Networking & Relationships – the bedrock of social media
I had a meeting with Marco Campana, Online Capacity Development Coordinator with OCASI (Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants) a few days ago. I initially met Marco at the Maytree Foundation’s 5 Good Ideas – lunch and learn series. He and his colleague Christopher were speaking about using social media with non profit organizations, a subject that I am extremely passionate about and that has become my new vocation. Marco is assisting many groups across the GTA use social media in their services and his Settlement.org site is a great example of what can be accomplished with these simple and inexpensive (mostly free) tools.
We had a great discussion and Marco helped me immeasurably by letting me know about the Net Tuesday group that meets monthly and discusses common interests and issues related to using social media in non profit organizations. I look forward to continued sharing, learning, refering and collaborating with Marco. I made a brief video that talks about my meeting and also gives me a chance to test out my new Kodack Zi6 camcorder.
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Hi Brent,
Thanks for posting about our meeting, and for sharing some of your knowledge and resources with me. I’m looking forward to ongoing collaboration (and I want to play with that nifty camcorder of yours!
).
Just to be completely open, our Settlement.Org sites are currently not using open source tools – they were created well before Web 2.0 and much of the free, good stuff was available. However, my site http://atwork.settlement.org is being moved/migrated to a Drupal installation and a youth portal site we’re working on – find out more at http://youth.moresettlement.org – will also use Drupal. We’re using WordPress for some of our blogging and I highly recommend that as a blogging/website platform, so simple and easy to use.
So, yeah, we’re getting there for sure, but not everything we do is with the free tools.
This kind of collaboration between non-profit tech types and potential consultants is important and useful and I’m hoping we can connect with more folks doing this work to ensure that we can refer agencies to people who get the work they already do and how technology can enable that work in different ways.
Hey, thanks for the links and your kind comments Marco. I’m very excited about doing this work with non profits and the educational sector. Hey – I don’t even mind working in the business sector. Let’s keep chatting and moving forward with pushing the envelope..
all the best,
Brent