Here's some great takeaways from a session I attended at the N-TEN Bay Area Conference earlier this year on pull technology. [Yes, I'm finally working my way free of blog backlog!] Nonprofits have access to a new generation of tools that can help to raise money, take action, and engage stakeholders. The session was driven by the fabulous Marnie Webb from CompuMentor and supported by Peter Campbell of Goodwill Industries. Here's how the Web 2.0 remix of data and content can help nonprofits:
"Pull" information, such as a Google search result, has been requested by its audience. "Push" content, such as a TV commercial, is sent regardless of audience interest. For-profit organizations have already adopted Web 2.0 pull technologies actively, as effective means of guerilla marketing, viral marketing, and word-of-mouth promotion.
Web 2.0 collaboration is uniquely suited to NPOs from one important perspective. A nonprofit is more likely to be focused on issues facing its community, rather than the success of its individual organization. As pull applications help to develop constant freshness and engagement with nonprofit constituents, issue awareness benefits all nonprofits in that particular community.
Tools to explore
Marnie stressed that nonprofits need to move into these tools now - as an early source of information, nonprofits can be built into the tools (e.g., become the expert on a particular subject), rather than one of the millions that come later.
- Interactive mapping. Google Maps is the new standard.
- Blogging. Online services such as Blogger and Typepad will publish your news online while enabling your constituents to comment directly upon it.
- Podcasts. Like Tivo, which time-shifts the delivery of broadcast television content, podcasts can time-shift audio content. Audio information is recorded at broadcast, then listened to at the listener's convenience.
- User tagging. Your audience annotates your content according to public taxonomies, making it possible to reach entirely new audiences. Del.icio.us (just purchased by Yahoo!) led the way.
- Photo sharing. Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) provides an easy way to post streams of photos, which can then be shared and commented upon by constituents.
- Community-ranked news items. Sites such as Common Times and Digg provide a platform that moderates and rates incoming news items from RSS feeds.
- Community news aggregation. The Port enables any organization to create a customized news feed for its constituents, making "newsmasters" out of webmasters.
What's next
Implementing pull systems allows you reach beyond your typical community, not just the organizations that already relate to your issue. At the same time, there's a lot of confusion about how these technologies help marketing - and in fact, about what marketing means in this new environment. As part of this online outreach, nonprofits must empower the folks who engage online to take action...thereby engaging potential constituents who are not online.
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