Daniel O'Neil

Seth's mad at the "non-profits" and the situation is worse than he thinks

Seth wrote a strong post today highlighting how non-profits are failing to embrace the new social media technologies that seem perfectly designed to help them to fullfill their missions. He says that we should be agents of change and yet we fear it. His post was so painfully true that I almost couldn't finish reading it. From what I have seen in international development, we don't just fear new technology, we fear all change.

I started blogging as a way of joining in the discussion of how to improve international development projects. I have been working internationally for over twenty years and have become disenchanted with the lack of progress. One of my first posts was on how non-profits do not foster learning. I later wrote on the new challenges in the development business and the failure of USAID's excellent online document depository to foster learning.

I've never figured out why we don't do better to foster organizational learning and change and am ashamed by our collective failure. Somehow non-profits have become more afraid of failure than of the status quo. Too often we focus on short-term goals ("number of people trained," "number of schools built," "number of farmers using new techniques" and we lose sight of our broader goals.

The international development work that I do is full of projects that failed to have a lasting impact and yet negative evaluations are very rare. I've heard it said that the best predictor of success for a new entrepreneur is the number of businesses he or she has started--not the number that have succeeded.  In business, it is recognized that failure is probably a better learning tool than success. Yet non-profits hate to admit failure.

What if we admitted that our approaches were risky? What if we strove to either make dramatic changes or to fail brilliantly? Our track record would not be perfect, but we would certainly be remarkable and isn't that better?

How much Clout do you have?

Fareed Manjoo wrote in Slate that Tweeting a protest against a company has more success when you have more followers and are therefore perceived as having more clout. However, the number of followers is less important than who the followers are--the President's Daily Brief is written for a select audience, but one with a lot of clout.

Seth Godin points out that the "web" knows how much "clout" we have and how much are followers have. It knows if our tweets are retweeted, if our followers have lots of followers, and which of our ideas are amplified. Each of these bits of information is hidden in a different place, but they could be aggregated together. Whether we like it or not, someone is going to figure out how to do this. 

Are you ready to have your clout measured? Would you pay to have that information on your followers? What about your competitors?