Guest Post: How a Charity's Use of Social Media Advanced Its Good Works
Can effective social-media efforts help a charity better accomplish its mission?
For KaBoom, a charity that builds playgrounds, the answer is clearly yes.
The organization has been growing quickly, thanks largely to a well-coordinated social-media effort that gives supporters of its cause the ability to organize themselves online and work together to build playgrounds in their communities.
The Monitor Institute, in San Francisco, recently released a report that explores KaBoom's social-media strategy and offers recommendations to other organizations that are looking to organize supporters online.
Heather McLeod Grant, who co-wrote the report for the Monitor Institute, offers the following guest post about KaBoom's efforts.
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By Heather McLeod Grant, Monitor Institute
With the release of the new book, The Networked Nonprofit, by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, a lot of nonprofit groups are realizing they need to embrace social media to increase their effectiveness.
At Monitor Institute, we are also interested in the application of “social networks for social change.” So when we were asked by KaBoom, which works to build playgrounds throughout the United States, to document how it used online tools to scale its offline program, we said yes.
We spent several months studying KaBoom’s innovative approach to extract its lessons learned. The results are published in a new case study called “Breaking New Ground: Using the Internet to Scale,” which I wrote with Katherine Fulton.
Instead of replicating a traditional nonprofit approach to expansion, KaBoom has used the Internet to disseminate its model, empowering local communities to build their own playgrounds using free resources on the KaBoom Web site.
And the results have been impressive. Through a suite of online tools—including a social-networking site, online training, codified content, and a Google-map mashup—KaBoom has helped more than 6,000 communities build local playgrounds in the past few years. That's far more than the 1,700 it has built directly in 15 years.
In so doing, it has had more impact for less cost. In 2009 a dollar spent on online tools helped improve 10 times as many neighborhoods as a dollar spent more directly on playground equipment. For any nonprofit group seeking to use social media to increase its impact, more "lessons learned" are detailed in the case study.
For those interested in reading even more about new networked ways of working, see the cover story of the Stanford Social Innovation Review summer issue, entitled “Working Wikily,” by Monitor Institute practitioners Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper, and me.
The article explores how social-media tools are driving more-connected ways of working characterized by principles of greater openness, transparency, distributed effort, and collective action.
It came out of our collaboration with the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, including work with Ms. Kanter, who was simultaneously working on her book.
What other examples have you seen of nonprofit groups working in more-networked ways? How are you using online platforms to disseminate real-world program models and encourage offline action?
Source: http://philanthropy.com/blogPost/Guest-Post-How-a-Charitys/25159/