Here is a nerdy/important 🧵 I posted on Twitter today about nonprofit communications, platforms, strategy, values, power, and money ⤵️
(Please share widely and share your thoughts, tips, ideas, and tools with me. )
About 4 years ago, I closed Ben Carter Law and returned to the nonprofit litigation & advocacy space. In this time, as Senior Counsel at the Kentucky Equal Justice Center (@kyequaljustice), it has been my experience that nonprofit "comms" largely means:
What are we doing on Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter?
(A cutting-edge org has a Tik Tok Kid, too.)
The conversations are often, understandably, about shared toolkits, compelling graphics, the right frame for our message. Toolkits, graphics, and messaging that will go—primarily and sometimes exclusively—on FB, IG, and Twitter.
And, yet, I am nerdy enough to have:
built a legal app with Afterpattern that 60,000+ people used to protect themselves from eviction, and
big qualms about the fact that @kyequaljustice's relationship with Kentuckians—our potential clients, allies, & donors—depends on and is mediated by Big Tech and its billionaire tech bros.
I want segmented email lists. Phone numbers. Addresses. Our blog in your RSS reader. Subscribers to a podcast. Capacity to build relationships IRL.
Like many, many nonprofit organizations, the Kentucky Equal Justice Center's work is not, on its surface, about power, democratic participation, tech platforms, open protocols.
KEJC’s work is DACA renewals, rental assistance, protecting people from debt collectors, helping people get health insurance, helping the state revise their SNAP notices so people can actually understand them.
(I say KEJC’s work is not normally about power and democratic participation on the same day that @fairerelections and @kyequaljustice will file a brief at the 6th Circuit challenging Kentucky's process of restoring (or not) people's voting rights as arbitrary and unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment.)
To get to my point:
This episode of The Talk Show with Anil Dash and John Gruber talking Twitter, values, power, and ending with a conversation about open protocols (email, RSS, etc.) has crystalized a lot of what I have been trying to synthesize.
When* nonprofits worry about their comms strategy depending on these privately-controlled companies and their (often libertarian, but, at best, profit-driven) politics, their fickle algorithms, the nonprofit's complicity with platforms that amplify hate, violence, etc.,
*to the extent nonprofits worry about this at all
the excuse I often hear—again, understandably—is
"we gotta be where the people are."
I agree with this response for exactly (and only) what it says: we do gotta be where the people are.
But/And
In 2022, isn't it obvious by now that part of our work—in addition to health care, LGBTQ+ rights, SNAP benefits, DACA renewals, preventing evictions, recovering stolen wages, [whatever a nonprofit org does]—is also leading people to communications platforms that share our organizations' values?
I have long felt that every progressive, issue-based nonprofit organization must also be a voting rights organization.
If you care about
abortion care,
equal pay,
criminal legal reform/the punishment bureaucracy,
racial justice,
bike lanes,
gun reform,
affordable housing,
GUESS WHAT?
You also have to care about gerrymandering, voter suppression, universal vote by mail, ranked-choice voting, early voting, voter disenfranchisement, campaign finance rules, and on and on and on.
Yes, there are whole organizations and coalitions of organizations that do work in each one of those areas, but that doesn't give your issue-based org a pass on fighting for America to use the fairest, most democratic processes available to ensure lawmakers and leaders actually represent the people you're org is working to protect. #SorryNotSorry
In the same way as every progressive issue-based organization must also be a voting rights organization, the work of these same organizations *is also* building toward and participating in media and communications ecosystems rooted in our values. Values like abundance, welcome, neighborliness, valuing each person—their time, their dignity, their creativity—regardless of wealth, race, gender, ability, etc.
Yes, we have to "be where the people are."
But, while we're there, shouldn't we be leading people to spaces where our relationships aren't mediated by billionaires? Spaces that aren't controlled by venture capitalists, funded by nations with interests very different than our own?
While I'm enough of a nerd to write this thread, I'm not enough of a nerd to know whether there's already a toolkit for democratizing nonprofit communications work and disentangling it from Big Tech.
Please share any tools, strategies, platforms you are using, exploring, thinking about that will move us in this direction. 🙏
I would really like KEJC's comms on FB, IG, and Twitter to all come accompanied with a comment or reply tweet that says, "If you're here, consider joining us on more democratic, less corporate platforms like email, our podcast, [insert other platforms here]."
That seems like a good start. Maybe a link to a blog post explaining the problem and the need to build better, more just, more democratic social media ecosystems together and move away from Big Tech platforms.
Again, please share any resources or ideas you have. Already having success in this direction? Fess up.
In the spirit of this post, I'll end it by encouraging you to sign up to get KEJC's emails. Or, if you want to donate to KEJC, you can sign up for emails as a part of that process!
And, follow me on Mastadon at @mastodon.social/@notbencarter