The Mercy Corps Blog

Blog Post Posted May 19, 2009, 2:19 pm by Floyd Mann

Embracing the social network

Last month my colleague Roger Burks and I attended the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco. Roger had been to the conference in previous years and helped lead a session on better online storytelling that was well received at this year's conference. As a recent migrant from the for-profit world, this was my first time attending a conference geared specifically for non-profits.

It was interesting for me to see how non-profits are adopting the latest technologies. My impression has been that in the past non-profits were slower to embrace technology than many companies in the private sector were, which makes sense when you think about it. A company that invests in hardware and software to reduce the cost of making their product gains a competitive advantage over its rivals. This allows them to slash prices and increase market share or pay a larger dividend to their investors, both benefits that are quantifiable on a balance sheet and sure to please shareholders.

But how do you measure the increase in "good" produced by a non-profit using more technology? Besides, non-profit's "competitors" are more often partners or friendly rivals than opponents. None of us want to drive the others out of business; we want to see improvements in the lives of the people we are serving regardless of who improves them. So without the motivation of undercutting competitors by improving efficiency (and frequently a conservative attitude toward responsible stewardship of donor's money rather than entrepreneurial risk-taking), non-profits have often been slower on the technological uptake.

That is changing for a number of reasons. For one, technology is simply more pervasive in our society than it used to be — the younger generation of employees being hired at non-profits these days have been raised in a world full of computers, video games and cellular phones: for them technology is just a part of how they communicate and do business. Also, the quality and ease of use of software keeps increasing, particularly open source and web-based software. While it may take an IT professional to set up and manage a network file server for staff members to share photos, just about anyone can figure out how to open an account on Flickr (including us).

Which gets me to the hottest topic at the conference: social media. The rapid adoption of social media and mobile technology is fundamentally changing the way people get their news, keep in touch with their friends and organize into coherent movements. Those of us involved in promoting causes through the internet were astounded to watch the amount of money raised online in the run up to the latest presidential election, to see the way candidate's websites went from being places to re-syndicate information to the very core of their campaign strategies. The internet as a tool for mobilizing involved citizens and raising funds for causes has come of age.

So like most other non-profits we're now on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and MySpace. We love keeping in touch with our supporters and donors in these places. That said, we'd also be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that access to the online "society" we're spending an increasing amount of time in is not evenly distributed.

While many of our donors can be found in these places, few of our beneficiaries can. Mercy Corps' Centers for Excellence are one of our attempts to keep the gap between technological haves and have-nots from growing too wide, but they are a mere drop in the bucket when compared to the tidal technological shifts occurring right now. So for now it is incumbent on us to represent our beneficiaries in this new online society. And we ask our donors and supporters for help making sure that those absent from these new platforms are not forgotten.