I just checked my Twitter feed, then my profile. I am following 25 people. In that small number I seem to be unusual. Among the 330 people following me many are also following hundreds if not thousands of other people. Does this make me feel a little less special? Yeah, but that’s not my point here.

I use Twitter for work, and my work is all about the social sector. So I assume my followers form a cross section of the sector. A typical follower of mine is following 500 people. The all-time Twitter-holic on my list is following me plus 37,695 others. The most followed individual in my orbit who is not a politician or an institution has 340,757 followers. This made me stop and think – how do you follow 37,000 people on Twitter? For that matter, how do you follow even a mere 500?

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What is so new about the New Normal? “The New Normal” is a phrase favored by pundits to describe the current economic and political condition of our nation. While we are settling into a new social contract—or perhaps it is the absence of one altogether—I can’t call it the New Normal. For nonprofits and the people they serve, for the poor, for the shrinking middle class, and for every American who still believes in the promise of a just society, it is the New Abnormal.

I will be leading the keynote at the Ohio Grantmakers Forum Annual Conference in October on the topic of Nonprofit Strategy in the New Abnormal and check out my recent guest blog at the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Tell me what you think. Is any of this new or normal?