Disclaimer:  the wild elaborations on this theme are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my clients and colleagues.  Please don't assume that these distinguished organizations partake of - or encourage - the hypomania that this topic tends to inspire in yours truly.


I love it when several great projects converge.

As long time readers of this blog know, I've been saying for a while that we need better knowledge management for the nonprofit sector as a whole.  It's one of the reasons that I'm such a fan of Social Actions,and one of the reasons that I love working on Third Sector New England's vlog series on nonprofit management. I'm always looking for ways to use online strategies to unify the information and wisdom that exists in nonprofits and other mission-based organizations.

So when Geeta Pradhan and Andrea Martinez of the Boston Foundation asked me for some advice about how they could webify their material on nonprofit management into an easy-to-use online reference tool for organizations in Massachusetts, I had a vision about merging several online resources in a way that would be really useful.

So here's the road map for creating a working prototype:

Take the answers to frequently asked nonprofit management questions from the project's founding partners, Third Sector New England and the Boston Foundation.  Bring these materials online in XML format,* with the items residing on the respective home web sites of the organizations that created them.

And then...

Add a search and aggregation engine powered by the Social Actions platform, which can organize and display links to relevant resources for the edification of those who seek answers to questions about nonprofit management.

And then...
Add one or two content partners, after a careful process of vetting the accuracy of their online information about nonprofit management. Use the IdeaEncore platform to manage and host information offered by partners who are not able to provide their nonprofit management content in XML format on their home web sites.

And then...

Launch a simple portal that enables a nonprofit manager to enter a few key words regarding his/her question, and which will then yield links to videos, white papers, cheat sheets, audio recordings, and other sources of practical knowledge on the topic.

And then...

Tweak, tweak, tweak.

Thanks to the enthusiasm and dedication of colleagues such as Geeta Pradhan, Andrea Martinez, and Tim Gassert of the Boston Foundation, Denise Moorehead and Bethany Ramirez of Third Sector New England, and Peter Deitz and Christine Egger of Social Actions, we are gearing up to develop this prototype.  Thus far, it has a rather mundane working title:  NonprofitManagementAnswers.Org; I'm sure that something snappier will emerge soon.

In the prototype stage, the functionality will be quite simple, but the potential number of content partners is limited only by the vetting process.  These partners will be able to make their content available through this portal by providing an RSS feed from their home web sites, by using IdeaEncore as a host for material in XML format, or even by electronic transmission of a simple spreadsheet.

Beyond that, the possibilities are dizzying. The prototype is in the works, but everything that follows is strictly my pipe dream.  I'm certainly not speaking on behalf of the partners in this project when I mention the following notions, but they are exciting to consider:

What if we found some way to cross-reference this project different but relevant sources of information, such as the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network's statewide database of trainings, or the Massachusetts Nonprofit Database?

What if we laid on semantic search tools?

What if we created a widget that any organization concerned with the nonprofit sector could embed on its web site, enabling it to provide its stakeholders with access to reliable answers to frequently asked questions?

What if we added tagging, rating, and commenting functions - to enable visitors to build a folksonomy and share their own knowledge?

What if we expanded to a regional or even national scope, in which the attorney general's office of each state government were invited to contribute information about compliance with their laws and policies?

What if additional content partners were drawn from the very best of nonprofit management support organizations, statewide nonprofit associations, and community foundations across the country?

I saved my biggest pipe dream for last:  what if this project were fully integrated with the various online capacity mapping and resource matching tools for nonprofits that I've previously described in my blog?  In the best of all possible worlds, a single login would enable the seeker to roam and save a vast range of information and insight, and perhaps even identify potential partners for resource sharing and collaboration. It wouldn't be the magic solution to every obstacle that nonprofits and other mission-based organizations face - but in a time when both the complexity of problems and scarcity of resources are increasing, can we afford to turn down an opportunity to develop an array of online tools to meet our needs and consolidate our efforts?


*  In my private jargon, the verb is "XMLify."