The problem:

There are lots of first time nonprofit managers who need not only answers to specific questions but guidance and mentorship.

Third Sector New England has plenty of in-house nonprofit management mavens, but there still aren't enough hours in the day to provide mentorship to all the new nonprofit managers who would like a little advice.

Detailed and well-written answers to frequently asked questions are available through web sites such as the excellent Nonprofit FAQ on Idealist.Org, but some people learn more effectively by listening and seeing than by reading.

A partial solution:

Get the nonprofit management mavens of Third Sector New England in front of a video camera, elicit succinct answers to frequently asked questions, and post them to the web for all to see and hear.

And this is exactly what we - Denise Moorehead of Third Sector New England, the distinguished videographer Steve Garfield, and yours truly - have been doing. We've put together a number of short segments in which TSNE's mavens respond to frequently asked questions about topics such as finance, human resources, program evaluation, diversity, and fiscal sponsorship for nonprofits.

These segments are currently available on TSNE's Strategic Communications Blog.   Eventually, it will be a web-based video reference tool for new nonprofit managers.       They haven't been arranged in an optimum FAQ format yet, but you are welcome to take a sneak peek at some of the segments.

I'm hoping that we'll eventually be able to add Seesmic to the mix, so that nonprofit professionals can use their web cameras to add comments and follow-up questions, thus sparking a real exchange of knowledge.

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Above, you see TSNE's executive director, Jonathan Spack, in our first video segment, explaining an often obscure distinction in nonprofit jargon.  

Below that, you'll see Steve Garfield introducing Denise Moorehead and me to the wonderful word of asynchronous threaded audio-video discussions on Seesmic.

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This article was originally published in my personal blog, Technology for the Nonprofit and Philanthropic Sector, under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons License.