Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

An Amazing NpTech Social Media Link Buffet: Take Your Pick!

 
Chinese Buffet by Drunken Monkey

During the past two weeks, links shared via the #nptech hashtag on Twitter have been like a Chinese buffet, a huge selection of tempting dishes that look so good you want to fill an entire plate.   And because you probably can't eat that much - unless, of course, you're Joey Chestnut - you put many small samples on your plate instead.  

I wish I had the capacity to write a blog post about each of these links below.  But that would be a lot of content!  I've been retweeting a lot of these links, but I also like to look for patterns and the best way to do that is aggregate them in a single blog post.   So, here's a few samplings from my digital buffet.   Take your pick!

Events

Twestival Local Weekend: Last February, Twestival raised over $250,000 for charity:water on Twitter on February 13th with more 200 cities sponsoring local tweet, meet, and give parties.  Starting today and through the weekend, Twestival will rock on, with over 200 local Twestivals happening supporting tweetups to raise money for a designated local charity.   A few examples - TwestivalDC, BostonTwestival, SFTwestival, and so many more.

9/11: With President Obama planning to formally declare September 11th  for the first time as a federally recognized National Day of Service and Remembrance, thousands of organizations around the nation are already mobilizing Americans to engage in service and perform good deeds in observance of the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.    This site, MyGoodDeed is encouraging people to pause and share their plans for a personal good deed.  You can even add a good deed widget for your site.

ServiceNation, a national campaign to increase service opportunities and elevate the importance of service in America, has received a $500,000 grant from Facebook as part of its expanded partnership. Facebook’s grant will encourage users of the social network to learn more about service opportunities through ServiceNation’s Facebook Page and connect with MyNation, a new, online social-networking community on ServiceNation.org being launched in preparation for the first National Day of Service on September 11, 2009.

Mozilla Week of Service Begins September 14th:  Mark your calendars and sign up to offer your geek skills to your local community for a service project this week.  I've been doing this for ten years as part of the annual NTEN Day of Service for the NTC.   To learn more about it, join the Mozilla crew and friends for a Twitter chat next Monday evening.

September is Preparedness Month:   We know that September is usually a bad month for hurricanes and other natural disasters.  The NY Chapter of the Red Cross offers Ten Tips in this YouTube Video.

NTEN has two fantastic events this month! The Online NTC takes place September 16-17th - get a special 25% discount here.  The conference will showcase NTEN's new book about mission-driven technology.  Steve Heye has been blogging chapters in the book for the past few weeks.  WeAreMedia Webinar on September 23rd - A Choose Your Own Expert Format!  Registration here.

Socap09 Still Buzzing:  Last week, the SoCap Conference generated a lot of buzz.  Susan Tenby from TechSoup shares her notes from the Unconference.  What was most sexy?  Metrics!  More from Stephanie McAuliffe's blog and SocialBrite.

NMC Future Symposium explore applications of techology that could impact issues of global importance over next five years or more.   They're encouraging folks to submit proposals.   (I'll be delivering the keynote, my first in a virtual 3d environment.)

PopTech Conference:  PopTech is one of the most renown annual gatherings of doers and thinkers in the world.  Mashable has dubbed it one of the best places to watch great minds in action. They also have a Fellows program - Nathaniel Whittemore has the scoop.

Gear Up For Giving from the Case Foundation is a month-long series of social media tutorials, to help nonprofits and their supporters understand how to use key tools and techniques to create awareness, catalyze civic action and cultivate new supporters and donors for their causes.  (I'll be participating in one at the end of the month).  Watch for news about the Case Foundation's second America's Giving Challenge. 

American Open Challenge is GlobalGiving's second online giving contest.  It's open to 501c3's serving U.S. communities can compete with each other by fundraising on the GlobalGiving site.  Projects working in the U.S. will have the opportunity to earn a spot on the GlobalGiving website if they mobilize supporters to raise $4,000 from at least 50 unique donors.  There is prize money available for the organizations attracting the most donors and funds.  You can read a case study about the winner of the first contest here.

Stop Complaining About Cause Fatigue!  Okay, with all these contests perhaps you're worried about Cause Fatigue.  Here's a systems way to think about the impact that such contests can create.

SocialGiving, a Ning app that allows for peer-to-peer fundraising initiatives for Ning Network Creators was launched this week by PincGiving.   Ning has been a popular platform for nonprofits to create communities of interest around their causes.  Manny Hernandez, author of Ning for Dummies, is the founder of tudiabetes and estudiabetes - two highly successful nonprofit communities on Ning.  Follow his blog for expert Ning advice.

CharityWater's BrandedFundraising Network:  Has done an impressive job raising money - over $200,000 to date.  One charity:water stakeholder has singlehandely raised $50,000 to celebrate his 50th birthday.

 Good Reads: Online

Charlene Li's latest slide deck about engagement, relationships, and social media.  The engagement pyramid on slide 15 reminds of the ladder of engagement.

Are social networks and social networking impairing our ability to learn? This was a question raised by a recent Stanford Study and debated over on Brian Solis's PR2.0 blog here and here.  Brian talks about how those of us active in the real-time Web experience an evaporation of attention span and our ability to digest and respond to everything that moves us.  I'm experiencing it - hence this buffet post.

Serendipity:   For a teacher, serendipity is taking your class to the woods to look for leaves & finding a giant, terrifying caterpillar. Is serendipity the potential value that comes from distraction?

The Hierachy of Distractions:  Just for fun! Come on, get distracted and read the post from Mashable.  (I knew there was a reason why I haven't taken the IPhone plunge yet).

Visual Mapping and Diagnostics for Scaling Change: From Steve Waddell, Iscale - this paper has done the impossible!   It has explained social network analysis and techniques in a way that is easy to understand for those who are not experts.  With the onslaught of information and greater complexity in our work, visual diagnostics are more and more important.  There's also a paper that Steve co-authored about a methodology for social network analysis.

How to Weave A Tighter Community from Angus Parker at WiserEarth.  After you have your social network analysis map in hand, here's some tips for putting the information into practice.

Inspiration

My Teacher, My Hero:  School is back in session.  To celebrate, you can create a video about a special teacher who inspired you.  I did.

Global Voices Bloggers Mentor Others.  I think it is really cool that Tharum, a Cambodian Blogger, is mentoring a Danish blogger launching a climate change blog!

Emily Troutman has just launched a new online art/journalism project with a social conscious.  It's called Why Congo Matters.

The Year That Changed the World from Michael Meyer was just published.

Metrics, Stats, Research, and Other Misc. Geekery

Facebook Picks:  If you have joined my Facebook Fan Page, then you'd know that I run more like a focus group where insights and links are shared.  Here's one I shared, an interview with Sarah Koch from Causes.

How do you measure sucess on Twitter? It used to be tough to gather rich metrics on a Twitter use. But as the Twitter has flourished, so has the number of ways to track success. This post from Marketing Profs gives you a couple tools and techniques for measuring your Twitter presence. A few tools mentioned:  Twinfluence, Twitalyzer, and TwitterEffect (which shows you how many people unfollowed or followed because of a specific tweet).  Take it all with grain of salt.

Twitter Demographics:  Last month, we learned that Teens Don't Tweet.  This month, ComScore revealed data that youth are overrepresented on Twitter.  Ah, one more screen capture for my social media research snippets.

SmallWorlds:  While I'm on the topic of ning, this newest project from GlobalKids embeds a 3-D Virtual world inside a Ning site.   Very cool.

BackUpMyTweets.  Since you can't retrace your tweets past a couple of months, this might be useful.  You could, if you remembered the words, search via google and add your Twitter ID. 

A Roundup of New Year's Predictions, Resolutions, and Best Of 2008

Flickr Photo from Bearman 2007

It's that quiet week between Christmas and New Years.  Lots of time for reflection and to write that end of year post.   Ah, but what format to use.  It boils down to two choices:  gaze into your crystal ball and predict the future or look back at the year just ending for the best (or worst) moments. 

Last year, I couldn't decide and ended up writing the look back as a lessons learned, a personal New Year's resolution post, and a round up of what nonprofit folks had on their minds as they entered 2008:

• Four Lessons Learned: Social Media and Nonprofits Meme:  I listed four lessons learned and tagged four other people.

• New Year's Resolution:  Get Rid of that Pile of E-Waste:  I researched the best ways to recycle the pile of computers and geeky stuff lying around my office and cleaned my desk.

• Round up of New Year's Reflections, Best Ofs, and Predictions for 2008

This year, I decided to create a New Year's post that looks at both format and content so I have a handy reference for my year-end post for 2009!

1.    Best of Social Media,  Nonprofits, and Social Actions for 2008:       

You'll find a couple of "best of social media 2008" lists around from social media gurus.  The list can be general, looking at strategy, tools, and developments like this one from Paul Gillin or go narrow like  Mashable's "The Year in Tweets."

In the nonprofit space, Joe Solomon (@engagejoe) has written about ten best social action platforms.  Over at change.org, Nathaniel Whittmore has an post about online social action platforms looking ahead into 2009 and for mobile platforms.  Britt Bravo has an annual list of favorite books.  Lucy Bernholz takes a look at buzzwords in philanthropy in 2008.

You can pick out the best content on your blog, other people's blogs, or ask your readers.  Michelle Murrain has a top ten list from her blog. (The Wild Apricot Blog has some tips for tracking your top ten posts)  Others scan their bookmarks or twitter networks and pull out their favorites for the year, like Marion Conway's post listing her favorite blog posts      Mashable has asked its readers to share their Best Blog Post.   Another approach is to keep a scorecard based on an analysis using an outside service compete as Alan Benamer has done with his 25 Top Nonprofit Web Sites for December 2008 or just share a list of your top ten favorite blogs.

Rather than construct your own top ten list, you can aggregate ten other top ten lists - here's Social Citizen's Top Ten Top Ten Lists for 2008. 

And, if you rather focus on people than content, write a post about the people who most inspired you during the year past like Dr. Mani.

2.     Predictions for 2009

If you don't feel in a reflective mood, then get out your crystal ball and predict the future.  You can focus on your industry

Alan Levine, in his post, "Tis the Season for Predictions" tells why people like to predict the future.  The big prediction in social media circles seems to focus on Twitter - and that it will go mainstream in 2009.    I did a round up of social media predictions from the gurus, picking a few trends that had implications for nonprofits. 

Alex Steed offers his connective predictions for 2009 at the NetSquared blog.  Lucy Bernholz is the queen of of social actions predictions.  The nonprofit law blog offers its gloomy predictions for 2009, as does The Philanthropic Family Blog

3.  Goal Setting

These are the New Year's resolutions posts and take several formats.   They can be personal goals, blog goals, or business goals.   If you're thinking about sharing some of your personal resolutions, here's an excellent over of some personal social actions that you can take courtesy of the Case Foundation blog.

You don't always have to what you intend to do, you can also look at what you might stop doing.  

How do you mark the end of the year? What resolutions will you make for 2009?

NpTech Summary: Best (free) Sources To Get Social Media Audience Usage Research

Flickr Photo by Lynetter


Figuring out where your target audience is spending their time on the social web and what they are doing is an important prelude to crafting a social media strategy.  This is a different activity than "listening."    Thankfully, there is lots of  research available about people who are using particular social media sites or tools.  While there is no substitute for a commissioned market research study of you existing audiences' social media usage, you can certainly glean a lot of useful tidbits from secondary research reports.  And, did I mention they are free?

The only time you'll spend is tracking them down.   Well, now you can spend your time on analyzing it because this week's NpTech Summary points to the best of the best free research studies on social media usage, adoption, and other snippets.


1.   The Definitive List of Social Networking Sites and User Numbers:   Wikipedia has a list of the major social networking sites in grid form, with a link to the site, a brief description, and number of registered users.  In the footnotes, you will find links to recently published reports from reliable sources.   

2.   Comparisons:  Compete provides free information for over a million web sites, including site traffic history and other metrics.  You can generate nifty comparison charts and graphs - for example compare the site visits of Myspace to Facebook to Hi5.   You'll want to pop the feed for the Compete Blog into your reader. While many posts cover studies that won't necessarily be relevant for nonprofits, the ones tagged with social web are worth their weight in gold.  Take for example this post about social networking site membership overlap
across sites which is useful helping you choose which sites you want to explore first.

3.  Who's Tracking  Social Media Research Studies:    The Read/Write Web does a great job of consistently tracking and highlighting key findings from social media research studies.   If you subscribe to the Read/Write web, you already know that.   But, if you're on the prowl for (free) audience data, try cruising through the posts tagged with "statistics" and "research."  Mashable also covers social media research studies, browse posts tagged with "statistics" and "research," but you can cut to the chase with Aaron Uhrmacher's "How to Find Statistics on Social Media."

4.  Pew Internet and the American Life Project:  This is one of the best resources for nonprofits.  The research explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life.   There are regularly published reports about online activities which also include social media usage.  Take for example these recent reports on podcast downloads and video sharing.

5.  Twitter Traffic and Demographics:   The best and most recent round up of Twitter statistics comes from Compete Blog.   You can also track Twitter traffic and trends on Compete as well.

6.  Deep and Wide Social Media Research:  Want an encyclopedia of social media statistics?  One of the most popular studies that looks at who is using what social media tools and how is the Universal McCann’s Social  Media Research Wave 3 research report, which looked at 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries.  It is filled with attractive charts and graphs, take for example this one of social networking site usage.   

On the other hand, maybe you want take a deep dive into data about one specific tool or site.  Check out this extensive Facebook study by FaberNovel or if you are curious about Facebook applications installations, the place for metrics is Adnomics.

7.  Global Social Media Usage:  What if your audience is from outside the United States and need to data that less US-centric.  Morgan Stanley publishes a regular report on Internet Trends that includes comprehensive statistics for social media and social networking sites from around the world. Here's a summary from TechCrunch of the March, 2008 with some highlights.

8. Technographics:   This resource comes from Forrester, from Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff and as documented in the book Groundswell.   It's an online tool where you can add some basic information and see what people are doing on the social web across different demographic groups.  Here's a slide show that explains the different online social activities.  In Australia, Lynda Kelly and Angelina Russo did research of museum goers and applied the technographics methodology of Forrester to Austrailian museum visitors.

9.   Unusual Statistics on Web 2.0 Use: The Spire Project at Oxford University ran a survey to discover what online services people were using and in what manner.  The full study is here.  While the results are more than a year old, this study has information that others do not.  Take for example the lurker ratios across different sites.  Nortel recently did a study of the "hyper connected," heavy users of social media - that also provides insights not typically found in other studies.

10.  Social Media Adoption Rates in Nonprofit Sector: Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth surveyed the 200 largest nonprofits and found that they are adopting social media at a much faster pace than the business world, with 75 percent using some form of social media like blogs, social networking sites, podcasts, wikis or other formats.

Outside research studies are not only useful for informing your first ever social media strategy, but you may need to pull statistics to prepare a case for senior managers.  And, if you have calculate ROI, having a collection of secondary research and statistics can help you too.

You don't need to waste time creating presentation slides from scratch.   I'm tracking social media usage studies and pulling interesting screencaptures from studies as I catch them in my RSS Reader.  You'll find them in this set on Flickr  called "Social Media Snack Facts" with links to the original study.  I always (try) to tag them with nptech.   
If you're looking for interesting snippets, Lynetter creates awesome presentation slides with creative commons licensed photos illustrating an important demographic.

What social media research studies have you used to help inform your social media strategy, convince upper management, or prepare ROI study?

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free

NpTech Summary: A Few Good Ways To Track NpTech With Social Media

The NpTech Blogs TwitterFeed

The NpTech 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. 

 

I've been thinking a lot lately about listening and the tools for listening. So, I thought I'd share a few sources that have flowed through the NpTech Social Media Stream about how to monitor nptech.  The number of nonprofit technology folks in the social media has grown by leaps and bounds, making the nptech meta feed quite a lot to consume, unless you've fully mastered the art of high volume scanning.  (I have, but for many people it is simply tooooooo much information.)

There are lots of niches, small aggregated collections of crowd-sourced links being share where you can dip your toes in the water and not suffer too much from information overload. 

Any one of these sources will give you quick sense of what nptechers are thinking about.  Although, be warned, you don't want to avoid the blind men and the elephant trap.   

1.  Follow social bookmarks tagged with NpTech on Del.icio.us: People are still tagging items into del.icio.us with the NpTech tag and I still use it as one of my best sources.  Just pop the RSS into your RSS Reader and you can quickly scan lots of resources zeroing in on the ones that you find of interest.    Use medium volume scanning techniques.

2.  Track the NpTech Group in Mag.nolia.com: This is a smaller volume that bookmarks tagged on del.icio.us, but I consistently find resources that I haven't seen elsewhere.

3. Follow the NpTech MetaFeed: Warning this is not for the faint of heart or those who can't deal with repetition and high volume.   This feed, created by Marshall Kirkpatrick, combined nptech tag feeds from a number of sources.   It's great for overall pattern analysis and a broad swipe.

4.  Follow the NpTech Blogs TwitterFeed: This is an aggregation of feeds from nonprofit technology blogs put together by @engagejoe. It isn't comprehensive, but it is a nice way to dip into what nptech blogs are saying.  He is looking for suggestions to add.  Here's a few Joe.

5.  Subscribe to a Twitter Search on "Nptech":  Still lots of good 140 character resource sharing happening via the #nptech has tag.  Easy to scan too, although tiny urls require you to click through.

6.  Scan Nonprofit Pulse: This site aggregates the tweets of 259 Twitter users identified with nonprofit technology.  There are two RSS feeds - top links and the tweets. 

7.  Read TechSoup blog, Netsquared blogs, and NTEN Blog. It's easy enough to pop the RSS feeds into your reader and these organizations aggregate resources and keep on top new developments in social media and nonprofits.   

8.  Subscribe to specific nonprofit technology blogs: Which ones, and how many - well that's up to you.   But there are more and more nonprofit blogs being launched and many are good.  I really appreciate the blogs that aggregate sub-niches of the field - take for example Social Action's roundups of social fundraising.   

9.  Join the NpTech FriendFeed Room: I have to admit it, I love the FriendFeed Room.  I wasn't going to put it on this list because it is nice and small.  It isn't a fire hose - it is a community - lots of great information shared here and conversation.

10. Follow the NpTech SlideShows on SlideShare:  The best place to find inspiration for presentations, particularly for presentations about social media and nonprofits.

There's are also some interesting ideas floating around for the future including NpTech-A-Matic.  It doesn't exist.  Peter Campbell's interesting idea using Ubiquity. 

How do you track the nonprofit field?  What ponds, rivers, or oceans do you swim through to find information important to your professional development as nonprofit technologist interested in social media?

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free

NpTech Summary: Social Networking Strategies and Nonprofits: Getting Beyond Shiny Object Syndrome and Getting More Precise Practices

Photo by PixelFarmer - Zen Mutt (a rescue dog) - Title "Precision"

The NpTech Tag Summary went on hiatus to give some space to rethink, reinvent -- again.   Conversations are getting more distributed and it is getting increasingly difficult to use tagging to discover, aggregate, and summarize them.  I'm moving beyond monitoring the NpTech tagged items and meta feeds to incorporate nuggets from micro media sources, nptech bloggers, friend feeds, and networks.

The summaries will be briefer, focused on a social media theme or a social media question related to practice.  I hope to go deeper on one theme rather than cover many resources superficially.   

We are in the very early stages of how nonprofits and social activists can leverage social networking applications for good causes and just learning what works and what doesn't.   I think there are a couple of things that need to be happen before we get to best practices and knowing precisely what works.

Nonprofits need to look at objectives and resources, target their audiences, and think about multi-channel efforts before  jumping on the Let's Use Facebook bandwagon.  (I think this applies to all social media - see the Cute Dog Theory for more)  Activists need to better understand the psychology of Facebook apps and perhaps revise their campaign strategies.   Facebook application developers who want to help change the world and work with nonprofits and activists need to better understand how Facebook culture and behavior meshes with activism and fundraising behaviors and workflow.

I raised a question about that last point in the FriendFeed NpTech Room. I may be way off.  But as more and more FB apps developers approach nonprofits and nonprofits hone best practices -- I think more dialog and understanding will lead to more effective tools (and multi-channel strategies).

Photo by AllSpice1 (Can you tell how it has been photoshopped?)

In a post titled "Why Social Network Marketing Misses Out:  Playing Solitaire at a Party" suggests a fourth reason -- not leveraging the networked effect.

Have you noticed that the card game solitaire doesn’t make for a good party game? It’s the same thing when it comes to social networks. Social networks are about self expression, communication, and networking and sharing with others –it’s more akin to social card games like poker, gin, or even mah jong. The core elements of these games encourage sharing, trading, communicating with other players of the party.

So, as you start to shop around for ideas to meet your objectives for your social marketing activities, remember that repurprosing the traditional microsites is missing out on the social behaviors that are native to social networks."

Geoff Livingston makes a good point about why some efforts using Facebook have not raised huge dollar amounts.  He warns us about getting seduced by Shiney Object Syndrome, a common problem where one does not have a target the audience precisely or use a multi-channel strategy - and just sets up a Facebook Cause or Fan Page.  Sort of a 2008 version of build it and they will come syndrome we saw in the 1990's ...

As Geoff points out:

What’s the secret sauce? Not buying into social media/Facebook hype ....  Precision targeting with intelligent integrated outreach across diverse media yields results.

I totally agree with the point about multi-channel campaigns - it has been my experience too with Facebook and other social media tools (as documented in these case studies).

He also describes some issues with the interaction design of Causes:

In addition, the Social Cause app does not let non-profits a) access the contact information of members b) update members on the cause or c) even send them a receipt for donations, and of course, market again. Instead a third party handles all touches. This is a disaster for cause marketers who simply can’t follow up or integrate with other initiatives.

These insights are not new for nonprofits.  Allan Benamer, of the Nonprofit Tech Blog points out that "It’s been suggested Causes has numerous problems in its business logic that seems to stem from a lack of understanding of the giving process. For one thing, it’s very difficult for nonprofits who are actually interested in engaging Causes users to engage that group. Causes doesn’t have a specific backend interface for would-be nonprofit administrators to deal with a Causes members list."   

Dan Schultz makes a similar observation in his recent publication "Guide To Facebook Activism" published by Digiactive, a five-month-old site devoted to digital activism.   He says, "Facebook may be free, but it has not been designed to suit your needs as an activist organizer.   This means you will find that the site's functionality does not always match what you need.  You will have to stretch what's there in order to be effective."

Let's also not forget that we have lots to learn about the next generation of donors and how we integrate strategies to reach them using social media.

What do you think gets in the way to "best practices"?  Is it only shiny object syndrome?  Could it be the interaction design and lack of precision of the tool?  Could be not having a multi-channel strategy?  Is missing out on how to leverage the networked effect?  What do you think?

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag Summary: Learnings from FriendFeed Experiment

During the past few weeks, Twitter has been down or out due to stress.  To learn more about Twitter scaling issues read this interview by Jesse Stay.  When a service goes down, users will complain. And if happens a lot, they may move on. There was much speculation as to whether they mover to Jaiku (with its newly minted Google money), or Pownce, BrightKite, Tumblr, plurk or FriendFeed.

FriendFeed has been getting a lot of buzz lately.  FriendFeed is in a category called digital lifestyle aggregators that let you aggregate all your various feeds and share with your friends.  Want a fuller description of FriendFeed? (Read this).  Want to go even deeper? Follow the poweruser of FriendFeed, Louis Gray.  (And for expert level knowledge, read these blog posts about FriendFeed that Louis Gray has bookmarked.)

In the last few weeks, there has been posts about how conversations have shifted to FriendFeed.  Not everyone is thrilled with FriendFeed, some say it is just generates noise and is a parasite.  About two weeks ago, FriendFeed added a new feature: rooms.  This feature enables a group of people to join and share items they have discovered from their FriendFeeds (or elsewhere) and have micro-discussions.  It seems that a room helps with the noise levels because people have to consciously add info to a given room. It doesn't just take everything from a feed. So it's more selective.  It's unclear whether this advantage will withstand a larger number of people sharing more items or as more rooms are set up (already we have a nonprofit room, a nonprofit and web2.0 room, etc).

Jonathon D. Colman set up the nptech room on FriendFeed five days ago and 105 NpTechers have joined the NpTech Room.   Some participated in the formal experiment I designed which involved a quick knowledge sharing task.  In addition, a lot of ad hoc conversation and informal resource sharing unfolded.    There was also a bit of reflection to identify how to efficiently use FriendFeed and determine its value to nonprofit. 

The jury is still out - there is some value to the conversations and connections that FriendFeed generates, but it is difficult to efficiently scan and participate.

I like what Marnie Webb likes about FriendFeed Rooms.  As she says, it combines social bookmarking, feed reading, and the casual interactions of Twitter into something that works somewhat like mailing list, but doesn't add to your email overload.   Also, for the past year, I've been summarizing resources being shared through the NpTech Tag, I've felt frustrated that you didn't always know who had contributed the resource and while one could add brief annotations, there was not a space for conversation around those shared items. And as Marnie notes, the conversation in FriendFeed is valuable.

Marnie mentions one downside to FriendFeed - that she is unable to process the information as quickly or as seamlessly as she can with other tools that she is regularly using for social bookmarking, feed reading, and causal interactions.  In the comments of Marnie's post, Laura Whitehead points out that FriendFeed may offer ways to widen the conversation, but some of it depends on how we get our information, manage it, and connection.  Some people choose one site or method to connect with others, while others are "network weaving," jumping from one site to another.

Here's a summary of some of the topics and discussions that took place in the NpTech FriendFeed Room. 

Exploring FriendFeed

One of the first topics of discussion that came up was how to efficiently use FriendFeed.  What were some ways to filter the duplications?  What are some practical tips for using it?   

The formal experiment I designed involved asking people to pick a useful post from the list of FriendFeed bookmarks in del.icio.us identified by FriendFeed expert Louis Gray and say why the resource was useful.

Beth Dunn shared Social Media Club: Join Our FriendFeed Room and Kill A Mailing List

Beth Mazur shared Keep Your Eye on FriendFeed It May Be The Google of Social Networks

Roger Carr shared "Why You Should Use FriendFeed"

Ruby Sinreich shared "Making Real Friends Imaginary"

Chad Norman shared  "Let's get Serious About FriendFeed: The 1995 Message Board, The Smart Consolidator and the Stolen Conversation."

Andrew Cohen shared "Three Reasons FriendFeed is Great.  Three Reasons to Fear It"

Q: What happens when you put a bunch of NpTechers in a room together?
A:  They talk about tools!

Well, not exclusively as you'll not below.  But there were a number of quick conversations mentioning new tools.

Blist
Hitwise (new features)
Iceberg
Wordframe
adocu (one word tweets)

NpTech Talk and News

A number of posts were shared and discussed that were not about tools. 

Philadelphia Wireless Fights To Stay Alive (posted by Holly Ross who knows a bit about this topic)

The Best and Worst Cities for Nonprofit Efficiency (posted by Sarah Conner Smith)


Social Media and Web Strategy and Marketing

Jonathon Coleman shared The (Lil) Green Patch Facebook app has donated $33,600 to The Nature Conservatory's Facebook Cause (I screenshotted and summarized the discussion thread here)

Causes Raised $2.5 Million in First Year of Operation Allan Benamer asks "What's the average for nonprofit websites and their e-mail lists?"  Perhaps you can learn that here.  More analysis from Steve MacLaughlin

Eric Johnson shared Text to Save Lives

Reed Stockman shared Is Social Networking/Causes the Next Big Thing?

Clay Newton shared What CEOs need to know about the social web?

Eric Johnson shared "Is Facebook Page a Complete Social Media Strategy?"  Covers the pros and cons of running your own branded social network or going with Facebook or Myspace.

Andrew Cohen shared How do you test our web site cheaply?

Jonathon Coleman asked "How do you know if your web content is strategic?"  Marnie Webb answered.

Some threads of conversation about the Case Foundation's Social Citizen paper - can be summarized as
"This paper is right on in identifying the current "situation on the ground". The question is, as always, how do you apply the information?"

Will Boyd has a question about non-profit marketing?  Can you answer it?

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free

NpTech Tag Summary: 10 x 10 Ten NpTech Tagged Items About Social Media and Nonprofits That You Can Check Out in Ten Minutes

Want to listen on Twitter?  Use Tweetscan and type in key words.  Don't forget to add the search tool.

1.  Win $10,000 DonateNow Mashup Challenge at NetSquared.  Okay, building the mashup will probably take you longer than ten minutes, but $10,000.   Hurry the deadline is May 19th to submit your idea.

2. Ben Rigby of Mobile Voter, and the folks from Rock the Vote have just written a new book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage
Youth. On a related note, see Allison Fine's Social Citizen's Report commissioned by the Case Foundation.

3. What's the nonprofit chatter that is happening right now on Twitter?  Go do a search on Tweetscan and find out.  (I found this link via the 501 (c) Files here is Oprah's hopelessly misguided take on giving.)  And, be sure to add the search toolbar to your browser.

4.  Two items grabbed from the NTEN Blog .. Lauren-Glenn Davitian's "Be the Media -- Free Speech Unfurled" guest post on NTEN blog. Chris Brogan is doing an expert session over at NTEN.  The session itself is longer than ten minutes, but well worth it.

5.  Could a local social change site knock off Facebook for the social networking webby?  Found out why you should give Change Everything your vote and how to vote.

6. If you already have a presence on MySpace, check this out - causes has just launched an application at MySpace.   Who has installed it?  What are the results?

7. Despite a DOS attack this week on SlideShare, a couple of nonprofit techies managed to upload slide shows.  Check out Joe Solomon's slides about how to use social media to build relationships.

8. Nonprofit Tech Blog points to a new report from United Nations Foundation and The Vodafone Group Foundation, "Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use."

9.  Circleup is a social messaging application that allows nonprofits to communicate and collaborate with groups.  It's promotional literature says it fills the gap between one-on-one messaging and large e-mail marketing newsletters and it works on IM networks and Facebook. My visceral reaction is - oh great - more incoming messaging to ignore.

10.  Ever wanted to be a curator?  The Brooklyn Museum is seeking a more diverse group of people to evaluate the photographs submitted for a crowd curated exhibition called Click.

Bonus!

11.  Who is the nonprofit techie dancing around in the raccoon costume?

Now if this only took ten minutes to scan, write, and compile!  :-)

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free

NpTech Tag Summary: Nonprofits and Digg, Happy EarthDay, and a few other nptech tidbits

| View | Upload your own

NpTech resource sharing and conversations are getting more and more distributed.   Here's a roundup of NpTech articles, resources, upcoming conferences, and more -- plucked from the NpTech Tag stream, Twitter, listservs, and other digital nooks and crannies ...

Danielle Brigida put together this excellent slide show on how to use tools like Digg and StumbleUpon (not humans) to drive traffic.   Love the dogs!

Speaking of Digg and dogs .. watch Kevin Rose's dog do some tricks.

Speaking of dogs, gotta love this new campaign site launched by Pets for the Environment.   The site features "Eddie" a dog who is inspired to educate humans about toxic chemicals found in pet products and that can be harmful.  The site uses story, a call to action, and multi-channels.   The story on the top page is very, very engaging.

Happy Earth Day!

TechSoup has just launched a nonprofit environmental impact reduction resource.

NTEN blog points to the Google Checkout Earth Day campaign.

Google's Earth Day Logo is cool, but did you see Twittearth?

Mashable has a list of ten tools to celebrate Earth Day, including this WikiHow to guide.

A Few Items Worth Noting

Metro Mapper Blog offers some reflections about how they used Twitter to get the word out about the voting for their Netsquared project.

RAD Campaign "Leveraging the Real Power of Social Media" In a nutshell what you put in is what you get out.

Flickr now has video. Despite the not in my backyard reaction from the community, some new video groups like this one - tell you story in 90 seconds are cropping up.

good2gether is not another social network for nonprofits.  While it describes itself as a social media Web service, it is more a buzz service for nonprofits that intends to connect people to causes through a network of media outlets, corporate intranets, college/university websites, social networks, and others.   On the site, you can see a list of nonprofits that have signed up and a series of videos by the founder giving the elevator speech.  Announcements of media outlets and business partners are forthcoming. 

SquarePeg is for activists and integrates different web2.0 tools into one dashboard. (I think)

Do you hate scheduling meetings in email?   I do.   Here's two useful tools that help you schedule without generating a million emails.   Doodle and When is good.

A Few Conferences

Conference registration for n2y3 is opened, with a limited number of public registrations available.

Hastac II Conference on May 22-24 - details here.

Games for Change to offer a free one-day workshop for non-profits interested in social issue video games on June 2nd in NYC,  It's called:  Let The Games Begin: A 101 Workshop for Making Social Issue Games

Personal Democracy Forum takes place June 23-24 in NYC.

Web of Change and MaRS is hosting Social Tech Training (STT) – a hands-on Web 2.0 oriented learning intensive for people working in the social change sector. This 3-day training session will be held June 22-24, 008, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.   The agenda is really broad covering a wide range of topics.

YPulse National Mashup is on July 14-15th.

New (to me) Nonprofit Tech Blogs

Conor's Fundraising Blog by a nonprofit staff person for a charity in the UK

Crazy Dog Lady is written by a nonprofit marketing staff person.

Moses Sena Kpetigo is an ngo professional in Ghana, Africa.

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free

NpTech Tag Summary: Facebook Apps for Good and GTD

 

The NpTech Tag Summary went on hiatus to give some space to rethink, reinvent. It came back last month in a new format and aggregation process.  Conversations are getting more distributed and it is getting increasingly difficult to use tagging to discover, aggregate, and summarize them.  I'm moving beyond monitoring the NpTech tagged items and meta feeds to incorporate nuggets from micro media sources, nptech bloggers, friend feeds, and networks.

The summaries will be briefer, focused on a social media theme or a social media question related to practice.  I will also take a look back to put new trends in context.  So it's a mixture of current trends and some reflection.   Inspiration may come from outside our silo and together we'll remix it ...

At Graphing Social Patterns, I asked a panel of Facebook App Developers if they know of any Apps for good?   There was silence.  So, been looking around for some examples for a couple weeks now.  So this week's summary focuses on Facebook apps.

A roundup of some Facebook apps for good and getting things done.

As many nonprofits are aware, Causes is the most installed fundraising application on Facebook, although there have been a few exceptions, the dollar amounts have been less than fabulous (see Nonprofit Tech Blog and Frog Loop Blog).   

Soon after Facebook opened its platform in March, 2007 and Causes attracted attention, several more fundraising apps were launched in June, 2007.  In December, 2007, we started to hear about Convio's Facebook app,  designed to easily integrate Facebook into their Convio-powered campaigns, content and list registration forms, also launched.  Are there any case studies or experiments using these other apps?

We started to see the beginning (and end?) of  virtual philanthropy, virtual gifts of small dollar amounts.  This fit into the virtual gift giving culture of Facebook. Hey, if you were willing to send your friend a set of virtual fuzzy dice, why not a virtual breast cancer ribbon?   In February 2007, Facebook began testing virtual gifts.   One of the results was a Facebook Group called "I will not pay $1 for virtual gifts."  A few months later, Changing the Present launched a Facebook that allows users to give the gifts of $1 to a nonprofit.   While virtual gift giving probably did not yield big dollar amounts (correct me if I am wrong), where there other benefits or useful outcomes?

Over the past six months, I've been seeing more Facebook apps that attempt to generate income for nonprofits from other means that having users reach into their own wallets.   We're seeing advertising revenues and "sponsored clicks" like the FreeRice game.

Click for a Day for Breast Cancer is Facebook version of the click to help fund free mammograms for women in need web site.  Like the web site, when you click on the button the site sponsors provide funding to the National Breast Cancer Foundation to help clinics provide free mammograms to inner-city, low-income, and minority women whose awareness about breast cancer is often limited.  There are currently 3,336 daily active users

There are also several other Facebook versions of the "click to support" web sites such as the Click a Day for Hunger and Click a Day for Animal Rescue.   How much money has been raised?  What is the value?  Would love to read a case study.

Putting this model on steroids is Social Apps from Dank Apps that uses an advertising revenue model based on installs, clicks, and user engagement with Facebook games to generate money for a charity.     The earnings are being put directly into a Facebook Cause so this has the benefits of reporting back to users in a way that makes it accountable.  It just launched last week, so we're in wait and see mode.

The linking of advertising revenue generated application with Facebook Causes as a way to report on earnings is an interesting strategy being used by The Nature Conservancy’s Cause.  It is now growing stably at around 1,000 people per week according to an interview with Jonathan Colman.   Jonathan says that the secret to their success is to reach out to folks developing applications like (Lil) Green Patch and I Am Green, who are already donating a portion of their ad revenue to the Conservancy.   

This collaboration between app developers and nonprofits is something to watch as Jonathon Colman observes in a recent interview. "We’ve asked these application developers to make that donation of earnings directly to our Cause on Facebook – this has the benefit of allowing them to report back to their users in a way that makes them highly accountable. Why? Because those visitors can go straight to the Conservancy’s Cause and see the donation for themselves without ever leaving Facebook. And while they’re there, a lot of these visitors are deciding to join up and donate. So the developers are happy because they have proven legitimacy and we’re happy because we’ve gained all of these application users as an engaged audience."

So, maybe direct donation approach alone isn't the best outcome or use for Facebook Apps.  Combing with advertising revenue and collaborating with app developers may be strategy.  What are the other values and are there apps that can be used successfully to deliver that value?  Are there Facebook apps that can educate, engage, or raise awareness about a charity or cause?

The League of Young Voters launched a Facebook App to hold a primary on Facebook to engage young voters in the lead up to the primary.  They announced the results of their Facebook primary.  I would also like to see the results of this experiment.   They lay outcomes, but how did they measure the value of this Facebook app?

 

Freecause developed the pink ribbon facebook application for the Susan G. Komen for Cure.  The application was created to both reach existing constituents and rapidly acquire new constituents and when users add the Pink Ribbon application they are adding Susan G. Komen for Cure’s brand and expressing affinity for the organization directly.

| View | Upload your own

 

  It Takes All Types is a tool box that includes Facebook applications to allow people to sign up as blood donors and receive alerts by phone, text, e-mail, Facebook, fax, whenever blood is needed in their local area.  It received quite a bit of media attention when it launched a couple weeks of ago.  I hope they document and share a case study on the results.

The Facebook Events is an application that lets you tell friends know about interesting events coming up in your community and to organize social gatherings. Certainly this could be used to promote fundraising and other nonprofit related events.  Anyone have a case study about how they used it and if and how it added value to marketing a nonprofit event?

I'm sure I missed a few nonprofit friendly Facebook apps .. so please do leave a comment.   I would love to see a class or module or a presentation about Psychology of Facebook apps and doing good.

Update:

PledgeBank on Facebook.

A roundup of some Facebook apps that might actually helped you GTD ...

WebWorker Daily has a post called "12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally" that offers some great advice for thinking about the value of installing particular Facebook apps. Think of your apps in two ways…what do you want to see (that will appear on your Facebook home page) and what do I want the world to see (that will appear on your profile)?

Read/Write Web has a list of favorite apps for Getting Things Done.

From Nick O'Neill at All Facebook, Facebook has added a new feature that enables you to block specific friends from sending you application invites.  Another efficient way to do this to use "ignoreall"

Chris Brogan has an excellent post and screenshot of the Facebook Apps that he finds most useful.

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag Summary: Twitter Tips, Tricks, and Tools

Marnie Webb's monthly Twitter usage tracked over the past year and half created with Tweetstats.

The NpTech Tag Summary has been on hiatus to give some space to rethink, reinvent.  I had an opportunity to chat with Marnie Webb about reinventing the NpTech Tag summaries.   Going through hundreds of resources and manually summarizing them each week has less and less efficient way to capture the zeitgeist of the community.  NpTechers have embraced tools like micro blogging/media, social sharing and friend feeds as a way to share information with their colleagues - so the summary needs to reflect this and it can't if friend feeds and twitter tweets and other micro media nuggets aren't incorporated.   So, with that said, I'm now beginning to monitor nptech twitter tweets, friend feeds, and other sources and incorporate those into the summary. 

My initial thinking is to make the summaries briefer, focused on social media, theme oriented, but publish more than one per week.   How does that sound to you?   Nothing set it in stone, and suggestions and advice is more than welcome.

The theme for this summary is Twitter.

Twitter Adoption

Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about twitter use on college campuses amongst students and faculty.   The article points out the advantages and disadvantages.  A new point: The immediacy of the messages helped the students feel more like a community.  Twitter as a community building tool.

While some may find the 140 character limit of Twitter too constraining, it could get you thinking creatively.

Interesting Nonprofit Example

When Frozen Pea Fund launched back in December, 2007 to raise money for breast cancer research and support Susan Reynolds, one of the campaign tools was PEAple.   This was a twitter hack that allowed tweets from people in the group to aggregated in one feed.  Just last week, this technique was used by the NTEN for the 08NTC Conference making it possible aggregate tweets of conference followers and attendees.  Eve11 wonders, how did they do that?  The answer is here.

Twitter Tips and Best Practices

Chris Brogan has a guest post on problogger called "How I use Twitter to Promote My Blog."  He simply doesn't self-promote his blog posts.  He posts questions, reports or summarizes comments from Twitter, and may ask for a Stumble.   How do you use Twitter to encourage blog traffic?   Not sure?  See ProBlogger's tips for twitter for bloggers.

Useful Twitter Tools

Quotably lets you type in a user name and see threaded conversations.  Here's an example using Marnie Webb  and Laura Whitehead.  This will be a useful tool sweep through and round up the conversations of NpTech folks, although it is a little glitchy.

Ruby Sinreich has identified some more Twitter tools. Specifically, she has discovered some neat stuff for wordpress, twitter integration.

Bleeding Edge

FriendFeeds now integrates with Twitter.  Lots of buzz on this from the fast moving social media crowd.  Give it another six months for nonprofits to explore.  Dave Winer, TechCrunch, FriendFeed Blog, Venture Beat and Mashable.

Need A Good Primer To Explain it to Your ED?

 

The NTEN "Twitter Me This" Webinar also has some great resources and you can download the powerpoint which will save you lots of time if you need train other people on Twitter.

What's your best Twitter trick, tool, or tip? 

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 or tweet or friend feed hundreds of resources each week. Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, is commissioned to write a summary.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag Summary: NpTech Slide Decks, Twitter Saves Children, and Visualizing Information for Advocacy

One of the above is the actual cover of "Visualizing Information for Advocacy" - a must read booklet from Tactical Technology Collective.


NpTech Conversations


So, you want to build a MashUp?  Take the NetSquared Mashup  Challenge!

Drew Bernard has a review of a new guide by the good folks at Tactical Technology Collective called "Visualizing Information for Advocacy"


Nonprofits are from Mars, Designers/Techies are from Venus from the alldaybuffet describes some classic communications issues between nonprofits, designers, and technology staff.  It notes, "Maybe the answer is an intermediary b/w tech and design volunteers and the non-profits they’re working with–something like a consulting company or creative manager."  There's also another article on a similar theme that focuses on the describing the problem -- or why nonprofits, designers, and techies can't talk to each other.   Perhaps
the skills identified in this workshop or sessions at the upcoming NTC designed to look at change issues that technology surfaces from the viewpoint of executive directors or IT staff might help.


Gavin Clabaugh  tells us how to embed "Skype Presence" in a SharePoint Web Part.

Teresa Crawford is in Kiev in the Ukraine doing a workshop on Web2.0 for NGOs there.  Here's one of her training presentations.

Deborah Finn has written a SEO primer called "Search Engine Optimization for Nervous Nonprofit Novices"
and she is seeking feedback from SEO mavens.  There's a good round up of links to blog posts and articles by other nonprofit techies and SEO mavens.  For a step-by-step tutorial on SEO techniques for nonprofits,
Wild Apricot's 30 Day Guide to Search Optimization is a good choice, while Search EngineLand site is probably the subject matter expert of choice.

Beth Dunn's "Money for Nothing, IT for Free" has a post about the importance of considering the total cost of a technology investment even if it is free and some advice for getting started.  This guide on the Total Cost of Technology from the ICT Hub may also be useful.

For more NpTech Talk, see this roundup over at the NTEN blog.

Social Media

A couple of really useful  posts on Facebook and Nonprofits.   Ethan Zuckerman gives a summary of Pros/Cons of facebook Activism, a presentation by Imran Jamal and the Burma Global Action Network.  The good folks at Care2 (Heather Holdridge, Justin Perkins, and James O'Malley) have a detailed case study on the NTEN blog about the top Facebook winner of the recent Case Foundation America's Giving Challenge.  There's also a profile of the Humane Society's recent $50,000 contest win from Microsoft.

Net2 ThinkTank gives up a round up of how Nonprofits and NGOs are Using Mobile Phones and SMS for Social Change.  Lots of good stuff from Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net and Katrin Verclas and Corey Ramey at MobileActive.


Twitter's CEO has learned that short is sweet, flexibility is essential, and applications shoudl work so that people don't have to be at their computer all day long. Nate Ritter gives a brilliant example of how Twitter could help save the lives of missing children.  The Chronicle sets up a twitter account to broadcast links to blog posts. 

With streaming video tools that are free - like Ustream.TV - I imagine we'll see more people video streaming from professional conferences like next month's NTC Conference in New Orleans.  This post shows you how to jury rig a DIY periscope for your webcam if it is built into your laptop screen. This is useful if you want both broadcast AND use your laptop to take notes (or answer email).

According to TechCrunch, Bloglines experienced a major outage, leaving many who use bloglines taking a serious look at alternative RSS readers and exporting and backing up our OPML files.


Are you spending too much of your day in your email?   Here's a couple of GTD tips for processing your email and being more efficient from LifeHacker.   Empty Your Inbox with Trusted Trio and How To Stop Checking Email on Nights and Weekends.


NpTech Slide Decks

SlideShare is like YouTube for powerpoint presentations.  It also offers groups where members can share slide decks.  There's even an NpTech group that has to date 115 slideshows and 31 members.   Here's a roundup of recent additions:

Social News for Social Good is about how to build buzz with Digg by Jonathon Coleman and the slide show he presented at Forum One - Social Sites for Social Good.  The presentation describes the benefits of using Digg and shares some before/after results. He also talks about how, contrary to some observations, Digg just isn't empty traffic.  Haven't dug into Digg yet?  No problem, I dug into the NpTech + Digg tag archives and pulled out this terrific Beginner's Guide To Digg.  Check this recent interview to learn more about Jonathan's secrets to using social media tools for success. 

Social Metrics:  The Search for ROI in Social Media by Steve Latham of Spur Digital.   Be sure to check out slide 13 that answers the question, What Can We Measure for Web2.0?"  Also worth checking out is this slide show on Social Media Measurement techniques and Greg Cangialosi's ROI of Social Media which coins a new phrase, ROE (Return on Engagement).

I'd Like That To Go: The Impending Mobile Revolution by Holly Ross, NTEN, is the slide deck from her presentation at the TIG Legal Services Conference about mobile campaigns and use of mobile in program delivery.  If you're coming to NTEN's NTC Conference next month, you can experience this technology first-hand. You can find all the presentations from that conference here.


New (to me) Blogs

Building Foss for Society Blog is the blog for the Humanitarian FOSS Project a collaborative, community-building project that was started by a group of computing faculty and open source proponents at Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Connecticut College.

Drew Bernard has a blog about conversation, technology, activism, and life.

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.

 

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

The Bloglines Plumber Has No Idea ...

I read a lot of feeds for a lot of different projects.  I use two different readers - Google Reader and Bloglines - and have multiple accounts on each to manage projects.  There are a couple of reasons for that --

• Easy to manage multiple projects with lots of feeds - and I don't get distracted.  If I had better discipline, I might be able to do with folder organization.
• I train people on both RSS readers, so I like to keep my fluency on both.

I keep all my NpTech feeds (there's like 200 of them) in a bloglines account.   Bloglines experienced a major outage over the weekend according to TechCrunch which explains why I have chunks of my NpTech feeds missing and otherwise screwed up.  Ugh, it's time for me to come up with a new tool or switch everything to Google Reader, and perhaps rethink my work flow.

Anyone else out there read 500-1,000 feeds for different projects?  What tools/workflow do you use?  Well, off to export my OPML files from bloglines.

The NpTech Tag Summary will be coming shortly -- blame the plumber.

NpTech Tag Summary: 96 Inflatable Penguins, Facebook Philanthropos, and Nonprofit Twitter Packs

What does a pile (96) Inflatable penguins look like?
(Find out at Penguin Day)

NpTech Conversations

Non-Profit techies are blogging about the NTC next month in New Orleans (here and here)

Any excuse for a party!  Drupal 6 release!  Also, Jeff Reifman of NewsCloud announces the beta release of the Drupal Newsroom Module!

Last week, TechSoup's Nonprofit Commons hosted "Best Practices for Non-profits in Second Life."  You can find the chat and associated links here.

You have until March 14 at 5:00 PM to enter the NetSquared Mashup Challenge.  Check out the projects that have entered so far in the project gallery.

Philanthropy 2.0

"Is Facebook a Bust or Is Obama's Model the Future?" asks the NTEN blog riffing a recent article in Slate Magazine titled The Facebook Philanthropos.

A new online journal about the everyday people who work in community nonprofits is coming.  It's called Blue Avocado.  Hat tip Lucy Bernholz who is working on some thoughts about relationships between online giving marketplaces (DonorsChoose, GlobalGiving, Kiva) and how (if) they are changing giving.

Chris Brogan is hosting a TalkaThon on the question, "What is the Next Kiva.Org?"

Don't Tell the Donor asks "Is Everybody Talking about You Yet?" and suggests that nonprofits respect their donors, give them something to talk to about, and then get out of the way.   In a new column on the
Nonprofit Times called "Our Donors Are Talking - What Are We Afraid of?,  the column talks about transparency and the need for charities to join the conversation.

Social Media Adoption, Strategy, and Evaluation

Marshall Kirkpatrick summarizes the responses he got from his 1300 friends on Twitter about the barriers to social media adoption and how to avoid them.  (hat tip Beth Dunn)

Tim Davies is working through strategy options on Facebook and provides an great analysis of Facebook groups versus pages.  On TechSoup, there's a discussion about Facebook pages and networking tips.

Leyla Farah points to some recent articles about the death of social networking in the nonprofit sector with some commentary.

Beth Dunn writes about the importance of outcome-based thinking in the successful implementation of a social networking strategy.

Paul Caplan advocates for more qualitative data or stories to be included with your numbers when evaluating social media projects.  Check out the Social Media Guide he wrote for the Media Trust in the UK.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky's forthcoming new book (publication date Feb. 28th) pulls together a solid theory of organizing and networks.   The Network-Centric Advocacy blog gives it a rave! (and points to this YouTube video of Clay Shirky)


Social Media

Amy Sample Ward gives us a reflection on how she uses Twitter and shares some of her recommendations about micro-blogging can be useful to nonprofits.  She says Twitter can open a window into the conversation already taking place in your industry and bring you into that conversation as a participant.

Meanwhile across the pond, Louise Brown from the ICT Hub has a post called "Twitter-Tastic" where she describes Twitter as a giant text messaging service but with pictures and hyperlinks.  She points to a post called "Twitter's Two Networks" that illustrates the difference between following and followers as listening and talking.

Chris Brogan started a project called "Twitter Packs" which is a simple list of people who use twitter organized by interests or locations.  The Nonprofit Twitter Pack is here (are you following everyone?).  Not on the nonprofit list?  Add yourself here.

The 7 Things You Should Know About series from Educause provides concise information on emerging technology tools.  Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice.  Two recent briefs include Twitter,  Facebook, and Skype.

The Mobile Active Wiki has a stash of well organized links about Mobile Advocacy, a one-stop place to learn more about it, strategy considerations, costs, tools, and best practices.  (And if you have a stash of old cell phones in your sock drawer, be sure to see this video - The Secret Life of Cell Phones and visit this site to learn more about recycling your old cell phones.)


New (to Me) Blogs

The Realist Idealist is brought to you by the good folks at the idealist.

Philanthropy Re-Wired is a casual examination of how technology is changing the sector and written by Claire Baralt

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.

 

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

 

NpTech Tag Summary: Penguin Day in New Orleans, Fondling the Tools, and More

Photo from LolNPtech.org (Registration is here)

Mashups, Meatballs, and New Orleans

Do you look at all of the data available online, and imagine ways to combine and connect it to increase awareness about an issue?  Then enter The Netsquared Mashup Challenge!  Applications will be available form Feb 1 to March 14, 2008.  (Wonder if smashups are eligible?)

NTC will take place in New Orleans March 19-21.  There's going to be a Netsquared Meetup (recommendations for restaurant or location are needed)

How will your nonprofit avoid the Meatball Sundae? asks Rich Reeder.  Of course, referring to the newish book by Seth Godin called Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?


Social Media: Adoption, Strategy, and Measuring Success

ZUP4Nonprofits has a two-part post (pt. 1 and pt.2) that discusses how to lay the groundwork for board signoff on an organization's social media in initiatives.

I Collaborate blog has a post about how to lobby for skype in your organization, if you're working internationally.

Nancy White answers a question posed by Laura Whitehead "Getting the most from social media for nonprofits: what would you recommend?"as part of a LASA Panel she is planning.  Nancy raises a few questions about whether a distributed presence for organizations - splitting the attention of members between an organization's web site and social networking profiles is a liability or an asset.   What I wonder is whether difference audiences are being reached? 

David Wilcox has been doing a lot of thinking about re-inventing membership organizations or associations given that one can connect and meet people who share their interests online more easily with social media tools.

JournaMarketing has a post called "Why Your Blog Is Worthless without Connectedness" which harkens back to an ongoing debate we've had in this space -- is a blog just a web site or a community?

Network-Centric Advocacy blogs points to a new feature at Alex's Lemonade Stand called "From the Mail Bag."  Interesting site from NRDC called "itsyournature.org"

An article about new features coming from social network sites that will prevent your personal and professional life colliding and resulting in embarrassment.

This post traces the evolution of social networking sites from the 80's to present time, although missing a few major early players.

KM4Dev has a section devoted to Social Network Analysis process and tools.

Jeremiah Owyang's "Why Your Social Media Plan Should Include Success Metrics" post might help nonprofits identify some realistic short-term outcomes for social media implementation.  I love the term "fondling the hammer"  which is about focusing on the what the tool can do, not  the tool.

Let's Fondle The Tools the Right Way

Chris Brogan's A Sample Social Media Toolkit describes a few sample tools and what they can be used to accomplish.

Michelle Murrain is doing a post about 100 free and open source software tools.  Her selection criteria. Here's here write up on word press.  By my calculations, she have almost completed the series before the NTC in March.  Meanwhile, across the pond, Susie muses about GIMP.  There's also the DiSo Project, an umbrella for a group of open source implementations of distributed social networking concepts.

NTEN's monthly roundup of tech resources called "Things We Like"  (and I'll add to "fondle.")

Okay, now we're onto fondling APIs, google's to be exact. Via NTEN blog Google moves one step closer to making desktop applications obsolete with the release of the Google Chart API.  The Wild Apricot blog offers a tutorial and a list of sites currently using the API. 

Speaking of Google, check out this new doc uploader and this bookmark service that aggregates all social bookmarking sites in one click (for those of us tool fondlers who need more than one tool for each type.  Guess you can't have too many social bookmarking applications.)


Philanthropy, Fundraising, Disasters, and Video

Good corporate citizenship was highlighted at Davis this past week.  Bill Gates gave a speech on "creative capitalism."  Gates Foundation also announced grants to programs aimed at helping small-scale farmers in Africa and Asia.     Intel unveiled its support for the Global Education Alliance's pilot program to create an education framework in Rwanda.

Reacting to the Chronicle's Direct Mail is Dead, the Donor Power blog says not so fast.

The Nonprofit Blog reviews InStedd.

This spring, Video Party, in association with Art Matters 2008 and Apathy Is Boring, will be presenting a selection of films about creating a world that we want to live in. "Whats Your Revolution?  Share Your Stories and Change the World" is accepting submissions until February 7th.   

MasterNewMedia has published an awesome Video Beginner's Guide written by Michael Pick.

New(to me) Blogs

Good Works Grapvine covers social media and strategies for Non-Profits.

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag Summary: More Doves on the Map, Social Networking Debates, and Social Media Revenue Models

Ushahidi.com Screencapture - Getting More Doves on the Map

NpTech Memes and Conversations

Social Networking

A couple of interesting social networking threads.  These include: how SNS might influence changes in practice, whether to engage or not, and best tools. 

Change in Practice?:   The Economist did an "Oxford-style debate" the following issue:  "Socialnetworking technologies will bring large (positive) change to educational methods, in and out of the classroom."  Danah Boyd makes a case for not integrating SNS sites directly into the classroom, but they provide a valuabled networked public space for youth to gather with their peers.  She says, "SNS do not make youth engage educationally: they allow educationally-motivated youth with a structure to engage educationally."   Vicky Davis says it is about Educational Networking, not Social Networking.   

With a wink and nod to the Economist,  here's a proposition we could debate in the the NpTech space:

"Social networking technologies will bring large (positive) change to nonprofit communication and fundraising strategies, including those controlled and implemented by the organization itself as well as those outside of the boundaries of the organization's control."   

Engage in Social Networking or Run Screaming?:  Need some food for thought on the topic?  Britt Bravo has a round up a couple posts on the topic, "to social network or not to social network?, including an Idealware article by Brett Bonfield entitled "Should Your Nonprofit Use Social Networking Sites?" which is part of a three-part series.  So stay tuned.

Best Social Networking Tools:   The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants was hosted on the Wild Apricot Blog.  There is a list of seven posts that recommend the, "Best web 2.0 and social networking tools for nonprofits." 

Where is Open Source in the NpTech Ecosystem?

Michelle Murrain has some reflections based on her recent article on TechSoup, "The True Cost of Free and Low Cost Software."  She wonders whether nonprofits have a better understanding of acquisition costs of FOSS software.

Memes

Deborah Finn has created a NTC wish list.  It's a great idea and I think everyone should have some personal learning goals before attending a major field event.  So,  I'm translating it into a Social Media Meme.   If you are going to NTC, what are your 3 goals?   Are there people you want to meet and have a conversation with?  A session or event you're interested in?  Blog it and tag three others who you think might be attending.  To get it started, I"m tagging Gavin Clabaugh, Michelle Murrain,  and Jason Zannon.  (Only because I know they'll be there ...)

Social Media ROI and Revenue Models

Social Signals has the first post in an ongoing series called "How your non-profit can earn revenue with Web 2.0?" which covers the pros/cons of making income from your social media.   The series will cover in more detail revenue models such as advertising,  fee for services, and indirect revenue.  I wonder if there will be section on "How to Make Money by Giving Something Away for Free?"?

Chasing Social Media Influence from WebProNews summarizes some learnings about memes from a recent white paper called "Social Media: Distributed Influence Quantifying the Impact of Social Media."   The paper looks at some proposals for quantifying metrics for influence as a measurement for Social Media.  Alison Fine wrote a reflection about what we need to learn from networked activities in response to my NTEN article and our subsequent email conversation.   Gayle Roberts made the point, "tags about the links between people are equally if not more valuable than tags about people."   She also pointed to FAS research company that does social network analysis and their gallery of visualizations.

RSS and Blogging

The Wonderful World of RSS from the NTEN blog shares notes from the first 501TechClub lunch in Portland, Oregon.   Marshall Kirkpatrick shared his knowledge about RSS and Holly captured some tips in this post.  I love this, "RSS is not like email: you do NOT have to ready everything.  Just skim headlines for the important bits."

Your RSS Reader can be a terrific personal knowledge management tool. Micro Persuasion tells you how.

Creating Passionate Readers talks about the value of creating a passionate audience  (how much you talk about yourself will never compare to the power of others talking about you) and some tips for doing it. The "go the extra mile" resonates.

Beth Dunn has a list of benefits for blogging to advance your nonprofit's core mission.  What else would you add to the list?

And if you're knee deep into blogging and wondering how to avoid it becoming a time sink, here's ten tips for blogging productivity.  I'm trying to do more of #1 and #10.  What about you?

An Introductory Guide to Global Citizen Media by David Sasaki offers context and case studies which show how everyday citizens across the world are using blogs, podcasts, online video, and digital photographs to engage in unmediated conversation which transcends borders, cultures, and different languages.   This is an excellent primer to share with people are just getting starting applying the tools.

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and Social Media Fundraising

There's been a lot of excellent discussion (online and offline) and posts about nonprofits and twitter lately.  So, if you've just set up a twitter account and are wondering, now what?, here is a really good Twitter starter guide.   Coolcat Teacher blog shares some twitter productivity tips,  Read/Write Web some promotional tips, and Terry Freedman offers some cautions.

Flickr Keeps Getting Better describes Flickr's new statistic feature and how to use a new online photo editing plugin with your flickr photos, called picnik.

Some more on privacy issues on Facebook and the blurry lines between personal and professional online social networking.   Some new features on Facebook coming in response.

Peter Deitz offers his predictions for 2008 on social media fundraising.

Activism, SMS, and Mashups

Ushahidi is using a map to convey citizen reports of violence in Kenya.  More from Nancy White, Ndesanjo Macha (Global Voices), and Ethan Zuckerman.  Citizens can submit a report via SMS or Web and it appears on a google mashup.

FrontlineSMS, the first text messaging system to be designed for nonprofits and is a free download for nonprofits.  Anyone testing or using it?

Joe Solomon has an detailed analysis about how the features and interfaces of online petitions might be improved.  He even includes an interface mock up.

Social Media Adoption Issues

Michele Martin has a post called "The Social Media Helix and Learning."  She uses the phrase (admittedly not the best) of "turtle learning" to describe those who are not using RSS, tagging, and social networks to share and exchange information.   When you get highly connected, you can use shortcut navigation across networks to turbocharge this process.  What does it take for an individual to move from the slower pace to faster pace.

Personal Productivity in an Age of Social Networking

The Myth of Managed Multi-Tasking from GeoScrum (hat tip Knowledge Jolt with Jack) points to research that finds people who work in technology are prey to embedded multi-tasking that will make us less effective.  One tip mentioned comes from Tim Ferriss's book The Four-Hour Work Week:  turn off your email and only read/answer it twice a day.

5 Boundary-Setting Tips for the Work Obsessed is from Anne Zelenka, who serves as Editor at Large for Web Worker Daily).   She just published a book titled Connect!: Web Worker Daily's Guide to a New Way of Working (Nptecher Judi Sohn is a contributor).  The book has been reviewed by bokardo.com

If you're looking for some ways to track your time online, either to be more productive or to measure ROI of Social Media,  Nate has recommended some applications that do this.

New (to me) Nonprofit Blogs

21st Century Volunteerism offers some tips for funding networked volunteers.

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Summary: Slow Wifi and Flickr Massage Edition

I'm working remotely on an unreliable and slow wifi connection and Flickr has been getting a massage (down for maintenance) for most of the afternoon.  As a result, I'm publishing a briefer than usual edition of the NpTech Tag Summary because I can only get to fast loading blogs and web sites.  In addition, no visuals either. 

NpTech Conversations

Wild Apricot Blog is hosting next week's Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants on the topic "How are non-profits using Web 2.0 and social networking tools?  It is important to think about the benefits, objectives, and audience before jumping on the social networking bandwagon.  If you can't wait, read Alexandra Samuel's "Best Practices for Social Networking Nonprofits,"  a guest post on Katya Andresen's Nonprofit Marketing Blog.  TechSoup has just published a thoughtful article from Idealware that raises the question, "Should Your Organization Use Social Networking Sites?"

Accross the pond, our nptech colleagues in the UK are busy planning sessions for LASA's upcoming Circuit Rider Conference for ICT Support and Development Workers.  Laura Whitehead is the session designer for a workshop on Social Media and Nonprofits and she's asking for input from the NpTech community on the session.  Nancy White shares some insights in the comments.

Looks like the NpTech community in Portland, Oregon is thriving. I suspect NTEN's presence in Portland has something to do it!   By the way, the NTC early bird deadline is fast approaching.


Social Media

Seth Godin points to Mark Rovner's insightful post about the current state of fundraising.  The summary: most big charities are based on direct mail
fundraising, and direct mail is dying. What
to do?

Giving Anonymously facilitates person to person philanthropy. It enables people to give to people in need anonymously.

Pixelanthropy takes hold in Second Life! via the AFP Blog summarizes this news story from msnbc about nonprofits in Second Life inspired by Kiva in Second Life's Grand Opening Party at the Nonprofit Commons.

The Point is describes itself as a social platform for people to solve problems they can't solve alone.   You can set up a fundraiser, issue a challenge, or social contract. The intent is to leverage the networked effect or the Tipping Point (the title of a book by Malcolm Gladwell that means the given moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass.) I love the cartoon animations that offers different use scenarios.  This is refreshing to see on an "alpha site."  Jeremy Pepper, who spoke at this month's NetSquared Net Tuesday Meetup, is the director of communications.

I noticed Soup.io in the NpTech Tag stream.  I set up an account and played around.  I didn't have the context until I stumbled upon this post from Nat Ritter (who also spoke at Net Tuesday).   This might help some of the limitations of Twitter, particularly the problem of retrieval.

New (to me) Blogs

ZUP 4 Nonprofits is a new blog by Audrie Zettick Schaller and focuses on "What's up!" in nonprofit management and development and also includes social media.  ZUP, but the way, is used in text and instant messaging to mean "What's Up."

IgniteSocialMedia writes about how to get started using social media.  Several recent posts have looked at productivity issues.  See Social Media Is A Waste of Time, Part 1 and Part 2.  (Hat tip Amy Sample Ward for discovering it!)

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag Summary: New Year's Resolutions, Social Media Learnings, and More

The Race is On! The Young Voters Facebook App


Four Lessons About Social Media and Nonprofits Meme

In the last NpTech Tag Summary for 2007, I started a meme for 2008, what are your lessons learned about Nonprofits and Social Media?  You had to answer these questions and tag several other people.

• What if you could start all my social media and nonprofits work over from scratch?
• What would I you differently?
• What 4 lessons have I learned that will stick with you  for 2008?

Here's a summary of some responses taking one point from each post, but these posts are written by very smart people and oh, so good, definitely worth clicking through and reading the entire post.

Holly Ross says, Accept the fact that you will screw it up.

"We all hate to look dumb, so rather than try something we might fail at, we don't try at all. That strategy isn't going to get us anywhere. At NTEN, we'll be pursuing all this social media stuff with a little more reckless abandon in 2008. Sometimes we'll look silly, but at least we'll try."

Laura Whitehead says, Keep your eyes open to new possibilities

Social media is evolving fast. Keeping up with emerging networks and technologies and evaluating their potential is really important to me. I can use all of my other lessons above to share, participate, discuss and get involved to keep on top of new technologies.

Britt Bravo says, Information overload is real. 

I LOVE being able to read, listen to and watch the kind of content I want, when I want to. I used to subscribe to everything I saw that interested me, and then try to consume it all, even if I discovered that the content wasn't that great. I didn't want to "miss" anything. Now I am much more discerning about what I subscribe to, and if I
notice I haven't read or listened to something for a while, I delete it.

(Check these tips for information overload that came flowing through the NpTech tag)

Katya Andersen says, "It’s about “social,” not “media.” 

As I said in this post, while social media seems oh-so-new, what makes it hot could not be more
ancient or old-school.  What’s significant about social media is how it allows us to quickly and expansively fulfill our unending human need for connection.  While I myself have fallen into the trap of focusing on my organization’s need to do Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, that’s not the point—what matters whether those are places to strengthen connections with my target audience.  If my target audience isn’t there, I’m not going there.

Amy Sample Ward says, "Stay optimistic"

There is truly such a thing as information (or social media) overload. It is easy to get overwhelmed and walk, or rather run, away. Do not fear! If you stay optimistic and approach your social media strategy and usage calmly (and use the POST method!), you can have the patience to filter out the noise and hear the important conversation

 
Sue Waters says, "The most important lesson I learnt in 2007 was that when you are struck, if you have invested the time and effort into building strong social networks, one of your networks will help you out."  So, she reached out to her Twitter network and generated this awesome collaborative list of learnings.

Deborah Finn says, "It's really about your mission, it's not about your social media"

2008 is Your Year of ...

Jeff Pulver, a social media thought leader, says "Four days into the new year and I have to ask, have you made 2008 YOUR year yet?"  He is, of course, asking if you've gotten started on those New Year's resolutions.  Let's check in a few:

The Influence blog asks "Will 2008 be the year that "blog" and "web site" become interchangable terms?" but also reviews the top nonprofit technology trends of 2007, including are "the rise of social media" and "google,
google, everywhere."    The most interesting trend that has not been covered excessively in the nptech blogosphere is the use of online visualization of policy data. These can be done through sites such as Graphwise, EditGrid, Zoho Creator, Dabble DB, and others. 

Paolo Ferrara, from Italy, offers his predictions, plus challenges us to look into our crystal balls.

What is 2008 the year of in Philanthropy?

Eugene Chan, Community Technology Foundation, points out that the main weakness to year-long resolutions is that they only happen once a year.  So, he's is blogging a new resolution each month.  January's resolution is about learning from data and small bites.  He intends to use his pattern analysis and creative problem solving skills to improve the organization's IT help desk.  I sure hope he blogs what he learns along the way and doesn't wait until the end of the month to share what setting up this process. (And speaking of learning from data, Kami Huyse has a great list of low-cost measurement tools for measuring the ROI of pr efforts.)

Maybe your New Year's Resolution is to be a better leader, than hurry - sign up for NTEN Technology Leadership Series taught by John Kenyon. Or maybe it was to do something about that pile of e-waste or the clutter in your office, drop everything and go read "Clearing Out for Cause" and "Teaching Computers New Clicks" on the Washington Post web site.  Is it the year of Twitter for your organization?  Go to the next Net Tuesday.  And, if you're gonna jump on the blogging bandwagon, here's some good points on what to think about before your begin a blog.

In lieu of making predictions for the new year, Jon Stahl is tagging excellent resources into the nptech tag stream.  He says this "How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" is a fantastic book and points to this FireFox extension that allows you to shop at Amazon and donate a portion of the proceeds to support the participatory culture foundation (makers of miro).  Jon thinks that this idea could be adapted for any nonprofit organization.

Social Web for Social Good

The Tactical Philanthropy blog is calling for a community wide discussion about what to measure in Philanthropy and why.

I receives lots of emails last week that announced, "Last Time To Donate To XYZ in 2007."   What about the first opportunity to donate in 2008?  January is always a tight budget month, so what about a really small contribution?  Perhaps this list of "Modest Needs Top Five" might inspire?

Charifree is not the name of a new chewing gum. It is a new facebook application allows users to utilize their social network on Facebook to raise money for their favorite charity without actually having to donate any money.  Despite this favorable review, my reaction is ugh .. another way to spam your friends.  Where's the ladder of engagement?   One wonders if application design like this does more harm than good?  Am I missing something?

Robert Scoble was kicked off of Facebook for running a script that scraped his friends names, email addresses, and birthdays into his gmail account.   After saying he wasn't using the friends data, Facebook reinstates his account.  Stephen Downes observes "This, I think, is a pretty clear message from Facebook to the effect that it thinks it owns your data." and offers further analysis here.  The debate raging is open social networks versus corporate espionage versus accepting the Facebook terms of service.  Not sure how much of connection there is to FB applications like this one, but for nonprofits, access to donor contact information is essential for building ongoing relationships.  Something important to think about for your social network strategy.   

The Nonprofit Eye gives us a critical analysis of a healthcare gift card from Givewell.com

Beth Dunn has a thought piece about what nonprofits need to think about in reaching out to younger fundraisers.

Happy Frozen Pea Fund Friday, a weekly effort to raise money for breast cancer. (Here's the context)  There's also a wiki for campaign planning and long-term goals which may include starting a nonprofit organization.  So, if any of you nptechers have some advice, please share it.

New (to me) Blogs and Save the Date

ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace) explores the use of information and communications technology for conflict transformation and is written by Sanjana Hattotuwa.  If you are, like me, only just discovering this excellent blog, read the 2007 year in review post to catch up.

Save the Date - March 31, 2008.  Women Who Tech Telesummit

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag Summary: Best Wishes for Healthy, Happy, and Social 2008!

The Net2 Secret Plan from Marnie Webb

NpTech Tag New Year's Reflections, Predictions, and Best Ofs

What are some of the ways that the social web marks the New Year? Let's take a look.

Chronicle of Philanthropy has a roundup of predictions for 2008 from
nonprofit leaders, including Daniel Ben-Horin, founder of CompuMentor who predicts, "Successful nonprofit players in the social media space will those who understand the opportunity without being seduced by it."    Also quoted is Sean Stannard-Stockton, author of the   Tactical Philanthropy blog  was also quoted and he shares his expanded predictions here, including "Charities recognize the potential of social-media tools and finally get serious about integrated online strategies."

Lucy Bernholz points to an NY Times editorial on embedded giving  with a prediction about what will continue to work best with giving to charity.  The Selfish Giving Blog by Joe Waters gives us some tongue and check predictions about Cause Marketing. 

For social media and technology predictions, here's a few from the Read/Write Web.

I wonder how Jason Zanon at DIA would score those predictions? And speaking of predictions, in December 2006, Jon Stahl predicted that the Web2.0 bubble would burst.

Britt Bravo at NetSquared summarized a community discussion about the "Best of the Nonprofit Social Web."  Emily offers her thoughts here.  Nedra Weinreich hosted the "Best of Nonprofit Campaigns" carnival of nonprofit consultants.  Wendy Harmon gives us a list of her favorite web sites.  Some bloggers, like Skelliewag, highlighted the best of best of their blog posts, while CogDog blog took the opposite approach and look at the Top 0 list.  And finally, Chris Brogan focused on needs for 2008.  What are the nptech social media needs for 2008? 

There are also a few who blogged New Year's Resolutions, from not being a bore to being a more robust activist.

As we move into 2008, one last reflection, what are you lessons learned about Nonprofits and Social Media?

NpTech Tag  Reflections

Over the course of the last year, I've been in engaged in a monthly real-time voice discussion with colleagues at CpSquared about online communities, specifically tagging communities and the community sits behind the NpTech tag.   I came across Jeremiah Owyang's definition of online community -"An online community is: Where a group of people with similar goals or interests connect and exchange information using web tools" and it defines the tagging community.

But over the past few months, I have noticed, like Amy Gahran, that as I've engaged more in using Twitter, I'm connecting with resources and people more on Twitter than with social bookmarking tools.  I still bookmark items with the nptech tag and I still monitor the tag stream, but on Twitter I feel more of a connection to the actual person, not just the exchange of information.  The main reason I'm still tagging is for retrieval when asked for a resource on and to write this summary.   

But, there's something about the instant gratification Twitter provides, that just-in-time byte of information.   I am wondering how all relates to the NpTech tag community and what it means.   How do we continue to connect and have a conversation facilitated by different social media tools?  How to make these summaries more useful to you all?  Thoughts, leave them in the comments.

Social Media Conversations

Marnie Webb writes about why nonprofit should stop lecturing and start listening and her experiences from a recent hands-on workshop where nonprofits were taught how to follow what was being said about their causes or organizations on the social web.    If you are in a position of teaching this skill to nonprofits, what do you show them?  How do you make easy? What is the reaction?

Beth Dunn asks "Do Social Networks mostly promote inclusion or exclusion?" and writes about how to engage more deeply in conversation on Twitter.   She says how important it is to be open, transparent, humble, and receptive to comments and criticism is on the social web.  What do you think?

On blogs, comments are the conversation.  Michele Martin wrote this piece about the six reasons why people aren't commenting on your blog in reaction to a piece by Chris Brogan called "The Power of Comments" where the post was in the comments.  I'd add to her list, because you didn't end your post with question.   Michele wrote an excellent post summarizing her reader's comments about commenting.   

There's a gem of an idea from one of Michele's readers, Sarah Stewart, about writing a statement on your blog about why commenting is important to you.

Katya Andresen has some great advice on building relationships on social networks.
The Frozen PeaFund, a social media campaign to raise money for breast cancer research, is seeking some advice about becoming a nonprofit organization.

Twitter

Nonprofits will be delving into the world of twitter on January 8th at the Net Tuesday SF Meetup.

Marnie Webb points to hashtags with a note in Ma.gnolia.com, "Seems like it could be a way to tweet for causes."   Laura Whitehead describes "it as an easy way to track a specific topic or event such as the San
Diego Fires using the Twitter network. This allows for hyper-instant
communication surrounding disaster relief and reporting."  Elsua notes "If only Hashtags would be a native feature from Twitter, right? Things would be even much more interesting!"

NetworkforGood has a new learning center called "fundraising123."  It is a fundraising guide for the overworked nonprofit.  There's lots of great tip sheets on different topics, including Social Networking.  Here's a tip sheet on Twitter.

New (to me) Blogs

A Small Change-Fundraising Blog: A blog to answer questions from nonprofits about fundraising


Brenda Zulu from Zambia, a journalist who covers ICT and Development issues.

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag Summary: America's Giving Challenge, Googlization of Nonprofit Transparency, Muck on Twitter, and Desklickr

The Googlization of Nonprofit Transparency

What's Hot in NpTech

The America's Giving Challenge launched this week.  There was much media buzz, including articles in the New York Times and Washington Post.  Also lots of buzz in NpTech circles including NTEN, TechSoup, and David Collin.  Britt Bravo has a how-to get started post over at NetSquared.  Ruby Sinreich gets interviewed on NPR's marketplace.

Sean Stannard-Stockton is discovers Google's Nonprofit Portal and blogger ask "What if Google made play at Guidestar?"  Sean asks, "I think this is a game changer. If these Google pages resided at the top of the search results when people look up nonprofits, than these pages will become de facto home pages, but with blog posts, new stories and discussions that are both positive and negative."  There's quite a bit of discussion in the comments.  The Red Cross was mentioned in the post and Red Cross staffer Wendy Harmon responds on her personal blog.

Cold winter days are great for catching up with your reading.  Looks like 1cent thoughs on NpTech blog has been enjoying the Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant. Favorite quote:  "Sacrificing managerial efficiency on the altar of inspiration."   

Speaking about Great Nonprofits, Perla Ni, former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, has launched a new site intended as the Zagat Guide for Nonprofits.   Read more about from NTEN as well as a profile in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

NTEN released its CRM Satisfaction Survey last week. Michelle Murrain blogged her thoughts and an interesting discussion followed.

If you're really procrastinating about your year-end campaign, better read this quick.

Social Media

Here's the collective wisdom from NpTechers on outreaching to bloggers. 

This week, Britt Bravo wrote a fantastic piece titled Ten Tips for Asking Bloggers To Write About Your Cause.  One of her tips is to start reading the blogs (here's a good beginner's guide to RSS) She points to additional resources including Reaching Bloggers on Spare Change and a cute little video Blogger Outreach 101 on the Common Craft blog as well as an example from 10,000 Villages who contacted bloggers and asked them if they would like to join their blog press list. 

Two weeks ago, Jo Le asked a question on the progressives exchange listserv about how to reach out to bloggers.  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.  Other resources noted included 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.


Social Media Strategy Notes

The Free Press Action Network has a campaign called "Stop Big Media" that is asking people to email their Senators to urge support for The Media Ownership Act of 2007 and take a stand for better media.  If you
want an entertaining way to learn more about why this issue is important, check out the online game "Whack a Murdoch."  The campaign is offers an example of a social media integrated advocacy campaign.  Check out the blog, photo petition, YouTube Channel, and MySpace. 


If you are planning a social media integrated campaign, one NpTech tagger suggests this useful article (just substitute the word corporation with  nonprofit.)  If you're considering Facebook, you must go read Rich Reader's post over at Netsquared.

Meaghan Lamarre over at echoditto has an epiphany about twitter and its usefulness. Do you agree that "shared being" is valuable?  For further analysis, you must read Twitter:  Why we should love muck and feces

AFP Blog points to a post called "What the Creative in Creative Commons Really Means" from PC Magazine. It lets creators understand that copyright is not one right, but a bundle of rights.  And that if you create a work, you have the ability to let the world use it in useful ways.  Meanwhile someone tagged this useful article in the NpTech tag stream.

Stay Away from Spock

I wish had I seen this post from Nancy White a week ago when I stupidly responded to several requests from people in my network to join them on Spock.    I should not have allowed it to scan my address book to send out invites to people who probably don't need or want this service. (apologies to everyone)  Nancy White points to good posts about the problem, "It May Be the Evil Spock" and "Initial Response to Spock" by Jim Benson who suggests that we should join Spock because it has crawled the web and created an identity for us - which needs to be cleaned up.   In the comments, Chris Messina against signing up to clean up your profile because Spock is worse than a yellow pages listing.  The bottom line, we have to think more and more about the social effects of technology. Beware nptech colleagues, don't use this service.

Social Media Marketing Playbook:  Excellent Resource

Marnie Webb tagged an excellent post titled "12 Ways To Make Your Website Ready for Social Media Creators."  The post describes ways that you can make your web site content re-usable for social media creators like bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers.  This post is just a small taste from the book "Getting to Firstbase, A Social Media Marketing Book" by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo.  As a blogger, I got a review copy and while I haven't completely finished reading it, it is definitely a must-read.


Digital Story Telling, Photo Sharing, and Other Ways To Use Photos

Alan Levine, developed a workshop resource called "Fifty Ways To Tell A Story" where he experimented with online digital storytelling by telling the same story on 50 different sites.  The resource has links to the tools with reflections on techniques.

If you just want to focus on how to tell you stories in photos, check out this post from Wild Apricot called "Ten Best Photo Sharing Sites."   I have never really made past flickr because of the wonderful community there, and the continual improvement in features like the recent addition of analytics and stats. Marnie Webb tags Laughing Squids' take on flickr stats.

Jon Stahl found a nifty tool for mac and flickr lovers called Desklickr.  Can you guess by the name what it does?

Meanwhile Gregory Heller tags an analog way to tell your story: moo cards.


Video

From the recent discussions on some list servs, lots of nonprofits who have applied to the YouTube Nonprofit Program are still waiting for approval.  A more timely approval process is anticipated once they get through the backlog. 

In the meantime,  this post from Marc Sirkin sharing his YouTube Nonprofit Channel experience is worth reading as people contemplate a YouTube strategy.  Marc's findings: Traffic increase, little donation follow through.  You can find a collection how-to YouTube and Viral Video strategy resources here.

Blogging and Blogs

Issac is from Kenya and is working in Tanzania for children who are orphans because their parents died of aids.   A great example of blogging the stories of your organization.   

For some pointers on how to write a successful blog, see Digital Inspiration's Presentation on the topic.

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Summary: Dress Up Your RSS Icon for the Holidays, Facebook and Nonprofits Roundup, and More

 

Tis the Season

Pamela Ashlund writes about the RSSing of the holidays.  You can download a set of icons here.  (I like the FreeGeek recycled green geek tree)

Chez Pim's, annual online fundraising campaign, Menu for Hope happening December 10-21.  Last year the campaign raised $62,925 for the WFP.

Just in Time for the Giving Season, TechSoup is hosting an online event about online gift giving

Go check out the Story of Stuff.  It's enough to really  make you re-think your gift giving. 

NpTech Bytes and Pieces

Remembering Wayne Glynn, a tribute to a colleague from Deborah Finn.  Other thoughts from NTEN.

NTC is open for registration!  It's in New Orleans!

Wired for Change  is a result of a merger between CGL Group and DemocracyInAction.com.

Blogging Projects

Chris Brogan offers a gem of a post called "Social Media Starter Pack" that summarizes five concepts and includes tools and easy to get started first steps.  This blog post is part of a project to write 100 useful posts on social media.

The blog post series meme continues with Michele Martin who recently finished a week of posts called "Employee Learning Week" in celebration of ASTD's Employee Learning Week.

Solo blogging projects look like an interesting way to take a deep dive on a topic and attract people fascinated by the subject matter.   What nonprofit technology topic would you focus on for a week or 100 posts?

Social Networking

Quick, you don't have much time left to nominate the Best of the Social Web for Nonprofits in 2007.

A number of people have been linking to Jeremiah Owyang's presentation at the Web Community Forum on Facebook.

A few reflections from nonprofit tech bloggers about Facebook strategies, including these thoughts from Beth Dunn, Marnie Webb, Rich Reader, and Ian Wilker.

Marnie Webb points to a blog post at the Harvard Business Review from Charlene Li of Forrester Research on whether organizations or individual should bother with social networking sites.   She lays down a great case for professional networking and potential value it offers.  For an alternative view, see Thomas Davenport's "Why MySpace and Facebook Won't Change The Workplace."

Holly Ross at NTEN covers the Facebook privacy flap.  Here's a video about privacy concerns on Facebook and other social networking sites.   A few more useful resources here and here.

Micah Sifry and Joshua Levy at PDF catch up with Change.org's Founder, Benjamin Rattray, to discuss what's new at Change.org

Here's an interesting post on the topic of creating connections through conversations and offers some good points about facilitating online conversations, perhaps of use to those who have started Facebook groups and want to create a community.  Speaking of connections and conversations, check out Britt Bravo's "Has Anyone Ever Died from a Blog Comment?"

EchoDitto has a post with roles and responsibilities for an online marketing team.  I wonder, if or when, we might see a job description devoted to social networking.  What responsibilities would be on such a job description and who would be an ideal candidate?

Here's another social networking sites for charities called "MyCharityPage."  You can about the launch here.

Nancy White has launched a group on Facebook well worth joining and actively participating.
Open Source Research on FB for Non Profits with Nancy's Friends.

Video

The World Food Program announces a YouTube viral video competition called Hunger Bytes.  (Maybe they will enter a few in the NTC video contest

This video on Current.TV explores mobile phone technology that is advancing the process of Microfinance in India and other developing countries, making it possible for them to quantify their credit and help put them on the same level as larger banks.

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.

 

NpTech Tag Summary: Nonprofits Lead Fortune 500 in Social Web Adoption, and More

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag Summary: Happy Thanksgiving, Cuneiform Code, and Social Networking Questions

Ma.gnolia Thanksgiving from Miss Rogue

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanks to the magic of Google Trends, this is the search volume for the top Thanksgiving-related searches since 2004.   Maybe in addition to "Buy Nothing Day" we should have eat nothing day and donate what we would have spent on food to hunger charities.


Social Tools for Shared Knowledge

The Cuneiform Code  (1 of 2) from Gavin's Digital Diner boils down KM practices to three simple truths: 1) know what you need to save, trash the rest; 2) know where to keep it 3) make it findable.   Gavin describes how he creates a simple knowledge base with Share Point in the sequel post, "Cracking the Cuneiform Code - The KM Supremacy."  This is great way to think about what items you want to tag in a social
bookmarking service, if that's a tool you're using for KM.   This would also make an interesting blog meme. 

Here's another way to share knowledge with social media tools, viddler, a video host that allows others to comment on the video and add remarks and clarifications.    Coolcat Teacher Blog points to this excellent video tutorial about Twitter that uses it. 

Here's another opportunity to apply Gavin's Cuneiform Code with wikis as the tool. The Acronym Blog gives us ten ways that nonprofit associations can use wikis.  Part 1 and Part 2.

Social Networks and Social Networking

Rich Reader had some reactions to last week's NpTech Tag Summary musings about social networks for nonprofits in light of change.org's launch of a white label social networking application.

Elizabeth Dunn shares some of her thinking about how her organization will make the decision about using a social network as part of its marketing mix.  I wonder what this might look like in a logic model?

Amy Sample Ward suggests that the question is not a "to use a social network or not to use a social network" but which social network to use.

If you're considering MySpace, check out the analysis of MySpace from the Frogloop blog. Similar to their Causes analysis awhile ago, they examined 150 nonprofit profiles on MySpace to see which functions
people were using, how those features were working, and how much money
their profiles were raising.

Meanwhile, UK based NpTech colleagues are actively experimenting with Facebook organizational presence and documenting their learnings in Facebook and their blogs.

Some find social networking a key benefit to using Second Life as explained in this post, "Top 10 Reasons Why Second Life is Worthwhile for Nonprofits?" 

A new trend is niche audience social networks.  Here's a story about one niche audience social network that may be of interest to nonprofits.

It's always good to step back and ask what social networks can do for you (or your organization) every now and then even after you've jumped in.

White African has a list of Africa's Web 2.0 sites found via Marshall Kirkpatrick's excellent post in Read/Write Web.

Blogging Advice and Some New (to me) Blogs

Michelle Martin asks "Should you only blog if you have something original to say?"  Michelle describes a blogger who stopped because she felt she didn't have anything original to say.  Michelle challenges this notion as the only reason to blog and asks if others have struggled with this very issue.

The skelliewag blog has a value packed post about how to increase your readership, challenging the notion that posting more frequently leads to more subscribers.   Be sure to read the comments lots of good tips.

Timothy Moenk, Net Tuesday Organizer in Atlanta, writes a blog called  "continuous partial attention"

Happy Birthday Cards,  Security Warnings, and Upcoming Events

NetTuesday in Atlanta is next Tuesday.

Idealware celebrates its second birthday!   The term screencasting turns three!

Happy Birthday to Eugene Chan!  How did I know?  Facebook's Birthday calendar application.

TechSoup blog issues a security update to its email newsletter subscribers. Reactions from nptech blogs here and here.

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.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

NpTech Tag: Change.org To Launch White-Label Social Network for Nonprofits, GeekToys that Give Geekbumps, and Blog Readability

What reading level is your blog?  Most NpTech blogs are high school level.  Remember, it's not the level, but whether it is a match to your audience.

Social Networking for Social Change

According to TechCrunch, Change.org, a social networking site that links volunteers to causes and voters to politicians will launch a new white-label social network for non-profits.  For the launch, they’ve already partnered with 50 non-profits, like Care2, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International

The question it raises for nonprofits is, join an existing network like Facebook or MySpace or build your own social network or combination? And maybe this should not be an either/or question, but most likely resources will dictate that.   

Rolling your own social network wrapped with your organization's branding, data, and integrated into an organizational site will provide more control.   According to an email from Ben Rattray, Change.Org founder, "This is not at all meant as a replacement for the profiles organizations have on MySpace and Facebook, which I think are great for reaching younger supporters.  But these sites have two important limitations that give nonprofits reason to look for additional tools.  First, neither site has all the custom features, branding, or data integration that many organizations want.   Second, we're hearing from most organizations that despite the huge membership of MySpace and Facebook, only 5-15% of their current donors are on either site.  So nonprofits that focus exclusively on these sites are failing to fully engage 85% of their existing donors – comprising the people most likely to give and raise additional money."

So, does it make sense to roll your own network to appeal to those 85% of existing donors who do not participate on social networking sites, but may be engaged with the organization through other channels like email, face-to-face, or web site forums?  Do we know enough about the differences between users and non-users of social networking sites?    Also, building your own social network and growing and supporting a community takes work and relationship building to be successful-- whether you to do it on Facebook or your own site.  As FrogLoop blog concludes in its recent analysis of MySpace, "Social networking sites are essentially a microcosm of the internet, and hosting a profile on either is akin to managing a website.  It still requires a lot of attention, staff time, management and promotion."

While larger nonprofits may have the capacity to sustain multiple profiles and community efforts on social networking sites, plus their own branded community, not all nonprofits do.   One hopes that nonprofits deciding to roll their own social networks, aren't creating their own social silos and have gone into it with a solid strategy, clear objectives and measurable metrics, and can evaluate the ROI. 

What do you think?  How will your organization decide whether to roll their own social network and/or have a profile on a larger social networking site or just say no to social networks?  Drop a comment or link back and I'll round it up for next week's summary.

More On Social Networking for Social Change

OneNorthWest recently hosted a seminar on social networking sites and environmental organizations. Jon Stahl has a live blog post of remarks by the speakers. 

This is a must-read.  The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication October issue is devoted to scholarly research on social networks.  There are 18 articles.  If you're short on time, read the abtracts and dive deeper into Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.

Social Change Websites is an excellent directory of the best nonprofit, grassroots, and advocacy campaign websites devoted to social change.  You can sort by category and location and it campaign as a basic description.  I'd love to see more detail, like an overview the strategies or how they measure success.

Marnie Webb (who appears to be blogging a bit more these days since she switched to a MAC) tagged an interesting article from the Wall Journal that asks "Is there a numerical cap on how many friends we can have?"  The article refers to the Dunbar number - 150 - the ceiling on the number of personal contacts a human has the capacity to maintain.  The article says that new research suggests that social networking sites will help humans surpass this limit.  Last word from Prof. Dunbar: .."isn't sold on the idea that social networks make his number outdated. The research, he says, "made us realize people don't know what these
wretched things called relationships are -- and that helps explain why we're so bad at them."

Hitwise has published a study that shows visits to social networks overtaking visits to web-based email services in the UK for the first time.  Is this wave of the future?  Will email remain the killer app or go the way of the page view?

The Wild Apricot Blog has published a nice list of ten examples of how nonprofits can use Facebook. Be sure to check out Beginner's Guide to Facebook and How to promote your Cause on Facebook articles.

DevelopmentSeed blog posted back in October some screenshots of the Facebook application created to Help End Poverty as part of the UN Millennium Campaign outreach to Facebook community.  Would love to read a summary of the campaign results and lessons learned.   If you're curious about what other Facebook applications are being used by nonprofits, check out this top 12 list.

Perhaps you're wondering what type of skills you need on staff to implement a social networking and media strategy.   You can learn a lot about that more through this informative interview by The Buzz Bin with Steve Bridger on the Buzz Director.

Tis the Season

These sites may not be of interest to participants of "Buy Nothing Day," on November 23, but what better way to feed your consumer urges and desire to good by shopping for charity!  A new entry into the charity shopping category, is MAATIAM.  Of course, another way to do this is to set up your own shop on cafepress. (Oh, I so want a NTEN baseball cap!)  Or purchase gift items from a socially responsible retail store like Ten Thousand Islands that helps support local artisans and Fair Trade in developing countries.

Now that you've shopped for good, what about for yourself?  Check out Steve Dembo's Geek Toys that'll give you Geekbumps which includes the Give One Get One XO Laptop Campaign (hurry offer ends on November 30th) and a Chumby (hmm .. Nancy White got herself an early holiday gift)

It's November, crunch time for nonprofit fundraisers looking to take advantage of the holiday giving.  Don't have your strategy and plans in place yet???  No worries.  This early holiday gift from the good folks
at Care2 and SeaChange Strategies, "A Procrastinator's Guide to Year-End Fundraising"
will give you a crash course on best practices for maximizing online giving.  This beautifully designed and well written concise guide is a must-read.

Nonprofit Software

Earlier this month, Convio alerted its nonprofit clients of an Online Security Issue as reported by the nonprofit tech blog (be sure to read through the comments), NTEN and TechSoup blog. leading to an impassioned request for best practices for minimizing damage when this security breaches occur on several listservs.  Allan Benamer responded this week with some suggested guidelines for nonprofits to use for disclosure of security breaches

Check this out!  The NOSI Choosing and Using Free and Open Source primer is on the ICT Hub Knowledgebase!

Video

The AFP Nonprofit Technology blog points to a story by Jennifer Gilomen from BAVC about digital storytelling techniques and tools for nonprofits in the NPTimes.  If you have a subscription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, there is another related story called "Telling Moving Stories."  You read an excerpt here.

Michael Hoffman from See3 points us to the 1 Second Film, a collaborative art project, micro video blogging example, and micro fundraising campaign.

Global Development Matters is a new site with lots of video, quizzes on global development and extensive q/a on a variety of global development project.  Check out the introduction video for more.

Andy Carvin has a terrific interview with Marc Hawker and Jiva Parthipan about their experiences making a viral video for Amnesty International's anti-torture campaign about Guantanamo interrogation techniques.

Chris Brogan points to Show in a Box, a fully packaged WordPress blog with custom themes and other features built in to create an out of box video blog experience. 

Ever wanted to incorporate a slide show in your drupal site?

SEO/SMO

Grassroots.Org has a general primer on Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits, although some of the information in the linkbuilding section is circa 1999. 

Jonathan Coleman's slide show, You Can't Raise $$$ if People Can't Find You on SEO fundraisers.

SMO stands for Social Media Optimization which is the process of making your site/blog more visible in social media searches and sites, more easily linked by other sites, and more frequently discussed online.


Micro Media: Strategy, Tools, and Techniques

A few months ago, Jeremiah Owyang coined a term "MicroMedia," which is the next evolution of micro blogging (think Twitter).   Quick audio or video messages published to a trusted social community.  May be created and consumed using mobile technology and distributed using other social media tools.

Here's a good list of micro-media tools, although they are labeled as mobile learning tools.

One of the hallmarks of micro blogging is that you had to write the essence of an idea in more than 140 characters or in the case of micro media capturing the video in less than minute or recording your report very concisely.   Perhaps there is a lot to learn from headline writing skills.

Amy Sample Ward has an interesting take on adoption issues as related to micro-media tools.

Blogging

While it is almost a year old, this slide show called 10 Ways to a Killer Blog by Robert and Maryam Scoble about how to blog well is an entertaining, quick and useful read.

NpTech Global

Kabissa joins Aid for Africa for the third year running!

I don't speak or read Japanese.  So, I have no idea why this page was tagged with NpTech.  Do you?

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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