“We Just Need A Website”
I’ve been in a lot of community and committee meetings in the past year and the central theme of the meetings seems to revolve around the idea of, “we just need a website." Why is it that we think a website will solve all of our information and communication problems? If you haven’t figured it out yet, it won’t. If your network of agencies, volunteers or churches have an information sharing problem, a website won’t solve it. A website works the same way a phone or email does. Information is shared from one person to another. A website can transfer information in a lot of incredible ways, but not without someone or a group of people using it. Think about it like a lawnmower. Depending on how much money you spend you can get a really nice one or one that will get the job done. The more you spend the more features it has like, zero-turn radius or the ability to mulch. You buy the mower to cut the grass and you buy the type of mower based on your yard size and budget. Pretty simple stuff right? We all agree though, that if no one uses the mower, the grass won’t get cut. A website is no different. You can spend lots of money or a little bit of money. You can also get lots of features or only a few. On and on. We can get caught up in the scale of social network sites like Facebook or we can get blown away by the amount of self-generated content on Wikipedia. The impressive amount of people and the activity we see causes us to generalize web use and not accurately translate that into our local communities. We relate our own internet experiences of sharing on blog posts or reading a new article that someone else commented on and we believe this is the norm. The massive amount of content shared on these platforms isn’t the norm and no one ever really talks about the number of employees these websites have nor geographic span from which people come from. NeighborLink is no different. It’s a tool developed to simplify the process for volunteers to find individuals that need help who can’t find help anywhere else. In Fort Wayne alone, over 90% of the posted projects are posted by me that I receive via phone. As much as I wished everyone could post their own project or the agencies that choose to refer to us would post it for their clients, it’s just not going to happen. Where NeighborLink is different though, is in our desire to share our tools with others. We’ve spent a lot of money developing our tool and we feel we can bless other communities by giving our tool away to communities that are willing to put in the effort to use the tool. If that’s you, contact us. For everyone else, I encourage you to rethink your own website strategy and consider what the goals are and what it’s going to take to make them happen. If you don’t have access to those resources, then you’re going to have to rethink your strategy. I hope you find the right tools to move your nonprofit, church or organization forward.
