An online argument between Seth Godin, Beth Kanter and a number of other writers on social media has broken out, centered around the use, or lack thereof, of these tools by non-profits.
Seth Godin, from Creative Commons Licence
The normally on-point Seth Godin began by posting a blog, entitled “The Problem with Non” chastising charities for being unreceptive to change.
Not a bad argument to make, but he screwed up by trying to prove the point by linking to a list of the Top 100 Twitterers, void of any charities but full of celebrities. As Beth (in this linked post) rightly pointed out, this means little. What, the United Way isn’t as cool as Britney Spears? Ya think?
Tom Watson, another blogger, went further than Beth, arguing that the charitable sector is one of the most innovative.
The truth, as with so many of these things, lays somewhere in the middle. Seth is right–charities, on the whole, don’t embrace change as well as the for-profit sector. There are a whole host of structural reasons for this, some of which include:
- The lack of profit motivator;
- The inability of charities to invest in R&D (because of limited borrowing and leveraging options);
- The hesitancy of charities to spend too much on administration (because of pressure from donors);
- Most importantly, the lack of market mechanisms to reward effective work. For profit business succeed because consumers buy products out of a mixture of marketing and product quality. Unfortunately, for non-profits, there are limited ways for consumers (donors) to judge the quality of your product other that how you market it. Thus, its all about your marketing and PR. This entrenches the big boys and makes it harder for the little guys to compete, even if they are doing better work.
I can understand Godin’s frustration however, because social media has leveled the marketing playing field to some extent.
Smaller charities need to understand this is their moment. Embrace it now, before the bigger slower and bigger beasts catch up. When they start throwing big bucks into this new field, it will be just as hard to compete.
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One point worth mentioning is that Godin is not only criticizing non-profits for not embracing change, but for not using Squidoo.com, his web 2.0 pet project that he claims to give tens of thousands to charity, without providing any actual data on the roi for charities that invest in the project…