In preparing for my luncheon presentation for the Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association on Why Nonprofits Should Blog (Tuesday, June 7, 11:30 AM – 2:00 PM, at the Lenox Hotel in Boston), I have come up with a short list (below) of nonprofit organizations who have already established a presence in the blogosphere. If you’re in attendance next week (you can register here), you’ll hear me and special guest speaker, Emerson College faculty member Dr. Todd S. Gernes, offer kudos to these prescient organizations for being early adopters of an online communications platform that will likely have been put into play by more nonprofits than not come this time next year.
Nonprofit Blogs
Greenpeace
Action Without Borders
The Sierra Club
The Nonprofit and Foundation Advocacy Blog
The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Watch
The Freeway Blogger
The Oceana Network
Vermont Nonprofit CommunIT
Project-Blog
Wired Communities
Common Cause
Operation Give
Simmons College
Charity Governance
Dean Nation
Supporting Advancement
By the way, if you know of any other nonprofit-related organizations in the blogosphere, please bring them to my attention by listing them in the comments section below. I’ll add them to this list, and perhaps over time I can compile a long master list of nonprofit blogs to which we can all refer. Thanks.
Helpful, relevant links:
Debbie Weil on “which is more effective… a blog or an e-newsletter?”
Christian Crumlish (Radio Free Blogistan) on blog strategies for nonprofits.
B.L. Ochman on do you really need a blog?
Phillip J. Windley (Windley’s Technometria) on how to start a blog.
Michael Hyatt (Working Smart, The Alternative to Working Hard) on, also, how to start a blog.
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In preparation for my discussion of blogging and higher education, I found the following blog-site, which seems to support many of Bob’s comments.
http://nancyschwartz.com/nonprofit_blog.html
It seems to me that there’s a core of common wisdom about blogging and nonprofit organizations. One question that I have about the topic is this: what is it about the structure or ethos of nonprofit organizations that makes blogging an appealing option? Should nonprofits blog differently than for-profit organizations? How could we begin to answer this?
From Entrepreneur.com. “For-profit investors look for low costs, which means more profit for them. Nonprofit investors, on the other hand, are actually investing in a cause, so they want to see as much money as possible go toward that cause—not toward overhead.” Certainly, this seems like a key point. Nonprofit investors are cost-conscious and cause-centered. One conclusion I would draw from this is that blogs might very good sense in a nonprofit business plan.
From Thompson & Thompson [http://www.t-tlaw.com/np-01a.htm]: “Nonprofit organizations do not have stockholders except in some rare cases. In some states nonprofit corporations are simply known as nonstock corporations, both of which terms mean the same thing. Nonprofit organizations may have members instead of stockholders, although in many cases nonprofit organizations have no members at all. But the main contrast is this: in a profit corporation, the stockholders are the legal owners of the corporation whose shares they hold. However, a typical nonstock corporation has no owners in the legal sense. A nonprofit (nonstock) corporation simply owns itself.” We might boil this down to stockholders versus stakeholders. The structure of the blogosphere (distributed, decentered, and content-driven) can be a great way to build stakeholder value (in contrast to stockholder value).
From http://www.nonprofits.org. Summarizing here: nonprofits may have complex business structures, in the sense of having multiple lines of business, or more lines of business compared to for-profits of a similar size. Also, nonprofits typically rely much more heavily on volunteer labor. Conclusion: the fluidity and the highly distributed, decentralized nature of blogging fit well with the structure and complexity of nonprofit organizations.