For this month’s post, we’d like to thank ShareTraining faculty member Dan Lowman for sharing his thoughts in advance of his February 29th seminar:

In 2007, Facebook had only been open to the general public for four months.  In hindsight, it is amazing to me that I boasted as being one of only two people at GG+A with a Blackberry as recently as 2004.  In 1999, I joked about having a “steam-powered modem”—it moved 128kbps so as a practical matter, it wasn’t much of a joke.  No need to fast forward—just blink and everything changed.  Star Trek ’s communicators frankly had nothing on the iPhone, except possibly the ability to transmit faster than the speed of light.  But they certainly didn’t allow cheap video-calling to the other side of the planet.  Nor Angry Birds.

The last few years have found companies, non-profits, political campaigns and anyone with a recipe to share uttering phrases to the effect that they need to get online, get on Facebook, get tweeting.  Some people say it without even knowing what they mean: Remember the late Senator Ted Stevens saying, “The Internet isn’t a big truck.  It’s a series of tubes.”  This was in 2006.  If you’re online enough to be reading this post, at least we can all agree that the Internet is not a big truck.

The 2007-08 Presidential campaign season, first with political organizations like MoveOn.org and ActBlue, and quickly followed – indeed, surpassed – by the Obama for America campaign, brought the new media into politics in a big way.  Thirteen million people received more than 2 billion email messages, equivalent to more than 20 percent of the total votes cast for Barack Obama.  Did it get him elected?  Certainly not by itself, but it sure helped.  2012 has arrived and the emails have begun anew, along with all the manner of social media.  It is estimated that Ron Paul’s political advertising has received more views on YouTube than on television.  The Pew Center for People & The Press has found that more Americans get their news online now than any other medium.

Can an organization replicate these phenomena when it comes to communications, engagement, and fundraising?  Maybe  not—but there is an awful lot we can learn about reaching people in new, diverse and dynamic ways.  On Feb 29, join my ShareTraining web seminar, “Segmenting for Success:  What Nonprofits Can Learn from the Donor Analytics of Presidential Campaigns” for a discussion about how modern political campaigns are leveraging new media to raise tremendous sums of money and mobilizing millions to volunteer, vote and affect outcomes.  We’ll talk about using those techniques to create impact for our nonprofits and learn how to avoid mistakes where political fundraising methods simply won’t work outside of that context.