Here's my notes from the afternoon session of NetSquared North, part of the Northern Voice conference.

Khaliya Hamlin (Identitly woman) led a conversation about the key issues facing nonprofit groups and some ideas on how to solve them. We posed the question "how do you want to use technology to achieve your nonprofit's goals?"

The group said that they were most interested in using technology to:

• increase visiblity
• engage people
• recruit & involve volunteers
• internal collaboration
• meta-networking

We spent a 5-15 minute session digging in to each of these topics. Here's our notes:

Increasing visiblity

Strategies:

Our first session at NetSquared North today covers online community engagement. The ever-fabulous Nancy White is facilitating.

We've started by sharing stories about online community projects we're working on now, including:

Your Kamloops (Arjun Singh)

• site, blog, and mailing list
• largely one-way
• tools: typepad (blogging software), topica (email list tool)M/li>
• some multimedia (ourmedia.org)

• deals with broad range of issues
• new issue every three weeks
• each new issue involves engaging a new community and getting contributions from its members, including feedback on our forums
forums have actually been the most static part of the site
• for most topics, there's already some other big online site/community out there
• we're hoping to facilitate more satellites, on and offline
• using a tool called QueryForm

• film project exposing corporate malfeasance
• site and forum
• e-mail campaign and recruiting
• network of networks (forwarding
• included messages from other groups
• e-mail marketing targeted to local community when/where a film screening was taking place
• created online store to market DVD
• setup tool & method for hosting "Corporation" house parties

>> "heartbeat" model: using offline events to intensify/focus engagement in an online community

We're live blogging today from NetSquared North, a gathering of folks interested in non-profit technology issues who are in town for the Northern Voice blogging conference. Check out the NetSquared North wiki here.

Our opening session decided on four topical discussions for the day:

10:10-11:20: Online community-building: blogging and beyond
1:00-2:05: Top 5 non-profit technology needs and the best practices for addressing them: non-profit capacity-building