Gavin Clabaugh geeking out at the recent Technology Affinity Group Conference
Community Technology Foundation Flickr Photo
To read about the adoption challenges facing foundation chief technology officers in the age of social media, see Lucy Bernholz's thoughtful reflection on fitting new tools into old cultures.
Tis Almost The Season
In less than two weeks, we'll start seeing more and more holiday alternative giving-giving guides. The first one spotted in nptech social media space is The Progressives Guide to Holiday Gift-Giving. I particularly like the Eat a Cookie, Save the Oceans cookie cutters you receive when you adopt a marine creature.
Lucy Bernholz as identified a new buzz word, embedded giving.
Steve Dembo of Teach 42 has taken up the challenge with the launch of his personal fundraising campaign on behalf of Habitat for Humanity. He's 25% of the way towards his goal. Who is next? Need some ideas, check out this resource.
DIA's take on the Wired Fundraiser and people-powered giving. He suggests this create an interesting strategic question for organizations that seems like a fruitful place for future investigation: how do you get those people involved? Some answers in the comments. What's your take?
Easy Sponsorship is yet another group payment tool, one designed to collect money for sponsored fundraising events.
This Week's Net2ThinkTank
This month's Net2ThinkTank is a timely post on how nonprofits can use the social web during the giving season, although the question may be better phrased as how can you integrate the social web during the giving season. In the coming weeks, according to Katya Andresen of Network for Good, up to half of all charitable giving for most nonprofits is going to happen. This post will give you a roundup of some ways to incorporate social media, from specific tips to best practices, including:
- Give some link love, giving back as much as you ask for (Michelle Martin agrees)
- Five ideas from the Wired Fundraiser 1) do your normal outreach 2) ask your most passionate supporters to spread your message 3) create web content for these super activists 4) reach to bloggers 5) keep an open-mind
- Emily's World offers specific tactical tips
- Rich Reader testing, testing, testing
- Allan Benamer suggests broadcasting, narrowcasting, and one-on-one interactions
- Heather Cronk describes the benefit of positive peer pressure
- Nick Booth says shop for a cause
- Holly Ross observes it's all about accelerating and amplifying authentic relationships built through high-touch, slow-growth work and leveraging it into a fast growth strategy via social media tools. I'm thinking about some of the recent discussion threads about social media measurement and "relational objectives" dovetails with this.
- My own take on this topic is a call to action for more role models doing personal fundraising on their blogs called Fashion and Passion for Cause.
Blogging and Micro Blogging
Tactical Philanthropy blog announced the One Post Challenge by inviting anyone to post a blog entry to the blog. Any blog post that generates the largest number of commentators will win the challenge and a donation of $250 to their favorite charity, matched by another $250 by Network for Good. Here's the first entry titled "Who Defines the Philanthropic Product?"
Amy Gahran writes about why liveblogging (the "old fashion way) is so damn hard. She suggests getting a good micro blogging tool.
Utterez is a moblogging service that is starting to be used by a number of bloggers. Michelle Martin checks out a similar tool called gcast. Has anyone written a review of these types of tools or at least compared both of these?
Social Media Measurement
Geoff Livingston of the Buzz Bin launches the Social Media Measurement Meme discussion thread inspired by Kami Huyse because before adoption will occur across sectors, tangible results need to come to the forefront through measurement and case studies. (Here's a case study about the Gates Foundation)
A list of data visualization tools, not context, but interesting to browse.
Social Networking
Facebook Pages and Social Ads
Facebook Pages is a new service that Facebook is offering to encourage brands (or nonprofit organizations, personalities (like Ranger Rick) or causes) to promote themselves through their social networks. Some influential analysts predict that "Consumers will publicly endorse brands, resulting in the birth of the “Fan-Sumer” resulting in efficient word-of-mouth in a trusted network." More in-depth analysis
How is this different from Facebook Groups some nonprofits may be asking? You can add applications and other features wanted by nonprofits. Like groups, it's free to set one up, but, if you shell out some money, you can increase the viral distribution of your Facebook Page with Facebook Social Ads which advertises the page to the news feeds.
Facebook pages may offer some of the functionality that nonprofit users have been wanting and some problems, for example, profiles set up as an organizational persona (not a real person) being deleted because it violates the Facebook tos.
However, as the allfacebook blog points out, since anyone can set up a page similar to causes and groups - how does one distinguish the "official" page for a cause or organization versus one set up by a fan. Ian Wilkes summarizes some negative reactions here and says it reminds him of AmWay. More analysis from this article.
Open Social
Michelle Murrain has an insightful analysis of Open Social ! = Open Data and another post rounding up of some articles and the best blogs and sources to follow the development. These include:
- Thoughts on the Social Graph (recommended by Jon Stahl)
- OpenSocial Zen - meant to be a place for developers to share ideas. They haven’t really started yet, but hopefully it will be an interesting place to watch
- OpenSocial Directory - a directory of the apps that already exist to use OpenSocial (talk about caffeine and pizza!)
- OpenSocializr - a Ning social network on OpenSocial (I guess that’s logical)
- OpenSocialBlog - an interesting blog about OpenSocial
Social Aggregators
Social network aggregators is a relatively new breed of applications which try to consolidate all your various social networking profiles into one, with varying success. Here's a roundup of the top ones.
Second Life
If you are an active user of both Second Life and Facebook, check out Second Friends which lets you display your avatar name and picture and list of your Facebook friends that are using Second Friends on your Facebook profile. If you're finding the whole idea of social networking and virtual worlds a bit overwhelming, this might drive you over the edge.
More on American Cancer Society's activities in Second Life beyond the Relay for Second Life. Rik Riel (who beings a new job as a Second Life developer) observes "It's a good summary of how an effective real world non-profit is learning now to leverage Second Life's strengths to reach their target audience and promote their cause."
Why Creativity Matters is a video post from a series from the NMC about the range and diversity of self-expression in virtual words like Second Life. Hear why NMC believes that virtual worlds are fundamentally changing the way we think about learning, social interaction and self-expression.
Social Presence: Twitter and Mobile Phones
A BusinessWeek article debates whether Web2.0 applications such as Twitter unseat simple electronic mail as the No. 1 business communications tool. The anti-email argument states that email doesn't build institutional knowledge. Email accounts accumulate valuable institutional memory, but are deleted when individuals leave a position. Spam and ineffective spam filtering continues to be problem. The pro-email side argues that it isn't an either or situation and what's needed is inbox 2.0. I wouldn't say that I'm hooked on email either, but I'm forced to use it as part of my communications toolbox. What do you think?
Whatever you do, don't twitter while you sitting on a panel at a conference!
Do you have a love hate relationship with your cell phone?
Nonprofit Widgets
John Bell of Digital Influence Mapping Project rallys behind widgets for nonprofits saying, "Non-profits need to engage their brand ambassadors now." He also calls for the creation of "nonprofitwidget.org" as not just another clearinghouse (like widgetbox) but as a toolbox for promotion and measurement for nonprofits who would use this type of resource.
Criteo Widget is a recommendation widget I might try. It lets you know which blogs my readers see before they read my blog.
Nonprofit Software
Convio alerted its clients about a security breach on GetActive systems over last weekend and reported by the nonprofit tech blog (be sure to read through the comments) as well as this other Convio security incident. This raised an impassioned request for best practices for minimizing damage when this security breaches occur on several listservs. Sounds like the topic of a nonprofit software article waiting to be written. More from the NTEN blog.
Laura Quinn of Idealware has published Six View of Project Management Software and here's a report from a fan.
One Laptop Per Child
AFP Blog points to this article from Reuters about the OLPC and the era of low cost computing. As noted in September, The "Give One Get One" campaign will start on November 12th.
Video
A video interview with Kaliya Hamlin who started her girl-geek crusade in order to make the online world a better place for women users. If you missed She’s Geeky* on the west coast, your next chance will be heading east!Edit HTML
Tube Mogul is a video sharing service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.
New (to me) Blogs
Goodwill Fashion Blog is part of Goodwill DC's integration of a social networking strategy to reach a new segment, young professional women interested in vintage fashion. (Read the case study here)
Mission to Learn is a Weblog dedicated to ongoing exploration of how online learning technologies can be used to achieve positive social impact and written by Jeff Cobb. (Be sure to check out his del.icio.us links, particularly the resources on good blogging practice).
Mission + Strategy = Social Value is by Jean Butzen who has worked as a developer of supportive housing for homeless adults and families and is now a consultant.
Amy Sample Ward's Version of NPTech shares her unique viewpoint of nonprofit technology issues from the perspective of working private philanthropy and advocacy nonprofits.
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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Hi Beth,
Thanks for calling my attention to Facebook Pages. I think we'll give it a try at SmokeFree Wisconsin. I'm living in constant fear that our profile will be deleted any day now.
Posted by: Liz @ SmokeFree Wisconsin | November 13, 2007 at 09:25 AM
Beth--I've been a little behind on reading and commenting lately. (I think I need to take your recent "Establish A Routine and Stick To It" post to heart!) Thanks so much for the mention of Mission to Learn here. Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Cobb | December 01, 2007 at 09:55 AM