Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Influentials in nonprofit tech

Beth Kanter was named one of the most influential activists by Fast Company Magazine as part of a recent feature on women and web 2.0. Beth expanded on the list and added several categories of potential interest to readers here, including: Nonprofit Technology, Social Change Activists, Big Picture Thinkers, Nonprofit Social Media Strategists, and Nonprofit Marketing and Fundraising. I'm honored to be among them.

As a tech aside, I discovered this news through twitter. Slow as I was to get on twitter, I was faster than my tech guru David Pogue. I actually now rely on twitter for news - its like my own custom-fit stock ticker - all the news I want, there when I want it. Not only that - its a two-way ticker - I ask questions and get answers. Recently, when I "hinted" that there should be a twitter site to follow philanthropy prize announcements the "hint" was picked up within minutes by the good folks at socialactions and changetheweb and, lo and behold, a twitter feed for social action prizes was created (#saprizes). Time from idea to implementation - about 15 minutes. Follow me here.

HT @christineegger

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been reflecting on the way I get my news - and it has changed. I used to have a systematic process of reading through threads, and then with twitter usage, been getting my news that way as well.

The speed is fast.

I see a gap between those - much like the "brain gap" described by Gary Small in his new book, iBrain. The gap between those who getting their news/information via social media or filtering by friends - and those who get it from slower sources.

Lucy Bernholz said...

One edit - the hashtag for Social Action prizes is now #prizes4sa.

Beth - I agree with then news gap/news lag - I've found, in the 3 months that I've been using Twitter - that my email now seems archaic. I guess advanced Twitter users now use DMs instead of email. Given how old this dog is, I'm somewhat amazed at how my own behaviors can change so quickly when a tool really fits the job.
Lucy

Anonymous said...

I'm feeling the same shift in communication habits. Email is/did to letter-writing as Twitter is/will do to email. It took a couple of months to find my Twitter voice, and rythym, but I'm still amused and surprised by how quickly I embraced its informality. It's nothing to send off a tweet to someone, when an email to accomplish the same task would take a half hour of painstaking wordcraft.

Same for how quickly I embraced its forced brevity. Who knew that I only needed 140 characters to express a single coherent thought? My husband would swear I needed at least 2,000 words.

Lucy, thank you for prompting and drawing attention to the "social action prize" hashtag. I'm looking forward to tweeting the heck out of it as more and more of these prizes are generated.

Christine Egger
Social Actions