Last month I made a prediction that we might see fundraisers with Foursquare or some other location-based mobile social network with gaming element. Looks like my observation of fundraising 2.0 trends of 2009 and  my 2010 predictions are on track. TechCrunch just wrote about a new mobile application called CauseWorld.

Here’s how it works:

CauseWorld app users earn “karma points” when they walk into stores and check in with their cell phone. No purchase is required at any store, and karma points can be redeemed nine predefined good causes. Big brands like Kraft Foods and Citi (both are on board) then turn the karmas into real dollar donations to those causes. Food for poor families, water in Sudan, trees in the Amazon, etc. are examples of the causes.

Like foursquare and gowalla, you open the application on your phone and see local businesses (instead of showing everything around you, CauseWorld only shows businesses that you can check into for karmas). Enter the store, check in, and get the karma points offered to you. Once you’ve collected enough karmas you can donate them to a variety of causes. And, of course, you get badges for various activities.

The causes that are supported are listed on CauseWorld — it’s a good mix of wildlife conservation, hunger and others. 

This idea is really cool for a couple of reasons. The user doesn’t have to donate, but they’re leveraging a corporate donation. Sort of like embedded giving that Lucy Bernholz talks about, I think. The application is fun and well designed.

It doesn’t have a social element where you can see how many karma points your friends have within the app itself, although it uses Facebook Connect and you could opt to have your good deeds streamed on your wall. It might get more motivated if it had the leaderboard design that Foursquare has.

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Welcome to all the visitors from Mashable! We were thrilled to be featured in Melissa Rowley‘s article, 4 Social Good Trends of 2009.

For first-timers, we thought now would be a good time to highlight some of our favorite posts on Socialbrite since our launch earlier this year:

Some of our favorite causes

• Tweet for a cure to end SMA

• Global Voices: Lifting up the powerless & voiceless

• An inventive cause campaign to fight malaria

• Tim Ferriss’ method of supporting causes

• Boxee and the promise of open media

• All for Good: A Craigslist for service

• California’s Secretary of State: Come and collaborate!

• How the National Wildlife Federation uses social media

• Socialbrite’s night at NetTuesday

• UniversalGiving: Tailoring an impact just for you

• Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing

• YouthNoise: Helping young people network a cause

• Kiva: micro-loans to entrepreneurs abroad

• Giving Challenge: Tap your networks to support a cause

Some favorite tools and tactics

• How to make your website more accessible and 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities

• 20 tips for mobile advocacy

• A user’s guide to mobile activism

• How mobile is empowering consumers

• SEO: 9 tips for optimizing a nonprofit site — Search Engine Optimization isn’t black magic, so get your site to shape up

• 8 tips for raising funds online

• The Extraordinaries: Building the ‘micro-volunteering’ movement

• Twitter as a tool for activism

• How to build a Facebook community — 14 levers you need to be pulling

• How to add a Facebook Page Fanbox to your site

• How to use Seesmic Desktop

• Carbon footprints, nation by nation

• Foundation Center: a deep resource for philanthropy

• Guide to shooting photos in public

• How to capture great photos on the road

• Fair use in the digital age

• Seven blogging tools reviewed

• Socialbrite releases Creative Commons plug-in

Thanks to everyone for your support this year! (Don’t forget to follow @Socialbrite on Twitter!) We’re now working with a number of nonprofits and educational outfits — TechSoup Global and Scholastic, to name two — and looking forward to helping others with their social media needs in the months ahead.

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Rachel Sklar, Rachelle Hruska and Anastasia Liapis at last February’s Social Media Week.

SF, London, Berlin to be part of wide-ranging global teach-in

Spent an hour on a conference call this morning where it was announced that Social Media Week, inaugurated last February in New York, will expand to include San Francisco, London, Berlin, Toronto and São Paulo, Brazil.

The weeklong event will take place Feb. 1-5, 2010. The goal is to “explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large … and to create a global platform for conversation, connectivity and learning,” said event organizer Toby Daniels, who was on the call.

While the Socialmediaweekny.com site talks about a five-day conference, it’s less a conference than a sprawling series of loosely connected events all related to the theme of social media. (I like to think of it as a “teach-in,” though perhaps that’s too retro a term.) Events will span a variety of formats, ranging from talks, presentations and panel discussions, to interactive workshops, seminars, networking events and drinks receptions. Some will be free, others will have an admission charge. Some will be put on by marketing groups, others by nonprofits and social change organizations. They’ll all be listed in a public calendar.

In San Francisco, Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club will be the local organizer, natch, and there will be a daylong jobs retraining summit as part of the event. Chris is setting up a Basecamp site for volunteers to help organize the events.

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If you publish a lot of YouTube videos on specific topics, this screencast will be very useful.

With annotated links, you can edit your videos and add text links that will link to:

• Other videos on YouTube
• Playlists on YouTube
• YouTube Channels
• Searches on YouTube
• Groups on YouTube
• Any external link (only available to folks participating in YouTube’s nonprofit program)

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During the Philanthropy.com chat earlier this week on using Twitter for building community, Tim Hite asked, “This week Google will start searching Twitter for real-time search results. How will that impact the way nonprofits should use Twitter?”

For those who don’t know, the live search means when you now search Google, you’ll see scrolling updates from blogs, Twitter and FriendFeed published just seconds before. (See the screencast above.)

This this will impact your non-profit in three ways:

• Conversations happening on Twitter will get much more attention.
• Search culture will come to expect real time results.
• Stakeholders will expect your non-profit to be in conversations on relevant trending news topics.

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At Community Organizer 2.0, Debra Askanase just wrote a piece called Front and Backyard Conversations. In it, she talks about social media as a public platform –- a front porch, but also a private platform where “conversations continue, out of the public eye.”

Front yard conversations are replies on Twitter, videos posted to YouTube, photos posted to Flickr, and blog posts and comments. The backyard conversations are personal emails, chats on the phone and ideas shared over pizza.

To go from the front yard to the backyard with your customer, you need develop increasing levels of trust, as in Debra’s diagram:

Questions I’d be asking

• At what point does your organization call a donor on the phone, or have coffee with them?
• What criteria, beyond donation amount, would you use to open up backyard communication?
• And once you have lunch with them, what changes in your relationship on Twitter?

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Flickr Photo by PCSO900

Using Facebook to raise awareness about the International Coast Cleanup

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Vikki Spruill, president and CEO of the Ocean Conservancy, and members of her communications team, Laura Burton Capps and Dove Coggeshall, about their recent experiments and learning on Facebook. (The organization is a Packard Foundation grantee.)

The Ocean Conservancy is dedicated to the goal of a healthy ocean by increasing public awareness of ocean issues and bringing significant changes to the way oceans are managed. Here’s an overview of the issues they are working on. For the past 24 years, they have organized an annual grassroots volunteer event called International Coast Cleanup in which hundreds of thousands of volunteers spend a few hours removing trash and debris from coastlines, keeping track of every piece of trash they find. (The most recent event was on Sept. 19.)

Some of the key principles for an effective social media strategy are experimentation, learning, and rapid prototyping. David Armano describes this process as “Listen, Learn and Adapt.” You can’t answer the question “What’s the value?” unless you experiment and learn. Easier said than done.

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Why even small, resource-constrained nonprofits should be using social media

Guest post by Jordan Viator
Nonprofit Live TV

What are some of the ways in which social media can be used to advance the social good? Nonprofit Live TV put the question to Matt Mahan, Nonprofit and Business Development Director of Causes and Carie Lewis, Director of Emerging Media of the Humane Society of the United States.

The 7-minute interview, conducted at the 2009 Convio Summit conference for nonprofits in Austin, Texas, last month, addresses how smaller, resource-constrained nonprofits can be using social media.

Mahan and Lewis give examples of how outreach on Twitter or Facebook can engage support for a cause or organization. When someone’s birthday rolls around, Mahan says, instead of giving them a Starbucks gift certificate or the like, It’s much more meaningful to receive a gift in the name of someone who’s truly deserving. The Causes site has also recently upgraded its partner center to enable nonprofits to interact more actively with their supporters on Facebook.

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On Tuesday I’ll be leading an online session for Philanthopy.com about building communities on Twitter (follow @Philanthropy for details).

Communities do not just happen. And they certainly don’t happen overnight. You have to have something important to talk about. And you have to be prepared to consistently connect people together over a period of months.

But Twitter seems like a big mess, doesn’t it? With thousands of tweets going off every hour, about hundreds of different topics, how do you build a cohesive group of fans?

The answer is hashtags.

Hashtags are a way to funnel specific discussions about a topic into a coherent thread, sort of like using Twitter to tune into specific radio frequencies. But not everyone knows how to create successful chat sessions.

In the screencast at top, I outline the basics of managing a hashtag chat on Twitter:

• How to use TweetGrid (one tool among many valuable tools)
• How to create a hashtag

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