Digital Now

I rally enjoyed Digital Now and I am so sorry that it has taken me a week to get this review up here. I had the absolute pleasure of having lunch with Bill Strathmann, CEO of Network For Good right before his panel. I was planning on attending it anyway but that was the deal-sealer. He did a superb job of showing how NFG is leveling the playing field and opening up the donation channels to every 501.C.3. The widget technology of Six Degrees is the exact breed of tool that can empower the long tail and really create the capacity for even the smallest of charities to raise money. I especially love how they use Guidestar to vet their organizations.

In the afternoon I jumped around between sessions. It was clearly not a typical practice in this crowd as I saw few, if any people leave and enter sessions. The session on MyGoodwill was amazing. The premise is that it is an information and training portal for Goodwill to use in delivering job skill training.   The technical implementation was cool but the methodology and their approach was something special. It reinforces the idea that technology is really secondary behind design and methodology.

The session on Developing an E-Strategy was fairly cursory, and I did not stay terribly long. I think it was critical information for so,me people in the room to her. The emphasis was that random technology implementation will yield random results. Some of the people in the room had just heard about a number of technologies in previous session and needed to hear that strategic implementation is easier on the budget as well as on constituents.

The next day Patty Glodman from March of Dimes, Jenny Levine from American Library Association and I presented on Org 2.0. We talked about the various implementation methods and tools that we are employing and spoke to the success and challenges we are facing. I think it was exceptional how we all three outlined our expectations of the technology before we implemented. Nothing is more critical than knowing what you want to get out of the tech. Between us we covered pretty much all of the web 2.0 things from wiki to virtual worlds, to home brew videos and so much more. We fielded a bunch of questions and got to meet a folks afterwards. I think the key message we delivered was that the coming tech wave will give individuals almost the exact same capacity as the large organizations ... so how do you work in that new reality?

Comments

[Mustapha Hydara]

Dear Readers,
I am pleased to find some cool and interesting stuff about social networks, online fundraising tips and lot more.

I will be please if any one of you can join me as an online volunteer for Kamwokya village in Uganda to support an Orphan charity ASOD. This group of volunteers are doing a significant effort at grassroots level to help the HIV/AIDS orphans in their community.

You are highly invited to join us at Nabuur, a Dutch online volunteering site at http://www.nabuur.com/modules/villages/villages_village.php?villageid=216

Your support and advise is highly welcome and i will look forward to hear from any of you rading this post.

Bye for now and thanks.

Yours

Mustapha