Nonprofit professionals have a lot of competing demands made on our time. Perhaps more than the average person. Our digital networking tools have been touted as a means to simplify our lives by helping us to manage more and more things inside and outside of the workplace. But, we often think of this digital coordination power as it applies to communications. I recently was inspired to think of how we could refocus on the power of digital tools to imagine a reinvigorated nonprofit workforce.
The inspiration came from a keynote given by Dr. Milton Chen of Edutopia at a summer learning conference hosted by the National Summer Learning Association. In his talk, Dr. Chen highlighted a disconnect. “Our children are living two lives,” he said, “a digital life outside of school and an analogue life inside of school.” As a society, we should ensure that are children live one life, Dr. Chen encouraged, challenged to lead integrated student lives in school to develop the skills necessary to flourish in the workplace and in their communities.
Dr. Chen and others see this issue as fundamental to today’s debates on education. Nonprofit professionals, especially those just entering the sector, have to grapple with the same divide between speedy digital lives and the sometimes painfully traditional analogue habits of the organizations we love. This challenge should not pit a new way of doing things with what has been tried and tested. How best to incorporate the speed and dynamism of digital tools with the thoughtfulness and discipline of analogue tools should motivate us to think of what a nonprofit 2.0 workforce can look like down the road.
Currently, digital tools, social media, new media, call it what you will, serve primarily to boost our communications, marketing, and development campaigns, and help our professional counterparts get out the word about the work of their organizations. In the future, we will increasingly need to think of digital tools more as creators of organizational culture and less as windows into what our organizations already do offline.
Just take a look outside of the workplace. Our online world represents more than mere communication. It is a catalyst for identity creation through the imagining and promulgation of culture, the building of communities, the enrichment our personal experience with our friends, and the entertainment of ourselves through recreation. Likewise, we can change the terms of the conversation in the workplace and define digital tools more as facilitators of identity creation.
Of all professional sectors, ours brandishes an uncommon advantage when we set our mind to innovate. Much of what we can do comes from a belief in imagination. As nonprofit professionals, we are driven by causes, missions, issues, because we imagine a better world. When looking to our online toolbox our imaginations will determine what’s possible. Viewing digital tools as creators of identity we can think of how they can help us
- enrich our organizational cultures;
- enable new professional development experiences;
- create inter-organizational and beneficiary relationships;
- imagine new and better ways to program; and
- transform our power to advocate on behalf of our causes, issues, and communities.
Bottom line, it’s more than a communications game.
This article is the first in a series that will explore each one of the bulleted points above in greater detail. Do you think Chris left something out? Let us know by commenting below or on the YNPN-NYC facebook page.
Chris works at the Fiver Children’s Foundation helping to design and implement evaluation, development, and communications strategies. He has 5 years of experience working with local and international nonprofits based in NYC. Read all of Chris’s posts for YNPN-NYC.
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