Nonprofits are Falling Behind Gov 2.0

A few days ago, I tweeted my friend Marty to ask him about an article he had mentioned a while back on how the Department of Defense uses network structures to combat terrorism. I thought this would be a great example to get the attention of nonprofity folks: “Look, even the Dept. of Defense is embracing network structures, so, why are you stuck in your hierarchies!”

Within minutes, I got a tweet back from — YES — the Department of Defense!  A very nice tweeter named ArmyNYC was doing a good job of listening on Twitter and responded immediately and offered help in finding the materials I was looking for. The twitterer was in real life a public affairs officer at the Army Public Affairs office in heart of Manhattan.

The revolution in how government works is in full force right now. We really are at a historic moment in time wherein all of the pie-in-the-sky that I and my fellow geeks speculated about last year in our anthology on next generation government in Rebooting America is happening. Now, chronicled every day by the brilliant folks at the Sunlight Foundation and TechPresident,is Gov 2.0 for transparency. Conversations are fully embraced and, hopefully, maybe, a growing, trusting relationship and conversation between constituents and public officials on blogs, websites and Twitter is happening. It certainly helps that we have the tech savviest administration in history using the internet as effectively to govern as they did to campaign.  Check out Recovery.gov and Serve.gov is you haven’t already.

And then I saw this post from Katya: Nonprofit websites even worse than government ones . . . Turns out a new research report by a market research firm called ForSee entitled Trends in Constituent Satisfaction
with Nonprofit Websites: Building Membership, Donations, and Loyalty through the Web Channel [Warning: very annoying and unnecessary amount of personal info needed to input before able to download the report!] reports that nonprofit websites score a mediocre 73 out of 100 on their quality scale, a point behind E-government sites!

I did a survey in 2007 for the Overbrook Foundation that found that only 25% of the human rights grantees in our sample had a blog that allowed for comments. And I’m not sure the results would be much different today even though nonprofits are joining online social networking sites at a torrid pace as the NTEN survey revealed this week.

Why are we so slow as a sector to embrace Web 2.0? It’s confounding, but here are a few guesses:

1.We are an extremely risk averse sector. Foundations and large donors are by nature risk averse, and this trickles down to grantees. Web 2.0 feels too open and trasnparent to feel safe.  See, look what happened to Domino’s Pizza, after all?

2. We are terrible listeners. Ongoing learning, whether it’s the serendipitous learning of listening to the blogosphere and Twittersphere about your cause and issues, or the more systemic learning of evaluation, are simply not valued in the sector. If they were, we would have more data on what’s effective and how much evaluation is funded and done. We don’t. Period. Feel free to disagree. You can find the one shining example of an org. that learns brilliant on an ongoing basis. Trot out Teach for America and City Year for the umpteenth time. OK, that’s two, only 699,000 to go!  If you’re not focused on listening to and learning from your constituents, then embracing social media that enables that becomes less important.  I’ve never listened before, they seem to say, so why start now?

3. The generational divide is so much more prevalent and harmful to the sector than the digital divide. The Boomers that run organizations from staff or board positions don’t get it. It’s what their kids do, not what grown-ups should have to do.  They just want to close their eyes and go back to their Rolodex’ and date books and wish the whole thing would go away.

Of course, I don’t agree with any of these reasons!  But they are my best guess as to why we’re  falling behind even the government in making the transition to the new world. We’re like print media, desperately clinging to the shores of the old world in the hopes that the storm will blow over.

The Wiki That Isn’t on Change.gov

Working Wikily, a paper and idea crafted by The Monitor Institute and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (although originally coined by Lucy Bernholz), describes a collaborative way of working that is inclusive and transparent.

The Obama administration is putting these ideas to work using wikis and public policy on their Change.gov site reports Nancy Scola. Launched yesterday, the health care discussion with two members of the transition team, Dr. Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson, on a wiki on Change.gov.  This certainly strikes me as more transparent and constructive than the black hole of resumes with which the site started.

I like the opening statement on the page, “Our policy teams will be sharing new developments with you, the American people, and asking for feedback. It’s up to you to respond.”  In particular, the “it’s up to you to respond.” part putting the onus on us, citizens, to participate is great.  Brava!

Here’s the part that I don’t like about this wiki:  it’s not a wiki.

This is a blog post, think Huffington Post not Wikipedia.  Here’s a wiki:  http://votereport.pbwiki.com/FrontPage.  This is what we used to organize Twitter Vote report and you can see the different pages that participants created throughout the project on the right side:  such as partners, media outreach, project tracker, user stories.  Volunteers created these pages, posted content, others revised and edited it.

Perhaps I’d let this technical issue go if the opening question were better. “What don’t we like about the healthcare system” is waaaaayyyyy too broad as a starter.  Here, I’ll give you all the answers and then we can move on:  It’s too expensive, not portable and doesn’t provide things we need, like medications, inexpensively.

OK, so it’s not a wiki and the opening question doesn’t work, is that all I’ve got?  Nope, here’s the big one, and the one that stops too many efforts from being truly transparent: Drs. Hughs and Aronson posted a question, invited us to wrestle with it, and . . . And, what?  What are they going to do with this conversation.  Without a commitment to listening it runs the risk of becoming a long thread that starts out with long, thoughtful responses (and these really are that so far) that will ultimately degenerate into something less civil and run the risk of petering out all together. Why not extend the challenge by posing several questions that people can begin to wrestle with (e.g. what are you willing to pay for health care? what are the pros and cons of a government-run system?  how can we reduce the significant liability risks that health care providers have now?) and asking people to wrestle with them online, and engaging groups like Public Agenda and Everyday Democracy to facilitate local disucssions and develop real proposals and solutions?

You had us at wiki, Change.gov, now really challenge and engage us, please!

10 Questions for the Candidates

My friends at TechPresident have just launched a very cool new site called 10 Questions. Here’s the nub of it: Over the next month voters, citizens, people of all stripes and persuasions post videos on the site posing questions for the candidates, subscribers to the site will vote on questions winnowing them down to the top ten. The candidates post video responses to the questions, us real people spend the next month or so deciding and discussing whether they answered them at all, adequately or well.

In essence the site takes the YouTube debates to the next logical step of removing the broadcast media filter entirely and letting us wrangle with issues, questions, responses in the lovely, messy way a democracy is supposed to work.

I’ll be sure to keep a careful eye on how the questions are unfolding over the next few weeks!