January 06, 2004

Weblog Strategies for Non-Profits

Christain Crumlish has published a nice post on weblog strategies for non-profits. Its a fairly lengthly weblog post, and he includes a variety of interesting ideas and approaches that could be used by non-profits (or other organizations).

I'm going to skip over all of the good ideas (you can read them for yourselves), and quote one of the slightly pessimistic comments he made:

For example, I'm on the board of directors of a literary nonprofit calledWatchword Press. As I was getting very excited about the possibilities in this area, I was talking to the publisher of Watchword and as I started regaling her with these ideas, I could hear her eyes glaze over (we were on the phone). It was that blog thing I'm always going on about... So these ideas won't be relevant for everyone, at least not right away, but the general steps outlined above are worth investigating for any organization.

I've been working with the concept of weblogs in a non-profit for about two years now, and I think I've seen a fair amount of the glazed eye's Crumlish refers to. Most of the people I've talked to don't exactly get the power of RSS and weblogs. And among those who do "get" it, many aren't interested in diving in and doing it. I've been struggling with the motivation question for a while now, and I don't really have a solution. Except that those who have been successful seem to be doing it because they get something out of it. I've found that writing about the various topics that interest me provides me with a great record of the resources I've found, and that I enjoy writing. I've also found that feedback helps. It's nice to know that people are reading what I write (the RSS feed for this blog is one of the most "hit" files on psesd.org, and I occasionally check Technorati). The comments feature hasn't really taken off yet (and, we've been getting more and more comment spam), that's okay. Although the general weblog project has been a mixed success at best, I have found great uses for the technology in the project management arena. Okay, enough rambling.