How foundations are using new web technologies

The current Chronicle of Philanthropy has four articles all about how foundations are experimenting with new interactive web tools to tell their stories and share knowledge. They're posting videos, creating online radio shows and inviting readers to comment and react. They're also offering readers ways to act on what they've learned. Read the main article here; the article about how one small foundation is making itself heard is here.

At this stage, a lot of what these foundations are doing is experimentation by trial and error to find out what will work - and what won't. In that way they're right on pace with the newspaper industry and even with television and movies. No one really knows how these technologies will develop and what will turn out to be the next must-have tool. Remember the days before e-mail? Can you imagine life without it now?

What foundations are learning is that they can't be left behind. They have to try out new ideas and be willing to fail, if they're going to have an impact in a rapidly changing world.

We're in the same boat in workforce development. We need to do some experimentation of our own to figure out which of these technologies will work for us. One key principle is that the technology shouldn't drive us. Instead, we have to start from our overall goals - helping job seekers find good jobs, helping businesses find skilled employees, and strengthening our local economies.

In our day-to-day tasks to achieve these goals, how can we use tools like blogs, wikis, podcasts, MySpace pages and YouTube videos to help us be more effective? All those links are workforce development examples you might want to check out.

Web 2.0 image: Markus Angermeier