If we ask 'how do non-profit organizations change as they adopt social web strategies' we may assume certain points about social organizations and change that are not actual or necessary elements of social organizations. Besides the obvious fact that a non-profit organizations does not include those that lose net earnings unintentionally but have profit as a general goal, we encounter the issue of a value theory regarding the nature of what profit is as well as a pre-determined value for the relationship between a non-profit organization and social networks. It is useful to clarity these unclear meanings in order to determine a more firm criterion of non-profit organizations and their relationships to social networking organizations.
First the issue of profit. Generally it is taken to mean net revenues beyond the cost of production. In thermodynamic terms the points is akin to making a perpetual motion machine, or starting a universal flow of energy from absolutely nothing that continues to increase (without being God). Few organizations actually create environmental profit. The exceptions are clever arrangement of renewable resources such as clover into interesting shapes for specialized purposes such as deer hunting calls, and occasional non-renewable transformation of a limited amount of resources in to information processing technologies. Profit from the human point of view ought to be considered to be providing necessary elements for human life sustenance with the least amount of disorganization added to nature (thermodynamically). I would guess that perhaps no more than ten percent of business actually operates at anything resembling a profit.
The second point is that of 'social networking' entry; organizations of human beings are of specialized functions. An acceptable way to determine what is and isn't a non-profit organization would be to determine who receives the profits. If the Salvation Army earned two billion dollars annually selling edible books yet allocated the 'profit' over production costs to buying bicycles for the homeless then it would rightly remain a non-profit organization. Organizations should be free to produce profit without being taxed so long as they distribute the excess earnings not required for financial life support of organization members impartially to reviewed eligible non-organizational members. This non-technical distribution of allocation eligibility requirements for non-profit status would not change the function of the organization. Social networks are what organizations are for themselves.
Organizations are social networks frequently with a hierarchical flowchart of power allocation within the organization from top to bottom. The membership is generally yet not always closed or exclusive. It is possible in some organizations such as Helium.com for the membership to be open and works based for determination of the allocation of resources, yet there is of course no review of the allocation of resources beyond life-support levels for the insider organizational employment as their would be in a non-profit. Not to labor the point with Helium.com overmuch for I have no idea what they have determined as a right profit level-perhaps the minimum required to stimulate participation by the class of non-direct employee writer-members if we go by the prevailing business ethic of the era, organizations may extended their membership or social networking sites in production, consumption and allocation of profit.
Social networking sites that become dominated by particular, exclusive profit memberships may become an ontology of social control enabling a filtering of competitive rival organizations. Social networking may synergize business advertising and memberships. Non-profit organizations may benefit equally from Internet structures, and may actually have a competitive advantage over traditional for-profit organizations. Many of the unemployed at least, with the desire to work for themselves, find the idea of erg based compensation helpful. It is a kind of ideal to replace the lost natural world opportunities for direct self-production of income. The days of homesteading in nature, hunting and fishing or growing a garden on free land have long passed. Through the creation of non-profit organizations enabling a variety of new work opportunities for anyone willing to work, it may be possible to accomplish triple goals of reducing waste of natural resources, increasing employment in the United States and serving the needs of the disadvantaged that benefited from traditional non-profit organizations.
We can see in the late philosopher Jean Paul Sartre's 'Critique of Dialectical Reason' that an organization is a specialized concatenation of social relationships. Of course participation in the organization did not occur for all members at once. The late arrivals are preponderantly less advantaged than the early arrivals though not necessarily in all cases is that so. Social networking sites taken over by large numbers of people with world-views of particular organizations develop a product inertia such as is found in 'The Herd' of listeners tuned in to ESPN each weekday morning. Perpetuation and increase of social networking such as in NFL football create vast pay inequalities and opportunity costs for those investing time in social networks derived from NFL football. Non-profit social networking may be one method of providing a remedy for the entertainment capture of social time lost by millions of man hours each year to for-profit organizations dragging along the stage one idea of profit.
The United States may have the ability to develop stage two non-profit organizations that resolve vast social inequalities and disadvantages through a voluntarily reallocation of resource transcending traditional for profit goals of obtaining irrational cash. Such cash economies have no discrimination as toefficiency of production thermodynamically. Instead they have values based upon scarcity of resource, difficulty of adding value to a resource, and total flow of units with net traditional profit through sales or taxation. Non profits with vast social networking abilities may be better able to provide food, housing technology (such as geodesics), work and other necessary items to the masses with a better environmental profit equation than stage one for-profit organizations.
The potential uses of non-profit organization social networking are unlimited; they require only a little insight and comprehension of the malleability and range of the social networking structures. If they develop an environmental profit strategy of least-disordering of natural resources with most service to social vital interests, they will have taken a significant step on the way to making the world a better place to live for the poor and for all consumers.