Two Social Media Technologies That Will Transform the Nonprofit World

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1. Content.Cloud.0

Problem:  In large metropolitan area X, each of three nonprofit organizations wants to create the online portal for neighborhood-level indicators.

Analysis:  The idea behind a portal is that you try to entice the online user to come to you.  Once at your site, she can benefit from your content and online tools.

The downside:  The user experience is unpleasant because she has to go to your site to find the most accurate data about poverty, another site to find the newest statistics on crime, and a third to track city investments in her neighborhood.

Solution: Content.Cloud.0 is a new social media technology that enables nonprofits to share their content with one another easily.  This new de-portalization tool can be implemented using existing MOU technologies and other B2B instruments.

Here’s how it works:  A group of content creators/providers working in a given area (e.g, neighborhood indicators) agrees to share online content and tools with one another.

This new technology enables online users to find whatever content they’re looking for at their favorite port of entry into the online space, avoiding the hassles of site specialization.  Content.Cloud.0 builds on late 20^th century “SharIng” technologies.

2. CLOUTsourcing

Problem:  During the great healthcare debates of 2009 and early 2010, political will from above met limited agitation from below, leading to legislation that fell short of many activists’ hopes for universal health coverage.

Analysis:  Many of us advocates for low-income communities were sitting on our hands, either because healthcare wasn’t our issue or because we were in the middle of some other campaign.  It was clear, however, that the ability to access quality healthcare would affect the destinies of low-income people for years to come.  The healthcare debate was happening nationally and legislation was being debated in Congress.  Reason dictated we drop whatever else we were doing and get behind this issue.

The downside:  This didn’t happen to any significant degree.

Solution: CLOUTsourcing is a new social media tool that enables advocates to coordinate their actions for greater effect and the greater good.  CloutScourcing can be implemented using existing P2P technologies such as Meetings, Electronic Mail, or Picking Up the Phone and Calling Someone.

Here’s how it works:  When an issue that deeply affects low-income communities is up for a vote in Congress or in the state legislature, and/or is being debated extensively in the media, all advocates get behind the issue instead of doing their own thing.  They offer to help the lead agencies involved by mobilizing their networks; educating their constituencies about the connections between the issue in question and the fate of low-income communities; writing op eds; etc.

Comments

[Lynneakin]

timely for the work I am doing -organizing the nonprofit sector. is there a good keynote speaker on cloutsourcing you would recommend?

[Andrew]

Why not use google tools to do this for free? They have a host of great tools for schools and non profits. http://www.teleco4.com

[Albert]

I apologize for being such a bad ironist (is that a word?). I was trying to poke a little fun at those of us in the nonprofit sector (myself included) who look to new gadgets and tools to help get us out of our predicament, the predicament being that we spend billions of dollars working on behalf of marginalized communities to little effect. The social media technologies I refer to already exist: they're nothing more than our making the effort to share information (in the case of Content.Cloud.0) and coordinate efforts (in the case of CLOUTsourcing). We can do these things simply by meeting, talking with one another over the phone, or commmunicating via the Internet. Problem is, we don't--at least not to any significant degree. It's not the technology that's holding us back: it's us.

[Melinda Lewis]

I got the irony, if it makes you feel any better! And I especially appreciated the latter one--it is so easy for us to forget that there are absolutely no shortcuts to the organizing work that must happen for communities, particularly those that have been marginalized, to be fully included in our policy debates. And I'm always amazed at how reluctant people are to actually call someone else, today, when the reality is that there are just no substitutes for building, and even painstakingly maintaining, the relationships that can be motivational and even transformational.

[Albert Ruesga]

You might be interested in reading this article on the views of Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion.