10 Reasons nonprofit organizations should be using RSS

Here are the top 10 reasons you -- and your organization -- should use RSS technology.

1. RSS makes it easy to read the Web: How many bookmarks do you have in your browser? Does it make you ill to think of clicking through all of them to check for new content? Make RSS do the work for you -- subscribe to sites and your reader will collect the new relevant content. My bookmarks no longer scare me. In fact, I rarely use them.
2. RSS makes it easy to find relevant information: Searching the Web can be a chore, and most of us don't even have the patience to do more than search Google and check the first pages of results. RSS allows you to tap relevant, even mission-critical information by letting you create feeds based on keywords. How this works varies, but there are a variety of tools -- PubSub, Technorati, Feedster -- that you can use, and many aggregators integrate with them in way that allows you to create searches. Let's say you work for an organization that is following issues pertaining to same-sex civil unions and marriages. You can set up some keyword searches and then subscribe to those searches. The relevant information comes to you.
3. RSS lets you share the information you get: With RSS, information comes to you in manageable pieces: a NYTimes headline with a sentence-long article summary; a blog entry; a teaser for a longer blog entry; the pointer to a newsgroup posting; an e-mail announcement list; events listings. You can push that information out to interested communities -- simply send it via e-mail, or put it on your own Web site or blog.
4. RSS helps you participate in conversations relevant to your work: Naturally, if the New York Times or your local paper writes about your organization, you'll want to be the first to know. But it's also important to participate in discussions on popular blogs or other online communities. RSS can help you find these conversations, advance your organization's agenda, and generate attention for your work.
5. RSS makes it easier to control your own subscriptions: Unsubscribing from some e-mail mailing lists and announcements can be a chore. You can't remember how it is that you elected to receive the information in the first place, and worse, it ends up mixed in with your inbox and distracts you from getting work done. RSS gives you complete control. You can easily segment your feed from your regular e-mail or use an aggregator that bypasses e-mail entirely.
6. RSS allows people to share your content: When you create a newsfeed, you've opened the door to content sharing, and others can easily disseminate your good, relevant content.
7. RSS makes it easy for others to lend you a bit of their Web real estate: With RSS, other organizations can display some of your content on their Web sites. This is good. It gets your content out to a variety of audiences, and it can enhance partnerships. The best part? They don't actually have to talk to you for this to happen. Painless content partnerships -- what more could anyone want?
8. It's easy to avoid being a spammer: Forget opt-in and double opt-in worries. Allowing people to subscribe via RSS puts control into their hands and gets you completely off the spammer hook. Okay, so some e-mail publishers hate that (Bill Pease even asks if e-mail is dead  in a TechSoup community thread). It's hard to track traffic, they say, and it puts control completely in the hands of the subscriber instead of the publisher. I disagree. If you are creating good content, people will subscribe and they will stay subscribed. That means ultimately, the control is really in your hands. Compelling content is the most important thing. And not being a spammer is more than an ethical and legal issue, it means that your message will get to your intended audience instead of a spam filter.
9. RSS makes it easy to contribute to Web-wide conversations: If you're using RSS to track what people are saying about important issues and what people are saying about you, so are others. By making your content available via RSS, you're allowing other people to discover you. And they'll be commenting on your site, linking to it, and subscribing to your RSS feed.
10. It's only just beginning: RSS is still in the relatively early stages. The tools are pretty raw, but it pays for nonprofits to get in early on communication technologies. It will better position you to take advantage of them as they mature and additional uses become available. Ultimately, it's about making your views and your work part of the conversation.

Reprinted with permission from techsoup.org