Community Organizing?

by Don Davis
Viewcaster.net

Oh no, don't worry... this is not a political article.

The term does tend to bring to mind visions of activists on the streets of major cities corralling folks together to discuss, protest, or even support a common cause.

Thanks to social media, primarily social networking sites, we can now move some of our community organizing efforts off of the streets and on to the digital backbone of the internet.

Most of these sites offer features called groups or communities. Often we see and hear of the group or community function being used for such worldly important items like fan pages for popular music artists or pages supporting a favorite movie.

But many social network sites offer full community features that can go much deeper and can be very beneficial to local and national organizations, businesses and more. These community pages offer a full array of tools such as blogs, photo albums, discussion areas, wiki pages and more all dedicated to the particular community.

Member of a booster club for a school club or activity? Form a community and invite others to the community. There you can share ideas, photos, calendars and more all dedicated to that community and only its members.

Have a business and are working on a particular project that involves many different people and/or departments? You got it.... start a social network community. There you will be able to keep up with progress, share photo albums and files and more all dedicated to that project.

Some sites allow you to customize notificationss so that you will be notified if any changes or additions are made to the community content.

Think of the benefits a good community site could offer to a teacher. Form a community for a particular class and you could post project and exam dates on the community calendar, help with questions on the community discussion board, and more.

So you see... you don't have to be standing down on the corner or at the local community center with a clipboard gathering signatures and giving out information. You don't even have to spend the time and resources forming your own site using complicated CMS software.

Just hop on your favorite social networking site, see if they have a community feature and start getting productive being your own community organizer.

Have fun.

Article submitted Wednesday, November 24, 2010 & read 254 times.

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» left by David Tanguay (1 year 178 days ago.)

Good article John thanks for sharing.
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» left by Jennifer Stewart (1 year 178 days ago.)

This is my favorite community site, Don! I was resistant to social networking sites at first - especially Facebook - but not any more. I love the way they've opened up the world. Some of the connections are superficial, but not all are.
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