Rootwork Blog: Technology, Social Change and Nonprofits

To Causes, leaving MySpace to focus on its core community on Facebook made good business sense, but certainly those organizations left in the lurch on MySpace feel otherwise. Simply put, you can't rely on third-party, often for-profit services to support your organization's interests. While it's important to let go of your message, you still need to have control over your relationships — and in many online social networks, you don't. What would it look like if nonprofits and social change movements — which these third party applications often use to market themselves as effective and "good" — started demanding some openness?

Gurus, mavens and experts convey information — they tell you the way things are.

Organizers, conversely, cultivate leadership and facilitate a community's exploration of its vision — they offer a way to see how things could be.

Naturally, we need an accurate picture of how things are before we can strategize ways to improve them, and so it's important to continually listen to and learn from the experts, taking from them relevant information and measuring it against our own experience and knowledge. But folks involved in social change — online or offline — can't stay there. We have to be willing to step up and do the difficult organizing work that leverages our knowledge and experts' data into something larger: a movement.

If organizers limit themselves to seeing Twitter as a strategy in and of itself — without considering the strategy apart from the tool — they risk overlooking ways to run a more effective campaign on other platforms, or augmenting a campaign using multiple platforms. Worse, organizers risk giving supporters feel-good activism that quenches their desire for social change without actually moving the movement closer to a concrete goal, or putting any pressure on powerholders.

The strategy always comes first, and then you figure out which tool fits. The alternative? A forest fire.

Soapblox helps set up hosting and put a friendly face on a somewhat complicated piece of software. But there are hundreds of people working on DrupalDrupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) used for many complex nonprofit sites. Other examples of CMSes include WordPress, Joomla! and Plone. that aren't in any way connected to open-source hosts Bryght, Acquia or May First — and that's something that all of their customers benefit from: new features, continually-upgraded plugins and security fixes. Even if Bryght/Acquia/May First went out of business tomorrow, virtually all of its customers could find another vendor to take their system completely intact and get them up and running in an hour or two.