London Regional ICT Champion

Clearly the need for a ‘champion’ or ‘Buzz Director’ as Steve Bridger calls it, to promote technology to the community sector is one that many commentators – including David Wilcox, Nancy White and Beth Kanter (amongst others) – have been talking about.

As Steve Bridger says:

It’s a particular crusade of mine to encourage not-for-profits to identify an internal champion (or recruit a virtual volunteer) to take on this role. Call it what you will, and David Wilcox and Beth Kanter, have both had a go at (re)inventing job labels. I like Beth Kanter’s “Social Media Coach”. But how about “Cause Evangelist”?

Personally I quite like London ICT Evangelist. Maybe it’ll catch on and I’ll have to get my business stationery re-done.

There’s also been an interesting discussion about the qualities needed for a “buzz director” and technology initiatives that such a person might promote. Steve Bridger writes:

• Talk to everybody. Listen. Make it easy for colleagues to find you, or manufacture the conditions by which serendipity is more likely to occur.
• Your role is to create a buzz around your cause (and secondarily, your not-for-profit ‘brand’). But resist any desire (or pressure) to “own” the cause. Far better to identify the communities where your supporters and activists are already and join in the conversation.
• Explore ways to keep in touch and to share ideas and insights and share links to new developments. Embrace opportunities for collaboration.

Naturally such a person needs to be easy to find and offer easy interactivity with social bookmarking tools like Digg, , Technorati, Del.icio.us. Nancy E. Schwartz points us in the direction of Shift Communications and their new template for online . Nancy writes:

…you’ll see the following elements that enable online release readers (who include many traditional journalists, as well as bloggers and your audiences) to easily take action:

• Full contact information with email, blog and instant messenger addresses.
• Succinct, news facts bullet points — easier to digest than traditional narrative.
• Delicious page with links to related sources, updated regularly and available as a feed to your RSS reader, so updates come to you. In this case, SHIFT uses this page to link readers to coverage of their template release, and the agency itself.
• Downloads — in the sample a photo, logo and the press release template.
• Links to spokesperson’s LinkedIn profile.
• One-click buttons to add the press release to the readers Delicious bookmarks or to rate it via Digg.
• Technorati tags to improve search access via Technorati (mostly a blog-focused search engine).

As with everything in life, this blog is very much a work in progress, but so far, the early signs are encouraging. I’ll let you know how I get on with Shift’s new template.