blog

I set up this site a few weeks ago, but it’s been a busy summer, and we’re just now beginning to take it seriously. It still feels like an experiment, but we do expect it to serve a few specific purposes:

• Knowledge-Sharing: Beaconfire’s grown a lot in the past year, and it’s becoming more important to find efficient ways to share knowledge among the staff. We’ve used staff-wide email, the company intranet, and a wiki, and we’ll continue to use those tools in a variety of ways. But they all have serious shortcomings–poor search capability, lack of archives, difficult to use–and we expect that the blog is going to be a better space to capture, store and share knowledge.
• Conversations with Clients and Colleagues: Another major weakness of the other communication tools noted above is that they’re almost entirely internal to our company. There’s no effective way to open up conversations on those platforms with our clients and colleagues, but those are often the people we most want to involve in these discussions. A blog makes that possible, not only because these conversations are taking place in a public, archived, searchable space, but also because our clients and colleagues will be able to comment and join in the conversations directly.
• Blowing Our Own Horn: We’re really proud of the work we do with leading nonprofits across the country (and we’re proud of the work they do, too), and we’d like to spread the word. We sometimes put out press releases noting milestones in major projects, but those can take a lot of time and effort to produce, and there are plenty of accomplishments we’d like to note that somehow never clear the press-release hurdle. We think a blog will be an easier and more effective way to let folks know what we’re up to.

But that’s just for starters–this is a work in progress, and I’m excited to see what will happen that we haven’t even thought of yet. I’ve been actively blogging elsewhere for about 8 months, and I’ve been astounded by the ability of the platform to open up conversations, create connections among people and organizations, and spark ideas and creative thinking. I fully expect the same things to happen here for Beaconfire.