POWR’s Foray into Blogging for Non-Profits
Visitors to POWR’s PA River Sojourns and Watershed Awareness Month webpages can now view current program happenings posted directly by staff via two new blogs. A "blog" is short for weblog, and is an online journal that will keep you regularly updated on programs, trips, news, views, stories, and related links. At it’s essence, a blog is another automated tool (such as bulletin boards) for sharing information and enlivening a website.

The 2004 PA River Sojourns weblog and the 2004 Watershed Awareness Month weblog are both powered by Blogger.com, a free on-line client and host that allows easy posting without requiring intensive programming or potentially expensive server-software interactions. The benefit of this is that the time spent on the blog focuses on content and not website creation.

Green Media Toolshed makes an interesting note on the value of blogs to the non-profits that utilize them and their constituent members through consideration of the “value of making more of the thinking and learning of the organization available to staff, friends and the public.” GMT also recommends an article by Zafar S. Shah at http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/section/466.html that further “makes a contribution to the chorus pushing nonprofit staff to be more transparent through use of the blog as an easy content tool.”

Both POWR blogs are considered external in that their purpose is sharing project and activity information with a wide public audience. An external blog may also be used for campaign organizing or themed training opportunities. Organizations may alternately choose to utilize blogs internally as training and record keeping tools. Or for updating associated individuals such as Board members about strategic planning or other related progress reports. In this case, it may be preferred to keep the blog on a private section of the organization's server for internal viewing only, as opposed to free hosting online.

The new practice of blogging has quietly taken over the on-line computing world in the last year or two, with notable contributions from Howard Dean’s grassroots campaign at http://blog.deanforamerica.com/, and the NPOblogs site (news from people who are getting things done) at http://www.npoblogs.org.

- posted by frank cetera @ 8:07 AM