Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

I turned 50 last month, so I decided to launch a user-generated content contest. I challenged my friends to go to remix photos of me, make a birthday card and post it to flickr. I had 54 people enter the contest, and I only knew half of them. One even created a birthday blog for me. What did I learn? Relax, the parachute works - people can make great stuff. Just don't parachute in, though - become a part of the community first.

Nonprofits are in between the early adopters and innovators, trying to explore new ways to engage stakeholders. They have limited staff and skills, and they get sucked into the hype, some wanting it to just go away. Others argue we should go back to basics rather than focus on social media tools. But it's not an either-or choice. You need to support your basic needs _and_ embrace Web 2.0. We need community "technology stewards" - people who can help lead the way and help nonprofits figure this all out. (The term was coined by Nancy White.)

Here's a quick tour of some low-risk experiments.

The first step is reading blogs and dropping comments. You don't need one yourself - just start participating. Lots of nonprofit folks have personal blogs before they have professional ones, so they start building their social media skills independently. They start talking about work, though, and they become informal tools for professional development. Personal blogs aren't just techies- they're upper management, and they're using blogging to help recruit new people.

Then there are organizational blogs. They offer a personal face for the organization to the public and their donors. They also facilitate connected networks. Social change orgs like idealist.org and the Genocide Intervention Network are integrating social media tools with meetups, so people go out into the real world to make change happen.

We started using the tag NPTech to help aggregate all sorts of content related to nonprofit technology. Hundreds of people have tagged thousands of pieces of content - links, video, photos, etc. It helps the whole community aggregate resources that relate to it. This has led to a lot of ad hoc collaboration, like using the tag to identify nonprofit tech events, rate them, discuss them.

I'm reading the firehose and putting it into nice glasses of water. Not everyone has to drink through the firehose. Some people can manage the flow of content while others just focus on receiving the highlights.

I also want to mention personal fundraising - tools that let anyone set up a tip jar and generate charity. I posted a widget to help raise money for a Cambodian to go to college, and people clicked on the widget and donated a few dollars until we reached the goal. I took this idea, and used a Yahoo charity contest to plug another Cambodian campaign - send $10 to send a kid to school. We went out in the community asking everyone we met to donate money, and did it through our social networks. We raised more than $50,000, and Yahoo matched it.

Jumping into cold water can be really uncomfortable, but your donors don't shrink. Start with a small project, get used to it, and enlarge it.