Jon Camfield

Thinking about tomorrow’s threats against human rights and Internet Freedom. Frustrated Optimist, gardener, salsa dancer, cook, husband, dad, embarrassed Texan. Opinions here are my own. he/they.

4 minute read

While few of the concepts at the 2.0 nonprofit conference were hardly new to me (Use twitter! uh, ok.); it was good to see where other nonprofits were and what the nonprofit leaders in the space were doing, and what the lessons they had learned were.

Again, trying not to sound snooty here, but the lessons weren't very "new" either, but the way they phrased them were -- instead of speaking about crowdsourcing, peer-production and open source/sharing, the presenters framed the same general concepts in communications and strategy language like message control (it's dead), reader-focused theories of change, stakeholders/champions, voice and vision, and so on. This gives me more relevant vocabulary to use to champion the full-sharing concepts when I speak with nonprofits.

Archived Comments

  • Jon, thanks for sharing your notes and linking to ours. I agree that some of the presentations were a bit introductory. I prefer concrete success stories. I thought the high points of the conference were practical email tips from Adam Green of moveon.org and the comments from Eliza Byard of ELSEN on how technology required not just new approaches, but a re-imagining of how her organization functions. Alan Rosenblatt is always entertaining too. Unfortunately, I missed seeing Holly Ross. I was disappointed that the gentleman from Facebook’s Causes app offered no new insights about where the application was going. Self-promo: Releated presentations by nonprofits successfully using social media: https://www.forumone.com/social – Andrew Cohen https://https:influence.forumone.com
  • Hey Jon - Thanks for the great wrap up notes. It’s been great to see so many people blogging about the sessions I didn’t get to sit in on! Question for those of you who are old hats at this new media stuff. What value CAN NTEN and others bring to you? What’s the best thing we can do to help you learn more about social media? I know there are lots of folks by now who are social media savvy, like you and am wondering what value we can bring to you. – Holly Ross https://nten.org
    • Holly; Thanks for dropping by! I think the huge value that NTEN could offer is being the convener and host of “who’s doing what and how’s it going” – best practices and notes from the field. Some of that got covered in the 2.0 Nonprofit conference, but I’d like to see lots and lots more. Stories of NTEN members who’ve successfully implemented various sharing / social media strategies, problems encountered, selling it to the executive staff and board, successes (and what you’re measuring as success in this wild and woolly world!) NTEN is uniquely positioned to ask these questions and share the answerers back out with the field; indeed it’s already happening in bits and pieces on the mailing lists and group wikis, but a more public space would be even better. – Jon https://JonCamfield.com