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RSS is the new Email
RSS to me is going to be the next email. Alot of people make the argument that "RSS hasn't caught on as much...", but I don't completely buy it. Over 65% of consumer marketing sites use RSS feeds today...that is a huge chunk of the web! Now, what I personally feel is happening...well, marketers are not sure what to do with it.
RSS is a great way to deliver content to your constituents wherever they are through aggregators. I personally subscribe to over 30 sites to keep up with the lastest political and nonprofit technology, as well as general tech and business news. Google Reader is just as great a companion to me as my inbox; I categorize incoming news, email it to friends and archive it for research purposes.
Now, when it comes to the use of RSS for constituent engagement, think of the possibilities you have using RSS to keep people on your site. We already live in an age where message control is becoming a thing of the past. You can take it one step further by allowing your constituents to subscribe only to the information on your site they want to see. Custom RSS feeds can really grab the interest of constituents, as they now can filter all the noninteresting news, blog posts, reports, press releases, etc. and get only what they feel is important to them. This can be taken one step further and be assigned to action alerts and donor solicitation s(I expect to get flamed for this, but I am prepared).
This will also save you time on determining the best way to reach constituents, and let them tell you how they want to get information from you. Give them options other that using an aggregator, such as email alerts when new content is posted or having content emailed directl to them. You may even want to get fancy and offer the ability for text message notifications of new alerts, news, etc. The possibilities are (almost) endless.
Give them control and they will love you for it!
Comments
long way to go
RSS is NOT really catching on, not among nonprofits. I work with very tech UNsavvy nonprofits, and they are underwhelmed by RSS. I can understand why; these nonprofits are still very email-based. They still subscribe to updates via email, read newsletters via email, etc., and RSS, like web-based discussion fora, means a different way of navigating information.
NetSquared and TechSoup deal, mostly, with tech-savvy nonprofit organizations (and that's great and very much needed). But if you go to, say, a volunteer managers conference or other NON-tech-focused nonprofit conference, you will probably be taken aback at just how tech-reluctant so much of the sector is. And most of the people at these conferences have never heard of RSS.
To spread the message about RSS and other emerging tech to nonprofits in a way that it actually catches on, advocates have to start taking their message to the nonprofits and these nonprofits' own preferred gathering places/avenues for information. That's what was done with the web -- the message was taken to CNS conferences and fundraising manager conferences and the newsletters these groups produce and what not, and the message was heard.
I wrote an article on my own web site regarding Nonprofits and RSS, describing RSS in a way that I think speaks more to what non-techie nonprofit staff value. Where I've had the best luck with showing its value is with people required to do media monitoring; the press folks in Afghanistan were *very* happy to learn about RSS, because the benefits to them were immediately obvious.
Mysterious RSS Feeds
Jayne, you are right that RSS feeds can be a very mysterious concept for people to grasp. I think things like Apple's including a feed reader in its Mail program will slowly make reading rss feeds less difficult to grasp. I've found that for non-tech savvy folks, it requires a one-on-one explanation. In the end they might not really understand what an rss feed is, but they understand how to add them and read them in their feed reader and why some of their supporters might look for them on their site.
categorizing incoming RSS feeds
How do you categorize the incoming RSS news in an automated way so that they flow into separate places that you have pre-set?
Human Rights Watch RSS News Feeds
I like Human Rights Watch's RSS news feeds page separated by regions, themes and countries.
Britt Bravo
Community Builder
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