Efficiency or disconnect?

As David Bollier points out in "Reinventing Democratic Culture in an Age of Electronic Networks", a 1996 report to the MacArthur Foundation, technology isn't just a fad, but has tremendous potential to "achieve core missions [of not-for-profits] and affect change. ...Information technologies allow time and resources to be used more efficiently, and coordinated better both internally and externally." Yet many not-for-profits represented in the Good News/Good Deeds focus groups complained, along with one executive director, that "the opportunity for dialogue is less and less because both the speed of communication and the energy it takes produce a tremendous amount of stress in people."

Others argue that on-line relating strays too far from the face-to-face values of many volunteer organizations. "It's much more impersonal than we have been in the past. It takes longer, going back and forth when we could have done it personally in 10 minutes and built a better relationship," one not-for-profit executive says. Another adds: "It's an enormous energy drain. ...It sucks time right out of your life, and it disconnects you from people in real life."

Maybe this is why nationally not-for-profits "still rely heavily on print," says Janel Radke, former director of the Center for Strategic Communications in New York (www.csc.org), a recently closed not-for-profit which helped other not-for-profits with marketing, publicity, and strategies for reaching key audiences. A 1995 survey of environmental groups found that out of 1.3 million instances of membership communications, 991,000 were delivered by bulk mail. (Think of all the trees!)

Locally, however, the Brainerd Foundation created ONE/Northwest (www.onenw.org), a not-for-profit devoted to promoting environmental networking and cyber-literacy among environmental organizations in the Northwest region. ONE/Northwest helps them boost membership, mobilize campaigns, and stay abreast of legislative issues. According to its founding director, former Microsoft employee Steve Albertson, the organization has worked with 65 of the 240 environmental not-for-profits in the Puget Sound region. "Being on-line means at least one person has e-mail," he explains. "Over 85% of them are now on-line." But not-for-profits without the infrastructure and support offered by ONE/Northwest are not so fortunate.

Help may be on the way. Microsoft and other funders — including Seattle Foundation and Medina Foundation — are creating a new membership organization intent on filling this void. This not-for-profit, called NPower (www.npower.org), will offer lower-cost technology assistance services to not-for-profits in King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties. It will be a sort of "ONE/Northwest for other nonprofits," yet its services will include volunteer match-making, conferences, and consulting. This effort is also being monitored by a national group of grantmakers studying technology issues and how the impact of their grantmaking can be increased by technology. It is modeled after such similar efforts as Chicago's Information Technology Resources Center (ITRC), San Francisco's CompuMentor (www. compumentor.org), and the Support Center for Nonprofit Management (based in San Francisco), known for excellent training sessions for not-for-profits including the three-day "Web Camp."

"Nonprofits virtually have to be taken by the scruff of the neck to be put on-line," David Bollier wrote a couple of years ago. "But once they're on-line, they become immensely grateful and enthusiastic users, quickly expanding their general outreach, membership communications, press relations, and networking." Some activists and analysts credit the success of the antismoking movement in part to effective use of computerized networking, especially those working through the dial-up bulletin board network created by the Advocacy Institute in 1989 called SCARCNet. Another Internet website, at (www.smokescreen.org), not only connects lawyers and activists, health nuts and committed nonsmokers; it also gives people texts and e-mail addresses to write the businesses, lawmakers, judges and law enforcers whose decisions affect smoking laws and policies.

Bollier points to a parallel opportunity not-for-profit and religious groups missed in 1934 when the broadcasting spectrum was first assigned by law — mostly to commercial radio and television companies: "Whatever the merits of commercial TV," Bollier says, "the effective exclusion of not-for-profit, civic interests from radio and TV resulted in an incalculable loss to American culture over the following generations. We occupy a similar window of opportunity — and peril — right now."