What's Sticky About The Networked Nonprofit

Launch day for The Networked Nonprofit was a blast yesterday. Our virtual launch was great fun and helped shoot us to the top of Amazon lists — and resulted in Beth gracefully diving into her pool!

In the evening we had the honor of attending a reception at the Packard family home, Taaffe House, by Carol Larson, the president of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

A book launch means that the ideas that have been in my head and Beth’s head (what we affectionately call her 10 1/2 floor!) for a year are finally out in the hands of other people. Naturally, our friends are the first to comment, blog and tweet about it, and yet it is still fascinating to see what from the book is sticking in their heads, what has captured their imaginations.

From our first talk at NTEN in Atlanta, the stickiest idea and image is that of non-Networked organizations acting like Fortresses.  Marcia Stepenak has a great post here calling us, and others like us, Fortress Fighters. And a slogan is born!

The imagery of free agents, like Marc Horvath (Hardly Normal), crashing into the closed gates of fortress organizations resonates with people who are on the outside trying to get in and on the inside trying to get out.

Our friend Lucy Bernholz notes that the notion of organizations working as networks. She liked it so much, in fact, that she made it one of her Buzzwords for 2010!

Finally, folks are noting that the book feels very real and practical and useful because of the real-life stories of organizations that are in the process of becoming Networked Nonprofits. Tom Watson writes, “What makes the book sing are stories and the voices: many terrific examples of how nonprofit organizations – big and small – have used these tools, and the ideas of the people who make it all go.”

Momentum speculated about what was coming, how social media was going to change nonprofit organizations. The Networked Nonprofit is about how organizations as traditional as The American Red Cross are turning themselves inside out. The world powered by social media has changed organizations forever, and locking oneself up in a fortress leads to isolation and irrelevance, the death knell for nonprofits.

We have a fun party planned in San Francisco today hosted by TechSoup, and then onto DC.  We’re looking forward to hearing what others think about the book and what ideas and concepts they find sticky — and what they think we’ve missed.

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