Gina Trapani is the editor of Lifehacker, a blog about software downloads, web sites and shortcuts that save time.  ("Don't live to geek; geek to live.")  A part of the Gawker Media blog network, Lifehacker is today the 14th most popular blog online according to Technorati's count of inbound links.

When I met Gina she told me that she used to work in the nonprofit sector and I was curious about her thoughts on the differences between that experience and where she is today.  We discussed the subject in the following interview, as well as Gina's thoughts about how nonprofit bloggers can build their readership.

The following is an e-mail interview with Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker.com. All photos are from Gina's Flickr account.

 
Marshall:

What is it about your work as a technologist and thinker that has jived better with the for-profit world than the nonprofit world?

Gina:

To be quite frank, I'm not completely sure that I do jive better with the for-profit world. :) I do hope to get back to non-profit work at some point. The reason I got out of it was because there were more technically advanced and challenging opportunities available in the private sector when I entered the workforce, which was at the very beginning of the dot com boom. There was also a very strong vibe of creating a "revolution" that would "empower the people" as the Web just began to come into its own in the mid-90's, and that appealed to me on the same "we're changing the world" level that nonprofit work does.

Also, my experience doing technology consulting for a nonprofit - many moons ago, when I was a green college student under pricing myself and getting in way over my head - was more difficult than I ever imagined. I'm a firm believer in technology as an enabling force for any individual or organization, and I went into the job with stars in my eyes, sure I was going to save everyone there from the dull, tedious parts of their workday with custom software that would help them concentrate on important things, like improving people's lives in one of the poorest, violent and neglected areas in New York City.

 The reality was that there was no budget, point person or commitment to technology within the organization. Miraculously they'd secured a small, finite budget to hire me to custom-build software for them, but besides a student at the public high school, no one else was tending to the organization's tech needs. Not to say this group didn't have strong smart people who did amazing things, it just felt like everyone was overworked, stretched thin and didn't have time or energy to learn how to use new software, or even invest the time in setting up a stable office computing architecture.

To give you an idea - there was literally one main office PC, that was on the same circuit breaker with an air conditioner down the hall in a public school building where the nonprofit was located. In the summer, when the air conditioner came on? The computer went off, no matter what you were doing. These were the kinds of basic tech infrastructure needs - a UPS (uninterrupted power supply), in this case - that weren't attended to, and it made doing any kind of tech work there frustrating and difficult. I wanted to be a programmer, not a help desk person, which is what I turned out to be more often than not.

Of course, it goes without saying this is one person's experience in one organization almost 10 years ago, so I imagine (and hope!) things have gotten better there and throughout the nonprofit sector as technology has become cheaper and easy to manage.

Marshall:

What sorts of organizing methodologies have you come across that the nonprofit world could benefit from borrowing from the for profit sector?

Gina:

My personal strategy is to use technology no more and no less than it's needed. I worked at an internet company that was saturated technologically, to the point where you'd instant message the person that sat next to you on your computer instead of turning your head and talking aloud. We spent all this money on expensive project management software and to auto-generate fancy Gantt charts to track our progress.

Then one day our VP painted an enormous wall in the hallway white, and charted out the next three months time from one end to another. Using index cards, push pins and strips of paper, she marked what projects were being worked on by whom and when they were due. It was the neatest thing: at a glance, walking down the hall to get coffee, you got a bird's eye view of what everyone was working on at the moment and where you were supposed to be on your own projects. That was a big lesson for me - software doesn't always solve the problem.

 The other lesson that many for-profits haven't learned yet is to avoid drowning your employees in gadgets and tech - like Blackberries, laptops, and weekend email sessions - because constant connectivity and an interrupt-driven existence can really degrade people's morale and productivity levels. The nonprofit sector, which usually doesn't have the budget to be early-adopters with gadgets like that, still has hope!

Marshall:

Are there any dark, hidden aspects of the for-profit web world that those of us in nonprofits might be failing to see when we admire the work of business types?

Gina:

Ha! That's a great question. I don't think it's much of a secret, but I do think it's overlooked sometimes: money and resources. I love writing at Lifehacker, but it's a job that I get paid to do, practically full-time. The site is published by an established media company that publishes a dozen other titles. This means I have a team of people behind me, selling ads, making editorial suggestions, keeping the servers up, designing the site, giving me tools to do interactive features and the budget to hire guest posters and associate editors. I get compared to bloggers who do their sites single-handedly, at night after their day job as a hobby, and it's just not a fair comparison.

Money isn't everything, and in times of buzzing tech hype (like now) BigCo's often squander it on bumper stickers and branded go-go dancers at industry events. Non-profits can and should embrace constraints and turn them into opportunities; but it's also important to remember that anyone can look like a rock star with an entire company behind them, too.

Marshall:

You run a high-volume blog with a large, perhaps uniquely adoring audience. It appears to use tags, RSS, lots of images and other methods of building and sustaining a large audience. What kinds of thoughts, technically or strategically, can you share with nonprofit bloggers that they can take advantage of?

Gina:

On the editorial side, to build an audience, you need to post often. We update Lifehacker 18 times a day (between 3 editors); for the first 9 months I was doing 12 posts a day on my own. That rate is insane for a blog that's not an entity in and of itself (as Lifehacker is), but definitely update every day, if not twice a day. Your posts don't have to be long and thoughtful - though some should be - just summarize and point to a news item of the moment that's related to your nonprofit's area of interest. You want to establish a constant conversation about particular themes, and show that you're an authority on those themes, able to discuss them intelligently on an ongoing basis.

Technically, take advantage of every single free resource out there on the web to reduce costs and technical issues. Use Creative Commons licensed or public domain images (we like http://everystockphoto.com). Host video at YouTube or the Internet Archive to avoid bandwidth costs. Odeo is perfect for podcasts. Use an open source CMS (like WordPress, or ask a hosting company like TypePad or WordPress.com to host your site for free in exchange for an ad.

 Barter as much as possible. Pitch a young designer to help design the site in exchange for linking to his or her new freelance business. Apply for the Google Adwords non-profit program to drive traffic. There are tons of services out there which make publishing easy, and a lot of them are free - take advantage of them.

In the case of a group blog, assign a single point person who's responsible for running the show. It's easy with group blogs to atrophy and go unupdated for a long time because equally distributed responsibility means that everyone else thinks everyone else is posting.

The important thing to remember is a blog is like a garden - it needs constant tending and watering. In fact, I think about Lifehacker as a hungry child, demanding its 18 new bites of food per day. It's not a one-time setup deal; it's more like TV or radio, which needs constant content in order to exist at all.

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