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Ideas for Your Blog

While you could use your nonprofit blog to track organizational celebrities ("Accidental techies -- they're just like us!"), your goals are probably more high minded. Consultant Britt Bravo offers some great suggestions for ways you can use your nonprofit's blog to help your cause (along with examples of success stories) in her 10 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Blogs:

1. To report back from an event or conference
2. To involve staff and take advantage of their knowledge
3. To involve volunteers and document their work
4. To provide resources and information to constituents
5. To provide resources and information from constituents
6. To give constituents a place to voice their opinion
7. To give constituents support
8. To create the media coverage constituents want
9. To give constituents the power and tools to create change
10. To reach potential donors

The vast majority of first-time visitors to your organization's web site will be looking for either 1) how to contact you offline or 2) an immediate answer to a very specific question, or both. If the information they're seeking is not on your web site's home page (or if it's not completely obvious where they need to click to find the information) then your web site is failing to nurture your relationships with current and potential stakeholders.

How did you get started on this idea?

By thinking about what happened to Chris Allbritton, the former AP reporter who got a blog and used it to cover the war in Iraq as the United States forces descended on that country in 2003. Allbritton raised $14,500 from 342 donors on a simple promise: send back from the war original and honest reporting, free of commercial pressures, pack thinking and patriotic hype. That was the assignment. It was new because it didn’t involve the media at all, but it was real journalism: war correspondence with an intimate feel.

Allbritton needed a plane ticket to Turkey (where he snuck over the border and found the war) a laptop, a Global Positioning Satellite unit, a rented satellite phone, a digital camera, enough cash to move around, keep fed and buy his way out of trouble. He went as an independent, representing only his readers, his backers, himself. He never asked permission to be in the country. He just went. The law was changing hands anyway.

On March 27, 2003 his reporting drew 23,000 users to his site, Back to Iraq. That was NewAssignment.Net in improvised form, because the journalist and a “paying” public got together and pulled it off. The people formerly known as the audience could, in a sense, hire their own journalist. Allbritton showed that it was possible; and I wrote about what he did in Columbia Journalism Review.

But I kept thinking about that episode because the implications were large. Alert publics hire their own correspondents and share the results with the world, cutting “the media” out entirely. This had promise. Meanwhile, Chris started stringing for Time magazine, and eventually became a Middle East Correspondent based in Beirut.

9) BlinkList "spaces" (coming soon)

Are you part of an organization, group, or class that would like to have a space to share the latest news or most important resources?  Would you like to have a free easy to use resource center or knowledge center for sharing and social learning?  Lets us know.  We are currently testing the ability to let any group / any user create their own space on BlinkList. 

How is this different from BlinkList.com? 

1) You get your own subdomain and 2) The creator of the space (subdomain) gets to decide who can contribute resources.  That’s right, you control who gets the key (bookmarklet to add information that is added to your own space).  However, all spaces are public and viewable by all.   

If you are interested in testing out a space, send us an email.