I'm an enthusiast.*  Pat Weaver of Mission Research is an enthusiast. 

So when she called me up the other day to talk about the Massachusetts NPtechWorking Group and other projects close to her heart, it was ten pounds of enthusiasm in a five pound bag.

The folks at Mission Research have a vision for collaboration among local nonprofits for longterm sustainability.  Both Pat and I are - yes, you guessed it! - enthusiastic about making that a priority.  I spend a lot of my time worrying about the specific topic of the nonprofit digital divide in Massachusetts, and it just so happens that Pat thinks that that is a good place to start in collaborating for longterm sustainability - so it was a very lively conversation.

Pat also called my attention to Sustainable Nonprofit, a web site that her organization has been developing.  I've been surfing through it, and here are my questions:
We desperately need to find more sustainable models for nonprofit organizations, and there's no doubt that information technology has great potential for increasing collaboration and reducing redundancies.

But do we need another web site?

One thing that's clear to me is that simply building a web site is not much help at all.  Unless a lot of time and other resources are invested in populating it with amazingly useful information and tools, and in attracting an unprecedented level of exactly the right visitors, then nothing much is going to happen as a result of launching Sustainable Nonprofit.  It ill becomes me as an enthusiast to say so, but that's what I foresee.

In the nonprofit sector, we have serious difficulty in bringing needs and resources together productively, and some of that is simply our failure to find the money and spend it effectively.  In my opinion, that's the greatest threat to the sustainability of nonprofits that deserve to thrive.  If the Sustainable Nonprofit project can start by finding the money, and continue on by bringing resources and needs together, then it will be a very great success indeed.  I hope that Pat Weaver and her colleagues at Mission Research will come to agree!


*  As opposed to a fanatic, I suppose.