By Mark Hrywna
If the Unabomber were on the loose today, he’d be a blogger. Ami Dar, founder and executive director of Idealist.org, said that during the mid-1990s, when Ted Kaczynski wanted his manifesto to reach millions of people, the only way to do that was through a major newspaper or television network. So he mailed bombs to get attention until The New York Times printed it in 1995.

There is no barrier anymore between good ideas and getting them to an audience, Dar said during The 2.0 Nonprofit, a two-day workshop in Washington, D.C. about technology trends, sponsored by Idealist.org and the National Human Services Assembly. Two things that the Internet revolution has done, he said, is connected people and empowered the individual.

What’s it all mean for nonprofits? It means the Internet is “how you connect to your future demographic,” according to Holly Ross, executive director of NTEN, a membership organization of nonprofit professionals based in Portland, Ore.

“It’s cheap, it’s easy and it’s ubiquitous, she said, and the Web is no longer just laptops and browsers, but it’s moving toward mobile devices and Web-enabled phones. “Web 2.0 tools that are typically light, small and easy are going to be huge in this arena,” Ross said. But it’s also not just young people going online. Sure, the demographics of those using the Internet may skew younger in general, she said, but across every age group, there are more and more people accessing the Internet.

Nonprofits should ask several key questions when developing their Web strategy and what they should be doing online:

- Does it help you listen, increasing transparency and access?
- Does it start conversations, connecting your community to each other and to resources?
- Does it let users share, allowing stakeholders to create their own experience with the organization?
- Do your strategies integrate, reinforcing one another and supporting data transfer?

“We love to talk but we need to get better at listening,” Ross said, although some nonprofits organizations are likely to be nervous about what they might hear. She suggested nonprofits aim for ways to get people to talk and share. With so much information to manage on the Internet, nonprofits no longer need to be an information destination, but a conduit to connect with others, she said. When the Internet first started out, the goal was all about democratizing information, but now there’s so much information on the World Wide Web that it can become difficult to manage it all.

“You need to lose control,” she said. “You’re telling your donors you trust us to give $25 but you’re not trusting them to comment on the organization.”

Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Sprout -- there’s a lot out there so Ross warned against trying everything at once. Instead, start small and jump in as an individual. “Figure one thing out, get comfortable with it, and decide if you are going to keep it in your work flow,” she said.

There are some nonprofits that have employees who dedicate one hour each day managing their social networking sites, like Facebook. But when they first started out in their foray into social networking sites, they could have probably spent more like two hours daily to get it up to where they are now, Ross said. “It takes some time for these things to build,” she added, and it can become a little less appealing to some because of the fundraising expectations.

“We’re all figuring it out little by little,” Ross said, adding that it takes some time for these things to build up. Most new technology adoption comes in the fundraising and communications areas since innovation is more likely to occur there as a result of being able to show a return on investment (ROI), as opposed to program and IT. According to Ross, the fastest growing segment of NTEN membership is marketing and fundraising.

Ross offered one rule that’s true for everyone right now: Don’t treat Web 2.0 like Web 1.0. “You can’t start on Facebook and just use messaging, look for ways to get people to talk and share,” she said, advising nonprofits not to be afraid to lose a little bit of control. “Web 2.0 is about a conversation. Email is not a conversation,” she said. “When a person gets an email from you, or reads your static Web page, that’s you talking at them. And while some people are fine with being talked to, increasingly, people want to engage in a conversation instead.”

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This article is from NPT TechnoBuzz, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

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