Moving movie audiences to take action from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I‘ll confess: I was excited to see The Cove take home the Academy Award for best feature documentary last night. While all the entrants were worthy, “The Cove” is among the handful of movies pushing the idea of Hollywood productions as the fulcrum for social change.

A few weeks ago I caught up with Christopher Gebhardt, general manager and executive vice president of TakePart, the Beverly Hills-based digital arm of Participant Media, which marketed and helped bring “The Cove” to theaters nationwide. Participant Media (formerly Participant Productions) — Jeff Skoll’s social entrepreneurial film production company — has an incredible track record in bringing socially relevant films to screens nationwide, including “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “The Kite Runner,” “The Soloist,” “Syriana,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Visitor,” “Food, Inc.,” “North Country” and now “The Cove.”

A breath-taking string of success.

“The Cove” is remarkable for its guerrilla filmmaking tactics in chronicling the grisly business of dolphin hunting in rural fishing villages in Japan, where as many as 20,000 dolphins are slaughtered annually. It won the Audience Award at Sundance last year. Participant didn’t fund the film but funded its marketing.

“We’ve spent the last five years at Participant figuring out how to take the film and really use it to … really get people involved with an issue,” said Gebhardt, speaking after a conversation on stage at Social Capital Markets 2009.

You may have noticed one fellow on stage at the Oscars — film subject and animal activist Ric O’Barry — holding up a sign that said, “Text DOLPHIN to 44144.” (The camera cut away after only one second — the academy has a long tradition of not acknowledging or encouraging overly activist sentiments.)

What’s cool about “The Cove” is that, just as the movie ends, theatergoers are met with the same message: Text DOLPHIN to 44144. When you text the short code, Gebhardt explains, you’re given ways to connect, including the option to sign online petitions to protest the brutal practice, send letters to President Obama, the US ambassador to Japan or Japan’s ambassador to the United States, or you can take other actions.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo. (I’ve started producing these in a higher resolution 3800 kbps bitrate at 720 pixels wide.)

I should mention that I was in the first group of bloggers in 2005 who signed on to guest-post on Participant’s first such effort: the “Good Night and Good Luck” site to discuss press reform and how changes in corporate ownership of the media have affected our democracy since the days of Edward R. Murrow.

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I’ve been following Ash Shepherd on Twitter for some time now because he always seems to have something important to share. Following is an email interview I conducted with Ash about a service he offers called Social Media Planning and Analysis.

What is social media planning and analysis?

Shepherd: Social media planning and analysis is really about two things:

1. Creating frameworks that keep social media activities mission focused in a sustainable manner.

2. Taking the time look at if what you are doing is working.

After all, none of us has the time or resources to do anything that is not helping us achieve our mission as an organization or company.

Can you explain what this looks like in practice?

There is obviously a lot that can go into explaining this but the simple breakdown is this: Goals, Strategies, Tactics, Tools and Metrics. The biggest point to make here is that picking your tool comes as one of the final steps, not as the first and only one.

This practice of keeping things tied to larger communication goals with specific actions and ways to measure successes as well as shortcomings is the key to sustainability for groups.

If you chase the tools, what are you going to do when they change? (And they will.) You have to start over. With a solid plan and framework the worst case scenario is that you have to adjust that last two steps of the process but everything else can remain consistent.

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If you’re using a blog to promote your nonprofit or small business, a large part of your strategy is about getting found on Google – otherwise known as search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is the practice of improving the traffic to a website from your website’s organic results on Google. If you don’t understand the value of SEO for your nonprofit, ask yourself the following question: “How would sending people to our website precisely when they’re interested in our cause impact our online fundraising?”

Simply stated, SEO is about getting more high-quality leads with your blog.

What is WordPress SEO?

Most nonprofits know very little about WordPress SEO. What are title tags? What is a meta description? And how important is the prevalence of keywords?

On top of this, blogging is only 1 percent of your job. You also manage your Facebook Page, organize events, write the email newsletter and explain what Twitter is to board members.

CopyBlogger SEO

Last month, Brian Clark (@CopyBlogger) announced the Scribe WordPress SEO plug-in (yes, that is an affiliate link). I purchased the plug-in as soon as it was announced for four reasons:

1. I write 12-20 blog posts a month.
2. About 30 percent of my clients find me through search. Getting higher rankings on Google means more business.
3. My time is extremely valuable. Amen, if SEO can be streamlined.
4. Brian Clark is a leading authority on SEO copywriting and publishes CopyBlogger. In short, smart cookie.

The Scribe SEO WordPress plug-in is not free, so I don’t recommend it if you’re only writing two to three posts a month or have SEO expertise. I also wouldn’t recommend it if your primary goals for blogging do not include ranking higher in Google searches.

If you are interested in Scribe, I’ve included a few screenshots of how I used it for this blog post.

WordPress SEO score

Scribe gives you a ist of recommendations to improve the findability of your content on major search engines. You can also reanalyze the effects your edits have on the content analysis SEO score.

Google SERP preview

Scribe allows you to see how your title tags and meta description will appear on Google:

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Scribe also gives you instant feedback about what SEO elements need to be completed in your blog post.

If you want to learn more, visit ScribeSEO.Com.

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Getting an army of Facebook fans for your nonprofit is not an easy feat. It takes lots of planning, hard work, and time. But just because you have a lot of Facebook fans doesn’t mean that you’re any closer to meeting your fundraising goals. Especially if you’re unknowingly creating barriers.

When potential donors go to your donation page, is it immediately clear how they can donate and what amount they can donate? Do they have to search around your site? How many mouse clicks does an entire transaction require?

7 things to keep in mind

1. Show Them Impact – One thing that worked very well during the Tweetsgiving campaign was showing people what their donations would buy. It created a direct line of site between donation and impact.
2. Make It Fun – Red Nose Day is a huge hit in the UK, precisely because it’s so much fun! Think of creative ways to make sharing fun for your fans.

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Add-ons to make your blog more powerful & versatile

Last week I attended a WordPress East Bay meetup in Oakland led by Podcast Asylum trainer Sallie Goetsch (at left in picture above). I’ve been an avid user of, and proponent of, WordPress since I began using the open source platform for all my blogs (Socialmedia.biz, Socialbrite and jdlasica.com) in December 2008.

At the end of the session we began discussing our favorite WP plug-ins. As someone pointed out, the WordPress Plug-in Directory is daunting and not terribly user-friendly, with 8,516 plug-ins and sometimes terse coder descriptions of what they’ve created. So it’s up to bloggers and journalists to sift through the noise and pinpoint the gotta-have plug-ins. (I’ll be doing the same with my favorite Apple iPhone apps next month.)

The WordPress development community is a wonder to behold and one of the main reasons I switched from TypePad to WordPress. Plug-ins greatly expand the number of things you can do with your out-of-the-box WordPress installation.

Here, then, are my 10 must-have WordPress plug-ins for anyone running their own WordPress.org site — I’ll bet you haven’t heard of some of these! Please list some of your own favorite plug-ins in the comments below.

Top 10 WordPress plug-ins

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Events guide for nonprofits & social change outfits

Here’s our roundup of conferences and events scheduled in the nonprofit and social change sector for the month of March. For the full year, see: Calendar of 2010 social change conferences.

Note that we’ve published a calendar of 2010 conferences in social media, tech and marketing on our sister site, Socialmedia.biz.

We’ll publish a list of noteworthy events in the nonprofit/social change sector on the first of each month during the year. Hope to see you at some of these!

Conference	Date	Place
March
Global Ignite Week	March 1-4	Worldwide
Ignite brings together geeks to do 5-minute talks in front of small audiences — with slides that rotate every 15 seconds. Global Ignite Week features 500 talks in 40 cities, including New York, LA, the Bay Area, Boston, Madrid, Manila, Paris and Sydney.
Journalism Diversity Symposium	March 4	Palo Alto, Calif.
News and Inclusion: Journalism and the Politics of Diversity will focus on the role of journalism in multicultural societies, with scholars from Singapore, Finland, Australia, The Netherlands, Canada, England and the U.S.
GoingGreen East	March 8-10	Boston
Here is where green-tech CEOs and industry executives meet investors. This executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on the most promising emerging green technologies and new entrepreneurial opportunities.
South by Southwest*	March 12-21	Austin
Counterculture meets geek techies, indie filmmakers and alt bands. This year’s SXSW schedule: Interactive, March 12-16; Film, March 12-20; Music, March 17-21.
eCampaigning Forum	March 23-24	Oxford, UK
The event for e-campaigning practitioners to share their expertise.
Twestival*	March 25	Global
People in hundreds of cities around the world will come together offline to rally around the cause of education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness. Twestival (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good.
Transparency Camp	March 27-28	Washington, DC
This unconference will convene a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates — government reps, technologists, journalists, developers, NGOs, wonks, activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent, accountable and accessible to the public.
* I’ll be attending

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The ultimate cheat sheet for nonprofits

You may be curious how Facebook Groups can complement the work you’re doing with your Page. Or, you may have a Group and want to move your fans over to your Facebook Page. Or, you mistakenly created a Facebook Profile for your organization and now realize that you should have started a Facebook Page.

If you’re confused by all the moving parts within Facebook, you’re not alone. Recently I presented a webinar for a small group of nonprofits and wasn’t surprised that the most popular slide was a cheat sheet on Facebook Pages and Groups.

Difference between Facebook Pages and Groups

The best way to think about the difference between Pages and Groups is to consider the users they serve.

Groups serve the needs of individuals just like you and me. Pages on the other hand, serve the needs of celebrities, businesses, brands and nonprofits. If you keep this basic framework in mind, Facebook will make a lot more sense.

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Organizations starting to use SMS as powerful tool for fund-raising

We’ve just released a new report, Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmark Study, that offers the first-ever look at how organizations in the United States are using text messaging and how subscribers are responding. It shows that mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular as an advocacy and fund-raising tool by organizations, and it provides benchmarks and metrics by which nonprofit organizations can measure their success with text messaging.

Co-authored by myself and Michael Amoruso and Jessica Bosanko of M+R Strategic Services, the free report also illustrates the various ways in which organizations are using text messaging. The study was sponsored by Mobile Commons and mGive.

The earthquakes in Haiti earlier this year showed the power of SMS as a tool for fund-raising (raising millions in just a few days), and it’s now clear that there’s an opportunity for nonprofits to tap into the mobile market to engage their supporters. As the study reports, there are currently over 276 million wireless users in the U.S., and during the first half of 2009, users sent about 740 billion text messages. The report breaks down not only how nonprofits can use SMS to interact with supporters but also releases statistics on how specific organizations fared with their SMS campaigns.

You might be interested in learning:

• How nonprofits engage supporters through text messaging
• The advantages and limitations of text messaging as a tool for engagement
• How to evaluate the performance of a text message

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Mobile advocacy basics, from from keyword response to mobile data collection

Guest post by Melissa Loudon
MobileActive

S MS is everywhere, in an amazing diversity of applications. From enabling ‘instant protest’ in the Philippines, Spain and Albania, to election monitoring in Ghana, Lebanon, and Sierra Leone to HIV/AIDS education and support in Mexico and South Africa, we’ve seen that 160 characters can make a difference. This how-to covers the basics of setting up an SMS campaign system, looking at different approaches to suit your goals, budget and technical expertise.

What do you want the system to do?

Before you start, it’s important to have a clear vision of how you want to use the system, and who the target audience might be. You should also do a level-headed audit of the resources available, including funding as well as staff time and technical expertise. If this doesn’t look promising, take heart! Sometimes the most effective systems are the simplest, and you don’t need a big budget for many types of SMS campaigns.

3 types of SMS campaign systems

In a MobileActive Primer on Desktop SMS Campaign Tools, Ben Rigby and Katrin Verclas identify three ways to use SMS campaign systems: Text blasting (bulk messaging), keyword response and smart texting. We’ll summarize the three approaches here.

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