“First, we’re strictly nonprofit.” That’s how UniversalGiving begins when describing its work. What it should really say is, “We may be nonprofit, but we are not non-impact.”

Why? UniversalGiving is making great impact on communities around the world, both in the work, funds and volunteer efforts contributed to individuals and groups via their platform, but also in effectively and passionately empowering donors and volunteers to contribute. Additionally, UniversalGiving is a member of Social Actions, ensuring that their opportunities to make a difference are heard and seen in even more places around the Web.

What is UniversalGiving?

UniversalGiving is “an award-winning marketplace which allows people to volunteer and donate to top performing projects in more than 70 countries around the world.”

It’s a marketplace, really, of opportunities to take actions for social benefit in various topics you may be after. Want to donate money and leave it at that? Would you rather connect with a group or individual in need halfway around the world? Maybe you want to join forces for a longer-term project for real impact. People simply choose a country of interest (such as China or Thailand) and an area of interest (such as education or the environment) and find a list of vetted opportunities to which they can donate money or give their time.

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I was honored to speak on Friday at the Summer of Social Good conference hosted by Mashable, a popular social media and technology blog and a big geek favorite. This was the culmination of the summerlong initiative to help raise money for four charities, Humane Society of the United States, World Wildlife Fund, Oxfam, and LIVESTRONG.

The event was hosted by the amazing Shira Lazar, who hosts Mahalo’s This Week In YouTube and is the editor-at-large for Conde Nast’s Jaunted.com travel blog from around the globe. She’s also the founder of The Society For Geek Advancement, which aims to bring together geek culture for social good.

The most dramatic moment of the conference had nothing to do with charity fund-raising.  It was the surprise marriage proposal on the stage from Mashable’s COO Adam Hirsch to Managing Editor Sharon Feder (she said yes)! (You can read more about that here). And while Pete Cashmore announced that he would be doing a charity event in September around his 24th birthday, I’m wondering what charity wedding registry Sharon and Adam will register with? (Kiva?)

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These easy-to-create widgets are a breeze to customize

The Facebook Page Fanbox is a social widget that converts casual website visitors into fans of your Facebook Page. The Fanbox does this with three key features:

• Streams content from your Facebook Page onto your website.

• Displays your current fans.

• Enables visitors to “become a fan” of your Facebook Page with one mouse click.

Embedding this widget on your website or blog is an absolute must — for any social media strategy. Plus, it’s very easy to create!

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Enhancing website accessibility from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

A few weeks back, at SOBCon busniess school for bloggers in Chicago, I met Glenda Watson Hyatt, a remarkable trainer and conference speaker who gave a presentation on how to make websites and blogs more accessible to the disabled. Glenda, who has cerebral palsy, deals with computer accessibility issues on a daily basis. I wrote about her advice on Socialbrite: 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities.

After Glenda’s talk and one by Lorelle VanFossen, author of “Blogging Tips” — Lorelle has occasional memory lapses because of traumatic brain injury — I captured some of their advice regarding how to make sure your website or blog accessible to disabled people.

Lorelle says that fully 60 percent of all sites on the Web are not accessible to the disabled — so pay attention, yours may be one. They discuss specific steps website operators and bloggers can take to make their sites and blogs accessible, including adding simple things like alt tags, captions and underlined links.

Tips to make your site more accessible to disabled users

• Include “alt” tags (alternative descriptions) and title tags in all images and videos.

• Make your links look like links. Use colors that distinguish them from regular text and use an underline to set them apart.

• Make your body text legible. The 0.8em default on some blog platforms is just too small for millions of readers out there. Usability should be your paramount concern — not all your readers are under 30!

• Also, make sure your stylesheet permits variable font sizes. If you’re using a fixed font, older browsers don’t let users adjust text size. (In Firefox and IE, you can hit command + or – to increase or decrease the size of the text on screen.)

• Give your photos captions, so the vision-impaired can know what they’re looking at.

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By Katrina Heppler, envisionGOOD.tv
and JD Lasica, Socialbrite

Last week, guests at the Digital Summer event in San Francisco “planted” 940 trees in Honduras with the help of partner Mokugift. Co-founder Hans Chung (whom we met at two previous awareness2action events) was in attendance, showing off on his laptop the site’s global reach: You can plant trees in Central America, Africa, Asia — countries such as Belize, Haiti, Nicaragua, India, Cameroon, Ethiopia — for a donation of just $1 per tree. Since the site’s launch, more than 75,000 trees have been planted.

We have a long way to go: Through its Billion Tree Campaign, the United Nations Environment Programme is calling on citizens globally to plant 7 billion trees. That’s one tree per person. As the site says, “Ordinary people can fight global warming.”

UNEP has partnered with Mokugift to make it easy for everyone to plant a tree. You can help spread the word through social media, including embeddable widgets like the one below. Mokugift tracks how your inspiration spreads from one friend to another friend, and to subsequent friends (3 degrees). You can see the total number of people you inspired and the total number of trees planted by them. For every 10 trees planted by people inspired by you (all 3 degrees), you will get a free tree.

As the site points out, “Sharing the inspiration with your friends is as important as planting a tree yourself.”

Katrina recently caught up with Hans at a cafe in San Francisco’s Union Square. In the video above, hear what Hans has to say about Mokugift and the UN program.

Remember, it costs only $1!

Plant a Tree

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, NGOs, foundations, businesses

Nora G. Barnes

Nora G. Barnes, Ph.D., professor of marketing at the University of Massachusetts and director of its Center for Marketing Research, offered a presentation today at the Society for New Communications Research about how to properly craft a valid research survey.

Nora has designed scores of major surveys, most recently the First Longitudinal Study of Social Media Usage by the Largest US Charities and The Fortune 500 and Blogging: Slow and Steady.

Your survey can be conducted by mail questionnaire, personal interview, “mall intercept,” telephone interview or electronic (online). You should stick to one chief methodology (say, telephone) and then supplement it with another if you wish (say, offer to send the questions by email). Mail questionnaires tend to have a low response rate (less than 5 percent) while she has been getting a 20 to 25 percent response rate using online polling. Providing incentives, such as the chance to win an iPod or Wii, often increases the response rate and thus increases the survey’s validity.

Tips for composing survey questions

• Keep it clear and concise.
• No double-barreled questions (keep each question focused on one thing
• No overlapping categories
• No vague or ambiguus questions

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Last night was another one of those eye-popping events where large numbers of people turn out for an event to discuss how new technologies can be used to advance social change. In this case, about 120 people turned out for Crowdsourcing for social good, sponsored by SocialEarth, and Hub Bay Area and hosted by Chronicle Books and organized by Sundeep Ahuja.

The gathering triggered a dozen ideas for future blog posts on Socialbrite, and since I don’t have time today to research all of the sites and initiatives mentioned, I’ll pass along some of the best nuggets:

• I met Leila Janah of Samasource (“computer-based work for women, youth and refugees living in poverty)” at last fall’s Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp when her nonprofit was just getting launched. Here’s our earlier interview: Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing. The goal, she said last night, is to offer “dignified computer-based work to the most marginalized communities in world.” At the moment, Samasource has brought in $210,000 in payments from project leaders to 517 people in six countries, many of whom had been making than $125 a year. (Become a fan of Samasource on Facebook. The event raised $380 for the nonprofit.)

• Jon Bischke, founder of eduFire, talked about his start-up — an open education platform that is pioneering live video education. On the year-old site, more than 5,000 people have signed up to become instructors and 30,000 people take lessons in a wide array of subjects. Based in San Francisco, eduFire has three full-time employees and several part-timers. (Become a fan on Facebook.) See an earlier video interview of Jon produced by DogandPony.com.

• Fun factoid from Bischke: “It took 100 million hours to build Wikipedia, and that’s the same amount of time that Americans spend watching TV in a typical week.”

• I invited Jacob Colker, co-founder of The Extraordinaries, to join me in speaking at Net Tuesday on Sept. 8, and Jacob once again dazzled the audience with accounts of how crowdsourcing can be used for positive social change in your spare time. “The Extraordinaries are here to make it ridiculously easy for you to do social good,” he said. You can translate documents, or identify figures in a painting, or help with science and medical problems, among many other options. (Become a fan on Facebook.)

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Photo by Mansikka

Tips on how to facilitate conversation around a tag

What is a #hashtag?

A hashtag is the symbol: #. (See the definition in Socialbrite’s glossary.) It is also a Twitter term that describes a keyword, prefixed by that symbol, that helps people track conversations on Twitter.

The hashtags site, a centralized directory of hashtags on Twitter, also offers a good definition:

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

A brief history of hash tags
Chris Messina is credited with starting hashtags and has written about how to make them most useful. According to the Twitter Fan Wiki, hashtags were popularized during the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag “#sandiegofire” to identify his updates related to the disaster.

Nonprofit use #1: Events and conferences

Since those early days, hashtags have been used in different ways by nonprofits. One of the most frequent applications has been to use them at events and conferences. It’s not uncommon to see the “official” hashtag included with the promotional information about the event, even events or conferences that are not technology focused.

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Last week, Chris Garrett and I gave a Techsoup.org presentation called Measuring Social Media ROI. A participant asked, “What is a widget?,” which Chris and I tried to explain, but only had limited time.

Thinking it might be useful to source the answer from an expert, I invited Eric Schrader of the social fundraising company givezooks! to answer two questions.

What is a fundraising widget?

Eric: A fundraising widget is a portable version of a campaign or personal fundraiser that you can think of as an ad for the fundraiser. And like an ad, it gets placed where potentially interested audiences will see it.

Like successful ads, it’s not good enough to be seen — it needs to move the person to action. Most fundraising widgets do that by letting people know what the fundraiser is for, what the goal is, how much has been raised so far, who else has given, how much it takes to make a specific impact and any number of other things about a fundraiser.

The nice thing about widgets is that once you place them, they update themselves — a widget typically pulls the latest status of the fundraiser from the main fundraiser webpage. Also, clicking on the widget typically will take you to the main fundraiser page.

Why are they important?

Eric: Widgets allow supporters to promote your fundraising on various websites. Whether it’s a supporter’s blog or a corporate sponsor’s website, a non-profit can get exposed to a whole new audience via a widget.

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