Seth Mazow is the Communications and Technology Coordinator at Interplast, a Mountain View, California based organization that provides free reconstructive surgery in developing countries for children who suffer physically or emotionally from a congenital deformity or injury.

Mazow has been using a variety of new web tools to advance Interplast's mission, most notably a blog and audio interviews recorded over Skype. In the following interview Seth and I talked about his experiences in bringing these technologies into an NGO that is non-technical in its focus.

Marshall:

Can you begin by telling me where you're at, big picture, in terms of your thoughts and feelings on bringing social web tools into a non-tech NGO?

Seth:

Sure. I believe that any NGO that has donors, members or clients ought to be aware of social web tools. The last couple of years have produced an enormous amount of low-cost possibilities open to organizations. All NGOs have a mission and they all need to communicate that message to the widest body of people without expending outlandish resources. Activities such as blogging, podcasting and social networking allow groups to disperse more information efficiently, quickly and effectively. These tools also allow groups to pay better attention to their constituents

Marshall:

What's working best so far amongst these tools, in terms of supporting Interplast's mission?

Seth:

Blogging. By far. We're a very visual organization, and saying the words "reconstructive plastic surgery" or "burn reconstruction" doesn't have nearly as much impact as seeing pictures of children before and after their experiences with Interplast. Blogging allows the information (patient stories, pictures, video interviews) captured in the field to be spread to our community within hours or days. Previously it would've taken months for our newsletter to come out. Newsletters are great, we still have one, but now we don't have to worry about editing out a huge percentage of the kids whose stories we have due to spacial and cost concerns associated with printing.

We can give our community the experience of working in a developing country from the perspective of a parent or a child through an interview with them while their child is in surgery, a child through their thank you note, a volunteer through their blog post, or a local government or newspaper through their recognition. All this for the cost of $15 a month [paid Typepad subscription]. Unbeatable.

The biggest barrier towards instituting the blog was convincing the interplast community (staff and donors) that blogs aren't just about cats and gossip. That was the impression when we started. I quickly learned that whenever i mentioned the "b" word people sort of recoiled and envisioned angry swarms of digerati. I started explaining it as a website that had comments enabled, was casual in tone and chronological - people could understand those words.

Getting our volunteers to "blog" was impossible. Getting our volunteers to write me emails every couple of days about a particular patient or experience was easy. So the key is to speak in terms people understand. Lots of folks in our community might not know "how to blog" or how to find blogs, but when we give them the link, or show them how to subscribe through email, then they get the info anyway because they treat it as just a website, which it is.

Marshall:

What other steps have been the key to making the blog work well for you?

Seth:

I've discovered that people really react most to stories about the patients, rather than the volunteers. So when I talk to the team members I try to emphasize that aspect. I also have to convince people that they don't have to sound like communications professionals, they should treat the blog as a neighbor. I often try to get our volunteers to cc us on their mass emails to friends and families, since those are the most honest.

Marshall:

How well are the recorded Skype interviews with field workers working out?

Seth:

Well, they are great for sites where we have a hard time finding a decent internet connection, or for sites where the volunteers are operating later than the internet cafes are open. This way we can get content (geekspeak for "stories") on to the blog without our team having to waste hours trying to upload posts (and having the power go out, erasing all work a few times). That said, time zones are a big challenge, and the technical issues aren't quite ironed out yet. Sometimes they can't hear me, other times I can't hear them, other times Audacity [audio recording software] can't hear either of us. We're in the midst of a lull right now regarding our surgical volunteer trips and our visiting educator trips, so I'm about to do weekly interviews with our chief medical officer, who has started blogging on his site evaluation trips.

Marshall:

Are people into the audio content?

Seth:

Into the audio content? Actually, not very much. It's a big mystery to me. Podcasting has definitely not been a success for us overall, but individuals associated with a trip or volunteer are interested, so i keep at it. But the program has not proven a broad success for us, and if it cost any significant money (we pay nominal amounts for Skype-out) we would drop it. That's what's nice about web 2.0 technologies. Things are free or cheap to try and once you get the hang of things, the barriers for experimentation are pretty low. It's not like buying a printer.

Marshall:

How do you schedule your time in regards to these new tools? If Google says 20% of its employees' time should be spent on experimentation, does Seth spend 20% of his time trying out new communication tools? 10% ? Or is this the wrong way to look at it?

Seth:

It's a little ambitious to say that I have a chunk of my time set out to poke around the internet finding new communications tools. Usually, it's 0% since i'm very busy doing lots of other things, but when a need comes up, then I can spend a fair bit of time researching, planning, asking and experimenting. So it varies widely. If we have no new needs for something technologically speaking, I barely even get through my feeds. If we're trying to solve a problem, I spend let's say 10% of my time experimenting. It's a luxury that I wish I could do more of.

This is the kind of thing that i think every organization ought to be engaging young people to help them figure out. Young people tend to be more comfortable in social networks and online environments, and NGOs tend to be nervous and wary. I think there is a great opportunity for smart orgs to enlist young people to help them make sense of the tools and their respective uses. They can also be great advocates and researchers.

I bet a bunch of high schooler would be thrilled to be helping cool NGOs, and they really embrace new tools anyway. A bit of mutual understanding and a lot could be achieved at no cost to the org and at the benefit of adding passionate supporters.

Marshall:

What's been the key to getting the support from your organization to do what you have been able to do?

Seth:

Modesty. Reasonable expectations. Clear pros and cons. In general, the community of folks who spend a lot of time online can tend to think of those who don't as stodgy dinosaurs, and those who don't tend to think the former are crazy, chaotic people without a firm understanding of the ways of the world. I think there needs to be more middlemen, and that's what i've tried to do. Ask nicely for help from techies, being upfront about your needs, resources and knowledge, and be upfront with your superiors about what could happen, good or bad.

I think its really important to speak to your audience. With techies I use words like content, aggregation, tags and unique visitors. To describe those same terms to my superiors I would say stories, collection, keywords and people.

Seth Mazow is the Communications and Technology Coordinator at Interplast. See also an earlier Net2 short video profile of Seth. Below are the three most recent posts to the Interplast blog.