Weblog
Jun 13, 04:09 am: How does blogging change you?
Via Learning 2.0: The Threat (and promise) of Social Interaction I found Minds on Fire by John Seely Brown. Joshua Porter says, of Brown’s piece:
So the shift to public display, a shift to expected social interaction, changed the way the students learned and the effort they put into their education. If that’s not an incentive to experiment with and use social software I don’t know what is. Social software isn’t just a new way to work, it changes the effort we put into that work.
This talks a lot about education (obviously) but I think the same thing applies to nonprofits. When we start to put our thinking and opportunities for engagement on display we change them — it’s like public speaking or any kind of performance. We can get to the good kind of nervous.
I’m not sure, though, that we really take advantage of this good kind of nerves. We’ve been missing a possibility here by making our public performance too internally focused. What do I mean by that? We need money and so we ask for money on our blogs, in our outreach, via our Facebook groups. If we don’t think of this as what we need, but others need from us, is there another way we engage people — still asking for money (because we do need it, after all) but maybe making something other than the exchange of dollars the value of the performance.
There is some evidence to suggest that people will give more if they are asked to engage in other things first. It may be that we’ve been treating this as a zero sum game but that, in fact, it is not. In fact, engaging people first can often result in bigger (financial and other) investments over time.
I know I started talking about public pressure and ended up talking about dollars. I guess, I’m saying that we need to lift our head up and realize that we are in public so that we can change more of our behavior. What do you think? Am I drawing connections that just don’t really exist?
(the research I’m referring to is something that Jennifer Aaker talked about at an event I attended a while back. But it looks like the research has not been published yet)
