June 12, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 — Technologies to Recruit, Organize, and Engage Youth
by Ben Rigby
Nonprofit groups and political campaigns can more cheaply and effectively reach a huge number of young people with new technology like blogs and text messaging — but organizations often don’t know enough about the tools to choose the ones that will work best for their purposes, writes Ben Rigby, who has worked with several new-media firms and founded MobileVoter.org.
“Web 2.0 technologies allow organizations to do more with less,” he writes. “Ignoring them would be a missed opportunity.”
Mr. Rigby’s book and its accompanying Web site explore blogging, online social networking, video and photo sharing, mobile phones, wikis, online maps, and virtual worlds, and discuss how charities and others have used those tools.
Charities should focus on using technology to engage and create a conversation with young audiences, rather than simply use it as a new vehicle for traditional methods of advertising, volunteer recruitment, and solicitation, Mr. Rigby argues.
“To be effective in the Web 2.0 environment, to some extent you have to adopt this more personal and transparent approach, while letting go of control and handing it over to your supporters,” he writes.
Each chapter ends with one or two essays by or interviews with technology, nonprofit, or political experts on topics such as political life on YouTube, using social networking for social change, and how charities can use blogs.
Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94103; (800) 956-7739; fax (317) 572-4002; http://www.josseybass.com; 268 pages; $39.95; ISBN 978-0-470-22744.
