The Challenge of Communicating In A Connected Society (and what that means to Facebook Causes)
by Brian Reich | 24 Jun 2009, 7:24pm
[I wrote this post so that it could appear on Beth Kanter's blog. I am a fan of Beth's blog and of her work. Few people do as much as Beth to help support the work of nonprofit organizations and charities as they explore the opportunities that our connected society offers. Needless to say, as I thought about all the different issues and ideas that I could share, I felt tremendous pressure to offer something new and groundbreaking into the mix. But I also realized that one of Beth's greatest strengths is her ability to help make sense of all the different challenges that nonprofits and charities are facing in the digital age, and to guide them towards appropriate actions. So I decided to try and channel some of Beth's brilliance and throw down some concepts for how I think communications online must evolve. And I have decided to use Facebook Causes as the centerpiece of the discussion. Keep reading.]
I have been critical of Facebook Causes, almost from the day it emerged onto the scene. I may just be cynical, but I’ve seen too many technology providers claim that their tools will help organizations raise money, engage volunteers, mobilize action, or generally address organizational challenges in ways that only the internet is suited to do.
Facebook Causes followed the same path.
I have not been surprised that despite a robust set of tools and a smart alignment with one of the world’s largest (and potentially most influential) online channels, Causes has failed to realize its full potential. The fundraising results have been underwhelming. The number or organizations who joined causes in the past with enthusiasm and now voice frustration, or who have abandoned their efforts entirely, continues to grow. And, users, who are hoping to provide meaningful, measurable support to the causes and organizations they support, are increasingly looking at other platforms and other ways to become engaged.
But its not just Facebook Causes.
This same criticism can be leveled on any new channel or platform that claims (or has claims placed on it - ahem, Twitter) that it can solve the many organizational problems that surround nonprofits and charities or address the intractable social problems plaguing our society on their own merits. Its not about the technology. And though that point seems to be pretty well understood, and most people I talk with agree that the path to success should not be defined by technology, our friends, clients, and the groups we support continue to make the same mistakes over and over. Compounding matters, despite all they have done to acknowledge and address frustration within the nonprofit community relating to the performance of their platform, and their commitment to adding campaign-experienced staff to their team, the Causes team still talks mostly of new features and functionality.
If Facebook Causes wants to fundamentally change the way nonprofit organizations and charities operate, and the impact they have on the world, a different approach is needed. Their focus must shift from building new tools and waging higher-profile campaigns to understanding what motivates action and how to support groups in their work.
Here is how I would approach it:
The Five Phases
Online movements are successful because they marry the right set of opportunities for engagement with a level of awareness and passion among the target audience. More often than not, the issues that groups are tackling, while critically important are complex and thus challenging for audiences to understand quickly or obscure and thus not considered to be immediately relevant by the audience. The Facebook Causes platform doesn’t change that. The successful causes on Causes seem to start out well known, or bring in a high profile or strong brand. They are tied to celebrities or major events. Everyone else must work harder to spark a true grassroots movement (online or offline) and realize the results that the technology world, including Causes, have promised through their platforms.
Let’s review: Its not about the technology.
As I see it, strategic organizations must move through five phases of effort: 1) Listening, 2) Introduction, 3) Education, 4) Engagement, and finally 5) Mobilization. The concept of moving in phases is not new. And words like listening and engagement are commonly used in the communications and organizing world, But like anything else, its how you approach it. So, let me try and offer a little context:
Listening: Before you launches any aspect of an online communications effort, it is necessary that the organization understand more thoroughly who the online audience is, what their interest and willingness to participate in your efforts might include (and is driven by) and what will drive them to engage and take action around this issue. The rules are changing, so whatever assumptions or knowledge we have needs updating. Part of that is done through the act of listening (monitoring, etc.), but more importantly you must also hear what the audience is saying. Groups should be monitoring online discussions about their key issues, as well as the categories in which they operate (political activism, advocacy, etc) to uncover key elements and trends driving action and to determine ways to align their work with other related efforts to gain additional momentum. Organizations should assess what drove success for online, global, and activism campaigns to identify “next” practices — instead of just trying to emulate their efforts. And, it never hurts to organize ‘listening tour’ to directly solicit input and feedback from members of your target audience, or to collect first-hand knowledge of how they get and share information, and how that impacts your work. Having an understanding of what has spurred action in the past and how to adapt those lessons to your work will help inform everything you do going forward.
Introduction: Organizations need to find ways to put issues in front of their target audience – to generate interest, prompt curiosity, and begin to build awareness. And, as a part of that effort, it is necessary to introduce the key voices representing the organization and their work. This might mean developing content that helps to frame the issues in real-world terms for the audience (security, cost, upcoming elections, etc), or maybe holding a series of small meetings with interested individuals in target communities (online or offline). You can begin seeding the discussion about your issues by participate in existing conversations in social networking and community site or asking questions about your issues in public forums where the target audience is likely to spend time, to begin a groundswell of interest. And you can spur attention by reaching out to bloggers or encouraging your supporters to introduce some of their friends to your work. A strong introduction and increased attention will fuel everything that follows. Just know that these, and similar efforts, will be important first steps in securing support for a project that must happen before the audience can be asked to engage deeply or take significant action. And they will also take some time to complete.
Education: Groups often underestimate the complexity of their issues (not to mention the need for activation to be more sophisticated than typical online advocacy or fundraising efforts in order to catch fire and have an impact). The result - low levels of participation and limited impact. The solution - when issues are complex organizations need to spend significant time and energy educating people who are interested or become aware. You might consider creating content to help fuel some of the public discussion you need, or collecting and distributing questions from members of the target audience to help people understand how to get more deeply engaged in the issues. Regardless of what form it takes, the education work should be in place before any significant outreach effort has begun, to help avoid wasting resources or time. This will be necessary to get interested people sufficiently invested in the issue so they will take ownership and action to support the rest of the effort.
Engagement: Engagement can range from taking simple actions – signing a petition, recruiting a friend, etc. – to truly empowered citizens taking action to help grow and expand a campaign. And as the level of awareness and understanding about the issue grows, it will be possible to engage the audience more deeply, and to expand the reach and impact of the campaign further. But until that happens, moving quickly to request action (or financial commitment) from your audience won’t work. And that is what we are seeing increasingly from groups operating online. Someone signing up for your email list does not necessarily mean they are ready to donate or get involved. A single donation, particularly one resulting from a relationship to someone who is already part of your network, does not mean that your new supporter is interested in a relationship with your organization. And failure to recognize the desire for people to learn more, develop a deeper relationship, or take actions that require less commitment or investment only serves to alienate users whose wishes aren’t being considered. Engagement is complicated, and ongoing. Groups need to identify ways that the target audience can engage with your organization and participate in a meaningful way, then provide tools and support to make that possible — not the other way around.
Mobilization: Finally, organizations will need to identify ways to activate and mobilize its audience that go beyond what traditional things we are seeing online. Simply building a large list, sending emails to Congress, or signing a petition is not be enough. While those activities will have a role in the campaign, the types of online advocacy that have defined previous campaigns will not be sufficient to bring about the change needed to pass your policy plans. In fact, the very nature of Facebook Causes — and its ability to standardize and simplify the ways that audiences can get involved in issues online — now means that every group needs to find new and better ways to distinguish themselves and their work. I recommend using the earlier phases of the campaign, and the audience that is assembled in support of the campaign, to help identify. And make sure to help define your needs before looking at what the different platforms and channels can offer.
Summing up…
I say this all the time, but I think it bears repeating here:
Technology will play a critical and central role in the effort to raise awareness and mobilize support for organizations, and platforms like Facebook Causes provide invaluable tools to support that work. But, for groups to succeed, they must realize that technology is only one small part of the equation.
The internet has become an essential part of everyday life and changed the way we relate to media, information, and each other. Audiences of all ages and types are more connected, diverse, and sophisticated than ever before. Newspaper reading, television watching, and radio listening habits are changing constantly as new technology becomes available. And as a result the promotional and communications activities that organizations have grown accustomed to no longer work as they once did, and new options must be explored.
A strategic use of the internet and supporting technologies will allow groups to organize its base of support more efficiently and cost effectively than traditional organizing tools and methods allow. Your message has the potential to spread farther and be embraced by more people because of the reach of the internet and the role that technology plays in people’s lives. You have an opportunity to receive instant feedback and real-time measurement of the impact of your work, directly from your most important constituents. And, you have an opportunity to tap a bottom-up, grassroots-fueled revolution to expand the reach and increase the impact of your work. This type of community, when cultivated properly, will strike out largely on its own and without the need for strict management or control, and accomplish things that you could never do by yourself.
That is the promise of platforms like Facebook Causes, and all the other technology providers out there — or should I say the promise they make. Buy our tools or create a profile and our system will take care of the rest. But, to be successful, and lay the foundation that will lead to long-term online online (and offline) success, you must understand the best practices of traditional organizing and embrace the full potential the internet and technology provide. You must establish strategies that include all the various opportunities for online communications that exist today, so you can use them to cultivate and support a community, raise funds, or receive any other commitment from your audience. And you must define your goals and strategies before you pick your tools and tactics.
It is not enough to simply build a large email list or promote your activities anymore — you have to do something. Its not enough to create a profile on Facebook Causes and expect tens of millions of people to find their way to your front door. You can’t expect your audience, no matter how passionate they are about your work, to make an online contribution only because you ask - or to continue to make donations after they became involved through an event or opportunity. Those are all actions that you, as an organization define. Your audience, and particularly those who donate, want to be directly involved in your work and empowered to help support your efforts in the ways, and using the tools, they feel most comfortable with. You need to follow their lead. Anything short of that will make it impossible for the type of engagement you desire to succeed and will be a missed opportunity that places serious limitations on your ability to grow and meet the goals that you have outlined.
My challenge to nonprofits using Facebook Causes…
There is no right answer or silver bullet solution to this challenge — but everyone is facing it, and since the world continues to change, we will all be struggling to figure it out for a while. My challenge to you is this: tap into your community from day one – use your existing audience, and the audiences you hope to engage around your work, as partners. Invite them to get new ideas. Ask them to help you understand their needs and how to meet their expectations, so you can stop guessing. In essence, I am challenging you to integrate your online presence and the voice of your community into the very heart of the projects that you pursue, however and whenever that can be coordinated.
My challenge to Facebook Causes…
No tool or feature, no matter how incredible, will dramatically change the way nonprofit organizations use your platform. No new set of features will spur the Facebook audience to use Causes significantly more to activate on their interests. And no case study or campaign example, especially ones with high-profile partners or plans that include other media - like TV or print advertising - will serve as a good model for others to follow. Thus, my challenge to you is this: change your focus. Stop developing new features and tools until you have found ways to get your users more invested in the setup you already have. Find ways to better educate and support all your nonprofit members, as well as the users that power your success. I’m not suggesting you stop innovating or improving your tools, but the needs of your audience should drive that work, instead of the technology driving how the users are able to get involved.
I know nonprofits are struggling with all the changes in how people get and share information, and the opportunities that technology and the internet provide. I know that the Facebook Causes team wants to revolutionize online fundraising and engagement. And I know there is a huge community of users, as well as bloggers and consultants, experts, and practitioners out there who want nothing more than to support both groups in making this important transition. So there’s really nothing standing in our way.
Let’s get to work.
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A Giant Brain Dump
by Brian Reich | 23 Apr 2009, 10:26pm
I wrote this post off and on all day. I started to write about Facebook Causes and the challenge of getting nonprofit organizations to understand how to truly leverage the opportunities that technology, and the internet, and online communities can create. Somewhere along the way I got off track and launched into a broader discussion of social impact and how to measure it. But then I realized I didn’t have a great answer. I am not even sure what my point is anymore. Anyway, there is a lot here. There might be some nuggets of real insight. Its possible I haven’t said anything of value at all. Let me know what you think.
When it launched two (or so) years ago, Facebook Causes had the potential to change the way nonprofit organizations use the internet. It has not lived up to its potential.
The Causes team gave nonprofit organizations access to a toolset that could change the way they communicate with, engage, educate, and ultimately mobilize people in support of their work (whether that mobilization was around some kind of action, or in the form of fundraising, or whatever) and tap the incredibly powerful community that was building on Facebook in the process. But not enough has been done beyond developing and promoting a robust set of tools to put nonprofit organizations in a position to take advantage of Causes in a meaningful way. And so, two (or so) years have passed and Facebook Causes still hasn’t lived up to the expectations that we all had for the platform.
For two years, I have been telling nonprofit organizations that the Facebook Causes toolset was worth exploring — but that success (however you defined it) would require significant effort on the part of the nonprofit organization to figure out how to communicate effectively, promote the right kinds of actions, and cultivate strong relationships with the Facebook audience. I told them that the Facebook Causes team, while well meaning, did not have experience or insight into how nonprofit organizations work, nor did they seem all that interest in supporting their use of the platform. I have actually been delivering the same message to nonprofits about technology solutions (database solutions, content management systems, advocacy toolsets, email programs, mobile donation providers, you name it) for years. But they didn’t want to hear it — the nonprofit signed on, experimented a bit, and when they didn’t see an immediate, dramatic, or significant return they got frustrated and (largely) abandoned the platform. This story has been repeated over and over and over again.
When I first met the team from Facebook Causes I told them I was impressed with the platform, but that my experience working with nonprofit organizations led me to believe that they had some work to do still before they could have the kind of impact they were talking about. They needed more support for nonprofits, and education for the audience. They needed to marry the robust set of tools with content and guidance on how to take advantage of everything, and what success looked like. At each of the half-dozen or so events where I have seen the Facebook Causes team present, or display, I told them the same thing. Nothing. I know the potential for Facebook Causes to really succeed still exists. And I think the team that Facebook Causes is smart, committed to helping nonprofits succeed. But the list of things that need to happen is still the same.
Here is what I think Facebook Causes needs to really be a game changer:
Part I: Educate and Support
Facebook Causes must educate and support the nonprofits who use their platform: Most nonprofit organizations are still struggling to understand how to use technology and the internet to advance their mission. You can have the best toolset imaginable, but if the nonprofits who are using the platform don’t understand how to take advantage of the resources you are providing, it won’t work. The Facebook Causes tools are relatively simple, but communicating with, engaging, educating, and mobilizing audiences around serious issues and causes is anything but. The Facebook Causes team needs to be in the business of explaining how and why people take action, what motivates them, and how their platform can help to facilitate those efforts. You must also support the nonprofits, continuously, so that they can evolve their understanding of the online environment, the Facebook Causes platform, the audience and how it behaves, and similar. Case studies aren’t enough — learning that some other organization, using completely different messaging and working to achieve a totally different type of outcome, doesn’t provide much in terms of insight to a nonprofit about how to succeed in their work. In some cases this support can be generalized — a newsletter or blog post — but in most cases you will have to work closely with each nonprofit organization who seeks to use your tools and work with them to develop the best possible strategy for maximizing the tools.
Facebook Causes must educate and support the audience that uses their platform. People are willing to organize (online or offline) in support of an issue, give money to support a cause, or take action to help support an organization — but most don’t know how. You’d be surprised how difficult or confusing some of the requests organizations make can be. Moreover, nonprofit organizations often assume that the level of knowledge and comfort that their audience has is greater than it is. Your tools may make it easier to take certain actions, but they don’t help the audience understand what they are supposed to do. They need help and it is your responsibility to help them. If you are Facebook Causes, and your success is measured (at least in part) by the willingness and ability for audiences to take action through your platform, you need to teach those audiences how to get involved. You need to not only show them how to find the causes they want to support - but in some cases help them figure out what organizations are doing work they think is important. Part of that is functional help - explaining which buttons to click or how to fill in certain fields (even when something seems simple, a little extra bit of explaining still goes a long way). But helping the audience to understand how their support is important, and tying their actions into other opportunities to learn more, do more, is also critical. While that is really the responsibility of the nonprofit or cause, they aren’t always capable or realize the need (see above about how you should teach nonprofits as well), and so the Facebook Causes team must pick up the slack or the whole system will fail.
Whether you teach nonprofit organizations and audiences yourself, through white papers, podcasts, video tutorials, live events, webinars and conference calls, one-to-one tutoring, or other methods, or ask the experts (folks like Alison Fine or Beth Katner, among others) who do understand this world to do it for you, you have to do it. Whether you take responsibility for providing ongoing support directly to nonprofit organizations, or simply create a marketplace where consultants or community members help folks to navigate the challenges, without that kind of support, the nonprofits will never fully utilize Facebook Causes, and you will never reach your goals.
Part II: Focus on Impact, Not Activity
I wrote a post yesterday about how I believe the internet has made us lazy. I noted:
“Organizations send millions of emails but settle for ridiculously low open rates. People sign petitions online every day, with one click of a mouse, but those petitions rarely (if ever) change minds or impact the outcome of a vote. Organizations raise millions of dollars online, to cure disease or address hunger, but while the organizations and their reach grows, those problems and many others seem more intractable than ever.”
Basically, I think we have lost sight of what real impact looks like, how to change behavior, and how success should be measured. We’ve settled for low open rates, and dollars raised, and names on an email list — but while those are interesting metrics, they aren’t measure of the organizational missions being achieved. This is organization building and nothing more. If that is your goal, great. But last I checked, most nonprofit groups went into business to do something, not raise money or build email lists for a living. People are doing too much serving of the cause and not enough solving of the the cause.
I want to offer four thoughts:
Awareness is not impact. Organizations send emails, write blog posts, host events, give interviews, and a host of other things on a daily basis. They do this across dozens of different platforms online, and offline as well. And all of these activities are for the purpose of raising awareness about an issue or an organization. Raising awareness is important, and its a necessary step in the process of generating meaningful, measurable (and sustainable) impact — but it is not impact on its own. The fact that people know about the existence of a climate crisis, or the number of food insecure people in this country, or the lifesaving benefits of providing clean water does not result in any significant change in that situation on its own. Other steps are needed, and those steps won’t happen without some kind of directed action. So when organizations measure their success (and claim impact) because they have attained press coverage about an issue, or because they have built a new website or sent a large number of emails, that is not enough. And when we, as a community, applaud the organizations that have raised a lot of money or hosted a great event, we are only reinforcing this misunderstanding.
Measure your impact against your goals. The idea of measuring impact is straightforward, assuming your organization has a clear set of goals. For example, if your mission is to reduce the number of hungry people in the country, you should be able to easily track whether your efforts have had the intended result or not. Simply count the number of hungry people in the country before you mount your campaign and then measure again afterwards - the results speak for themselves. I’m not trying to suggest that measurement is easy, it is time consuming and expensive, and can be confusing. Real impact and measurable change can take time, sometimes generations, to occur, but if you are clear about what you are trying to achieve, the determination of whether you have been successful is not difficult to determine. And if you cant’ measure whether an activity is helping you to achieve your goals, you shouldn’t be doing it. That’s easy to say, but more difficult to make happen, i realize. Maybe you don’t have enough patience (or your supporters don’t) to wait that long to see a real impact, or perhaps you don’t think you can sustain the level of energy across your entire audience all the way until you realize the successful completion of your work. That doesn’t mean you should stop measuring impact, and working towards those goals. There is no single path to success and more than one way to measure something — so establish goals that can be tracked continuously and measured incrementally, so that you are make progress and demonstrate impact as you go. Just don’t let the size of your email list or the launch of your new website get confused with your real mission.
On a related note, there is also a need to measure whether individual actions — or the work of communities for example — are meaningful and contributing to the larger outcome. We are still a ways from figuring out exactly how to make that happen. Its necessary to measure the impact of these actions because without clear data, most of what we do to address causes is guess work. I believe, and have experience to suggest, that canvassing is an effective way to get people to show up at the polls for an election, for example, but what about the canvassing activity is triggering certain action, how those experiences can be translated to nonprofits and serious issues is far from an exact science. And when you start to look at online activities, we have next to nothing to measure against. My personal belief is that the online audience has grown weary of online petitions, and that most email newsletters from organizations are worthwhile (and that’s just for starters), for example. I have open rates that tell me only a fraction of the audience on an email list is interested, but no way to measure why someone does or does not open something, or what changed from the time they signed up. Similarly, I can watch how a piece of legislation moves through the legislature towards approval - but what weight an online petition is given by a legislature is unknown, and there are so many variables its tough to determine what pushed something past that tipping point. My gut says what we are doing needs to change, but experience and perspective only goes so far.
The data you need to collect. There are two broad categories of data that I believe need to be collected, and then analyzed, to begin to measure how individual and community actions result in social change. First you need to measure the activities that people are undertaking at each stage of a campaign. You must track all the different factors that contribute to someone taking a certain action. And you need to keep track of how the effort is progressing, whether people are doing X or Y, and what action on your end triggered that. In most cases, the tools for measuring this level of detail - especially online - exist (though too many of the tools only go one level deep when the really interesting information comes from deeper). But in some cases the tools have aren’t sophisticated enough, or aren’t designed to track individualized behavior, and marry it with personal information and similar. If the tools are available, the organizations don’t have the resources or the knowledge to maintain that level of detail. Its easy to see where the system can break down.
Second, you need to understand why people took certain actions. You need to ask what role your organization’s work had in their decision making, what outside factors influenced them, and what will be required to sustain their involvement over time (if not increase it). You need to understand what kind of environment your audience is operating in, what experiences they carry with them, and the like. This information is very hard to quantify, to apply a score or value to, or to measure head-to-head against other data. In most cases it can’t be. But that is where we are headed, towards the ability to customize and personalize every communication, and request for action, and measure of impact on a certain campaign or a broader cause. Without that, we may never know for sure how to really change things.
How to use that knowledge: Our tendency is to want to roll up that data, to find the larger trends and the broadest of factors that can be applied. But in today’s fragmented society, its reasonable to assume that every member of your audience is unique and the ways to spur them to greater involvement must be unique as well. Consider this scenario: we know that people are more likely to act if they get a personal message from a friend. And we know that people are more likely to act if the request is specific to their interests. With the proper tools and sufficient resources, we could keep track of what triggers people’s behaviors, who are their friends, and what type of message they need to receive in order to do something. But having millions of individual, personalized, issue-specific and detailed conversations is improbable. So what is missing? We need tools that allows us to scale individual conversations on a mass scale. We need to take the data that we have about people’s behaviors, their connections, and their interests and marry them together into a formula that churns out specific directives. We need to take the concept that Amazon.com has mastered in recommending books, or iTunes has developed to suggest music you should buy and apply it to social issues and support of important causes. But more than just an algorithm that measures all those factors, we need to find a way to apply that human ingenuity to make sure we don’t miss out on the special detail that makes things happen.
Part III: What Needs To Change
A few wrap up thoughts:
The news media is a big part of the problem. There are lots of people who ‘get it’ — consultants, nonprofit leaders, technology people and such. We are in the business of helping nonprofit organizations, as well as folks like the team from Facebook Causes, to understand the true value of technology in the context of communications, and fundraising, and other activities online. Its a slow process, but progress is definitely being made. At the same time, nonprofits probably give more weight to something in the Washington Post or New York Times (not to mention CNN, the Philanthropy Journal, and so on) than anything else. And in my experience, most of the news media doesn’t ‘get it.’ You read article after article about the tools and gadgets, or a big story about how one group raised a bunch of money or built a big email list. But those stories rarely get into the heart of the matter and those articles fall short of explaining all the factors that contributed to a set of outcomes. No matter, the message they send is readily shared and embraced by people everywhere, in the nonprofit community, technology circles, and even the broader audience — and their perspective is shaped. As long as the news media continues to tell that limited story, we are fighting an uphill battle.
Technology people need to change their message. One of the contributing factors to all this confusion and frustration are the Facebook Causes folks themselves. They are sending the wrong message to the nonprofits. I have been at numerous presentations by the founders, and other staff from Facebook Causes, and talked with them at various points directly — and at every turn they explain how easy it is for nonprofit organizations to use their tools to raise money. They lead nonprofits to believe that their tools are the reason groups have raised money, or generated a following, or similar. That message resonates, the groups sign on to Facebook causes, and they truly believe they have found an easy way to raise money or grow their organization. And by the time they realize that the technology doesn’t replace the other aspects of fundraising and communications, or that it will take time to cultivate a loyal audience and such, they have expended a lot of energy and reached a high level of frustration and disappointment. The result is a chilling effect across the entire organization, not just for Facebook Causes, but for the internet and technology more widely. Its obviously not just Facebook Causes that does this - technology providers across the board have been selling their tools as the solution to a variety of nonprofit communications, engagement, fundraising and other challenges since technology first came around. Maybe those technology providers really believe their tools will result in a quick win for nonprofits (I disagree). Or maybe they just know that it is effective marketing and care more about selling tools than supporting nonprofits in meeting their missions (I hope not). Either way, the unfortunate result is that too many organizations have invested significant funds in technology and not seen enough of a return, not enough nonprofit organizations truly understand how to use technology and the internet to advance their efforts, and few, if any, are paying attention to how communications and engagement and fundraising have changed as a result of our society being so connected and what that means to how they need to operate as a nonprofit period. The message that the technology folks push is often simpler, seems easier than the long hard slog that is relationship building and community engagement online, and nonprofit groups keep making the same mistakes over and over. That needs to change.
This will take all of us. The nonprofit community is fragmented. The technology community is competitive. The audience is distracted. And while that all happens, the issues that we need to address continue to get worse. We have the potential to transform the way we operate - as individuals and as organizations - to address these serious issues. But we can’t do it without true collaboration and cooperation. We can’t keep investing time and energy in one piece of technology or another, without considering what the outcomes will be and how we measure them. We can’t keep churning out emails and demanding actions from the audience without being able to demonstrate their their work is helping to achieve something meaningful. And we can’t keep talking at a tactical level - how to improve open rates, or how to get more people to give money — if we can’t figure out the bigger issues that will lead to real solutions.
I’m not sure where to go next, but I am trying to figure it out. So any help you want to provide or thoughts you want to offer, I’m all for it.
