Marshall Kirkpatrick

This weekend I posted interviews with two long time non profit technology profesionals: Beth Kanter, a tech consultant and trainer, and Michael Stein, owner of a software company for non profit groups, over at Net Squared. Here's a couple of highlights, I hope they'll convince you to go check out the full interviews and the Net Squared experience.

Discussing the parralels between Web 1.0 and 2.0, Beth said:

Nonprofits would say in 1994 - the World Wide What? In 1995, they would say -- it's hype. A few early adopters set up simple home pages, but around 97 more and more nonprofits started to put up pages. Then nonprofits moved to the second generation sites - more professional graphics, interactivity, etc. Webmaster became a professional position and there were web specific graphic designers. I think it (Web2.0 for lack of better phrase) is here to stay. There's still a lot of wild west ideas, but things like flickr and del.ico.us are not going to go away, I think. We had a lot of failures in early days of the Internet in adopting email and web pages, but there were valuable lessons learned. The early failures -- while some point to these as reasons why nonprofits should ignore web2.0 -- the early failures are important because they pave the way for more widespread adoption.

Here's my favorite part of Michael's interview:

Michael

Our clients with the most active websites are adding, in addition to their brochure-ish stuff, various forms of non-profit e-commerce - register for our meetings, make a donation, buy our publications.

But they are not providing information services, which is what all the blogging - wiki - rss stuff boils down to.

Marshall

Why should they?

Michael

In order to raise their visibility in the larger community that exists around their issues. In effect, for the same reason they have static pages about who they are.

I also put this little pop up box in the interview with Michael, it makes me think I should do more things like this.