pushing all human interaction online, but there’s nothing fake about finding someone who shares a passion or a problem and starting a conversation with them. As creators of niche blogs have often found, you can sometimes find a more genuine, passionate, informed, and supportive community on the web than you might be able to find in “real life” because of its constraints of time and space.
So the reason blogs offer an opportunity for personal satisfaction is that they enable communities and conversations. I am particularly interested right now in the role of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations in these communities and conversations, and the role of the conversations in achieving the ongoing goals of the organizations. Part II is more on that.
what’s up with women?
Posted on | September 23, 2009 | No Comments
I don’t get Maureen Dowd.
According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.
A good friend sent me this article, “Blue is the New Black,” and asked me what I thought about its implications for happiness for both women and men. It’s worth a (critical) read. Dowd cites the General Social Survey and Arianna Huffington, who in turn cites the GSS and an abstract from two professors at the Wharton School- the abstract (pdf) has some useful graphs and charts starting on page 34.
The starting point of both pieces is that women’s happiness has been declining since about 1970, when the GSS started measuring these things, while men’s happiness has been increasing over that time. The conclusions include things like Dowd asking rhetorically, “Did the feminist revolution benefit men more than women?” and Huffington proclaiming that “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”
Apparently, all women are sad.
I don’t buy it, and here are two reasons: first, the articles don’t even mention the fact that most people (even those crazy people known as economists) agree that there’s no way to get people to be consistent about measuring happiness. I could have the exact same amount of happiness as someone else, but I might quantify it differently. Plus, women are constantly bombarded with ads and social messages telling us that we’re not happy, whereas ads for men are all: “you’re awesome! now be awesomer!,” which to me is a pretty good reason to suspect that women and men might describe their happiness differently in aggregate. Also, happiness and fulfillment are not the same thing, and it’s a huge leap from “less happy than before” and “more stressed than before” to “living an unfulfilled and empty life.”
Secondly, Dowd goes off on a tangent about how women take more medication for depression, and therefore must be sadder, while completely ignoring the fact that the social incentives for men and women to get treatment for mental health may be very different. So women may not be popping more pills because they’re sadder, but simply because it’s more acceptable for them to do so. If we’re gonna stereotype here, let’s just go ahead and say that it’s much more socially unacceptable for men to get help for mental health issues than for women, since mental illness still equates to weakness in many people’s minds.
I grant that Dowd might have a point with her idea that men are now less likely to have complete financial responsibility for the household and family, and that this might reduce stress for men. I celebrate this reduction in an unfair burden on men bringing home that good ol’ bacon. But I think the rest of her conclusions are significant extrapolations from the limited data.
As Anna North from Jezebel says, Enough With This Crap About Women’s Unhappiness.
one nickel at a time
Posted on | September 20, 2009 | No Comments
Chapter 5 of The Search is called “One Billion Dollars, A Nickel at a Time: The Internet Gets a New Business Model.” It’s a great description of the way that GoTo.com exploited the long tail of attention on the internet to create the business model that Google uses today. Battelle says:
Gross’s core insight, the one that now drives the entire search economy, is that the search term, as typed into a search box by an internet user, is inherently valuable – it can be priced.
This was a revolutionary idea, and it’s related to Chris Anderson’s core idea in Free, that of attention as a scarce commodity in the internet age. Gross figured out that you can make millions (or billions) of dollars with thousands or millions of transactions that net you a few cents each. The other important piece of Gross’s work with GoTo was a new business model where advertisers only paid when someone clicked through to their site, instead of paying for the basic advertising space, like you do in a newspaper or on TV. Gross realized that this model is significantly more accountable, and the accountability enables companies that might otherwise feel uncomfortable venturing into web advertising to do so, because if no one clicks, they haven’t lost anything.
So GoTo.com (which eventually became Overture) had a viable business model before Google ever did, partly because Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally loath to mix organic search results and paid advertising.
Google eventually warmed to the idea, though, and created AdWords, which is at the core of its business model to this day. After that, AOL decided to use Google instead of Overture for its paid search results, which meant Overture lost a $50 million deal. That was the beginning of the end for Overture, which was sold to Yahoo soon thereafter. Today, Google pretty much gets the credit for pioneering the new business model. But Bill Gross is still inventing away, and after reading this chapter, I wouldn’t be surprised if another one of his creations changes the way we think about the internet yet again.
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