This morning, the members of the Nonprofit Commons demo’d SL for the US Department of State. Bill May (Serotta Keynes in SL) works in public diplomacy, as the Senior Technology Advisor. He invited the Public Diplomacy’s Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau (the vast majority of their work is conducted through the NGO community) to shoulder-surf while he introduced the members of the Nonprofit Commons to them.
It was pretty exciting to have such a good turn-out of our own members at such short notice. We had about 10-15 avatars from several different countries representing the nonprofit community inworld.
The members of the nonprofits cited the usual benefits that we all seem to appreciate about SL: the incredible International representation, the ability to procure a good group of volunteers, the ability to raise funds (based on work done in SL, not necessarily directly from funds raised within SL), the ease of access to a great network of new colleageus, the range of diverse populations, the ability to do a lot of conferencing without spending money on travel and hotels, and the potential for social marketing.
Penguin Kuhn referenced her blog post about Top Ten Ways SL can benefit Nonprofits
In all the visit was short and sweet, but the audience in the RL room (btw 25-30 people) asked questions of the SL group, seemed engaged, and according to Serotta, No One Left the Room!
I guess that is one measure of success?
Written by: Glitteractica_Cookie