Washington, DC - Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Bridge Conference for the second year in a row. Each year, nonprofit professionals and direct-marketing services, consultants, and experts get together to bridge the gap between fundraising and communications. This was also a chance for me to refill my waning supply of branded coffee mugs, highlighting pens, magnets, and bottle openers.

As expected, social media reigned over the breakout sessions and seemed to be on everyone’s mind. One could hardly finish a sentence before having it “tweeted” out into cyberspace by fellow conference-goers, inevitably carrying the hash tag #bridge09 for easy reading access.

As BlackBerrys and laptops kept these cyber conversations alive, some attendees couldn’t help but ask, “Is this all just a bunch of nonsense?”

It seemed like each session I attended was made up of a 50/50 split of social networking “believers” and “cynics.” Believers were determined that the hours dedicated to updating Facebook pages, counting fans, and linking their Flickr accounts to their YouTube channels were part of a greater strategy and were leading them, ultimately, toward reaching their marketing, communications, and fundraising goals.

The other half, the cynics, were finding that while time spent online was fun and exciting, it was not in fact valuable to the fulfillment of their goals. They mentioned that the stories of nonprofits making money through Facebook were merely anecdotal and could be counted on one hand. They worried about staff time spent on social networking sites and the inability to truly calculate a social networking return on investment that they could pitch to their board of directors. For a two-person nonprofit, how could they justify spending five hours a week engaged in social media with no solid measuring tools?

The funny thing was that even those who were cynics were still engaged in social media. There was a fear of being left out of the conversation. One man was furiously tweeting his disdain for Twitter.

I kept trying to figure out where I fit on the spectrum. I want to believe. I want to invest my time coming up with a fabulous online strategy that engages GFC’s community while raising our profile and increasing donations. I want to have over 1,000 Facebook fans by September, and I want them to comment on all our Flickr photos, be moved by our videos, and subscribe to our RSS web feed. Will we increase our donor base this way? Will we get press coverage? Grant money? Probably not. But until I figure out exactly what purpose all this “nonsense” serves or does not serve, I will continue to be part of the conversation, sending my thoughts and updates to the cyber universe. I’ll see you there.

Tamar Schiffman is GFC’s Marketing and External Relations Officer