For many small organizations, the idea of using the internet for promoting themselves seems beyond reach.
Without paid web experts on staff, it’s difficult for a small nonprofit even to develop a plan, much less to carry it out. There seem to be too many questions, too many choices, too many roadblocks for the average non-geek to think about promotion on the internet. Simple questions, such as whether to have a Facebook or a MySpace site for social networking, can appear overwhelming. What’s a small organization to do?
First, analyze your organization. If you are truly local only, then there may be little need for many of the offerings of the internet. Yet some web opportunities may have great value, in real dollars and cents. For example, if you can send out an email newsletter, you can save on printing and postage. And depending on your choice of layout, you even can make the creation of it a lot easier than with a printed version.
That means you can send them out more frequently, getting messages to your members more quickly. So that could mean making more money as well as saving it.
Many organizations, however, with a little brainstorming, can see many advantages to a strong web presence. An organization with which I’ve worked for many years is a small museum with a fabulous Smithsonian-designed exhibit that attracts about 25,000 visitors a year. It’s in a small city with a rich heritage, making a history museum an integral part of the community.
But it also has a small budget and an ever-aging pool of volunteers to supplement its three-person staff. So how can it use the web to its advantage?
Take, for example, its oral history program. It’s one thing to record these histories, but how much more work is it to get them transcribed? Many former city residents are spread throughout the country and can’t volunteer to come in once a week to help with the work.
But there are types of work that can be done wherever a person lives, such as transcribing or editing transcriptions. It just becomes a matter of finding these people. That’s where a good website and/or blog and/or email newsletter comes in.
The museum has an impressive library, which thousands of people a year use to piece together family stories. While volunteers help them find the local parts of family history, the museum almost never gets back the entire biography of these folks.
Imagine how that would change if it had a wiki and directed all the folks who come into the library to that site. Without any future effort by the museum, many of these families (especially those with web-savvy youngsters) would choose to make contributions to that wiki that include information far beyond what the museum library now contains.
These are just a couple of ideas the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum is now pondering for its future internet endeavors. They must be thought of as long-term efforts, starting slowing and growing over the years.
But the sooner your internet initiatives get under way, the sooner they will bear fruit.
Footnote added July 23, 2009: The Museum also is now making use of a Facebook site that has more than 100 fans. Feel free to join.
