lotusmedia 2.0

Mission - what we do.

Our mission is to combine the power of information, community organizing, and nonprofit resourcefulness to make strategic technology work for progressive organizations, coalitions, and campaigns. We do this by:

• Developing and implementing online advocacy and outreach strategies to engage supporters, build community, improve accountability, and create change.
• Designing, building, and maintaining web sites and collaborative tools that can recruit and mobilize supporters, serve constituents, educate the public, promote an issue or cause, and build a movement for change.
• Facilitating workshops, presentations, group trainings, and one-on-one capacity-building sessions with nonprofit staff and volunteers on network-centric advocacy, blogging, and mission-critical online tools.

Strengths - skills we bring.

• Experienced: over a decade in the nonprofit sector with a wide range of organizations
• Current: knowledge of online organizing tools & practices, social networking principles, network-centric advocacy
• Energetic: training, organizing, and public speaking
• Articulate: blogging/writing and community activism
• Geek: web development, digital design, XHTML, CSS, and some PHP
• Political: worked with local, state, and national electoral and advocacy campaigns
• Strategic: trained in strategic planning and grassroots organizing principles
• Progressive: worked on many issues including race, gender, poverty, environment, housing, civil liberties, labor, militarism, and more

See Ruby Sinreich’s resume for more details.

Vision - why we do it.

Technology should serve people and communities by strengthening and supporting work for social, economic, and environmental justice. Strategic use of information puts power in the hands of progressive organizations and activists, and facilitates more effective communication with constituents, potential supporters, decision-makers, funders, and each other.

Values - how we do it.

• The network is the movement.
• Simplicity is a virtue. (Plus it’s often cheaper & more effective.)
• Technology is not inherently good (or bad), it’s just a tool that can be used in many ways.
• The tools cannot be separated from the work, so it’s critical to understand nonprofits and advocacy as well as technology needs.
• A professional public image is increasingly important to nonprofits’ credibility.
• Access to information is critical to democracy.
• Creativity sustains the human intellect.
• Nonprofits shouldn’t have to pay "dot-com" prices.
• The path is the destination. Building open communities should be done with open tools.

 
Updated: April 2007.