Congratulations to Ben Jealous, the new President of NAACP

I was excited and heartened to hear that the NAACP had selected Ben Jealous from the Rosenberg Foundation to be its next President.

I’m sure that the next few months will be busy—especially with the national elections—as Ben lays out a vision for what the NAACP of the 21st century should look like.

I was also glad to read that he’s thinking about technology and media as tools and strategies to bring his vision to the fore.

Among his plans for the group are strengthening its online presence to connect with activists, mobilize public opinion and build a database for tracking racial discrimination and hate crimes; ensuring high voter turnout among blacks in the November election; pushing an aggressive civil rights agenda, regardless of the makeup of the Congress or White House; and retooling the national office to make it more effective at helping local branches affect change in their communities.

What are my (unsolicted) suggestions for how to go about leveraging technology?

• Deploy a Network-centric Media Strategy: Ben’s words echo much of what Allison Fine has written and communicated about in her great book: Momentum. Buy that book and Ben Rigby’s Mobilizing Generation 2.0.

• Use Social Media to Communicate the Personal: You may not Twitter, but I just checked and twitter.com/benjealous and twitter.com/naacp are available. What better way to build one-on-one relationships than through social media. The NAACP has a blog so that’s a great platform to begin with. Don’t just let staff blog by themselves—if you post to it as well that will make all the difference.

• Let the Web Be Your Eyes and Ears and Voice: One of our grants was to Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to develop a media catalog of media and press coverage regarding the issue of marriage equality on both the pro and con side. GLAAD felt that local media stories gather momentum quickly and that it needed a way to monitor breaking stories as well as provide useful tactics for its local members to respond to anti-gay news coverage.

• Data Matters: As a bit of a data geek, my mind raced when I read about the idea for a database to measure racial discrimination. One of our board members, Jim Fruchterman, has built a nonprofit on the very issue of measuring the immeasurable. Benetech has developed one of the most sophisticated open-source solutions for tracking human rights violations.

• Help Your Branches with E-Advocacy: Your chapters may have differing levels of technology adoption, but at the end of the day, e-advocacy is about using media and telecommunications tool to advocate for the NAACP’s platform and agenda. Resist the urge to have a national technology planning initiative—instead pick a handful of branches that have the tech savvy and are in critical districts for the upcoming elections to implement an e-advocacy strategy. ZeroDivide’s partner Aspiration has developed a comprehensive e-advocacy curriculum that might help.

While we will miss you here in San Francisco, Ben, we wish you every success at NAACP.