The Realist Idealist

Last week my boss asked me a question for which he claimed there was only one correct answer. No pressure, right? His question was, “is 100 million dollars a lot of money?”

Coming from the executive director of a medium-sized nonprofit (at least medium in budget size), I felt it was a bit of a loaded question so I went against my instinct and said, “yeah, that’s a lot of money.” Of course I was wrong. The only correct answer to his question is “it depends.”

To Idealist 100M USD is a ton of money; for Exxon, it’s a rounding error.

Similarly, “it depends” is the only right answer to many questions related to nonprofits (and social enterprise) - including their use of social networks.

Many considerations need to be taken into account to make truly effective use of social networking tools. Among them:

What is the current state of the rest of your organization’s technology (software, network) infrastructure?

What kind of time and/or personnel capacity do you have?

Who is the core group of people your organization serves or is trying to reach?

What do you hope being more “socially networked” will achieve?

Of course, there are many opportunities in using social networks. Scott Beale and Atlas Service Corps, for instance, just leveraged their Facebook group to win $50,000 in the recent Case Foundation competition despite being a very young organization. And certainly, many causes have gained exposure they likely never would have by simply launching their own website or building on the ground infrastructure.

However, the success stories must also be balanced with the less-than-successes as well as the out and out failures - something nonprofits don’t often hear.

One of the best articles on this topic was produced early this year by Idealware and published on Tech Soup (two excellent nonprofit technology resources):

http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page7935.cfm