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Friday, April 14, 2006

Why do nonprofits not blog?

There was a comment in an interview on Netsquared that nonprofits that do not blog are not serious about finding new ways to engage people.

I have been thinking alot about this comment and the more I think about, the more I get upset.

Why?

I am trying to find a web position at a nonprofit. I have learned from an e-mail list that I am on that alot of nonprofits do not have time to do everything they would like to do with technology.

I know this is true for small nonprofits. One person has so many responsibilities that they can not take on more tasks. Maybe they would like to have a blog, but where are they going to find the time to create one and keep it updated?

I am not sure if the same thing applies to larger nonprofits. But if it does not, the only thing I can think of is that they do not know how a blog can help their organization. I hope through
Netsquared these nonprofits will be able to learn how blogging and other new technologies can help them.

6 comments:

Jenny said...

I work at a non profit and I blog! My boss and I went to a "new media" conference (that was free...bonus). She finally found out that I'm not the only technology-crazy person out there! She was really blown away by the potential of "web 2.0." So now I get to try all kinds of new things - including blogging. I'm very new at it...we'll see where it takes us.

Anonymous said...

Hi, Emily. I took a stab at answering your question over at Netsquared in a post called Scary Bloggie 4. (I wish they offered permalinks.)

As for finding a blog-related job in a nonprofit, you may need to use the kind of approach created by John Crystal and Richard Bolles, i.e., identifying organizations that could benefit from the unique and exact portfolio of skills you offer and then creating a proposal to show how you can help the organization better achieve its goals.

You probably already know about the perennial bestseller What Color is YOur Parachute? This book by John Crystal's business partner, Nella Barkley, may be helpful.

Patricia Wilcox, LCSW said...

Hi Emily. I have started a blog at my non-profit, a child welfare treatment agency. It can be found at:
http://traumatreatment.blogspot.com/
I would love for it to become more interactive, and to connect with others who are doing child and family treatment or trauma treatment. I have found few people in my work world who know anything about blogging. I am enjoying learning more about it.

Anonymous said...

We're a very small nonprofit. We started two blogs on our website last September and saw a 200% increase in traffic almost immediately. The trick is, I never called it a "blog." We have an advocacy-focused blog and a news & information-focused blog and those sections are simply called "News" and "Advocacy". We have people within the organization whose primary responsibility is to keep their respective blogs going. They don't get stale.

We don't get a lot of comments on our blogs, but that's okay. I can tell by the stats (both in direct hits and Feedburner traffic) that people are reading and coming back and that's enough for now.

Trey Reeme said...

Emily,

We recently had a discussion in the comments of our Open Source CU blog about why credit unions aren't yet embracing blogs as a communication tool with their members.

Our commenter stated: "The discussions around blogging in our CU center around: 'Are we ready – culturally – to be open about all operations within our organization.' – are we really ready to walk the walk. The great thing about blogging is the ability to have an open and honest conversation with the consumer in a public & semi-permanent forum. We believe that at least some groups of consumers would welcome the opportunity to get up-close and personal – but are we organizationally ready to be that open, even when our consumers identify a flaw or fault?"

Kudos for asking the question to your readers and to the Netsquared community - sorry it's taken me so long to post this comment!

Anonymous said...

Hi~thought re: why NPs don't blog more...there's not adequately demonstratable ROI re: blogging. Takes a lot of time that could be delivering services or directly solving a problem. To me blogging and reading blogs is super fun, but in a sort of guilty pleasure self-indulgent way, the information you glean or share certainly isn't time-effective. Not to mention finding info, which can take hours (even with tags and stuff b.marked--and even if you keep your sphere and attention really focused to a manageable clique of people), and NP staff generally don't have hours to spare...