Today I had a chance to meet and schmooze with Al Essa, who wears a lot of hats in addition to serving as the chief information officer of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. For example, he is a founder/board member of .LRN (an open source educational technology project) and the creator of The NOSE (a web log about e-learning and open source applications).
It so happens that both Al and I will be workshop presenters at the upcoming conference on Grassroots Use of Technology. His topic will be "Adopting Open Source Software in a Nonprofit Environment," and he asked me for my thoughts on the needs and wants of small nonprofit organizations that are looking for ways to use technology more effectively.
My advice to him was to draw on his considerable experience with organizations that uphold education as a primary mission. I'm always pleasantly surprised at the number of nonprofits that define themselves as having a strong educational mission, even though they might focus on tasks as diverse as environmental protection, immigrants' rights, social services, promoting the arts, public safety, historic preservation, or ending racism - and I think that such organizations will be very receptive to what Al can teach them.
And indeed, a sustainable nonprofit organization is one that continually educates communities, clients, policy makers, donors, voters, activists, legislators, friends, allies, opponents, and fellow nonprofits about its activities and about the wider context in which it operates. As George McCully (of the Catalogue For Philanthropy) points out, donor education is a severely neglected activity in our sector, and yet there can hardly be a more powerful strategy for long range sustainability.
An inference that we can draw here is that in this information age, every nonprofit organization that is serious about strategic use of technology should be seeking opportunities to provide online education or foster an online learning community.
This does not necessarily mean investing in expensive and elaborate distance learning technology and conducting formal courses.
It does mean asking ourselves:
1) How do we (or how do we want to) educate our various constituencies about our mission, our work and the issues that affect it?
2) How can we use the information and communication technologies that we currently have to support and expand our educational outreach?
3) How can we take advantage of new opportunities and technology innovation to do more, better, or faster educational outreach?
4) How can we measure our effectiveness in educating our constituencies?
These are not questions that lead to a single answer for all nonprofit organizations - or even to a single answer for each nonprofit organization. As I having previously pointed out, the nonprofit sector is a world of constantly moving targets.
Our challenge is to stay committed to integrating educational outreach into our larger mission, and to make wise use of the good will and assistance of well-wishers and experts such as Al Essa.
