Comments on: American Cancer Society Adopts Internal Social Networking

By: Allan Benamer

Allan Benamer — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:16:22 +0000

@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.

By: Stacey

Stacey — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:01:51 +0000

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.

By: links for 2008-07-24 « CauseWired

links for 2008-07-24 « CauseWired — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:35:33 +0000

[...] 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 [...]