How Can We Jump the Shark of Connecting Nonprofits Online?

Also posted on the NetSquared Community Blog!

Photo by Bill Ward - Thank you John Dumbrille!

We're on the edge of using the web for change in ways we are just beginning to imagine. One thing I'm really interested in is how we can connect nonprofit data together. There are so many different 'green' nonprofit websites - so many different 'human rights' websites - so many different 'health' websites, etc. How can we connect the dots so these orgs' sites can talk to each other and help us find the information we need from across their issue-based networks?

Let's get a bit more specific ...

What if when you visited 1Sky.org - You could see events, petitions, and engage with changemakers across the climate change movement?

* Zanby is working on providing this technology - and is currently weaving 1Sky and TheUpTake, 350.org, and The Energy Action Coalition's online communities together. Engaging on any one organization's website means you're also engaging with the other networks!

What if when you visited Amnesty.org - You could explore the latest human rights news and research across orgs like Amnesty, Humans Right Watch, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights?

* IssueLab is working to aggregate research on social issues and push that research back out to other online communities and end-users. A human rights focused nonprofit could, for example, grab their Human Rights feed and share it on their website!

What if when you visited a nonprofit website that focused on disability issues, you could easily find the resources for the stuff you were looking for from that first site + a range of sites dedicated to disability issues?

* I used to be roommates with the Founder of DisabledCommunity.org - an index of resources for disability-related issues. Hooking up Google Custom Search, any website focused on disabilities could add a widget that enabled their users to search across DisabledCommunity.org on their site.

The potential of sharing events, communities, actions, research, resources, and news across nonprofit sites could be huge for raising awareness, increasing impact, and helping us find the most relevant information.

What are some ways we could build on these approaches (and others) to make it even easier and more effective for organizations to share across their online presences? How can we 'jump the shark' of webbing nonprofit & social change orgs together? Is this kind of cross-pollination something your organization would be interested in adopting? What would be the consequences (both positive and negative)? Are shared resources something YOU would want to engage with on your favorite nonprofit websites? How would YOU want to interact with this information?

I'm very excited for folks' thoughts on this topic, about how we can connect nonprofits & orgs together online. Looking forward to the comments & conversations!

Tags: nptech, nptechblogs, socialactions

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Comment by Marc Pare on May 6, 2009 at 11:44am: The tools to connect services with open APIs are maturing as we speak.

I've been building an issue-based mashup for the last few months, and, as a result, I've interacted with a lot of interesting tools (Social Action, included) for extracting and remixing data from all over the web. For instance, Yahoo! recently released the Yahoo! Query Language, making it easier than ever to interact with data sets online. Building web apps to do the kind of "webbing" you describe is easier than ever--Google makes it free and scalable with their Google App Engine.

Also, I'm pretty sure "jumping the shark" has negative connotations--

"Jumping the shark ...denote[s] the point in a TV show or movie series' history where the plot veers off into absurd story lines or out-of-the-ordinary characterizations. This usually corresponds to the point where a show with falling ratings apparently becomes more desperate to draw viewers in. In the process of undergoing these changes, the TV or movie series loses its original appeal. Shows that have "jumped the shark" are typically deemed to have passed their peak."

from Wikipedia

Comment by Christine Egger on May 6, 2009 at 9:55am: Great post, Joe. I'll be watching the NetSquared blog for comments/responses, too. My first thought, as I shared in a tweet, was to ask what needs to change in order for nonprofits to outright encourage this kind of cross-posting. How do we tie their definition of success to it? How do we shift the cost/benefit analysis that organizations engage in, when considering how to use their online resources, so that allocating precious space to highlighting the activities of others becomes a clear win? Some of that transition will come as the web becomes more a space for conversation (vs. monologue). And examples set by Tori Tuncan (Lend4Health.org) and others will contribute to it. But the organizational culture I know best -- that of US or North America-based organizations -- will resist, and it will be up to those who design the overall web experience -- via search engines, browsers, embeddable widgets, etc. to lead the way.