Net Tuesdays are spreading around the globe!
Tis the Season
Is mobile fundraising the next frontier? Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org says the numbers speak for themselves. Holly Ross at NTEN writes about a new ring tone, "Why don't you just shut up?" and points to this article about MobileActive in the Economist.
According to a recent national poll, when price and quality are equal, 77 percent will choose a brand that supports a cause. Is that why we're seeing so many charity online stores like the one from Campus Kitchens Project and Amnesty International. That also means good news for the shopping for charity programs.
Child's Play Charity targets gamers as a donor community, by Penny Arcade, raising millions mostly to provide games and equipment to child life programs at leading hospitals around the world. The program takes cash donations but it also links each hospital to an Amazon.com Wishlist where you can directly purchase games and hardware the staff at that hospital would like to provide to kids who are staying in the hospital.
And you don't have purchase new stuff to give a gift. StuffYourRuckSack lets you find travelers who are visiting to a developing country and can drop off items to a school or orphanage. You can also see if there is a local charity that you bring items to in your own world travels.
There are lots of alternative gift giving opportunities too, take for example Save the Children gift catalog that lets you and your children explore a map of the world and imagine how simple gifts make a difference. You can also use Network For Good Good Card, it works like a debit card and the recipient gets to donate to any charity of their choice.
Tactical Philanthropy continues the One Post Challenge with a post titled "Beyond Hacking Philanthropy" from Kevin Jones from Good Capital and who blogs xchangexchange. At first, I thought it might be about this recent issue, but it was the name of event "Hacking Philanthropy" to discuss philanthropy and technology today.
Papilia Online Tax Receipts enables nonprofits to provide donors with a secure web page that allows them to view their giving history and print personalized tax receipts.
echoDonations.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping charities start or grow their online fundraising programs by offering financial incentives for donors to give more.
CrowdFunder is another web site that lets you set up a page and collect donations for a personal fundraising effort or nonprofit organization. The causes range from helping Joe pay for his MCSE to helping Leslie cover her emergency eye surgery hospital bill. DaveTV has a campaign to support the One Laptop Per Child effort.
Social Media
Nedra Weinreich's tip jar, tipped me off to newly published study from Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson from U Mass Dartmouth about nonprofit adoption of social media tools. Key finding, as Sarah Dopp notes "The Nonprofits Are Winning." Britt Bravo is surprised that video is the most adopted tool and wonders whether it would be the same for smaller organizations. More on the study results from Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web and here. The results differ from a study released earlier this year.
According to Read/Write Web, FaberNovel Consulting has released a new research paper on social networks. The paper provides a theoretical overview of social networks and important trends. There's a good case study of LinkedIn. Slides are available in the NpTech group in Slideshare.
MoveOn.org launched a "Respect My Privacy Petition Campaign" last week. It was covered by C|NET news. The most recent campaign news from MoveOn - here. In response to the Facebook flip, Doc Searles, in this post and a follow-up argues that we should "stop petitioning Facebook and Google to solve our problems for us." and that it's "time to comeup with some new rules of engagement - ones that work for us as well as them." Stephen Downes suggests a boycott, but points out it is no cakewalk.
This article summarizes new research from Forrester detailing "The Seven Tenets of the Information Workplace."
Through bloggers, we learn that like it did for an older version of SnagIt, TechSmith is offering a free download for an older version of Camtasia, the gold standard of screencasting editing and capture software. Michele Martin is already exploring. Sue Waters offers some tips for improving the quality of screencasts and a thoughtful analysis of the pros/cons of using JingProject, a free easier to use screencasting tool also from TechSmith.
Jon Stahl points to Steve Anderson's exploration of Jing for a screencast which he discovered over the summer. Jon notes, "Both substance-wise, and the idea of doing ultra-short "casual" screencasts like this as a training/demonstration technique." I agree Jing is the thing for doing micro screencasting.
Virtual Worlds
The Horizon Project wiki, which explores virtual worlds in education, has been nominated for Best Educational Wiki 2007 - vote here.
Can't afford to visit Bali? Then do the next best thing, take a virtual trip to Bali. The annual international conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) is taking place in Bali and in Second Life from December 3-8th.
Blogging
Jo Le asked a question on the progressives exchange list serv about how to reach out to bloggers with teh results of a survey that found that small businesses, traditionally a Republican stronghold, favor Clinton in '08. There was lots of advice plus pointers to blogger relations guide, like this one from e-politics and a word of a soon-to-be-released guide from free range studios. Speaking of social media pr guidelines, check out RIP pitch is dead by Brian Solis and everything you need to know about Social Media Releases, a leading expert in PR 2.0 advice and writes a great blog too.
Ruby Sinreich a terrific post about how to use link to others in your blogging called "9 Ways to think about linking in a blog post" This might an example of #8, the friendly link which says I like what you're writing and want to share it.
Lee LeFever as done it again. This time with a video that explains what the big deal is about blog in 3 minutes.
Stephen Downes says the death of blogging is greatly exaggerated. Here's why.
Green Laptops
One Laptop Per Child give one, get one has been extended to December 30th. If you participate in Give One Get One today, you will receive your XO laptop(s) in early 2008. Your donated laptop will reach a child in
Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda in the same early 2008 timeframe. More information, see this write up from the Wall Street Journal, not quite a gee whiz fantastic endorsement.
Zonbu has announced a laptop version. It's an ecofriendly laptop loaded with open source software and friendly to the environment.
The NpTech Tag started as an experimental community tagging project in 2005. A loosely coupled group of nonprofit techies and social change activists decided to use the tag "NpTech" to identify web resources that would create an ongoing stream of information to promote and educate those working in nonprofit technology. Many individuals tag hundreds of resources each week. Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, was commissioned to write a weekly summary.
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Beth...I noticed you asked a question on your blog about SEO. I'm curious if you've leveraged the question function of Linked In in a similar fashion. I know Calicanis did this by saying "tell me how to fix Mahalo daily so I can get tons of hits" and got tons of answers and decent exposure (the story even got dugg). He experienced a little bit of backlash because his message was a bit corporate (i get 5,000 hits a day and i want to go even bigger, while folks that were listening were probably happy with their 100-1000 hits a day). To me, thats a neat way to leverage the wisdom of crowd....as long as your tone and framing is respectful and not corporate.
Beth I just wish I could be as prolific and high quality as you. Wow! Great posts this weekend...a per usual!
Posted by: Nathan Ketsdever | December 01, 2007 at 05:10 PM
Hi Nathan,
Actually about a year ago, I did an exhaustive study using the question function on LinkedIn to create a resource listing of nonprofit tech conferences.
When doing research like this, always think about two things -- the subject matter and the subject matter expert. Ask not what do I need to know, but who knows this? Then figure out what your topic is. Seek out the whos to the get to the what.
I used that approach and you can read about it here:
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/02/how_i_used_link.html
The reason that I didn't use LinkEd or Facebook was because the question was for someone else and I didn't want to have to aggregate the responses - (cut and paste) - I wanted to be able to email a link with the advice.
Posted by: Beth Kanter | December 01, 2007 at 05:31 PM