Blogging for change

As the blog phenom gains momentum, non-profit organizations and their philanthropic funders are asking how they can use blogs to improve their ability to get their message out.  Some groups are also starting to use password-protected blogs for better communication within their organization or between funders and grantees.

Tomorrow night I'll be giving a talk to some people from the philanthropic community. It's titled: "Blogs and the Public Interest: Does Participatory Media Strengthen Democracy?"  I'll talk about why I left a major media organization to explore participatory media, why I think it's important, and how non-profits can use it.

I'll also be running a brainstorming session on nonprofit blogging at the N-Ten Boston conference next week. I've prepared  this introductory blogging handout as a basic resource guide.  It's free for anybody to use. It can probably be vastly improved, and I welcome suggestions.

I'm also thinking it would be interesting to build a public aggregator of blogs by non-profit and activist groups. Please list any you know in the comments section and I'll start putting it together as soon as I gain critical mass.

Comments

[marnie webb]

I started collecting npo blogs here: http://www.omidyar.net/group/compumentor/ws/nonprofit_blogs/

In addition, these profiles might be of use to you:
http://www.techsoup.org/howto/npostory_article.cfm?articleid=80&topicid=0

Finally, you might find some useful stuff here:
http://www.techsoup.org/weblogs

Hope these are useful. I'll be looking forward to hearing how the NTEN Boston conversation goes.

[Zack Rosen]

Check out

http://advocacydev.org/blogs/

Our blog (CivicSpace)

http://www.civicspacelabs.org/node

[michael]

http://www.progressivemajoritywashington.org/ (we use the front page as a blog)

[Jim Moore]

Hi Rebecca:

It might be instructive to look at an ecology of websights devoted to one particular problem. The movement to stop the Genocide in Sudan provides several active sites that work closely together in complementary ways.

1. Sudan: The Passion of the Present is a site whose purpose is to use open source methods, an information community and the daily responsiveness of blog campaigning to inform and stimulate the movement. This site is by design edgy and personal, with several editors who work from the US and the UK, and post 24/7.

http://passionofthepresent.org

2. The Save Darfur Coalition is a broad coalition of major religious and humanitarian organizations. It's site is closely associated with Sudan: The Passion of the Present serves a different function and has a contrasting design. Save Darfur's site is the online educational center of a coalition and speaks with a more measured and consciously authoritative voice.

http://savedarfur.org

3. Fight or Die is an example of a grassroots organizing site that anchors daily direct action in the streets of New York.

http://www.fightordie.org

4. The United States Holocaust Museum Commitee on Conscience is charged with preventing and stopping genocides. It has a very powerful institutional site that focuses on Sudan--and it's staff works closely with leaders of the other initiatives.

http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/sudan/darfur/index.php

5. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International sites to provide in-depth reports.

http://hrw.org
http://aiusa.org

5. Sudan: The Passion of the Present has an "Activists Workstation" that provides instant access to a panel of realtime news aggregation services ranging from Google News/Sudan to Sudan.net and the Sudan Tribune, to the very anti-US Islam Online.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=sudan&btnG=Search+News

http://sudan.net/news.shtml

[Liza Sabater]

Hi Rebecca,

First time here.

I publish www.culturekitchen.com and am a contributor of Radio Free Blogistan (from whence I came to your blog).

This past week I wrote this on the blog :

culturekitchen is not going to be mine anymore. This here blog will be going through some radical changes in the next weeks. I am turning culturekitchen not only into a community blog, but into an online community and network for progressive activists. I will be using CivicSpace's platform to turn the place around and make it a node of the progressive movement. Many of us have recognized a movement germinated during this presidential campaign. Many have asked, what's next? My response is simple : let's turn action into community.

With the new culturekitchen.network I see the possibility of tending to this new progressive movement and growing it, propagating it. I see the possibility of using the technologies and practices we've developed online to build a stronger, more unified reality-based community.

In net art, critical theorists and curators talk about the use of the internet and software art as a means to creating virtual spaces that augment the geographical, analog, reality-based world. Well, after these elections, I see the online community building opportunities in reverse. We can use them not only as spaces to augment what's on the ground, but as outgrowths of what's happening online. We can use our online power to reach and transform the geographical, analog, reality-based worlds we're living in.

Many people living outside of faith based community have lost their ability to connect, to organize, and to network. But on the internet it is very different. Let's use the practices we have already put in place here and bring them to our geographical communities. To effect them, not through demagoguery, fear and manipulation, but through the transformative power of creative action.

I would be more than happy to join forces into putting this newsfeed together because I already have the infrastructure in place. All I need is editors.

I need people to not just add the links to the aggregator feature that comes with CivicSpace but act as curators and METAWEB the feeds. The major work would be in decided the taxonomies and categories into which these feeds would fall into.

This is absolutely necessary. For example, I've noticed that DailyKos articles that I comment or reblog on my blog, end up on a higher search order than the original. This happens to my posts vis-a-vis other blogs. I believe a lot of it has to do with how I have organized my categories and how standards friendly my blog strives to be.

Google is the biggest librarian in the world. The internet, the largest library. Blogs like mine are more than publications : we act as curators, critics and publishers of the wild and unruly world of publications.

With the new culturekitchen network, I hope to make it easier to find the voices of creative dissent; by becoming a node and gateway to the progressive and creative communities online and off.

Anybody and everybody that would be interested in participating in this project, please email me at blogdiva a.t. culturektichen d.o.t.c.o.m

[Warren Celli]

Rebecca,
1. On the hand out -- don't use PDF without telling folks its a PDF file -- pain in the ass waiting for Adobe Pagereader to open. Does not facilitate interest -- I hate that freaking program!!!!!

[Warren Celli]

Rebecca,
1. On the hand out -- don't use PDF without telling folks its a PDF file -- pain in the ass waiting for Adobe Pagereader to open. Does not facilitate interest -- I hate that freaking program!!!!!

[Hanan Cohen]

Nonprofit Online News is a great resource by the Gilbert Center. Not a blog per-se but a must read for social change activists and nonprofits.

http://news.gilbert.org/

[Trudy W. Schuett]

Yes, I know I'm late getting here, but I'm just getting caught up a little bit.

My DesertLight Journal is subtitled: "Domestic Violence Resources for the Whole Community."

It's part of a larger effort to provide awareness, and we hope, help, for the unserved and generally-ignored victims that don't fit into the plans/ideology of current services.

[sonny]

Sorry to be missing you in Boston next week. Last year's NTEN Boston was a catalyst for my now fully incurable blogging bug.

Here is my little blog on sector(and region) specific topics.

Vermont Nonprofit CommunIT: http://cvnp.typepad.com