Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

Kara Davis - Project Manager :

The new Internet is all about sharing, and nonprofits are just the types of organizations that should be shared. You have messages that people want to associate themselves with. You have missions that people want to support. There are a lot of organizations out there competing for donor funding; but, the more visible you are, the more likely you’ll come to mind when people are making their giving decisions.

The old Internet was about broadcasting your message from your web site and sharing links with friendly organizations in the same field in hopes that your audience would find you. It was about providing information and content to people who had heard about you through your offline marketing efforts and wanted to learn more. The new Internet is about ubiquity. It’s about reaching new audiences through web sites that have little or nothing to do with your organization—web sites that anyone might use for their own personal networking, knowledge-finding, or media-sharing. The best part is that, particularly as a nonprofit, you can usually sign up just like anyone else and use these sites for free!

Check out this one-pager from NPower NY and Seth Godin for six quick ideas to get started.

Depending on your organization, you may also want to start a group on MySpace or post a photo library in Flickr. It’s necessary to relinquish some control over context,* but once you get past that, you can use it to draw people back to your site (where they can see your content in context). Better to have them see it somewhere else than not at all.

*Relinquishing control over context does not mean that you give up your copyright. Check the terms of service on any of these sites before you submit—but, most allow you to retain full copyright over your original materials.

Ken Yarmosh - Former Staffer :

Brian and I did a blog workshop last week with Pamela Sorensen. Pamela’s the VP of Corporate Development at ExecutiveBiz, a local digital magazine written for Washington D.C. executives. She is a very well connected trendster who recently started a blog and was looking for some pointers.

Pamela’s blog (Adventures of Pamela) is quickly becoming a place to go if you want to learn about the upscale hot spots of D.C. Since I spend many a Friday night at coffee shops or bookstores (i.e., I’m not cool), what interested me was her recent articulation on why she’s blogging (Why am I doing this?):

Through a blog, I can finally have a place where I can direct friends and family to the stories, happenings, people, places, things, humorous situations, without writing it through multiple emails or phone calls. Not that I don’t want to socialize with my f/f, it is just easier to get everyone reading the same material at THEIR leisure.

The most important thing to remember about a blog is that it simply is a means to easily publish your content to the web. There can be a million and one reasons for doing so and that is one of the most powerful elements of blogging—its flexibility to help you accomplish your goals.

When it comes to blogging, there definitely are “best practices” but not a “one size fits all” mentality. The way your organization executes a blog will be highly dependent upon why you’ve decided to start it (see To Blog or Not to Blog?).