Twittering (or is it Tweeting?) for Change

I think we all know that social media is addictive. Facebook is the college student's "time suck" and constant distraction. LinkedIn is full of questions on a myriad of topics, all just waiting to be answered. Care2 and Change.org offer endless opportunities for doing good with the click of a button, whether it's saving several square feet of natural resources or discussing ways to effect change in a certain area of social justice.

And then there's Twitter. Twitter, which is basically a global discussion of everything under the sun, being carried out 24/7/365 (that's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year in the shorthand of text-speak).

I've had a Twitter account for almost a year (twitter.com/jessalynp), but have only "tweeted" 29 times, mostly because I get so overwhelmed by everything I've missed whenever I log in that I close the window again without doing anything other than crossing my eyes at the page. Today though, I read a great post from Heather Mansfield over at Change.org's Nonprofits 2.0 on how non-profits can use Twitter, and have vowed to dedicate a few minutes a day to tweeting...at least professionally.

On a personal level, all of the everyday mumbo-jumbo that's tweeted, most of which is irrelevant by the time I get home and actually read it, frustrates me more than anything else. Yeah, it's great to keep up with what people are doing and there are some people whose tweets I have sent to my phone as text messages so I can stay up-to-date on their lives in real time, but I'd really rather take five minutes to read and/or send an email than read about someone's day in such an impersonal manner. Backwards. In 140 character bursts.

For non-profits though, I think Twitter can be an invaluable resource.

The standard method of contacting members has, for decades, been direct mail, which works amazingly well but usually takes at least six weeks to get written, printed and mailed. This means the information in direct mail letters has to be fairly generic, otherwise it runs the risk of being completely outdated by the time members receive it. And getting members to respond in a way that's timely and meaningful both to them and to the organization they support is difficult.

A few years ago, non-profits began emailing, which is great - it takes hours instead of weeks to respond to something that's happened and members can express their opinions much more easily, through online petitions, emails to political leaders, etc. But members' responses are still fairly limited to whatever channel the non-profit has open to them at any given time, and non-profits often struggle to stay current in a world that's become used to the 24-hour news cycle.

With Twitter, a 140 character post from Washington about a bill hitting the floor in Topeka or a court decision handed down by the 9th Circuit can get people thinking and RTing (ReTweeting - basically the "RE:" of Twitter) from Honolulu to Tokyo: What will a moment of silence mean for students in Kansas public schools? Should there be one? And why exactly is it okay for that giant cross to sit on public land? ...or is it okay at all?

With a non-profit's followers responding more or less instantly (and the non-profit hopefully replying in return, when a response is applicable), non-profits and their members can engage in real time. They can discuss not only the outcome of situations relevant to their missions but how to influence those outcomes before they take place - and how to move forward after the fact.

In a world that deals in sound bites and tag lines, Twitter might just become the non-profit sector's best friend, and the 21st century tool it needs to effect change, or at the very least to start a discussion about it.