This isn't an original creation -- it's courtesy of Common Craft by way of Michele Martin -- but it's so good ...

Click To Play

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Google has a President's Day weekend warm fuzz for anyone publishing their blog's RSS feed with FeedBurner: Google Reader and start pages have just begun reporting successfully to the service. Anyone with a blog that uses FeedBurner, as this one does, should be sure to hit their dashboard this week. Via ProBlogger, where comments suggest a bump of +50% or so -- right around the neighborhood DIA's spiked up -- is fairly typical.

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It's come to the point where nonprofit staff who aren't using RSS aren't really doing all of their job. I know. I know. You don't believe me, and you don't care. You already use the Internet, so why take time you don't have to learn some new way to get the information you already get? Especially when the first thing an evangelist says about RSS is that it's actually like 11 different data formats and nobody can even agree what the acronym means? I know because I've been there. It was about 1995, and the .sig files people used on Usenet started saying "Visit my page on the World Wide Web!" I ignored it for months, because who needs some crummy new platform when I've got all the text-based newsgroups goodness my heart could ever desire? The answer, then as now, is that it will totally change the way you relate to information. It's like being myopic, and then putting on glasses. If you're resisting RSS, that's understandable. Only a minority of web users have adopted it, and that'll probably be true for some time. But it's the thought leaders, the proverbial creative class (dreadful term) that are using it ... and if that's the kind of organization you have or the kind of career you're building, it's time to get over that resistance.

If you're a nonprofit manager right now and you're not using RSS, you're falling behind.

You're not getting information -- about your cause, about your people, about your profession -- efficiently enough, which means you're not getting enough information, period. And someone else is getting that information, or will be soon.

• Someone eyeballing your job.
• Or your press release.
• Or your grant application.
• Someone competing with you for your constituents.
• Or someone competing with your constituency for influence.

They'll know when someone writes about your issue or blogs about your cause or has something to say about your organization, and know it without refreshing dozens of links and scouring dozens of mailing lists so their hands are free for the other hundred things they have to do. If they know it, you'd better know it too. Luckily, it's easy as pie.

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