Dangling Feet, Kerala; Courtesy of Taylor Davidson on Flickr

It’s shocking: The floods in Pakistan are affecting more than six times the number of people affected by the Haiti earthquake. I’ve been looking for ways to give back to help Pakistan. Where to give, where to donate, where to direct people. I came across a few great lists and posts, especially one from The Women’s Conference blog.

There is a lot of dialogue about why more people haven’t stepped up to help the people of Pakistan, especially this article from the BBC, which points to everything from the media portrayal of Pakistan to threats of terrorism. But let’s be honest, people hurting need the help of those who have the ability to help. Those who are displaced have nothing. Think about what hardship they are experiencing and then please consider taking a moment to donate what you can or help spread the word.

The flooding – which has now affected 20 million people, 8 million of whom need urgent aid – washed away infrastructure and has destroyed much of the country’s farming industry, which employs almost half of the country’s workers.

Several ways to help the Pakistanis

Pakistan needs our help. Here are a few ways you can help:

• UNICEF: 6 million children have been affected by the floods. Help UNICEF provide them with water, food and medical services.

• Red Cross: Red Cross is on the ground, providing relief supplies, mobilizing relief workers and providing financial resources to those in need.

• Save the Children: Save the Children is rushing essential supplies to children and their families.

• Oxfam: Oxfam is providing hygiene, household and clean-up kits to families in Pakistan.

Text your donation from your mobile phone

Here are two ways to donate via texting:

• Text “swat” to 50555 — this sends a $10 donation to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees that will go toward providing tents, food, clothing, and clean water. (Reply with “yes” to confirm the gift.)
• Text FLOODS to 864233 — this helps get relief directly to the children of Pakistan by sending a $10 donation to UNICEF.

  Continue reading »

Evernote, Wikipanion & GoDocs should be in your arsenal

Target audience: Students, educators, nonprofits, social change organizations, mobile diehards.

By Jessica Haswell
Socialbrite staff

School just got easier with this collection of the top 10 apps that you can’t hit the classrooms without. Having recently left the classroom (Cornell 2010 — woot!), these are some tools that I definitely wish I had. Add them to the list of Top 10 Student Tools for Fall that we ran last month.

Evernote: A revolution in note-taking

1This app is revolutionizing notes as we know it. Evernote is a mobile and web sync friendly, media-rich note-taking machine. The basic function of the app is note-taking with the ability to add voice, photos, location and tags as well as the option to share with friends. The most exciting feature of this app is the Evernote trunk, which is filled with all sorts of valuable tools that are sure to help you excel in the classroom. Platforms: iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre.

Wikipanion: Who needs a textbook?

2Who needs a textbook when you have Wikipedia’s brain child, Wikipanion? This app has really high ratings – because it’s simply a great app. You can access open source content on any topic imaginable, an essential tool for any class. Platform: iPhone.

GoDocs: Essential for your Google docs

3View, download and send your Google docs from your iPhone or iPad with this $3.99 app. Google docs are the go-to collaboration tool for students, and GoDocs will make collaboration even easier. The only thing it doesn’t do is let you edit docs. Platforms: iPhone, iPad.

Cliqset: Consolidate your stream

4Sharing, discovering and discussing on mobile and the Web just got easier: Follow your streams on Facebook, Twitter, Buzz — 70 social networks all told — in one place with Cliqset. This app is sure to help students simplify their lives and help professors keep students engaged. Platform: iPhone.

MyHomework: Digital planner in your palm

5Make sure you hand in all of the assignments on time – download this app. MyHomework makes it easy to keep track of, and color code all of your homework, classes, projects and tests. The app will also notify you when you have late and upcoming assignments by numbering them on your application icon. Buh-bye, paper planner. Platform: iPhone.

Rate My Profs: Students strike back

6The website has been around for a while — more than 10 million comments about 1 million profs — and now there is a free app available for this. Gotta admit, I love it. Rate My Professor was my bible for finding some of my favorite classes at school and avoiding some of the worst. Democracy run amok? Who cares! Platform: iPhone.

Kindle: Save money on textbooks

7Digital textbooks are for sure the way to save. With over 6,000 textbooks available for the Web, mobile and tablets, Amazon’s Kindle will save you about $60 on your average textbook purchase. Multiply that by the amount of textbooks you buy in one semester — that’s a lot of extra spending money. Platforms: iPhone, iPad.

Continue reading »

And download these 3 flyers on tools & platforms for social change

Last night I gave another in the series of Mobilize Your Cause mini-camps at the Hub SoMa in San Francisco. It went well, with representatives from Women’s Film Institute, CBS Interactive, Small Act and a number of startups and consultancies coming by to do a deep dive into how to use social media to move the needle for your cause or organization.

My partner and colleague Sloane Berrent wasn’t in town for the joint presentation, but Pamela Hawley, founder and CEO of UniversalGiving, came by and offered some great thoughts about the importance of stepping back and identifying your organization’s story — its core value proposition — before diving into the toolsets. Her recent trip to the White House with 50 other social entrepreneurs drew a number of questions from people eager to connect with the social enterprise community.

Handouts on social action hubs, mobile apps & more

For the event, Socialbrite produced three new or modified flyers — download them for free and repost on your site!:

• 12 Social Action Hubs — Online communities and crowdsource platforms (shortener: bit.ly/12socialhubs — PDF)

• 10 Mobile Apps for Social Good (shortener: bit.ly/10mobileapps — PDF)

• 12 Steps to Mobilize Your Cause (shortener: bit.ly/12steps-flyer — PDF)

A presentation to get the ball rolling

The presentation was intended not as a comprehensive survey of social media tools or strategies, but as a way to introduce concepts that can be plumbed more deeply in the weeks ahead. In the main, it consisted of three main parts:

• Case studies — successful cause campaigns by Equality California, Tweet for a Cure, Grassroots Mapping, charity:water, Greenpeace, Egypt’s Women & Memory Forum and Nawaa, a group of political activists in Tunisia. (What they did with Google Earth blew me away!)

• 12 steps to activate your supporters, starting with listening and ending with real-world events.

• Tools and action hubs for social change, including Google Earth, Creative Commons, Google Sidewiki, widgets, word cloud visualizations and more.

A technical glitch: Any theories?

We spent a half hour before the session began tackling a technical glitch I had never seen in 10 years of presentations: My videos were playing fine in Keynote on my MacBook Pro, but when the image was projected onto the wall, only the QuickTime still image was visible — nothing that “moved” was displayed through the projector during the entire evening. Which threw me for a loop, since my presentations are intensely media-rich. Have you ever seen that before? What do you think could have caused that?

Despite that, it was a great gathering and I hope to be back at the Hub soon! If you’d like a Mobilize Your Cause workshop held at your organization, drop us a line.

Continue reading »

Probably the most intriguing addition to the conference landscape is the upcoming inaugural CrowdConf, the first conference that focuses on the emerging field of crowdsourcing and the future of distributed work. Researchers, technologists, outsourcing experts, legal scholars and artists will gather Oct. 4 in San Francisco to discuss how crowdsourcing is beginning to transform the democratizing and flattening of the global labor market.

I hope to make it there, though a planned Air Force blogging expedition to Hawaii may prevent it.

Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, is spearheading the creation of the conference, which includes a call for papers with a deadline nine days from today. Here are the details:

When: Monday, Oct. 4, 2010, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

Where: The St. Regis Hotel, 123 3rd St., San Francisco

Tickets: $350 before Sept. 13, with discounts for students and researchers. Register here.

Speakers include: Tim Ferriss, Author, “The 4-Hour Work Week”; Sharon Chirella, VP, Amazon Mechanical Turk; Maynard Webb, CEO, LiveOps; Jonathan Zittrain, author and Professor of Law and Computer Science, Harvard.

Continue reading »

If you haven’t heard already, Facebook has launched a location-based “check in” app similar to FourSquare.

It’s called “Places” , and as you’ll see in the video above, Facebook seeks to encourage serendipitous meetings between Facebook friends at the places they hang out.

How can my nonprofit use Places?

Places is a location-based check-in app for mobile devices. Think FourSquare but with deeper and more developed friendship networks. With that, you should start your Facebook Places marketing strategy by reading four posts by Joe Waters:

• 5 Reasons Not to Give Up on Location-Based [Cause] Marketing
• Foursquare for Charities: Live Discussion
• How Nonprofit Groups Can Benefit From Foursquare
• Foursquare ‘Checkin for Charity’ Hits 135k Checkins, Raises $15k

Also, see this slick demo on how Facebook Places works on the iPhone.

How will your nonprofit use Facebook Places?

Continue reading »

Every year I pick a new conference (or two) that I really want to attend because I’ve heard it will blow my mind, because I want to connect with new people, because I know it’s good to stretch the mind and the soul. This year, it’s SOCAP.

In looking into the conference, I stumbled upon a post by my friend Emily Goligoski about a contest where you can win a pass to the conference. Yes, the contest has some element of voting but it’s not everything (thankfully) and regardless of if I win, I like the question they’re asking.

The Social Capital Markets Conference is a gathering of investors, entrepreneurs, and innovators at the intersection of money and meaning. SOCAP has spent the last two years defining the social enterprise movement. This year, more than 1,200 investors, donors, entrepreneurs, and innovators will decide: What’s Next?

A recent report by Hope Consulting on Money for Good revealed there is a $120 billion untapped market of individual investors looking to make a positive environmental and social impact with their dollars. With deserving entrepreneurs looking for funds to make that impact, the challenge is to discover:

What’s next? How will social enterprise unlock the $120 billion market opportunity for impact investment?

SOCAP will be exploring this question throughout the conference, but they want to hear from you.

The challenge? Tell them (in 500 words or less) what’s next in social enterprise to unlock the $120 billion market opportunity for individual impact investment, and you could win a scholarship to this year’s SOCAP, valued at $1,195, as well as the opportunity to be published in TriplePundit, an innovative new media company pushing the conversation forward about sustainable business in the 21st century.

Continue reading »

You may have heard of deal-of-the-day site Groupon — Get 50 to 90 percent off the best stuff your city has to offer! Hot deals in Chicago, New York, Boston! — and the breed of “offertising” sites that aim to make people break their habits and check out a new place. What if this model were applied toward getting people to buy more sustainable products?

That is the mission of San Francisco-based blissmo (tagline: buy good, feel great), which offers one-time discounts to certified sustainable and/or organic businesses. They recently launched their service and are currently featuring 50-percent-off promotions on Kaia Foods, a national organic food company, and wines at J Vineyards and Winery (see above), a certified sustainable vineyard in Sonoma, Calif.

From the perspective of businesses, offertising sites are a good way to gain new customers without requiring any upfront cash, as with traditional advertising. While we don’t yet know how effective these deals will be in retaining repeat customers over the long term, blissmo — run by entrepreneur Sundeep Ahuja, a friend — is positioned to be a better ally for green businesses, as they’re delivering customers who are already predisposed to buying sustainable goods and products.

We’ll be keeping a watch to see where all this goes. Meantime, I’m trying to shake the word “offertising” out of my head.

Continue reading »

Image by ChrisL_AK on Flickr

Huddle, Basecamp, DeskAway among tools to help your team members work together

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, entrepreneurs, NGOs, citizen publishers, educators.

By Jessica Haswell
Socialbrite staff

The Google Wave came and went – what was that thing, anyway? — but here are some tools that maximize the collaboration and efficiency of your organization and are sure to stick. We took a look at five of the top Web-based project management and collaboration tools that can help nonprofits and other organizations get stuff done. These tools are productivity boosters, regardless of whether your staffers work in the same office or if your team wants to engage supporters in far-flung locations.

Have your own favorite? Please share in the comments below.

Huddle: Free workspaces for nonprofits

1Habitat for Humanity, UNICEF and World Vision are just a few of the nonprofits using Huddle, and it’s a great option for smaller organizations as well. We use London-based Huddle — which just opened a San Francisco office — as the online workspace for New Media Labs, one of our nonprofit clients. Coolest features: Huddle’s customizable dashboard, making it easy to add widgets, and online whiteboards that foster effortless integration with LinkedIn, Ning and Facebook. Thanks to the Huddle Foundation, Huddle is one of the only outfits that offers registered charities (with budgets below $7 million) completely free services. Huddle.net won the Best B2B/Enterprise Start-up at the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009. Follow Huddle on Twitter. See Huddle on iTunes.

Basecamp: Over 3 million users

2They must be doing something right: Basecamp has 3 million users, growing at 1,000 companies a week, so one of the chief appeals of Basecamp is the ability to connect with outsiders and other organizations. On top of its massive user count is an extremely well-organized, powerful project management system, customizable interface design and mobile support. The price, starting at $24 per month, is comparable to other tools of its kind, but there are no discounts for nonprofits. Follow Basecamp on Twitter.

Teamwork Project Manager: More features for less

3This package offers a clean layout and customizable logo and layout options – important projects can be starred and featured on the main screen with “custom view.” Message boards are just one of the collaboration tools offered in addition to wiki-style notes. If you’re looking for the functionality of Basecamp at a lower cost, check out Ireland-based Teamwork Project Manager. Follow TeamworkPM on Twitter.

DeskAway: A good choice for the boss

4Delegation, sharing, tracking work and transparency are just some of the things that DeskAway prides itself on. One of this mobile-enabled project management system’s stand-out features is its ability to import data from Basecamp if you’re looking to switch out or back up your project data. Desk Away makes nominating a project manager to keep things organized easy — it’s a good choice for tech-savvy executive directors or C-suite execs. See info on the DeskAway mobile app. Follow DeskAway on Twitter.

Zoho: Build your own efficiency toolkit

5Zoho stands out from the rest of its field: It offers an online toolkit of productivity, collaboration and business apps similar to Google Docs, which has copied some of Zoho’s best features. The most exciting feature of Zoho is its ability to sync with other programs such as Google Apps or Microsoft Office, making it that much easier to communicate and share content with your colleagues. The one downside (or upside, depending on how you will use it) is that you buy all of the various tools — Business, CRM, Reports, etc. — separately. Zoho is perfect for those who want to build their own collaboration and efficiency toolkit. Follow Zoho on Twitter.

Continue reading »

You have an amazing new start-up, social enterprise or nonprofit campaign, and you need to get the word out. What strategies, tactics and tools are available to activists, business executives, consultants and marketing managers?

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be giving a Mobilize Your Cause mini-bootcamp at the Hub SF a week from today to answer that question.

We just lined up a great guest speaker: Pamela Hawley, founder and CEO of UniversalGiving, who’ll be talking about What’s driving your organization?

The two-hour presentation and conversation will cover strategies, tactics and tools for activists and change agents looking to mobilize supporters on behalf of a cause. Details:

What: Mobilize Your Cause!

When: Tuesday, Aug. 24, 6:30-8:30 pm followed by a mixer from 8:30-9:30 pm

Where: Hub SoMa, 901 Mission St., Suite 105, in the Chronicle Building

Program: The session will focus on the following:

• 12 steps to mobilize your cause: The components of highly successful campaigns that have taken advantage of social media’s ability to enlist and activate evangelists, with several real-world examples.
• New technologies: An overview of the best “social good” tools and resources available for advocates looking to make a difference.
• How to build an activist community: We’ll explore how different organizations have successfully used social tools to mobilize their members, spread awareness, engage members and raise funds.
• Mixer: Following the 2-hour session we’ll hold a one-hour Social Good Schmooze-Up mixer.
• How much:

  • Members: $10 (with Socialbrite discount code: HubMobilize)
  • General admission for this event: $15
  • Door: $20

Register on Eventbrite.

Continue reading »