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Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Questions from NTC Blogging Panel

I was reading the questions from the NTC Blogging Panel. They came up with some great questions.

Listed below are the questions I would like to explore more. I will write about them either on here, on the Nonprofit Blog Exchange, or on Netsquared.

  1. It is important to know who your audience is, understand that it may change as you go along, who you attract. So how do we do this?
  2. What is your goal? To educate, build community, fundraise. Focus on one to start with.
  3. What is the true cost involved in blogging? What's the management time, how many hours, time is already short, now you want me to blog?
  4. What's the impact of blogging in a distributed organization with a lot of chapters, where they might write things which do not reflect central policy, and may reflect poorly. What do you do?
  5. What resources are there for blogging (see the right side of this blog!)?
  6. When thinking about how to generate content for blogs, there's often a lot of internal communication about current news that can be used externally - strategic. Target where communication is happening to generate content without doing new work
  7. How do you rally citizen blog armies or communities of bloggers around a cause?
  8. How do you get other influential bloggers to link to your org/cause's blog?
  9. How do you get people motivated around issues with blogs like the March of Dimes Share Your Story site does?
  10. How do you teach blog etiquette (the one person who makes it a personal platform - me me me )?
  11. What are the advantages between blogs and message boards? What are the differences between blogs, wikis, message boards, etc and how do I decide which to use? In combination?
  12. Are people using blogs as community building tools? Examples?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

These are good questions that are worth discussing.

I think that blogging is useful mostly for organizations who generate newsworthy items on an hourly or daily basis. A blog seems like a perfect format for posting this kind of information. An organization that has a legislative agenda, for example, could use a blog to inform readers about the progress of a bill and urge them to write to their elected representatives. Organizations whose work involves responding to events--legislative actions, trials, executions, government corruption scandals, natural disasters, famines, and others--would benefit most from blogging.

I think that organizations whose work is not event-oriented--those that do research or philanthropy, for example--would not benefit much from blogging.

--D. Rowe