The Old-Fashioned Way of Communicating Meets Technology

I am listening to the nonprofit buzz in the room at a recent GiveMN training held at Central Lakes College and funded by the Otto Bremer Foundation. Executive directors are developing their organization’s page and brainstorming names with staff members for project pages. I can not believe that in 2009, $14 million was raised for the first ever Give to the Max Day. This is the largest day of giving event in the world, yes IN THE WORLD and guess where it started? In our great state of Minnesota.

Technology has sure changed the way donors interact and support the causes they believe it. To quote Dana Nelson, executive director of GiveMN, “the GiveMN site is like the Google of Minnesota Nonprofits.” How cool is that? Did you know that if you add a video to your messaging that you raise almost four times the amount of money? Each time you add a “click” to your communications with your audience, you lose half your audience.

According to Dan Moore, development and partnerships manager for GiveMN, this is common knowledge in the digitial social media technological society that we now live in where people my kids’ age toss around terms widgets and QR codes like I used to say Walkmans and floppy discs. There is conversation about building a data base of email addresses and it all comes back to relationship building. So we are sitting face-to-face with our GiveMN trainers, who have been fielding questions the ENTIRE time they were here.

So in this day of electronic wizardry and de-personalization that our current society seems to value, I must still subscribe that interpersonal communication and the old-fashioned way of teaching and being in the same room with each other is still one of the best ways to learn and grow.

Amy Wyant, NRS, Brainerd

The crowd.



Learning to add "Give to the Max Day" to their sites.



GiveMN Executive Director Dana Nelson  

 

Working on their sites.