Emily Turner at World Grows Wide has had two great posts recently on the thinking processes she's used in helping nonprofits select technology tools. They're both great examples of the ways that nonprofits should be thinking and I encourage you to read them to get a peek inside the brain of someone who's thoughtfully considering how technology should fit into and enhance organizational culture, work processes, etc.
In the first post, Emily discusses her organization's blog and the process they went through to decide on maintaining a blog, linking it to their overall web strategy and selecting the tools they plan to use. Again, in her technology stewardship role, she has some great stuff on the need for common language and how the blog is helping her organization further its mission.
Another great post went up yesterday where Emily chronicles her experiences in doing pro bono work with a semi-rural nonprofit. What I love is that she has dug deeply into what the organization really needs and is emphasizing finding tools that can be easily adopted by non-techie volunteers who are the ones really carrying out the organization's mission. Emily gets that Web 2.0 is about ordinary people being able to use the Web to publish and connect and as an IT staff person, she's doing what she can to ensure that the people closest to the work are able to use these tools with little help from her.
Both posts are definitely worth the read.
Thanks Michele! And I'm sure I'll eventually get a chance to make more than one post per week. Just soldiering on at this point, but I can't wait until I actually have enough time to dive in to all of this properly!
And I think I'll make a wiki post to go along with those ones in the near future - just need to think about it some more, first. It's all very exciting around here at the moment.
Posted by: Emily | March 28, 2007 at 03:30 PM