Full Circle Associates

Continuing the thread on non profits and blogs, here is a great article from Dina Mehta on the Tsunami blog project Social Tools - Ripples to Waves of the Future. Read the whole article. It's great. But here is one piece I wanted to highlight:

Motivational Drivers - Technology with Heart

One of the key drivers of this effort was the speed of viral communication, and the availability of accessible, simple tools that could facilitate this. In the face of such an event, these applications made a huge difference - expediting a need in people, the same people who were, perhaps, suffering from the vapidity of 'modern life',and became simply 'triggered' by such a genuinely significant occurrence, into a massively-emotional response. The Tsunami disaster had a truly global reaction, and we saw the effects - with the exponential spread of the 'message'in ways that we have never seen before.

While traditional media was doing its job, the World Wide Web was engaged in reaching people in ways that traditional media was not - by speaking in real voices, in real time - creating this huge wave of empathy, solidarity and action. Apart from the speed of dissemination of information, the blog also had a 'face' - people had access and could call or email. As a result, lowering barriers to getting information.

Technology with Heart.

This perhaps explains why we got so many people from all over the world writing in to us asking if they could volunteer in any way. It's why we got over 150 volunteers who were working actively on building this resource in a couple of days. It explains the push-factor, the desire and drive to help, in the knowledge that here was an opportunity to actually make a difference, in a personal way. We had so many people who had never blogged before, and still took the plunge and made their invaluable contributions."

nptech, Non-Profits, blogs, Tsunami