Jumping into the deep end of the pool

So, I spent the day at the Message + Medium + Mission Conference in downtown Minneapolis today. I was able to learn about all the fun technologies that I have thought about using in the past, or different ways to use those I have used for a number of years. Flickr, Twitter, Various Google technologies, FaceBook, blogs and many other of the usual suspects were discussed at virtually every session. Hundreds of non-profit employees, board members, and volunteers got to see how the world is changing and how this new world's tools can be used to continue their mission's in cyberspace. I attended as a member of the Rainbow Rumpus Board of Directors, to see how these new shiny things can help us create a more interactive online community for kids of LGBT parents.

There is much more to the game now than having a website out there with a mission, staff roster, and a listing of programming. Many orgs employ online donation, blogging, galleries of photos, video clips, and streaming audio already and have done so for some time. The even newer technologies of RSS, Flickr, Twitter, social networking sites that seemingly are for the individual are being tapping into for to create powerful online fund raising campaigns, action alert networks, awareness building, and simply getting an org's existence out there for more of the world to see. Only now you can know when the org has reached a fund raising goal, is tabling at an event in another state, or when the Executive Director is out for a stroll around Lake Calhoun.

Organizations seem to be becoming more alive and organic than ever before, as you can friend an organization, know where its representatives are, and in some cases observe live video feeds on the work being done. I saw so many interesting uses of seemingly useless social tools that now I wonder, if Twitter can be useful, what can't be?

It was a great use of a day, and a big wake up call to seeing potential usefulness in spending more time with my laptop. Any way to justify that is priceless to a computer geek that spends too much time thinking about books, reading about computers, and now computing about people. Ah, to be a Social Science major!