Transcript

By Michelle Samplin-Salgado

Last week, Jennie Anderson and I attended the Nonprofit Technology Network's (NTEN) 2009 National Technology Conference (NTC) . Because many AIDS service organizations are non-profits, the conference provides us with an opportunity to gain invaluable insight into how non-profit organizations across the country and around the world are using new media to inspire, connect and collaborate with their audiences. It was inspiring for me to learn from and share experiences with people who really care about what they are doing and believe in the causes they represent. And there is so much we, in the HIV community, can learn from people working to promote their own causes. Here are a few highlights:

• Beth Kanter's session on Social Media Strategy and Evaluation inspired me to continue to use new media to listen, learn, and adapt. She reminded us to “measure stuff that tells you if you reached your goal.” At AIDS.gov, we're finding that balance between evaluating the numbers (blog subscribers, traffic to the website, etc.) and the qualitative stuff (comments, engagement, etc.) that tells us if we're accomplishing what we set out to do. One of our goals is to inspire people and organizations to use new media in response to HIV. Are we doing that? Post a comment to let me know.
• Jennie presented on a panel about online effective communication strategies. We not only collaborated with John Kenyon and William Neuheisel but also learned a lot about online strategies. And we connected with our HIV colleagues like Luvvie, who launched The Red Pump Project for National Women and Girls HIV Awareness Day (March 10th). Luvvie told us that the project “represents the strength and courage of women fighting HIV/AIDS or affected by the disease both directly and indirectly.”
• I had the opportunity to give an Ignite Session . If you're not familiar with Ignite, participants have five minutes to speak, using 20 slides that automatically advance. It's an exciting way to hear about a lot of different topics. I presented about our World AIDS Day '08 activities - and was inspired (there's that word again) by other Ignite presenter's such as Manny Hernandez who talked about his Ning diabetes groups tudiabetes.com and estudiabetes.com (Spanish-language version).

We hope to see some of you at next year's conference. In the meantime, you can follow the conversation using the Twitter Hashtag #NTC09 . Ready Talk also recorded several of the sessions at NTC. One in particular that I enjoyed watching is Confessions of a Social Marketer (and it's free).

Thanks Holly and the NTEN team for hosting such an inspiring conference and providing us with so many opportunities to connect and collaborate. Until next year!