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Katrin Verclas, MobileActive.org

Social networks are mushrooming and nonprofits are flocking to them. MySpace is the 3rd most popular website in the United States and Facebook is the 7th, according to Alexa as 3/19/07. Care2, a social network of activists, boasts six million users. Senator Barack Obama unveiled My.BarackObama.com, a social network created for his presidential campaign, and there is even a Club Penguin, a brand-new social network "in braces," catering to the 8 to 12-year-old crowd. Even the CIA has launched a (albeit closed) social network similar to Wikipedia - Intellipedia - to allow analysts to collaborate across agencies and build a collective body of intelligence information. Social networks are clearly hot.

At first is was old-fashioned blogs that created communities of their own. Lateral connections among blogs via cross-linking and RSS syndication feeds create loose sets of like-minded social communities. And these communities have influence. Blogs are playing a similar role to satellite and cable TV shows in the late 70s and early 80s, when these shows gave the religious right - a then-marginal group - the power to form a public identity, attract others, and later develop its own cultural agenda and political institutions.

Nonprofits naturally go to where people hang out in the hope to recruit supporters, donors, and activists. There are more than 20,000 nonprofit and philanthropic groups on MySpace alone. With more than half of MySpace visitors 35 or older, they are on to something. O’Reilly's architecture of participation is in full swing with corporations and nonprofit alike using social networking to stay competitive, secure 'mind share', and harness collective intelligence.

But is this effective? What is the potential of these social networks and why should nonprofits care?

• Simply put, social networks are where there are a lot of people in one place. So, good place to go recruiting.
  

• Nonprofits also need to communicate and engage with greater authenticity in order to survive and thrive in this age of 'sousveillance', increased transparency, and accountability. This is much needed now when professionalized advocacy has worn thin and email advocacy is becoming increasingly less effective. Dialogue – and not monologue – is the name of the game.

• Positioning and spin, particularly in fundraising and marketing, is trickier than it used to be. For example, one man’s blog post criticizing Heifer’s fundraising methods resulted in a widely-watched YouTube video and a conversation with the organization about the best ways to support people locally.

• Anecdotal evidence suggests that smart social networking results in increased supporters, but the return on investment is still unclear. MySpace does not yield fast list growth for the average organization, but some nonprofit's activities have resulted in increased “community brand” support and growing contributions, sign-ups, and participation - albeit usually only when part of a comprehensive engagement strategy. (writ Care's ROI on their campaigns that included slick video on YouTube and extremely sophisticated MySpace pages, for example).

This points to the fact that many organizations are still lacking a good strategy. Tom Belford writes about this on the Agitator.

"We believe marketers must study their current and potential audiences, understand the communications habits and preferences of those targeted, and then experiment to test explicit marketing hypotheses relating to reaching and moving more effectively those targeted. For most nonprofits, I'll wager that less than half your current supporters have visited your website, that less than 10% of your current donors have contributed online, that less than 5% of prospects visiting to your website are "captured" by any means of registration or conversion. And a miniscule number have posted MySpace or Wikipedia entries or YouTube videos. This is not to be critical. Rather, it's to underscore the strategic and tactical challenges presented by the online medium. Nonprofits are just starting to get good at the basics of marketing in this medium.

"Now along come the social networking sites, whose consumer-centered premises and user expectations will perplex even the smartest marketers. Moreover... even these sites will evolve. Instead of simply aggregating masses of users with little common interest, the compelling social networking sites will be those focused on attracting and empowering communities of shared interest, whether the interest be chess or human rights, paintballing or fighting poverty. When individuals begin in large numbers (again, today the numbers are tiny) to organize themselves around common interests, sharing information, opinions and action strategies, the very raison d'entre of a whole universe of nonprofits will be called into question. For at the end of the day, the core function of so many nonprofits, certainly the cause groups, has been to package specialized (sometimes obscure or privileged) information about the environment, human rights, whatever issue, and use it to mobilize people.”

So is the better question: "Will certain kinds of nonprofits become anachronistic as online self-organized communities become more pervasive?"

This is a terrifying thought for some nonprofits, but it shouldn’t be. Social networks connect people who want to be connected around issues or causes. They need to successfully engage their supporters, communicate with them and not at them, and demonstrate relevance as well as results – now more than ever.

As Joel Podelny in the Stanford Social Innovation Review notes, "if social change is the objective, networks must transform the identities of people who make them up. To make this transformation happen, leaders must first and foremost understand their role as nurturers of networks." And the networks nonprofits have long utlitized are changing.