I was fortunate to spend the past week on a guest-couch belonging to Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org. At present, Change is trying to figure out what to do with all of that "now what?" energy that is surrounding post-election excitement. Also - you might have heard of this little site called Change.gov, right? It was put together by the incoming administration of the President-elect. That has worked out pretty well for the now 2-year-old Change.org, which is, at present, asking for folks' visions of what the incoming President should make top priority. When Change.gov launched, Change.org absorbed a huge-flow of misdirected traffic, and greeted people with the question - What next?

I was also fortunate to see Ben speak at Net Tuesday in San Francisco, where he was met with some resistance when he implied that most nonprofits aren't doing anything interesting with their online capabilities. Petitions are largely used to collect potential donor information, which is necessary, but as a whole groundgame, it is counter-productive to the potential provided for the Internet. The crowd rustled, and people explained why they disagreed ("the non-profit I work for is doing..." or "have you heard of X? They're doing REALLY interesting stuff!"). Ben and I chatted later, and discussed how he often runs into this "Exception to the rule," defense, which disproves nothing other than our collective willingness to remain behind the times.

I've talked with some other folks along the way, also involved in the NP Tech world, who are frustrated by this tendency. We tend to get caught up in our own universes in which we are so dazzled by what we do that we forget to outwardly evangelize. The more I think about the Changeblogger movement, the more I am impressed with their willingness to bring the message to those who aren't thinking in these terms. I very much appreciate what Ben's trying to do regarding spreading the message to other nonprofits he is working with (full disclosure - Change.org is a sponsor of my Millennials Changing America tour - but they never encourage me to say anything nice, if that's helpful), and also with those along the way I meet who are trying to augment the ground-game by using online tools. And finally, I think this is a highlight of the importance of NetTuesday Meetups, and others of their kind. It's important that we continue to come together and hang out and listen and drink beers, and the most important element of this is to get other folks in the door as well. Bring a friend. Bring three. Broaden our base. Gleefully inform the uninformed. This knowledge is rich, and our aspirations are valueable, but it isn't going to do us any good unless we recognize our collective shortcomings and be sure that we're spreading the knowledge as far and wide as we can.