Peter Deitz, Social Actions

When it comes to online fundraising, an obvious tip is to meet your current and potential donors where they are. With 300 million active users, Facebook is a natural starting place. Moreover, the company reports that people who are 35 years and older make up the fastest growing user demographic, which corresponds to the demographic mostly likely to make a donation online.

To help tech-savvy nonprofits make use of Facebook, this brief guide looks at four strategies:

1. Raise Meaning Before Money
2. Money Is Not the Only Metric
3. Your People Are Your Impact
4. Be Specific and Timely

Flickr Photo: rakkaI love public speaking.

My husband would swear it's because I love the sound of my own voice, but really, I like it best when I get to hear the questions and comments from the crowd. Truth is, I'm no expert. I learn as much as I share at any speaking opportunity.

Case in point: I spent the beginning of this week in fab-tastic Denver, talking with members of the Colorado Nonprofit Association about -- what else? -- social media.

The funny thing about telling people what they should be doing is how often you notice you aren't following your own best advice. This became patently clear to me in a small group session we did.

Remember those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, where you determined the plot arc by deciding which page to turn to? Well, our upcoming 3-hour online We Are Media event will debut our "Choose Your Own Expert" format. The best part: any path you choose will be a good one.

We've gathered some of the top nonprofit social media experts to help you devise a solid organizational strategy, as well as learn the secrets of a variety of social media tools.

> You should register for this fantastic event here.

You know that we're always trying something new here at NTEN, especially if it means that it will bring our members closer together. We recently launched a couple of roundtable discussions - phone calls with an online chat component - for IT Staff and communications/marketing folks. Today we met up with the marketing folks and had a great discussion about social media policies, facebook, communicating within your organization, and lots more.

Transcript of the chat portion is below. Feel free to join us in September for our next Communications Roundtable or IT Staff Roundtable!

Steve Wright's PantsAs I blogged earlier, I was lucky enough to spend last weekend in Nashville talking with the leadership from The Arc. I did a session on social media using the slide deck we created for our We Are Media trainings. All was going well. They were with me.

Then a very smart lady in the back of the room piped up: "We did all that, and our campaign still didn't work. What did we do wrong?"

That's when it hit me:

Flicker photo: mattedgarLately, I've noticed an uptick in the number of tweets on this theme:

I found an AWESOME way to get tons of followers on Twitter in days! (Insert spammy link here.)

This got me to thinking: Do we really want thousands of followers?

There's no shortage of folks out there telling you how. Then there are those mocking the tellers; just search for "twitter eleventy-billion" in any search engine for a great example, but be warned that it's pretty NSFW. There are even services out there that will auto-gather followers -- or let you buy them.

Yes, even in the age of social media, old school rules are being trotted out: bigger is still, apparently, better. The more followers you have, the more people may see your message, click on it, and take action. I get that. But like Aliza Sherman at Web Worker Daily, I'll take quality over quantity.

Here's my Twitter philosophy:

Now that the warm days of summer have finally graced us with their presence, January seems like a distant memory. But for those of you who participated in the Case Foundation Giving Challenge, it probably feels like yesterday. We hate to bring up all those sleepless nights and the constant campaigning, but now we've got a great write up about the Challenge from Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

A total of nearly 2 million dollars raised from nearly 75,000 people means there were a few lessons learned. Many align nicely with some of the principles of We Are Media. Here are a few tidbits I found particularly compelling:

In a scenario ripe for Hollywood exploitation, protests have erupted in Guatemala over the slaying of a lawyer. According to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing:

Protests are taking place today in Guatemala City to demand justice for an attorney who was assassinated on Sunday, and who claimed in a posthumously released YouTube video taped before his death that if he were to die, it would be at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom.

All sorts of applications of technology are tied up in the protests:

• The video making the claims was posted on YouTube, making it widely available and difficult to suppress.
• The protests are currently being live streamed, with intermittent police interruption.
• There is, inevitably, a Twitter hashtag used by the protesters.

Now, if only somebody could whip up some code to send the Twitter stream through a machine translator so I didn't have to rely on my rusty Spanish...

According to a survey conducted in March 2009 by NTEN, Common Knowledge, and ThePort, social networking has become an integral part of nonprofits’ online strategy. You may have already suspected that, but now you can get some hard numbers to justify that Facebook page you've been keeping so tidy and au currant. Then you can go all Matt Damon on your ED:

“You like apples? Of the 929 respondents to a survey, nearly three-quarters (74.2%) have a presence on Facebook, and 30.9% have one or more social networking communities on their own web site. How do you like them apples?”

But don’t take our word for it. Download the report and read it yourself. It’s free!

> Download the Social Network Survey Report

And if you're keeping track at home, that's two reports we've helped release during the NTC. Will there be another? Tune in tomorrow, same NTEN time, same NTEN channel.

Community doesn't just happen: It's built slowly, person by person, relationship by relationship.

I remember the days when you weren't someone's friend unless you'd personally delivered the pizza and ice cream after a break up. What happens to the notion of community when you move it online, and being someone's friend is as easy clicking a mouse? How can a nonprofit balance its own needs with the needs of the community? And where SHOULD you build that community anyway?

These are the questions that Jeff Patrick, President of Common Knowledge, is going to tackle in his session at the 2009 NTC, "Evolution of Online Communities: Social Media for Social Good". We had a chance to talk a little bit about how the online tools have come closer to our idea of what a relationship is, and what that means for the sector: