Net2ThinkTank: What is needed to facilitate more nonprofits' adoption of the social web?
Britt Bravo - who writes the most prolific of the blogs on Netsquared.org - has kicked off a new initiative, a collaborative blog series called Net2ThinkTank.
She says:
"My hope is that your collective wisdom will spark new ideas for how the social web can be used for social change, as well as produce solutions to challenges that web-based changemakers face."
Continuing:
"The Overbrook Foundation recently published, "Web 2.0 Assessment of The Overbrook Foundation's Human Rights Grantees" by Allison Fine, author of Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age. The results of the study was that most of the organizations the Overbrook Foundation funded were struggling to incorporate the social web into their work."
Those who've worked with small NGOs, whether human rights oriented or not, won't be surprised that the report concludes, amongst other things, that:
• Overall, the grantees are firmly entrenched in the Web 1.0 world, meaning that they use the web largely as a source of information rather than a tool for interactivity.
• Most grantees are not taking advantage of easy-to-use social media tools effectively. For instance, only half of them have blogs, and only half of these groups allow comments on their blogs.
• Survey respondents and group discussion participants often felt a “common struggle” in understanding which tools are critically important to their work and were at a loss as to where and how to get help for selecting and using new social media tools.
Which leads to the Net2ThinkTank question - What is needed to facilitate more nonprofits' adoption of the social web?
The answer in my experience is to ensure that cornerstone skills are in place - a term I incidentally first came across in an article on Poynter.org by Amy Gahran. I think the term is a good visual for the challenge ahead and solves my longstanding conundrum of what exactly to call basic skillset,
What has worked well is to start off with some PC 101 skills that simply speed up the inevitably slow laggard-laptops/desktops … and then gently moving over into Web 2.0 without making the transition too obvious … you'd be surprised how this improves retention. My colleague, Cesar Volpe at Tactical Communications, and I have thrown together a handbook for this purpose which can be found here: http://e-intelligence.weebly.com/beginnersiniciantes.html (English and Portuguese).
Cards as a basis for conversation also work extremely well - David Wilcox over at Designing for Civil society has pioneered this - check out his ‘demystifying Web 2.0′ deck here and also on this Social Media Game Wiki created by Beth Kanter.
It takes time and determination. But once a few board members let alone staff have become Google Reader and Google Alert addicts the road ahead is just that little bit easier.
