Is your organization still trying to figure out how to use social media tools like blogs, Facebook and Twitter to communicate with clients, donors, funders and community members?

Are you wondering if it makes sense for you to blog or tweet about your services, news and events?

NPower has teamed up with Philanthropy Northwest to help you explore how Social Media can support your organization’s communication and advance your organization’s goals. Join us for the first offering of this exciting class on Wednesday, February 24th.  In Social Media for Building Community, you will:

• Articulate your organization’s goals, identify messages, and explore social media tools.
• Evaluate the time needed to employ new communications tools vs. their value for your organization.
• Learn practical strategies for effectively connecting with various constituents using Web 2.0 tools.

Join us for Social Media for Building Community on Wednesday, February 24th. Learn more and register to attend at npowerseattle.org/socialmedia

Much like how it became required for nonprofits to have a website about 10 years ago, it’s now becoming standard for every nonprofit to have a presence on social networks – typically more than one. But similar to how just having a website wasn’t enough to bring clients and donors in the door,simply having a Facebook page or Twitter feed isn’t enough to cultivate relationships.

Yesterday, we came across an interesting article on nonprofit social networking, from Social Media Certificate, which points out that few nonprofits are fully taking advantage of the interactive nature of social networks. They cite a study which found that nonprofits tend to post pictures and news stories to their social networks, but then refer those looking to get involved to an email address or back to their regular website.

On one hand, I think that this article picks on nonprofits while ignoring the fact that many for-profits are doing the exact same things. On the other hand, I think it presents us with a good launching point for discussion on how we are using social networks. What goals did you have when you set up your nonprofit on one or more social networks? Why have you hesitated? What successes are you seeing?

While volunteers can be a great resource for maintaining or updating technology at nonprofits, they also can present unique challenges for nonprofit staff. We usually spend some time whenever we are helping a nonprofit set up a volunteer project to make sure that it is set up in a way attractive for modern volunteers, but that is only the beginning of making sure that the relationship works well.

Our colleagues at TechSoup recently updated their great manual for helping nonprofits use volunteers effectively on technology related projects. This is a great resource for anyone considering recruiting tech volunteers.

I wrote up a tip sheet on this theme a while back that may also be helpful for nonprofits considering volunteers for a tech project. The NPower tip sheet is something that I wrote up as I first started coordinating our volunteer program here, and is advice based around what I was seeing from the projects posted to our site.

If  you are looking to recruit a tech volunteer, consider NPower’s Volunteer Matching Service. Open to all members, this program allows nonprofits to post tech projects to our website to be reviewed by our volunteers. We do not have any opportunities currently posted, so your project will have their undivided attention. Here you can learn more about this program and post a project. Feel free to email me at volunteer@npowerseattle.org if you would like to talk about the program.

Following up on an earlier post, two new agency profiles are posted on the NPower Seattle website:

• Arts Corps (Salesforce CRM)
• Washington Health Foundation (technology planning)

These, along with the rest of the library, are available at: http://www.npowerseattle.org/about-us/tech-impact.

We’ve been trying to make sense of the hype around “cloud computing” for a couple of years now. One thing that muddies the discussion is the plethora of different solutions that fall into the bucket hyped as “the cloud.” Some of it is nothing new—Gmail is cloud computing. And Amazon EC2 is cloud computing. And Salesforce.com is cloud computing. And while they all have some similarities, there are a lot of differences, too. Getting your email archives in and out of Gmail is so simple I can do it.  EC2 is a utility—you start saving money with EC2 if you are a smart-as-heck software developer, but it isn’t something your average small-to-medium-size nonprofit would be able to use and become more cost efficient. At least not yet and not without a lot of help. Salesforce is somewhere in between the other two examples. So it is a continuum, I think.

We’ve been shooting around links to dueling cloudbusting/cloudfluffing articles lately on our internal email lists. Some folks point to the New York Times‘ take on Twitter “hacking” and the perils of Web-based tools and ITIC’s survey showing a slow cloud technology adoption rate. Other colleagues reference Microsoft’s survey showing rosier adoption plans and “Look, even Bruce “Security Guru” Schneier says cloud computing is the future…sort of.”

The security issue reminds me of a big knock-down, drag-out debate that we had at Town Meeting in the small Massachusetts town I lived in before we moved to Seattle. The debate was around whether we should all invest in a town sewerage treatment system or if we should continue on our merry way with every household having its own septic tank. Nothing gets New Englanders more riled up than a nice public discussion of where to put their poop. My neighbors fell into a couple of main camps:

• Pro Public Sewers: it would be more efficient to have everyone on one system so that we can manage our town’s waste in a professional manner and individual households don’t have to worry about the integrity of their own tanks. And it is better for the environment since you can monitor one system rather than having multiple septic tank failures that can ruin our water supply and hurt wildlife.
• Anti Public Sewers: maybe it would be more efficient, but now you have a single point of failure that, when it fails, will be catastrophic.

There were variants:

• Anti Public Sewer Seniors:  why does everything need to keep changing in this town since that new development went in off Sweetland Farm road? Individual septic systems were good enough when this place was first resettled after King Philip’s War in 1657 (the Indians burned the whole thing down don’t you know); why isn’t it good enough now and I was raised here and I have lived to 82 years of age next October and I’m still upright and my house has had the same leech field in the backyard since Eisenhower was sworn in and another thing: you people need to tell your kids to stay off my lawn and why is there a limit on th number of videos I can take out from the library and why are we switching almost exclusively to DVD’s when I have a perfectly good VHS machine, thank you very much.

• City Slickers Keeping Up with the Joneses: well Medfield put in public sewerage in 1999 and their house values have increased 217% since then, so why can’t we have public sewers and house values as high as Medfield’s?

And so on. In the end, I feel like there is no one right answer to these sorts of things—there is the right answer for the particular situation, your openness to risk, to the possible reward, and so on.

What are your cloudy thoughts?

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.

There was an odd point in the first US presidential debate when Senators Obama and McCain got into a semantic argument about the difference between a “strategy” and a “tactic.” Do you remember it? It stuck with me for days afterward–partly because I thought the exchange indicated something about McCain’s temperament and partly because it struck a chord with me in my thinking about technology strategy and planning for nonprofits.

McCain groused “I’m afraid Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.” And Obama later countered with “That’s not true, we had a legitimate difference, and I absolutely understand the difference between tactics and strategy.”

What struck me then, and what I’m reminded of now, is this idea that strategy and tactics and plans are somehow at odds. In reality, they should go hand in hand. At least, that’s how we think of it here at NPower. An operational plan for technology is a great thing to nail down–many organizations don’t even have that. But without connecting technology planning to technology strategy, the plan often goes unfunded and unfollowed. The environment can change quickly, making plans that aren’t tied to strategy become outdated. This is even more likely in our current days of economic uncertainty.

Plan on having a strategy in 2009.