I work with various non-profit organizations who have internal email, mailing lists, and social media, but no communities. Discourse is an incredible tool for building a community. Thank you.
Many solutions will let you build a community on their platform (Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup.com, etc.)–good for their platform. I like Discourse because organizations can build their own communities.
I created a one-pager to use for presentations. It includes some quotes that summarizes things nicely. (I like this presentation too.)
Why Use Discourse?
Intention to Action
“If we can use technology to shorten the path between intention and action, that excites me.” -Gerry Lopez (from AMC Theaters, not Mr. Pipeline)
Collaboration
“…standardizing and automating manual processes, improving workflows, improving knowledge-sharing and collaboration, and gaining visibility into the information we have, so that we can leverage the data to make stronger business decisions.” -Mary O’Carroll, Head of Legal Operations, Technology and Strategy, Google, Inc. (article)
Principles
“It’s super easy to build a small thing for a few people, anybody can do that, for 10,000 people say; it’s much harder to build networks and platforms and systems that work for 10 million people,” said Chris Fabian, who co-leads the innovation unit at the United Nations Children’s Fund and spoke to USA TODAY on the sidelines of the summit. (Article)
- Design with the user
- Understand the existing ecosystem
- Design for scale
- Build for sustainability
- Be data driven
- Use open standards, open data, open source and open innovation
- Reuse and improve
- Do no harm
- Be collaborative
Or you can play the Tron intro 
