Marnie Webb On Nonprofit Blogging

I'm continuing with this informal research of the nonprofit blogosphere by pretending to be Terry Gross and conducting "Bloggerviews."   In previous weeks, I interviewed nonprofits who have jumped into the blogosphere trenches feet first .... This week I wanted to get a bird's eye view  of nonprofit blogging from a nonprofit technology assistance provider (people who work with nonprofits on technology/capacity building issues).    Immediately, Marnie Webb came to mind because of her extensive blogging experience, her work with TechSoup/Compumentor, and writing about nonprofit blogging.   

The photo above is one of two places where you will find Marnie blogging.   She describes her blog as a "workish" blog and she posts as part of her day job, but also from home.  I suspect she can be found blogging during her ferry commute, too.    

1.  Why do you think a nonprofit organization should consider having a blog?  What do you think the benefits are?

It's not so much that I think they should have a blog as it is I think that they should practice blogging.  By that I mean that they should expose themselves online.  They should belong to listservs, comment on community bulletin boards.  I think that all organizations should track what people are saying about them, about the issues they are concerned with, about the communities they are concerned with and then they should comment on those when appropriate.

Typically, by training and inclination, I'm not all about spouting off on what "should" be done.   I try to understand the problem and present a range of solutions.  Attention though -- and attention translates to money, to clients, to promotion of your ideas -- is a problem for all nonprofits and I think blogging -- as an activity -- can help to provide some of that attention, not through PR tricks, but through making yourself and your opinions known in the course of doing your work.

The benefits?  Well, attention is one.  An organization becomes strongly associated with a topic not just in people's minds but in search engines and that translates to more attention.  I also believe it's a way to record the history of an organization.  Encourage your staff to do that kind of participation and you can draw that together -- the blog is simply the artifact -- and begin to build up stories about your organization.

Implementation, I think, depends on the goals of the organization. Does everyone in the organization do this?  Do you set limits on time, on topics?  Individual blogs or a section on the organization's website?

 

 

Note:  If you want read some of Marnie's colleagues blogs, here's a short list and hopefully if I've missed any, they will add the url in the comment section.

Greg Beuthin, ext311
Zac Mutrux, ext437

2.  In your mind, what does "readiness to blog" in a nonprofit organization look like?   What is the most important thing that has to be in place for a npo to be successful?

The organization has to be willing to put in the time.  Setting up a blog is easy.  Keeping it going and doing the kind of work necessary to make it successful is not. A decision-maker has to be enthusiastic about it and so does the person blogging (these may be the same person, but not always).  In my own organization, I encourage my staff to blog and then comment on their blogs or follow up on some of the ideas and ask them for help in implementing them.  It's important, I think, to offer that kind of encouragement.  To make sure people know that they are being read inside the organization.

3.  As you look at the nonprofit technology landscape, what is your sense of where nonprofits are in terms of using blogs?   What are some of the barriers to blogging?

I wish I had a good answer to that question.  The answers I have are the things that come out when I speak on this topic.  At this year's NTEN conference, the thing I heard the most had to do with message.  How do we make sure that people are staying on message?  What if they say something we don't want them to say?  Aren't ready for them to say?

With that in mind, I speculate that giving up control is a big barrier.  Time is also a barrier.

I'd like to get some funds or a partner to do some research on this question.  To get a more than anecdotal snapshot of the nonprofit blogosphere and identify the benefits, challenges, successes and lessons.

4.  Someone said recently, there must be so much drama and utterly bloggable depth to the nonprofit blogland ... Are there any dramatic moments that you have witnessed in nonprofit blogging?

Well, I think the nonprofits that open their blogs up to tell the stories of their constituency -- the March of Dimes blog for example -- are inherently dramatic.

5.  What is Compumentor/Techsoup doing to help support nonprofit blogging?

Frankly, I'm most interested in blogging as a gateway activity to a whole series of sharing that can happen online.  I think that blogs are one piece -- and probably the most easily accessible and implemented piece -- of an online strategy that can encourage collaboration through the installation of plumbing that makes sharing inherent and explicit.  There I'm thinking of things like wikis, social networking applications that allow you to eavesdrop on what your friends are doing (this is how I think of subscribing to a colleague's del.icio.us feed), and tools that allow you to find other people and organizations who are working to solve the same issues you are working to solve.

To that end, CompuMentor/TechSoup has produced a lot of articles on blogging and related technologies like RSS and podcasting.  They support me in doing quite a bit of public speaking on this issue -- a lot of our PR lately has come from talking with reporters about blogging.

We're also looking at the whole of which blogging is a part.  You can see our own experiemnts there in ConsultantCommons.org.  We've been thinking a lot about the issue of the Commons and how we can extend that toolset to groups of nonprofits working in specific issue areas.

 

Note:  Here are some links to few of Marnie's articles on TechSoup:
Weblogs: The Promise for Nonprofit Organizations  
Weblogs and the Nonprofit Sector
RSS for Nonprofits
Ready to Start Blogging?

6.  How long have you been blogging?  How/why did you get started?  Is your ext337.org your personal professional blog or is blogging a part of your job at Compumentor?

I found Blogger in January, 2000.  I can remember sitting in the office of friend's house in Malibu.  I'd had a website at that point for a couple of years and wrote short articles for it, updated the pages by hand. I thought of it as a magazine.  Via a now defunct site, design site license, I stumbled on Blogger and was blown away.  I set up the first version of crankreport, my personal blog later that same day.  I was a freelance writer at the time and so it made sense to me.  Anything that made writing and sharing easier made sense to me.  When I applied for my job at CompuMentor, blogging was listed as one of my hobbies on my resume.  Now, it's listed as a skill.

I describe ext337.org as my workish blog.  I do it at work and at home.  While it's not officially a part of my job, it's certainly a part of my professional development.  The blog is named after my extension in the office and it's part of my signature on the TechSoup forums.  Going to conferences is a part of my job.  Paying attention and contributing to listservs is a part of my job. In that way, blogging is a part of my job.

Technorati Tags: nptech, bloggerview, nonprofit,

Comments

[marnie webb]

Thanks for doing this, Beth. I had fun answering the questions.

[Ed]

Great interview, you two--thoughtful questions AND answers.

[Marshall]

Hi, thanks for the great interview. It was very inspiring. In my work with non-profits and socially responsible small businesses, some of the barriers I've seen to blogging include:

old operating systems and browsers; organizations who are not especially tech savy or well funded, but doing wonderful work, appear to me to often by 5 years behind the corporate and academic worlds. Things like WYSIWYG editors, some javascript programs, etc. are not even viewable on older OS or browsers. So people have to be convinced to upgrade sometimes.

General technological inexperience. In working with organizations made up of people with a little more life experience than myself (I'm 28), I find that they often have far less computing experience. So quick zippy little things I take for granted would never occur to them (eg, hover over a link and look at the URL in the bottom of your browser window before clicking, use ctrl-f to find your term in the page of text, etc.) It's little things like that that come from experience using a computer that really save time and make things like blogging more doable and easier.

Finally, this might sound silly, but I think there are a lot of people who have been socialized in such a way that they don't feel entitled to change the content of the web by contributing. This is part of the nexus of barriers faced by all but middle class, white men. I recently did a research training with a wonderful woman who does lots of great political organizing, but when she first edited and then saved a wiki space in wikalong she was beside herself..."I've never had an impact on what was on the web before" she said. I assume she's posted to forums, mssg boards, etc. But there's something about carving out your own unique space ala a wiki that has certain psycho-social/political barriers to it as well.

Them's my thoughts. Glad to find this interview via technorati tags, I'll grab your feed for sure. Best wishes!