My grandfather was a teamster–a team of horses teamster– in the teens and twenties in South Boston. When businesses adopted gas-powered delivery trucks, he stuck with his horses. As the adoption of automobiles became more widespread, Pop didn’t budge. He waited too long to make the transition to the new technology. When there was no call call for his skills, he spent the end of his working life in the stock room of the local grocery, no doubt pondering how a man in his 50’s ended up in a job populated by teenagers in search of walking around money.

Throughout 2008, I’ve been acting a lot like my grandfather when it comes to the rise of Social Media. As more and more nonprofits started asking us about Twitter and Facebook and Ning and such, we counseled them to wait and see what happens. We’d wave our hands and say “Focus on getting yourself to a stable and secure IT infrastructure, an easy-to-manage Web site, a CRM system, and a great email marketing service.”

That’s all still true. If you have inefficient, always-breaking-down systems, all the Twittering or Tweeting  in the world is not going to make your organization better. But, in the past four months or so, I think we’ve hit a critical mass. Your donors, volunteers, and–increasingly–some of the people you serve are using the Social Web. Right now, ignoring the Social Web is missing a big opportunity for extending your reach and depth of engagement. Soon, ignoring it will be like my gradfather’s horsebound intransigence.

So, I’ve been thinking about tomorrow’s Innovation Awards Luncheon as sort of like NPower Seattle’s Social Web coming out party. We’ve invited two of the leading thinkers about harnessing the power of the new social technologies–Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li–to speak to us all about this phenomenon. There are still seats available –join us for a couple of hours that will change the way you think about the Web.

As an aisde, I should mention that one of the Innovation Awards finalists, our friends over at the Washington Health Foundation, have been gearing up their use of “Web 2.0″ tools in the past few months.–with great results. A few members of the WHF team were planning on being in DC for the Inauguration last month, so they brought along some relatively inexpensive flip cameras. The results were quick and easy to produce, and pretty darn cool. Check it out at their Healthiest State blog.

My colleague Peg Giffels and I participated in the Pacific Northwest Digital Inclusion Summit held at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle  last week. It was a great day of knowledge-sharing and discussion hosted by the City of Seattle, Washington Communities Connect Network (CCN), and One Economy. I gave two back-to-back co-presentations that couldn’t have been more different.

The first was with Robert Bole, a driving force behind One Economy’s online media. We provided an overview of Web 2.0 concepts and tools and then, unintentionally, a sort of dueling banjos on the merits of various approaches to using social media. I felt little bit like Andy Rooney next to Rob’s great presentation of the benefits and upside of blogs and social networking and video-sharing. I found myself telling people “you can’t do it all,” “you should think before you dive in,” “don’t expect to increase donations two-fold.” This all seemed strange to me, because I thought going into the presentation that I might come off as hyping the technology. I’m a true believer in the possibilities presented by the Social Web. But next to Rob’s convincing evangelism, I felt like a plodding analyst with a lot of “on the one hand and on the other hand” stuff. Funny. 

The second presentation was about tech planning and nuts-and-bolts IT infrastructure with Derrick Hall from the City of Seattle’s Community Technology Program. Derrick does an amazing job of supporting all of the city’s public computers and providing technical advice to community technology learning programs throughout the area. Instead of alignment and engagemnt and messaging we talked about RAM and servers and firewalls. This was my change to be prescriptive and hyped up, while Derrick added the grounding balance.

I enjoyed both experiences and the strong feeling of shared purpose from presenters and audience participants. It was all over much too quickly. The city will be putting up all of the slides presented over the next few days on the Community Technology Program site, but you can grab mine right here: Web 2.0 Presentation | Wired/Tech Planning Presentation.