For quick consultations with colleagues, or staying in touch with
your contacts, free instant messaging (IM) services like Google Chat,
Skype, AIM, and many others will fit the bill. But if you need a
user-friendly way to interact directly with those online supporters of
your organization who aren’t on your contact list, a chatroom might be a useful tool for strengthening your online community.
In her introduction to Meebo,
Soha explained step-by-step how to embed a MeeboMe chatroom on your
organization’s website. Since then, Meebo has continued to become even
more useful, most recently with the addition of a notifier
that lets you know when your chatroom is active, in much the same way
as IM services pop up a notice when one of your contacts sends a
message. As well, for anyone who was unable to get into Meebo through a
corporate firewall may find they are able to use the service now that
https and proxy access have been added. On the other hand, users may
find that they’ll need to update their browser’s Flash player to
participate in the chat.
If you don’t want to embed your chatroom on your website, if you
need a chatroom only for a short period of time — to collaborate with
your team on a project, for example, or to support a specific campaign
— or if you have concerns about embedding a public chatroom on your
organization’s website, a hosted chatroom may be right for you.
Chatmaker,
for example, lets you set up an instant free chatroom as easily as
typing in a name for your chatroom and sharing a link with those you’d
like to invite. You do have the choice to make your chatroom secure,
for greater privacy, but it is a paid option.
TinyChat chatrooms are
“disposable” — they disappear when you’ve finished the chat, and the
only way to save data is to download the chat log file before you leave
— so it’s suitable for chats that you’d prefer not to have archived on
the Internet. TinyChat is free and couldn’t be more easy to set up —
just click a link and the chatroom is created automatically. Share a
link to the chatroom by email or on your website, or simply click a
button to invite people from your social networks (Facebook, Twitter,
and MySpace) to come to the chatroom.
With ParaChat, you can choose
whether to have the chatroom hosted on the company’s server or embedded
on your own website. One attractive feature is that you can make the
embedded chatroom in any size and customize it to match your site’s
look and feel. The Basic version of ParaChat is free and very
functional but it is ad-supported at this level — as with any
ad-supported service, you’ll want to be sure that the ads displayed are
appropriate to be associated with your non-profit website.
And for something a bit different, do have a look at Firefly.
It’s half chatroom and half social network — any Firefly user can drop
into chat on any Firefly-enabled website. (To get install Firefly is as simple as copy-and-paste a snippet of Javascript code, to add the interactive badge to your website or blog sidebar.) Users can see chat messages left by others, then add their own.
I’m inclined more to put Firefly more into the
category of “social annotation” for a website than traditional chatroom, as
it’s not strictly limited to real-time interactions, but it serves the same key function — to increase the opportunities for two-way communication between your nonprofit organization, the people you serve, and those who support your cause.
If your nonprofit is already engaging your supporters (or a
broader audience) with chat, or you’re using a private chatroom to get
things done with your colleagues, what tools and services have you found work best for you? And if you haven’t gone there yet, is a chatroom the kind of communications tool that you
think you might like to try?