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.
