NpTech Tag Summary: 10 Web 2.0 Things You Can Do In Ten Minutes!

Photo by SpacePotato

The NpTech Tag Summary went on hiatus to give some space to
rethink, reinvent. It came back earlier this week in a new format and aggregation process.  I'm moving beyond monitoring the NpTech tagged items and meta feeds to incorporate nuggets from micro media sources, nptech bloggers, friend feeds, and USG. The summaries will be briefer, focused on a social media theme or a social media question related to practice.  Inspiration may come from outside our silo and together we'll remix it ..

Stephen Downes points to Lisa Neal's "Ten Things You Can Do In Ten Minutes To Be A More Successful E-Learning Professional."   He uses the ten things in ten minutes meme and writes the Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be a More Successful E-learning Professional.   So, I'm remixed this memo into Ten Web2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be A Better Nonprofit
Professional 

1.  Set up a twitter account.  Go to the nonprofit twitter pack find and follow ten people who may learn something from.  Use your blog or twitter or whatever tool to solicit practical ideas on how to use social media to make connections.  (Lisa Neal)

2.  Set up Google Alerts to follow what's being said about your organization and cause online so that you can act on what's being said, join the conversation and build your community. (Deborah Zanke) (Jason Shim)

3.  Set up a feed reader for other organizations in your "subject matter area" and comment on a few blog posts a week or the ten most influential blogs in your area. (Gregory Heller) (Sarah Marchetti) (Amy Sample Ward)

4.  Create an OPML of blogs your colleagues on staff might be interested in reading and import it into a reader for them, a starter pack. Or use nonprofit.alltop.com (Sue Waters)   (Allan Benamer)

5. Truly embrace social networking by encouraging your staff, your volunteers, your donors and your Board to join Facebook or Myspace and teach(!) them how to promote your cause. For many in the boomer
bracket, this is all new...but so important to integrate into traditional marketing and fundraising efforts. (Jane Arsenault and Anne Yurasek)

6.  Goto animoto.com and create a :30 video using photos of people, logos, and text related to your cause.  Post that video on your website, any major sharing sites, and social networks -- then encourage people to share the videos far and wide!!  (Tyler Willis)

7. Convince your team members to set up individual bookmarking accounts, agree on a unique tag and start building a bookmarking collection for your organization.  Don't forget to sign up the feeds on the agreed tag
in your RSS reader and to add the del.icio.us application in your Facebook account. Collective bookmarking is an extremely powerful learning tool! (Johannes)

8. Want to know buzz? Use tools like Technorati, Bloglines, and Forum Tracker to monitor what people are
saying about your organization as well as to find new marketing leads to contact with your messages and stories of hope. (Jonathon Coleman)

9. Want inspiration? Search YouTube and Flickr for descriptive keywords that are part of your mission statement to see what your target audiences might find compelling and inspirational. (Jonathon Coleman)

10. Want to learn from the best of the best?  Visit SlideShare and read through great presentations on just about any topic. (Jonathon Coleman)

Bonus Tip

11.  Use new media before pitching new media sources (CarrieBethH)

Okay folks, can we run this up to 100 tips that you can do in ten minutes using Web 2.0 to be a better nonprofit professional?  Here's how you can help:

-If you blog, ask your readers to contribute
-Leave a tip in the comments
-Twitter it at @kanter

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.  Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, was commissioned to write a weekly summary.

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Comments

[Barbara Rozgonyi]

Check to see if you're on Facebook. You might be surprised! One of my non-profit marketing execution students found two support groups for their local charity. They found new friends and images they didn't know existed.

[Socialbutterfly]

Join a helpful email listserv! ;) (recently posted a list of helpful listservs.) This helps you see the questions and issues that other people in your field are currently asking and addressing. And, you can join in the discussion as well.

[Beth Kanter]

Adding this one from the TWitter
Set up a flickr account and encourage supporters to upload photos
http://twitter.com/farra/statuses/779248254

[Jeff Trexler]

What a great list! Organizations tentative about the social web should at the very least set up #s 2 & 8 immediately--these are essential to corporate identity management nowadays, and judging from my own experience a number of the larger for-profit and nonprofit orgs are using in interesting and useful ways.

Another tool that organizations might want to use is an internal wiki, on which people can archive solutions, strategies, documents and key explanatory reference material. Groups concerned about the learning curve of wiki markup may want to try a service such as pbwiki.com, which has a WYSIWYG interface that looks a lot like what they use daily in, say, Microsoft Word.