A Low-Tech Message Board Offers Access to High-Tech Experts

By NICOLE WALLACE

Helping.org and TechSoup — two of the most savvy organizations on the

topic of nonprofit technology — are taking advantage of a decidedly low-tech form of Web event. Using a message-board system, the two groups are sponsoring weeklong discussions that give charities the opportunity to ask experts and one another about the best ways to incorporate technology into their work.

Helping.org — the nonprofit Web site run by the AOL Time Warner Foundation — began the series of scheduled Web discussions a year ago by asking what it means to be an online organization. For a week, nonprofit professionals were able to go to the Helping.org Web site and pose questions to an expert on the subject, read and answer other participants’ questions, and post their own thoughts.

“We wanted to provide nonprofits a forum where they could share with each other what their own experience was, and where they would have access to somebody with expertise,’ says Jillaine Smith, a program director at the Benton Foundation, in Washington, which manages the Non-profit Resources section of Helping.org.

Building on that first forum, Helping.org has continued to hold monthly discussions on such topics as online fund raising and building online communities. In February, the site started co-sponsoring the discussions with TechSoup, a Web site run by CompuMentor, in San Francisco, that provides technology information to nonprofit organizations.

Susan M. Tenby, community producer for TechSoup and a self-described “listserv-aholic,’ says that CompuMentor decided against e-mail discussion lists because the volume of messages would have been overwhelming, like “taking a sip of water from a fire hydrant.’ She says message boards organize messages sequentially and by topic, rather than having them arrive in a haphazard jumble in participants’ in-boxes.

The groups also decided against using an online-chat format because of the difficulty of getting users together all at one time, particularly with their audience being spread over different time zones, and in some cases even different countries.

Helping.org and TechSoup have relied almost exclusively on e-mail lists to promote the events. They send announcements to their organizations’ e-mail lists, and staff members post announcements to e-mail discussion lists in which they participate.

Together and separately, the two groups have held a total of 10 moderated discussions. The number of messages posted during the last few events has ranged between 100 and 300 each.

Ms. Smith was initially disappointed by the relatively low number of messages compared with the number of people visiting the discussions.

She estimates that only 10 to 20 percent of visitors were posting messages, while the rest were “just lurkers.’ Ms. Smith says that she has been heartened, however, by the results of post-discussion surveys, in which the lurkers reported that they found the discussions helpful.

“So we backed off on our self-criticism a little bit and realized that just because people weren’t participating didn’t mean that they weren’t getting something out of it,’ she explains.

Ms. Smith says she has noticed that participation has been highest for those events where the moderator takes an active role — guiding the discussion, thanking participants for sharing their observations, and encouraging others to get involved.

The earliest discussions were conducted using a free message-board service. In February, the discussions moved to a new message-board system that TechSoup had purchased for its Web site.

The message board, which hosts 11 permanent technology discussions in addition to the monthly events, actually resides on the servers of the company that designed the system, but as part of the $5,000 set-up fee, CompuMentor was able to customize the message-board pages to look like the rest of the TechSoup site. The company also charges CompuMentor a $2,500 annual support fee and a $500 monthly hosting fee.

Ms. Smith has been following the growth in the number of Web events in the nonprofit world. While she sees their potential benefit to charities, she cautions that she has seen too many groups set up e-mail discussion lists, message boards, and chat rooms without thinking about what they’re trying to accomplish and not committing the necessary staff and other resources to the forum.

“There was this initial sense that if you built it people would come, but it’s much more complicated than that,’ says Ms. Smith. “The technology’s only as good as the use it’s put to, and the people who are using it.’

For more information: Go to http://techsoup.coolboard.com and http://www.helping.org/nonprofit/forums.