Uneasy Rhetoric

Marnie, who does deep thinking about how nonprofits can use blogging, social software, and their ilk, cautions about a trap in which it is easy to get caught:

I try to make the hook fundraising because I think that’ll pull people into the conversation. But utilizing social tools on the web—wikis and blogs and RSS—participating in web-wide conversations, all of that, it’s not about the fundraising potential.

As a development director, at least I have an excuse for getting caught in that trap. But Marnie’s post brings up something I have to tell myself constantly: nonprofit development is not just about money in, not just about marketing. While it has much in common with sales, at its core, it isn’t sales. Ideally, a nonprofit is engaging someone at a psychic level far deeper than they’d get from purchasing a new television or a new car or even a new home.

Social web tools are a great way to engage people in our too-busy society. I marvel at the kind of dialog nonprofits could be having with stakeholders, except that many won’t and probably never will. Marnie, in expressing her hope for “Web 2.0,” actually gets at why many, many nonprofits will never realize the full potential of these tools:

[Web 2.0 is] about opening up your organization so that you can achieve greater impact and create the change you seek by allowing your constituency to take pieces of your organization and make something out of them. It’s making the ideas portable and actionable. In the language of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it’s about giving your constituency the power to figure out their own next actions and the tools to do them.

In other words, its requires a level of trust and relinquishing of control that is beyond the comfort zone of “old media” types, and even many new media ones.