Guest post by Beth Kanter
bethkanter.org

It’s the sweltering dog days of summer and many nonprofits are deep into planning for year-end campaigns and perhaps looking for ways to raise money now. While I was sitting on the beach on vacation, Network for Good published a free ebook called How to Raise a Lot More Money Now – 50 Great Ideas from 11 Top Experts.

You’ll find lots of  advice and tips from these experts. The authors include Jeff Brooks, Sarah Durham, Jocelyn Harmon, Kivi Leroux Miller, Mark Rovner, Nancy Schwartz, Chris Forbes, Alia McKee Scottand Katya Andresen. Allison Fine and I have contributed some tips from a chapter in The Networked Nonprofit on fundraising.

More than 7,000 people have downloaded the book (you have to fill out a form first) and the reviews have been glowing.

Favorite tips from the ebook

A few of my favorite tips:

• Ignore your brand guidelines. They are all about you, not about your donors, and that will hurt your fundraising.
• Organize a volunteer online thank-you corps. Donors get a simple training and are then assigned new donors to personally thank on behalf of the cause.
• Take a very long walk. You’re more likely to solve lingering problems with creative solutions if you give your brain a break. Really. Try it.

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Charity: water’s “World Water Day” video contains a call to action starting at about 10 seconds in.

By Jessica Haswell
Socialbrite staff

Nonprofits have long known that creating a YouTube channel can help tell your organization’s story. But did you know that YouTube offers a nonprofit program? YouTube’s program gives nonprofits a number of handy features to get your message heard.

One nonprofit that put the program to good use is charity: water, which raised more than $12,000 in one day through the use of an in-video ad overlay on their World Water Day video, shown above.

Features of the YouTube Nonprofit Program

What exactly does YouTube’s Nonprofit Program offer?

• More exposure. Videos will be listed in YouTube’s nonprofit channel and Nonprofit videos pages, and you’ll have your own nonprofit channel, which can be fully branded to suit your organization.
• New outreach and fundraising opportunities. Your organization can add Call-to-action ad overlays on your videos, and a Google Checkout “donate” button can be added to your organization’s YouTube channel to help drive campaigns.
• Volunteer videographers. You can post a video opportunity on the YouTube Video Volunteers platform to find a skilled YouTube user to create a video for your cause.

To us, the most exciting feature of this program is the call-to-action ad overlay. You know how about 10 seconds after you start watching a You Tube video, an ad pops up at the bottom of the video? After joining this program you can now control the content of the ad overlay wording on all of your videos, giving you the ability to include a call to action: Link the viewer to your website, additional content, places to donate or other external sites. Cool, right?

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Jill Foster of Citizen Effect conducts an interview in the Gulf Coast (photo by Geoff Livingston).

Vittana, Citizen Effect, Spheresavers among the networks galvanizing change

Target audience: Social change organizations, nonprofits, educators, community organizers, change agents.

Guest post by Katrina Heppler
envisionGood

Social tools come in all shapes and sizes. Yesterday we looked at 6 productivity tools for social change — mostly desktop and cloud-based apps and one cool gadget for your pocket. Today here’s my list of 12 platforms and online communities that are doing an amazing job in promoting social change.

You must have your own favorites (I’ve left off a few of my own, like Change.org and Causes, for example) — please share them in the comments below!

For a different list of 12 community platforms, download our flyer: 12 social action hubs.

Vittana: Send someone to college for $25

1Vittana is an amazing online platform that connects people through lending and helps young people around the world to get access to higher education for the first time. Through Vittana, you can make a loan to a student to help him or her go to college. Vittana reports that their students have a 95% success and repayment rate on their loans. In essence, Vittana is like a “Kiva for worldwide education.” Through online loans from people like you and me, Vittana is building a world where anyone can go to college. Vittana has been recognized as a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow and HuffingtonPost #1 Game Changer in Philanthropy. Follow Vittana on Twitter.

Citizen Effect: Empowering citizen philanthropy

2Citizen Effect empowers citizens to become citizen philanthropists by providing us with the tools and networks we need to work directly with communities in need around the world. Through CitizenEffect, you can create your own project, bring your friends, family and social network together, and raise funds to make a significant impact in the lives of a community in need. You can also find great projects to support that match your interests. Follow Citizen Effect on Twitter.

Blissmo: Making sustainability easier

3Blissmo (formerly Spheresavers) is a new platform that aims to make sustainable consumption mainstream by making it cheaper and easier for consumers to buy sustainable. Check out Blissmo (our writeup is here) for deals on products and services from sustainable businesses striving to balance people, planet and profit.

OpenIDEO: Design together for social good

4OpenIDEO is a place where people design together for social good. It’s an online platform for creative thinkers: the veteran designer, the critic, the MBA, the active participant and the creative enthusiast with an idea to share. IDEO, a well-known design firm, developed OpenIDEO as a way to include a broader range of people in the design process to tackle social issues. Follow OpenIDEO on Twitter.

FrontlineSMS: Text groups of people anywhere

5FrontlineSMS is an award-winning, free, open-source platform that turns a laptop or desktop computer and a mobile phone or modem into a two-way group messaging hub. Since it works anywhere there’s a mobile signal, it doesn’t need the Internet – a major advantage for many grassroots NGOs, especially in the developing world. Once you have the software running on your computer, you can send messages to wide groups of people and collect responses to any questions or surveys you might want to run, all via text message. Follow FrontlineSMS on Twitter.

Global Giving: Support community-based projects

6Global Giving is an online marketplace that helps nonprofits raise money for grassroots projects and connects individuals and companies to grassroots economic development projects around causes and countries they care about. Through Global Giving, supporters can make direct donations to projects; no social activity or event organization is required to support a cause. Follow Global Giving on Twitter.

SeeClickFix: Get a local problem fixed

7SeeClickFix is a platform that allows citizens to report non-emergency issues and receive neighborhood alerts, providing a great way to get a local problem fixed. If you have an iPhone, Android or Blackberry mobile phone, you can download SeeClickFix’s free mobile app to report issues taking place in your neighborhood when you are on the go, anytime, anyplace. Follow SeeClickFix on Twitter.

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Nothing is Good from DoGood Headquarters on Vimeo.

Target audience: Social change organizations, nonprofits, educators, Web publishers. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

Guest post by Katrina Heppler
envisionGood

Socialbrite asked for a list of favorite tools or resources that I’d recommend to people to help advance social change, social good or social activism. I decided to break this into two batches: productivity tools, listed below, and 12 top platforms for social change.

I’m sure you have your own favorites — please share them in the comments below. And tell us if you like, don’t like or are new to the resources I’m listing here.

6 top productivity tools I love

Picnik: Edit your photos online

1Picnik lets you edit all your photos online, from one easy place. Picnik is great for quick editing/cropping/enhancing of photos published to the Web. Unlike Photoshop, Picnik is free and browser-based so you can edit photos quickly from anywhere.

MPEG Streamclip: A nifty video converter

2MPEG Streamclip is a video converter for Mac and Windows. I usually use this in conjunction with HandBrake when I need to convert video file formats so that they are accepted by Mac video editing software. See this page for a full description of MPEG Streamclip’s capabilities.

Flip: High-quality video on the go

3The Flip cam is the best high-quality low-end video camera ever made, imho. I take it everywhere. You never know when it will come in handy. Great for capturing quick interviews with people on the street, like this interview with the CEO-founder of eduFire. And all for under $200.

Skype: Great for free video conferencing

4Sometimes you just need face time (and no, I don’t mean the iPhone’s FaceTime app). Nonprofits and cause organizations have long known about Skype as a way to keep phone bills small when calling land lines or mobiles. But I like Skype for its free video conferencing capabilities. Click the video button on your screen and you can do a one-on-one chat — you just need a webcam. Watch this one-minute video explainer. (There’s third-party software for group video chats.)

FreeConferenceCall.com for long-distance calls

5I love FreeConferenceCall.com. It makes it a breeze to set up conference phone calls with co-workers, friends or business colleagues anywhere in the United States through a group call-in number (international calls work sometimes but often don’t). It’s not really free: While you don’t get a bill from the service, normal long-distance calls apply to anyone participating. Still, it’s a super-simple way to stay connected.

DoGoodHQ: Browse for social good

6DoGoodHQ is not necessarily a productivity tool, but it operates behind the scenes and could be a good way to gain exposure for nonprofits and social activists. DoGoodHQ is a browser plug-in I downloaded so that I support causes while I browse — you turn your web browsing into donations that support green initiatives and movements for positive social change. The plug-in, which is free and takes seconds to install, replaces traditional ads I don’t want to see with ads I want to see and support. I recommend nonprofits contact DoGoodHQ to find out how they can get their ads published on the DoGoodHQ network.

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Here’s a one-page guide to setting up an email list

Guest post by Tim Davies
timdavies.org

Even with all the amazing social web tools available today, e-mail remains a key communication tool for most people.

For many committees, projects and associations, an e-mail list has a lot to offer as a coordination and collaboration tool. For example, recently I worked on preparing a Web presence for the DFID Civil Society Organisations Youth Working Group, a group of development agencies and youth charities focused on working with a UK government agency to promote youth engagement and the role of young people in development. They’re currently online only via the Youth Guidance Project.

Because the Youth Working Group is essentially a network of organisations and individuals, with no permanent secretariat or central body, we’re building the whole Web presence around e-mail lists for the central group and its subgroups – set up to be open to anyone who wants to get involved. Content from the e-mail lists will be fed via RSS into a website based on DokuWiki, a fantastically flexible and easy to use wiki.

This set-up will involve the chair of each subgroup managing his or her own e-mail list, and all the members or associates of the Youth Working Group understanding how an e-mail list works.

So I took the opportunity to create a One Page Guide to E-mail Lists with Google Groups.

You can download the PDF here or view the full thing on Scribd and get the original to adapt for your own use in its original Open Office format, or MS Word if you prefer.

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The screencast above helps nonprofits take advantage of Hootsuite‘s new capabilities. As I say in this short tutorial, it’s one tool to manage your organization’s presence across a wide range of social networks. Very cool.

One of Hootsuite’s advantages over rival apps like Tweetdeck and Seesmic is that it’s entirely Web-based, and the company takes advantage of Ajax — a programming protocol — to let you drag and drop to your heart’s content.

Have you used Hootsuite? What do you think?

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