A friend of mine is the director of a women's shelter here in Washington DC. Two months ago my friend asked me if I could help her find some computers she could set up for the women at the shelter.
My first suggestion to her was that she should get herself online. By getting online she could make it far easier for others to help her.
As it happens, my friend already owned a laptop computer. Within a week I received a friendly "hi there" e-mail message from her. Last week she sent me a message saying she took delivery of several donated computers for the shelter.
How is it that being online makes it easier for others to help you? People who help charities and nonprofits often have quite busy lives themselves. Help-givers really appreciate being able to communicate online with others because e-mail communication allows them to offer more assistance to more people each day.
Imagine this scenario: Someone in your community is known to be willing to offer computer help to charities and nonprofits. He or she takes an interest in getting technology into the hands of people who otherwise could not afford it.
Would it be a productive use of that person's time to be playing phone tag with all the different people he or she is trying to help? Just keeping track of who needs what kind of help could strain the patience of even the most reasonable person.
Here is where the magic of e-mail kicks in. Your request for assistance can pop up as an e-mail message on the screen of a help-giver. If you include your name, phone number, organizational affiliation, and address in your first message, that information can be quickly saved to the help-giver's hard drive.
Once information is in electronic form (i.e. sent within an e-mail message), it can easily be referred to. It can forwarded on to someone else. It can be re-posted as a public message on an electronic bulletin board system (BBS). It could even be forwarded to sympathetic journalists in the press.
Help-givers are always thankful when people needing assistance reach them via e-mail. By getting online, people looking for assistance are helping themselves as well as helping their neighbors. The streamlining of communication that takes place via e-mail can free the help-giver to give extra assistance to others.
Here is another example. Last month I helped the director of a nonprofit adult literacy organization get online. It turns out this person already had a computer with a modem on his desk. All that was needed was an hour's worth of time to help him get set up online.
Three days later the person had already dashed off a dozen e-mail messages and had a long list of questions about the online world to ask me. Within the span of a week this person was transformed from being a person who had never used e-mail to being an active, enthusiastic online user.
How will online communications help this literacy organization? It will help in countless ways. It will allow easy back-and-forth communication with foundations and other grant givers. It will allow the director to engage in quantities of communication without the constant interruption of phone calls. Every phone call that is averted by using e-mail is one less interruption in his day. And one less interruption is one more opportunity for him to attend to other important work.
It would be no exaggeration to say that online communication is one of the best ways of making the gears of society turn smoothly. The telephone, on the other hand, is a communication device that makes the gears of society sputter along in fits and starts.
This is not to say that there is no place for telephone communication between people needing assistance and help-givers. It is just that benefits are often maximized when phone communication is kept to a minimum.
If you take an interest in helping broaden access to technology for those people who usually do not have access, one of the most effective thing you can do is to help the leaders of community organizations get online. By helping to empower them with an e-mail address, you can give them the gift of being connected.
Being connected online puts nonprofits and charities in a much better position to raise their arms upward for assistance. Online communication narrows the distance between the help-giver's arm and the help-requestor's arm. The chances of these two arms connecting firmly is what all of us hope for, isn't it?
Phil Shapiro
The author is an active volunteer in the Community Technology Centers' Network, an affiliation of over 270 community technology centers around the country. The network can be reached at:
Community Technology Centers' Network (CTCNet)
55 Chapel St.
Newton, MA 02158
Internet: ctcnet@ctcnet.org
Shapiro's home page, which includes further info about CTCNet, can be found on the web at: http://www.his.com/pshapiro/