NpTech Roundup: Grasshoppers and Ants - Social Fundraising Off Season

Photo by Mr. Clean1982

The NpTech Tag Summary is a weekly compilation of resources tagged with "nptech" by those who follow all things nonprofits and social media.  Since conversations are getting more distributed and in addition to using the NpTech tag to discover, aggregate, and summarize resources, I'm incorporating nuggets from micro media sources, nptech bloggers, nptech friendfeed room, and networks.The summaries are more focused on a social media theme or a social media question related to practice. 

Do you remember the Grasshopper and the Ant Fable?

It is a story about a grasshopper who has spent the warm months singing away while the ant worked hard to store up food for winter.  After the winter has come, the grasshopper finds itself starving and after asking the ant for food is punished for its idleness. The story is used to teach the virtues of hard work and preparation.

Although it is a slow time of year and the busy fundraising season is still several months away, there's been lots of activity in the social fundraising judging by these roundups of links from Peter Deitz and Tom Watson (not to mention all the items tagged in the nptech tag stream).  It probably isn't too early to start thinking about that busy year-end online fundraising season.  I suspect that the good folks at SeaChange are busy updated the 2008 the Procrastinators Guide To Year-End Fundraising.

Campaigns

• Global Giving's "Giving Made Green" launched last week and was written up in the New York Times.  More coverage in the blogosphere and beyond here.
• The Wall Street Journal published a very positive piece about the potential for online giving and social networks. The article profiles Networked For Good's Six Degrees of Separation.
• Small Change blog points to First Giving Digg Contest which was one of four social media promotional ideas using social media tools.  Which one worked best? Why?
• Michael Stein has an interview with Jonathan Coleman about his success building a donor base on Facebook.
• Beaconfire Blog, "The Twilight of Direct Mail" provides an analysis of the role of direct mail in Obama Campaign.
• Amy Sample Ward writes about the new plugin launched by Social Actions that will place ‘possibly related classroom projects’ from DonorsChoose.org at the bottom of posts, so that readers can find opportunities to take action to help classrooms around the world.   EngageJoe has been helping with campaign and hopes that if you're blogging wordpress that you'll install the wordpress plugin. 

Competitions, Awards, and Recognition

• Ending Global Slavery is part of an Ashoka initiative Changemakers.net.   There  are 15 projects in the competition, all with a mission of ending traffiking and slavery, including an entrant from Cambodia.  Hurry voting ends August 5th.
• Amy Sample Ward, filling in for Britt Bravo, writes about several awards and competitions including the UK Catalyst Awards and Simon Fairway's pointer to the digital makeover contest.
• There is still time to cast your vote over at Members Project where American Express is offering $1.5 million to support a project based on feedback from the online community.  Christine Herron suggests the Electric Company.
• Jonathan Coleman is the featured Changemaker at Change.org (hat tip NTEN roundup)

Alternative Approaches

• Lucy Bernholz reports that embedded giving - in which a charitable transaction becomes part of any other financial transaction, such as checking out of the grocery store and making a donation to diabetes care - has gone web 2.0 and describes SocialVibe. This platform lets consumers promote the brands they like and SocialVibes donates money to charitable causes or as Read/Write Web defined as "is an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity."  SocialVibe's proof of concept has donated more than $100K to charities so far.
• TechSoup blog profiles Taproot Foundation.  It's key goal is to pair pro bono professional services with nonprofit organizations who need them.
• WeWorkForFree is a design community that allows it's members to upload and share their portfolios in order to raise money for international programs that benefit developing nations around the globe.  It's a platform that facilitates in-kind contributions of services.

Shiny Object Syndrome

• Geoff Livingston mentions it here and points to examples and blog posts about the problem in the corporate PR sector. Jeremiah Owyang describes this issue, but calls it "Fondling the Hammer" It's a symptom of a larger problem - the lack of ROI thinking and it happens in the nonprofit sector too.
  
• Adam Hurst asks "Is Causes.com really costs.com?" He describes some of the work flow issues related to nonprofit using Facebook causes.  I'd two more issues with how the interaction design meshes with fundraising here and here. The DoGoodWell Blog points out that platforms for giving are different than motivations for giving. Qui Diaz talks about the importance of multi-channel campaigns and experimentation.

More Platforms, Platforms, Platforms, and More Platforms

• TogetherChange not quite sure what this is about, but stay tuned.
• ammado connects nonprofits, socially responsible corporates and engaged individuals who want to change the world. It was founded as a mission-based, for-profit enterprise in Dublin in 2005 by serial     entrepreneur Peter Conlon and Dr. Anna Kupka. Sounds like an European version of change.org?  Max Gladwell has more over his blog, Social Media and Social Living.
• From TMCNet.com: Blackbaud launched a new release of Blackbaud NetCommunity which includes  enhancements in both function and features.  Max Gladwell also has more.
• Kiva launches a new feature that maps the flow of loans from lenders to borrowers.

How Tos

• Steve Bridger's slideshow "Charities and the Social Web: Does It Mean We Have to Change Our Jobs?"
• Peter Deitz does a nonprofit riff on a report called "Strategy of Giving" originally written for business people to invest their businesses
• Rapid Donor Cultivation white paper from Common Knowledge
• Digidave of Spot.Us posted Ten Tips for Journalists to Fundraise
• Heather Mansfield, Making It On MySpace
• Jordan Viator, YouTube on a ShoeString and ask the expert at NTEN with Ramya Raghaven from YouTube
• Michael Stein (West Coast) points to how to use a video as a thank you for donations

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

[Steve Bridger]

Always incredibly useful, Beth. Note to self: I *must* read these Round Ups without fail.

Thank you, as always.

Steve

[Barbara Kelly]

Hi Beth: I love reading your blog and was very happy to see ammado mentioned today with the nice link provided and reference to the Max Gladwell post. I wonder if it would be possible to correct the spelling as "ammado" (vs. amando) with lower case "a"? Really helpful and appreciated since everyone who is anyone in the nonprofit universe reads your blog! Thank you, thank you. Barbara

[Geoff Livingston]

Thanks for including us in this list, Beth. I think Shiny Object Syndrome is an inherently human condition... iPhone anyone? But we do need to be aware of it as stewards of budgets, particularly those who have fewer dollars to make more happen with social causes.

[Lateef]

Thanks for posting - sorry I'm so late we have had a couple more platforms join the fray and gain some prominence since your posting: CauseCast.org and SocialVibe.com