Handheld human rights from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Co-director of Digital Democracy spells out how new platform can skirt government censorship

One of the organizations I’ve been admiring from afar over the past year is Digital Democracy, which works with local partners to put information into the hands of people who need it most – those neglected, disenfranchised or abused by their rulers. The group employs education, communication and participation to empower citizens to build and shape their own communities.

In this interview conducted last year, co-director Emily Jacobi (@emjacobi on Twitter) discusses Handheld Human Rights, a platform, project and website that makes human rights data accessible and actionable. Designed in concert with Burmese human rights organizations, Handheld Human Rights enables people there to communicate securely within their networks and to map crisis hotspots so that the international community can see the human rights violations taking place inside Myanmar.

The tool enables human rights workers to collect eyewitness accounts of killings, forced labor, rape as a tool of war and other brutalities and relay them to the outside world by skirting media censorship from Myanmar’s autocratic military junta. And it is slowly being adopted in other troubled places, like Thailand.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo
Watch or embed on YouTube

It’s a wonderful example of how activists can use media and data to drive home a powerful message. Contact Digital Democracy directly if you’d like to use Handheld Human Rights.

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Mobile devices, SMS, social networks are options for online donations

Guest post by Kemper Barkhurst
HiDef

Irecently set up an online donation form for Rio Grande Community Farm, a nonprofit where I serve as board member and volunteer. This PayPal donation form was static and made me wonder about other ways in which nonprofits can raise money with online technologies.

After a little research, I found a few new tricks by which nonprofits can connect and accept donations from their supporters. These methods extend beyond just online payments or joining a social network. Check out the new ways nonprofits can collect donations from a mobile device, a text message campaign (SMS) and even social networks.

Credit card donations with Square

One of those emerging services is Square, a payment system that processes credit cards from a mobile device. This type of system will allow a nonprofit to accept on-the-spot donations. Imagine that your organization is tabling at an event and instead of having to rent a credit card terminal or go through a cumbersome paper-filled process, you grab your smart phone and accept a donation and email the receipt on the spot. There is a low transaction fee associated with each payment and is something that nearly any size, smart phone-equipped nonprofit can get started using fairly quickly once the service is fully launched. The only missing piece would be getting those donors automatically into a mailing list or in a CRM so you can follow up with them of the great work they are supporting (by the way, we can help with that).

SMS donations with mGive

Another way that nonprofits can raise money is through text message donations. A service such as mGive and a well-crafted campaign can open new fundraising opportunities. For a fee, nonprofits can receive text donations in increments of $5 or $10 sent to a designated number. This donation is then charged to the supporter’s cell phone bill, so money can be collected without credit cards or cash payments.

mGive isn’t for all nonprofits, however; service fees range from $400 to $1,500 per month in addition to a fee for each transaction. A free account for contact list building can get a smaller nonprofit started with SMS. This account also allows outgoing messages for a per-message fee. Outside of the free account, it might be difficult to make back the investment without a large media campaign. There are some successes, though, as mGive processed more than $37 million within three weeks after the Haiti earthquake. This is a good testimonial to the power of a well-crafted campaign.

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Y ou’ve probably heard a lot about Facebook Pages (and you might have also downloaded The Complete Facebook Guide For Small Nonprofits, which was published last week).

One thing that sets Facebook Pages apart from Profiles, Groups and Community Pages is the ability to create custom tabs using an application called FBML.

There’s an excellent post over at Social Media Examiner about using FBML that includes detailed steps (and example code you can copy) on two specific tactics:

How to add a clickable image in Static FBML

How could this be used? Create an eye-catching image with a call to action that links directly to your donation page.

Upload your image to your Photobucket or Flickr account. Copy the image path into your FBML box. Next, you want to use this code:

How to embed a YouTube video in Static FBML

This allows you to put a YouTube video anywhere within a custom tab instead of being limited to the YouTube Box layout.

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Here’s an ebook I’m releasing as a comprehensive brain dump of strategies and tactics I’ve shared over the past couple of years to help small nonprofits get more out of using Facebook.

The Complete Facebook Guide for Small Nonprofits has 104 pages and 5 chapters:

• Why Facebook?
• Creating Your Facebook Page
• Customizing Your Facebook Page
• How To Make Your Facebook Page Do Tricks
• Your Facebook Community
• Facebook Extras

You’ll also find hot-linked video tutorials and case studies throughout the guide (simply click on the video images to view them online).

Like InboundZombie on Facebook to get the download

The Complete Facebook Guide For Small Nonprofits is only available for connections of the InboundZombie Facebook Page. I’m doing several Facebook experiments around promoting the book, so that’s why it won’t be available anywhere else.

What you can expect from joining InboundZombie Page

1. A cool ebook.
2. A discussion forum within the Facebook Page that will dive deeper into the chapters.
3. Strategies and tips about WordPress, Twitter and Facebook sent out through monthly updates.
4. Meet like-minded nonprofits learning about Facebook.
5. A few other surprises I can’t mention right now.

Finally, I’ve licensed the ebook under Creative Commons which means you can do a lot of things with it – without having to ask me for permission. Like my Page, then download the ebook.

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Produced by Justgood.tv

The Do Something bootcamp takes place all day today from 9 am to 4:30pm PST (noon to 7:30 pm EST) in San Francisco. The bootcamp provides how-to sessions on starting and running your own community action projects or social enterprises.

DoGood.tv will stream the event live, and Socialbrite viewers can follow the proceedings above. Here’s the schedule:

9-9:30: Morning address from Aria Finger, Do Something, COO
9:40-10:35: Branding and Marketing: How to find your voice and tell your story
10:45-11:40: Becoming a Leader: Team structure and leadership strategies
12:50-1:20: Do Something Youth Panel (Learn from three young people running their social change projects)
1:30-2:25: Partnerships: How to effectively partner with both for-profits and not-for-profits
2:35-3:30: Creating a Great Website: How to build a new site or improve your existing one
3:40-4:30: Interviews with young social leaders

Throughout the live webcast programming, you’ll be able to ask questions to guests and speakers. Just sign on via Twitter or Facebook chat or tweet your remarks to @justgoodtv with #dscamp and their producer will place your questions or comments in queue. “We encourage you to participate!” the Do Something folks say. (See our full list of social change organizations.)

About Do Something:

DoSomething.org is one of the largest organizations in the US that helps young people rock causes they care about. A driving force in creating a culture of volunteerism, DoSomething.org is on track to activate 2 million young people in 2011. By leveraging the web, television, mobile, and pop culture, DoSomething.org inspires, empowers and celebrates a generation of doers: teenagers who recognize the need to do something, believe in their ability to get it done, and then take action.

Green Mountain Coffee from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I‘ve been swamped by work and speaking engagements this spring, so I’m only now able to edit and publish the interviews I conducted at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin three months ago.

First up is a six-minute conversation with Amanda Cooper, new media specialist for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (its consumer site is here). I had heard of Green Mountain but wasn’t aware of just how much they’ve been doing in the social good space. The company has been donating 5 percent of its pre-tax profits to social and environmental causes for a number of years, with a focus on helping to alleviate poverty and hunger through its coffee supply chain.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Green Mountain works with partner universities, such as Dartmouth, to send interns down to the coffee fields of Nicaragua. “One of our interns lived down there for three months interviewing coffee farmers, spending time with their families, breaking bread over dinner and working on the farms with them,” Amanda says. “So it was a really life-changing experience for him.” The company puts a premium on getting to know the lives of the people they’re working with and the impact the company is having.

Green Mountain has also supported fair trade guidelines and organic coffee purchases since 2001.

The company works with nonprofits like Save the Children and Catholic Relief Services. “We’re looking to not just be a funder but be a partner,” she says.

Chandeleur Islands Balloon Aerial Imagery from Grassroots Mapping

Ways to get involved & new technologies being used to stop and track the disaster

President Obama addressed the nation last night and made a stop in the Gulf Coast region this week to survey the damage and relief efforts. As local residents already know, the environmental and economic impacts are far greater than anyone could fathom or dare imagine.

The “Crude Awakening,” as it’s been called, is causing a lifetime of damage to the Gulf Coast, spurring over 45 rallies nationwide to demand BP step up and take responsibility for its actions and that the government pass stricter regulations on offshore drilling. The Deepwater Horizon explosion occurred on April 20, and crude oil continues to spill into the Gulf Coast region.

In the mayhem and despair, citizens and activists are in a constant state of emergency and disaster mode. Anne Rolfes, Founding Director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told me, “Our office is bombarded every day by phone calls and people who walk through the door wanting to help in the face of this impossible situation. We are putting them to work to document the problem – gathering data, making the people-to-people connections that will help the real story be told. When the spill stops, BP has a public relations machine ready to minimize this and pretend it didn’t happen. We don’t have a machine but we have something better – real people who are passionate and determined.”

This time of year marks another important date for the Gulf Coast region. It’s the official start of hurricane season. With wetlands and marshes already under attack, meteorologists and hurricane experts warn this year’s hurricane season is more dangerous than ever. Imagine cities not only suffering water damage but covered in oil.

It’s hard not to be despondent, and worse, not know what you can do to help. Listed below are organizations making a difference and bringing together technologies being used to stop the oil spill from spreading and tracking the spill, providing a dataset open to the public.

Consider supporting these organizations and finding a way to get involved.

Grassroots Mapping

Grassroots Mapping, a creation of Jeffrey Warren from MIT Media Lab’s Center for Future Civic Media, is producing imagery created by volunteers and owned in the public domain. By using balloons and kites equipped with inexpensive digital cameras, these “community satellites” are able to georeference and create maps with 100x higher resolution than what is available on Google to be used in the environmental battle and litigation proceedings in the coming years. Orientation sessions are being offered in New Orleans and a DIY wiki is available on their website.

What you can do: Grassroots Mapping is currently running a Kickstarter project to raise money for more kites and helium tanks to put in the hands of volunteers in New Orleans. They are looking to raise $5,000 in the next 20 days. A donation of $10 or more gets you a print of any photo in their public domain dataset.

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During the Facebook Foundations webinars I conduct with Charityhowto, I’ve kept a running list of the most common questions registrants have had about creating and managing a Facebook Page.

Below is a partial list. The video above walks though the answers to each one.

13 Facebook Page features that will make your day

1. How To Quickly Find Your Page – Many folks have a hard time finding their Page once it’s created. One nonprofit marketer recently told me that they search for their Page each time they want to update it.
2. You Can Edit Your Thumbnail – That little tiny section of your main image that everyone sees in updates and new feed posts? Yes, that’s your Page “thumbnail”. You can edit it simply by clicking “edit thumbnail” in the upper right-hand corner of your main image. Also, see Kim’s post.
3. You Can Create Three Walls Streams Or One Wall Stream – You have two display options for your wall. One creates a single stream that includes posts by Page admins and posts by connections.
4. Users Cannot Post To Your Wall Unless They Like Your Page – A great way to increase connections is to promote your wall as the single place for discussion during an event. When users want to join the dialogue, they have to “like” your Page. Charityhowto increased their fan base by 323 percent in three hours using this strategy.

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This originally appeared as a guest post on VolunteerSpot’s Summer of Service blog series.

Iknow what many people say. They want to give back but they don’t know how. They want to get involved and volunteer in their community but they don’t know where to start. Well, we’re here to help!

In just one hour, you’ll have the ideas, tools, resources and motivation to get started. So let’s start this summer off with a new sense of how to give back.

For a lot of people, they go online to volunteer websites and start scrolling through the options. Everything looks good, or nothing, or somewhere in between, and they’re not sure what to pick. This is the vortex of indecision, and not where you should start!

First, block an hour from your calendar when you won’t be distracted and can sit and focus on the task at hand. Sit in a comfortable place with a blank piece of paper or in front of a blank document on your computer (with your browser closed!) and follow along with the exercise below. You’ll be identifying the key components needed to finding a nonprofit right for you and then we’ll provide the resources where you can find that match. Ready? Let’s go!

Write down the names of nonprofits that interest you. These can be nonprofits you’ve donated to in the past — maybe you’ve participated in a walk or event or have read about a cause or charity and are interested in learning more. Geographic location doesn’t matter; just start making creating a list of those nonprofits.

Write down the type of nonprofits or causes that you’re passionate about. My list would look something like: economic development, grassroots environmental groups, women’s issues (specifically girls’ education and financial literacy), health issues (specifically malaria prevention and treatment) and poverty alleviation. For you maybe it’s children or pets or house building. There is no right number to write down, if the list gets longer than five, prioritize your list to make going back later and looking at it easier for you.

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