Social change organizers are passionate people who work hard to better our communities, our institutions, and our society. With few resources, but with plenty of enthusiasm and agility, organizers find creative new ways to build the movements that change our lives.
In the past decade, the Internet has opened up entire new horizons for organizers. Online tools are regularly used to spread news, raise funds, manage events and find new supporters. Millions of people have been brought into social or political movements through the Web.
But by and large, the relationships built by online organizing are shallow. They do not have the permanency or power of offline, face-to-face relationships. Your group may have 1,000,000 people on its email list, but if only 1,000 of them respond to a call to action, you clearly haven't built a strong relationship with 99% of your "supporters."
Traditional face-to-face organizers, on the other hand, cannot effectively scale their activities. One human being can only know so many other human beings. The relationships may be deep, but they are few.
dotOrganize is a nonprofit project that aims to helps social change organizers combine the wide reach of the Web with the deep power of the handshake. We believe that smart use of technology, when combined with traditional organizing strategies, can create exciting new models for social change.
Goals & Objectives
Getting organizers to combine smart online technology with effective offline strategies is a long-term process. The first step is having tools that make the strategies possible.
Unfortunately, today's online organizing tools don't rise to the challenge. Most importantly, they don't follow the central rule of Organizing 101 - Know Your Constituents. In tech-speak, "knowing" your constituents means storing data about them and being able to communicate with them based on that data. Sadly, today's tools force most organizations to track constituent data in many different places. A typical organization might track donors with one tool, activists with another, volunteers with a third, and manage events with a fourth ... with none of those tools sharing data.
This "data silo" problem prevents organizers from forming deep relationships with their constituents. It was the #1 universal complaint identified in dotOrganize's 2006 survey. And in a recent NTEN survey, 83% of nonprofits ranked data silos as a significant problem.
To confront and overcome this challenge, dotOrganize takes a multi-facted approach:
Software Development: Enabling existing applications to talk to each other, fostering a wider ecology of application integration, and ultimately creating the flexible
and comprehensive toolsuites that organizers need.
Community Building: Cultivating a community of stakeholders to support tool development, information sharing, and peer-to-peer networking.
Defining Best Practices: Cultivating a body of knowledge that organizations can turn to when developing and implementing online technology strategies.
Providing Strategic Support & Information Resources:
Giving organizations the information they need to understand: 1) what�s possible, and 2) how to align their goals with appropriate technology solutions.
Support
Seed funding for dotOrganize is generously provided by the Surdna Foundation.
