Another Blog Success Story: Project Management & Review at Bridgespan

Here is another enterprise 2.0 success story where blog transparency trumped siloed email. The Bridgespan Group is a nonprofit organization that focuses on the management and recruiting challenges of the nonprofit sector. It was launched with the support of Bain & Company, Inc. and applies management strategies and tools to help non-profits and foundations achieve greater social impact. I had lunch a few months ago with Cris Peterson, their CTO, and we discussed uses of web 2.0, especially blogs. Cris had been skeptical of blogs, siding with Guy Kawasaki (now a highly rated blogger) who said, “A blog is written by someone with nothing to say, writing for someone with nothing to do.” Cris said he occasionally found a blog with good content, such as the work of Larry Lessig, but his perception was primarily that blogs provide a platform for viewpoints.

We met again a few weeks ago and I discovered that Cris had reconsidered blogs as a platform with more possibilities. He now looked at blogs for what they could do, not simply the use examples he had seen so far. Cris saw blogs as a simple system of linked entries that allow for comments and provide transparency and search. You can link together entries and have the comments incorporated as part of the value. They can replace email as it does not allow you to easily find anything and is difficult to use with rich media.

Cris was leading a media project and decided to use blogs to support the team review process. Bridgestar, the Bridgespan initiative dedicated to recruiting and connecting senior leadership talent for the nonprofit sector, wanted to present the answers to frequently asked questions about nonprofit careers in an engaging new format. . They produced nine videos and formatted them into a three by three Hollywood Squares-like matrix. To gather feedback from all the stakeholders during production and editing, Cris set up a blog on his iWeb account through his Mac. He posted the nine videos and the stakeholders were able to comment and see the comments of others in an easy format. They got updates through RSS and everything was searchable. The blog format saved a large amount of time and enabled a better product.

Cris is now looking for other uses of blogs. He plans to blog the next IT conference he attends so that his staff can get immediate updates on what he sees, again saving large amounts of time for him and them. It will also enable him to get feedback from his staff while he is still at the conference so he can ask additional questions while still on site.

In summary Cris said that he now finds blogs useful as long as a few key components are in place:
-the technology has to be simple
-the payoff for the investment has to be clear and significant
-the context of the discussion has to be right for the message to have value