· Non-profit blogs: two perspectives ·
Yesterday, I gave a presentation at the annual Connecting Up conference for non-profit ICT professionals. The presentation, "Non-profit blogs: two perspectives", was a joint project with Emily Turner from Philanthropy Australia.
I originally came up with the idea of a joint presentation with Emily because I figured it would be much more interesting if I partnered with somebody who also ran a non-profit blog, and particularly one with quite a different purpose than ANTaR's blog.
As Emily and I discovered while working together, we both started out from very different places at our respective organisations. Emily had to champion the blog all the way at her organisation, whereas my organisation had pretty much decided that having a blog was an essential part of our online campaigning strategy before I even started working there. In addition, Emily's organisation is using their blog to make existing information more accessible whereas our organisation is using the blog to promote Indigenous opinions and to break down some of the assumptions that some people have about Indigenous people. So while Philanthropy Australia's is membership-driven, ANTaR's is cause-driven.
Photo: Mister Bacon versus Monsieur Tofu by zoomar on Flickr. Emily's notes are on the left (tofu), I got the greasy bacon.
Not surprisingly, Emily and I both opted to use Wordpress as our blogging tool, primarily because it is open source (so it doesn't cost money, it just costs time (lots of time if you want to skin it!)). It's also really flexible, and has RSS built-in.
A big difference between the two blogs is that Emily does most of the blogging at Philanthropy Australia, whereas ANTaR's blog is written by a few different authors, who are all volunteers and busy with their own careers and other commitments.
This means ANTaR doesn't have much control over the blog, hence our major learning from this experience: our blog will take a long time to mature. We need to be patient with ourselves! But from every failure comes a positive learning experience, and I think that's a pretty valuable lesson :)
Photo: Parasail 101 by mdumlao98 on Flickr.
It's ironic that Emily and I met each other through blogging (she wrote to me in response to one of my posts, over a year ago). I'd forgotten the fact until Emily reminded me yesterday ... it feels like we've known each other for much longer. It's been great to work with Emily, she's very creative and I reckon an upcoming star in our sector :)
Tuesday May 20, 2008
Categories: Event
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