Mobilizing Communities in a Connected Age: New Report from ZeroDivide and Mitchell Kapor Foundation

The Mitchell Kapor Foundation*, in partnership with the ZeroDivide Foundation recently released a report titled “Mobilizing Communities in a Connected Age.” The report is an assessment of advocacy organizations’ use of technology, and is a companion report to their recent report that outlined the challenges facing philanthropy’s efforts to support technology use by advocacy organizations.

Both reports are well worth reading in full, and you can access both of them from the ZeroDivide Website.  What I want to focus on here are the key findings of the report on advocacy organizations, and the implications for community organizing groups.

In the report, Tina Lee, the author conducted a scan of the field, and based on her findings, categorized the field into three categories: Leading, Aspiring, and Legacy organizations.  The report details a number of findings that we’ll likely return to in later posts, but overall, four themes emerge that have critical importance for community organizing groups:

1)      Integration is key

2)      Integration of communications is of particular importance

3)      Successful technology integration flows from support by organization’s leadership

4)      Organizational culture is a determining factor in success

These are themes that PTP has been talking about for years. In fact, take a look at our 2004 report “From Exclusion to Inclusion: Stengthening Community-led Organizations with Effective Technology” to see how things have shifted over the last several years. More recently, we’ve taken these concepts and made them central to the design of our programs – everything we do is really aimed at integration, communications, and working to shift culture.

We encourage you to download and read the ZeroDivide report, and if you’d like, post back here with any questions or comments that you’d like PTP to take up in future posts.  The ZeroDivide reports, taken together, paint a picture of a changing field, and we’d like to invite you to join us in unpacking the implications of the reports for community organizing groups and how we can more effectively work together to build the capacity of the field.

*The Mitchell Kapor Foundation is a supporter of the Progressive Technology Project and included PTP in the survey of groups that are cited in this report.