Nonprofits, Blogs and Fear

Beth Kanter has a great interview with Michael Gilbert on nonprofit blogging.  Michael puts his finger on one of the key reasons so few nonprofits have jumped into the fray, and paints a bold vision for the future:

In my communication workshops, I still find that nearly every nonprofit organization is rather afraid of the idea of blogging. It's threatening to them to have their staff blogging, it's too much work to have their leaders blogging, and it seems irrelevant to have their stakeholders blogging. Obviously, I support all three of these blogging strategies and I think that together they represent a resurgence of a community based form of organizing, whether in support of social service or social change. But I think the vast majority of the sector isn't there yet.

...

There are a great many different possible models for nonprofit blogging. Right now, I think the highest payback for individual nonprofits is to use the blog model as either the main or the most important organizing paradigm for their web sites. But for some time now, I have been advocating that nonprofits work to release authentic voices in their organizations by supporting individual blogging, starting with the leadership. Authentic voices of that nature will open all sorts of possibilities for organizations who want to mobilize and engage people, whether donors or activists or volunteers. But the long term implications are a more network centric nonprofit sector, rather than the organization centric system we have now. It's pretty threatening on a lot of levels.  [Emphasis mine]

Michael's comments are relevant for all organizations, not just nonprofits, and for all industries, not just the nonprofit sector.  Every organization is going to have to overcome the fear of their staff talking freely with the outside world, and of their stakeholders talking directly to each other--and they will when the risk of invisibility becomes greater than the risk of losing control.  And every industry is going to have to come to grips with a environment in which connections between networked individuals matter more than organizational boundaries--and they will when organizations become less important in the value creation chain.

But by design, the nonprofit sector is insulated from the sudden economic jolts that can often unleash those kinds of changes in other industries.  This stability can help to insure that vital services don't ebb and flow with the economic tides, but it can also lock in outmoded ways of doing business, and prevent conservative, risk-averse nonprofit managers from being held accountable for their inability to adapt.  So I worry that the forces driving the innovative use of blogs in other industries today are going to take a little longer to be felt in the nonprofit sector.  There are encouraging signs, to be sure, but it's still taking longer than it should.

nptech

Comments

[Your Wife]

It's going to take nonprofits and our higher education institutions a loooong time to blog, that's for sure. Michael's comment about how blogging seems threatening accurately mirrors the responses that I get when I talk about blogging in academia. There's a lot of fear out there.

[Ed]

I really think it goes back to the insulation from market forces. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as I point out above, but it's keeping not-for-profit institutions from making changes that they should be making, but that their managers are afraid of.

Businesses weren't eager to start blogging, but they're doing it because it's a way to get closer to their customers, to engage them in conversation--and because their competitors are doing it. (Also because their employees were just forging ahead anyway.) I suspect that most nonprofits are going to have to be pushed before they jump, but once they do, they'll realize it isn't that scary.

[Joe Jurczyk]

Just as was the case with web sites ten years ago, the smaller nonprofit organizations are going to be reluctant to venture into blogging until the technology becomes more mainstream, the benefits of blogging become "obvious" or the organization has a technical evangelist on staff.

Joe Jurczyk
Grassroots.org
http://www.grassroots.org/blog

[Ed]

You may be right, Joe, but if so, it's a damn shame. The minimal cost of setting up a blog and the modest technical knowledge required make the medium a great fit for small, budget-conscious organizations. And given that small nonprofits often have very simple, shallow org charts, they don't have to fight an IT staff or communications bureaucracy to launch a blog.

But I don't think we have to sit back passively and simply watch orgs fail to act here. I think those of us who work with nonprofits have a responsibility to encourage them to take a look at blogging and at least think about what it might do for them. Lead them to water, so to speak.

[Your Wife]

I think you'd be hard-pressed to classify blogging software as new or cutting-edge. There are so many low-cost, reliable, and easy-to-implement options out there! And let's face it, creating and maintaining a blog is just a few small skill steps up from creating and maintaining an e-mail account. If you have sufficient skills to do the latter, you're probably going to be able to do the former.