Beth Kanter and My Intern Experience

As noted in class, last semester PAFF 551 were introduced to the idea of Social Media for nonprofits. One of the materials we analyzed was Beth Kanter’s Stanford Social Innovation podcast. At the time, I valued her insight on educating a nonprofit’s internal market (staff and volunteers) about social media. I appreciate the opportunity to further discuss “the importance of social media in the eyes of a nonprofit. Especially since as ‘millennial’ leaders in the nonprofit and/or public sector, we will be forced to engage in social media at one time or another.

Some of us have already engaged in social networking sites for nonprofits. Reading “the Networked Nonprofit” forced me to reminiscent on my intern experience as a ‘Community Ambassador’ for United Way of Buffalo and Erie County. I and seven other ‘Community Ambassadors’ were responsible to recruit and engage young people (Millennials) to volunteer for their community. Naturally as Millennials ourselves, we thought of creating a Facebook group.

Here is a link of our group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2377354942&v=app_2373072738#!/group.php?gid=2377354942&v=wall

This group was created before Facebook features such as ‘Like’, ‘Causes’ and even 'statuses’. Such features would have ideally simplified our communication attempts to our peers about volunteering. We were able to reach a few young people through Facebook but not our initial goal. As Kanter would note, complexity served as a barrier for our social media attempt. Kanter would also acknowledge the fact that the organization’s social culture was not codified. At the time a Facebook group was innovative for the organization. As interns, we were instructed on the media policies but not the social media policies. Such knowledge would have possibly generated more results.

Overall, my intern experience and Kanter confirmed to me that simplicity is necessary for networked nonprofits. Who would have thought that it can be complex to be simple?