Internally Focused Organizational Blogs
Kivi Leroux Miller December 13th, 2006
Excerpt from an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, Winter 2003, entitled “What’s a Blog and Why Should Nonprofits Care?”
Ana Sisnett, executive director of Austin Free-Net, a community technology nonprofit discussed the use of blogs by her organization in this article . . .
“When she encouraged her staff to blog about their work, Sisnett recognized another benefit of nonprofit blogging: She could now easily keep up to speed on her staff’s work and the progress of various, concurrent projects. Soon, between the executive director, the technical staff and volunteers, Austin Free-Net had three staff blogs full of updated and archived information that could easily be incorporated into strategic plan updates, VISTA reports, press releases, newsletters and grants. When a colleague, a sponsor or even a journalist needed information about a project or issue, Sisnett could refer the interested party to a blog.
Free-Net’s experiments with staff blogging fit a trend developing in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. According to Teresa Crawford, Technical Director at Advocacy Project and a leader in the movement to provide technology assistance to international nonprofits, blogs with an “internal focus” have made it easier for organizations to capture the knowledge of teams and support their collaboration. “Rather than only a linear discussion list for a team,” she points out, “individual and collaborative blogs make it possible to see ties among team members and issues they are working on.”
[…] See article excerpt on Austin Free-Net. […]