First, a description. The idea for this blog came out of a discussion in the Technology Committee – an attempt to answer the question “What is Technology?” The header is a variation on a name suggested by Denman Wall. I’m going for a series of entries, each with the same title, followed by a particular subject like the one you see above.
This blog is about the uses of technology to achieve organizational and personal goals. It isn’t about bits and bytes and terrabytes; it’s about how to take advantage of lightning speed “advances” when they truly are advances to increase revenue and deepen member engagement. All in plain talk.
Second, a little history. After a hiatus, I have rejoined NYSAE. For fourteen years, through 2013, I introduced and managed with the help of a team the Website Excellence Awards, now called the Digital Excellence Awards. You can see past winners going all the way back to 1999 here: http://www.nysaenet.org/awardsapplications/digitalexcellence. As far as I know, NYSAE was the first organization to award website excellence. It may be hard to imagine, but in those beginning years, many associations did not even have websites. The earliest awards were given at the end of a seminar and panel discussion that took place at I Love NY Day. In it, I went through the ten criteria we used to judge the success of a website as a communications tool, showed examples, and then entered a panel discussion with the winners.
To this day, when we talk about “technology” in the Not-for-Profit world, I believe we are speaking, for the most part, about the management of data and the facilitation of communications with audiences that matter to us. “Advances” have added some new criteria to the original ten – a suitable subject for another entry in this series. Your website remains your primary technological tool. The more you can do with it and through it in the most flexible manner, the better your success.
Third, what is “reinforcement?” I searched for a long time for a word to express a theme that is important to me. If you were in the Not-for-Profit sector in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, you may remember that there was competition for the traditional audiences of associations and fundraising organizations from “e-communities.” These competitors, it turned out, were insubstantial. The tech-bubble wiped them out because they were nothing more than technology. They lacked the history of interaction and the presence of organizations that had been around for decades, but they were a real threat, because they knew how to use the new technology and most traditional not-for-profit organizations did not. It’s in this atmosphere that the Website Excellence Awards were developed with the true goal of encouraging not-for-profits to learn from the e-communities how to apply the latest technologies, thereby “reinforcing” the substance they had developed over the years. Falling behind could mean losing that substance. Advancing means being aware of the position and value you already own and reinforcing it by using the latest tools in the right way. Reinforcement is a two-way strengthening: the new reinforces the traditional and the traditional reinforces the new.
This goes for nearly every aspect of your organizational and personal presence, as we shall see.