Nonprofit Technology – an oxymoron?

I spent part of last week in Atlanta at the annual NTEN conference (#10NTC). It was an exciting gathering of bloggers, tweeters, community organizers, communications staff, IT geeks, and more. All gathered for the purpose of learning more about using technology to support the life-changing or life-saving work of their organizations.

NTEN is a membership organization of nonprofit professionals who put technology to use for their causes. NTEN helps you do your job better, so you can make the world a better place.

Technology was used to the hilt at this conference. There was constant tweeting, blog posts written during live sessions and most presenters had set up a place for people in their session to capture notes online during the discussion. In some cases slide decks were made available online.

Here are some great take-aways from two awesome sessions I attended:
25 Ways to increase Your Organizations Communication Capacity
With Tirza Hollenhorst @tirzalyn and Mark Sutton @marksutton

Communication Strategy

• Define your communication goals. Just going there faster (more posts on Facebook or sending more Tweets) won’t help unless you have a goal & a strategy.
• Your website site has two audiences. People & robots. Write your content for BOTH.

Watch the slideshow.

Building Stonger Online Communities Without Losing Your Sanity
With @amysampleward, @askmanny, @wiserearth, and @CDEgger

From @amysampleward on her blog: “If you want to build a strong online community, getting the right platform in place is only half the battle, and it’s the easy half.”

There great community building strategies shared at this session. Here are two:

• Empower your community. Allow them to take action on your behalf or on behalf of the whole community mission/focus.
• Don’t underestimate the power of face to face.

You can view the session notes or read the full slide deck from this presentation: