How Hard Should Nonprofits Work to Keep Up with the eJoneses?
Writing on the Electronic Engagement Blog, Chris Labash, a business communications and strategy professor at Carnegie Mellon, wondered when and how the country’s impressive nonprofit enterprise would begin truly leveraging online opportunities. In the wake of the extraordinarily visible efforts of the Susan G. Komen Foundation to raise awareness of and funding for breast cancer research, Labash asked, "What other possibilities are there?"
Would they benefit from a Facebook page? Should they be using twitter? Developing their own social networking app? Be going mobile?
As we press forward into an increasingly connected world with the attendant rise in noise level, how do nonprofits compete effectively for share of voice, share of wallet and share of mind?
Effective websites are no longer an option but a necessity. Labash’s questions are viable ones, but for nonprofits, the issue is this: Is social networking’s payoff in terms of visibility and fundraising worth the resources — financial and human — required to set up an effective operation and keep it running? Many will say yes; I’m not so sure. These phenomena have such a short lifecycle — the time between the Current Big Thing and the Next Big Thing is growing breathtakingly small — that I wonder whether nonprofits would be better off engaging in technological activities that have the potential to be usable for more than a year or two. Keeping up with advances is critical; it’s what an organization’s publics are doing, after all. But resources are simply too scarce to chase after every single innovation that makes the cover of Wired. | 501(c)
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Technology
0 opinions for How Hard Should Nonprofits Work to Keep Up with the eJoneses?
No one has left a comment yet. You know what this means, right? You could be first!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: