The American Cancer Society has set up an internal social network for themselves:
When two Divisions of the American Cancer Society (ACS) came together to form a new, six state Division that includes the territory of Guam, the Austin-based executive leadership team foresaw opportunity and challenges. The sheer size of the newly created “High Plains Division” – with its more than 600 staffers – brought great reach and potentially the sharing of talent and resources toward the ACS’ ultimate mission: eliminating cancer as a major health problem by preventing cancer, saving lives, and diminishing suffering from cancer, through research, education, advocacy, and service.
But this new, geographically dispersed group was a conglomeration in need of collaboration. The familiarity and cohesiveness staffers had previously enjoyed as employees of smaller, independent regional offices was threatened. Now, the challenge to leadership of the High Plains Division was to bridge the inter-office divide, encourage strong working relationships, and advance the cause of the ACS.
That’s an interesting new use for a social network, bridging the culture of a geographically dispersed organization. Here are some screenshots (click on the pictures to see a larger version of the screenshot) (UPDATE 7/25/2008: Due to privacy concerns, earlier screenshots have been replaced by pictures of someone named David Neff praising the Mighty Hall of Printed Web Screenshots):
For more information, here’s a look at the short case study they produced. They hired Small World Labs to produce the social network for themselves. I don’t know pricing but if you folks are interested in how all this was done, put down your comments and I’ll follow up.
One caveat: for those of you who belong to much smaller organizations, I think you can get by if you use Ning to set up your social network. It won’t have a lot of bells and whistles until you hire developers. I recommend it mainly because you won’t be painting yourself into a corner later when you want to expand and develop. However, don’t make the mistake of doing social networking BEFORE you get your basic infrastructure down. At the very least consider setting up Google Apps for your organization.
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[...] A New Kind of Society for the American Cancer Society | Non-Profit Tech Blog Allan Benamer: “…an interesting new use for a social network, bridging the culture of a geographically dispersed organization.” (tags: causewired socialmedia) Posted by Tom Watson Filed in Links [...]
My neighborhood formed a Relay team last year to help the ACS’s Relay for Life raise money TO FIGHT CANCER and even though it was alot of hard work I was glad to do it because my uncle died of cancer and then I read that THIS is how the ACS spends their money? Disgraceful. I hope the ACS employees are managing to get some work done finding a cure for cancer and don’t just sit around all day posting personal info and making “friends” on the ACS MySpace page. Absolutely disgraceful.
@Stacey: If you had read more closely, you would understand this division of ACS is spread out over the Pacific Ocean. Do you have any ideas on knitting together a staff of 600 over a space that large? Have you ever worked on a large corporate staff before? I have. It’s incredibly difficult to get people who should otherwise be sharing resources to do so unless they actually know each other. Despite the fact that people can be in the same company, there’s no guarantee of cooperation without some sort of collaborative culture. It’s unfortunate that ACS couldn’t show real screenshots of the kind of work being done due to privacy issues but if they use this social network properly, it may erase the need for a few costly face-to-face meetings. Would you rather ACS pay for airfare, travel and lodging costs for its employees? Don’t you want ACS to be as efficient as possible in its resource allocation? How can ACS employees do this without having some sort of knowledge of the resources within its organization? These questions aren’t rhetorical, Stacey. They’re endemic to every large organization and that’s why we see social networking being implemented within a lot of Fortune 500s. I don’t see why that shouldn’t happen at the larger nonprofits. It’s more disgraceful when large nonprofits like ACS are hobbled by donor demands like yours that all its dollars are spent on cancer without regard to the outcomes that ACS is supposed to produce.
Resource Roundup 7/28…
Twitter: Not Just Chatter But a Channel for Your Cause (NTEN)Nice look at the benefits, drawbacks, and uses of Twitter for nonprofitsStill a Big Gap Between Reality, Wishes for Web 2.0 (IT Business Edge)Very useful look at how the social media software…