Blogging as an Effective Fundraising Strategy

Posted by irishg on April 9th, 2005 at 10:46am

CNN is blogging. Dave Barry is blogging. Yankee fans are blogging, as are roughly 8 million other Americans. Blogs, journals posted on the web, are quickly becoming the new “it” of the internet. But do blogs have a role in an effective fundraising strategy, or are they still too new for the nonprofit sector?

Jenn Thomson of Changing our World is one of the first experts in the nonprofit sector to look at how organizations are getting into the blogging fad. In her recent article (quoted above) at OnPhilanthropy.com, Thomson profiles a selection of early adopters who are using blogs for support, advocacy, and campaign work, and provides some strategic tips on getting a successful nonprofit blog up and running. Her question: “are blogs still too new for the nonprofit sector” remains open.

Blogs are just starting to enter the Internet mainstream and we’re likely to see many different approaches to blogging evolve as different types of organizations explore how the blogging phenomenon works for them.

Blogging is more than just a new format for publishing web pages - it’s really a new framework for organizations to feed information out to their supporters on an ongoing basis. We have become accustomed to the picture of the Internet as a huge information library — filled with ever-expanding bookshelves holdng all types of individual webpages. Tthe most popular tools we use to find information on the internet — search engines — resemble the catalogue indexes at libraries and present the intenret primarily organized by content: title, subject, author.

Blogging introduces a powerful “expiry date” bias into the publication of information. Blogs are all about what’s happening right now. Only the very newest information ends up at the top of a blog or in its RSS feed. Older posts are pushed down, eventually into archives that are only rarely accessed. This means that, by and large, blog postings are transitory — not permanent — with a focus is on providing the information that’s relevant right now, rather than building comprehensive information resources, because it will all be gone in a matter of a few short days or weeks. A challenge for organizations will be to find sources for that transitory type of information within their scope of the work..

Blogging also presents a challenge to organizations to loosen control of their public messaging, and allow for a diversity of voices. Organizations do not write blogs, individuals write blogs - and individuals have unique voices that do not always toe the line 100% with official communication strategies. The success of an organization’s blogging efforts may rely on their ability to give some “operating room” to their primary authors — to allow individual views to show through, and provide the readers with a real, human viewpoint and not just a sanitized, institutional communication package.

The future of blogging is very much up in the air, but the practice is growing and is starting to find a place in the nonprofit sector. This Global Fundraising Innovation blog itself is an experiment to see if a “consultants” blog can find a niche and build an audience. It’s been a curious, generally encouraging experience so far, and I was happy to see mention in Jenn’s article that it can take up to six months for a blog to find its audience.

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