Guest post by Kristy Graves
TechSoup Global

Storytelling is one of the most powerful vehicles to convey your organization’s message. This month TechSoup Global and a number of digital media experts are helping the nonprofit community learn how to hone your storytelling chops.

Starting Thursday, Jan. 13, join TechSoup’s Digital Storytelling Event. Participate in webinars, online events and discussions to learn how to tell your organization’s story through video and photos. Then, create a digital story showcasing your organization’s work and submit it for a chance to win prizes, including Adobe Premiere Pro, Flip Video Slide HD or an Optoma Pico Projector. No production or storytelling experience is necessary – this online lab will teach you how.

Head over to TechSoup’s Forums to learn how to start storytelling. Then, use the digital story you created and put those new skills to good use. Here’s the overview:

What

The second annual Digital Storytelling Challenge. Create a 60-second YouTube video or five-panel image story on Flickr, telling us about your organization. Training and resources provided by TechSoup and its partners. Prizes for the top three submissions from Flip Video, Flickr, Adobe and more. See full details.

When

This is a series of online-only virtual events.

Jan. 13 to 31: Submit your entries.

Jan. 13: First Webinar, How to Tell Your Digital Story, with Michael Margolis of GetStoried and Rob Kershaw of the Center for Digital Storytelling

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Anyone who reads the Kiwanja.net blog, or who follows our work with FrontlineSMS, will know there are two main themes that run throughout our work.

First, how do we lower the barriers to entry for NGOs looking to deploy mobile technology in their work? And second, how do we help share information about what mobile means in the developing world to the widest possible audience, i.e. one outside traditional development or technology circles?

A good example of the second theme is our recently launched Mobile Message series running on the National Geographic website. We’re also targeting non-mobile-for-development and non-ICT4D conferences and contributing chapters to books and giving interviews to magazines, which take the message to a new audience. The latest was a piece on mobile innovation for an in-flight magazine for travellers on flights to Africa.

One of our early initiatives was the creation of The Social Mobile Group way back in November 2006. It was the first Facebook group of its kind to focus on the social application of mobiles and mobile technology, and it remains the largest group dedicated to the subject on Facebook today.

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Lifestyle site offers resources for charitable fundraisers

One of the terrific new resources for those learning how to host philanthropic fundraisers is Vivanista, a very cool San Francisco startup that offers a wealth of resources around charitable events.

I recently chatted with co-founder Annie Vranizan in their San Francisco offices about the organization — which is due to receive its 501(c)(3) status in a few months — its goals and best practices around live events .

“We believe women can lead a philanthropic lifestyle” without being professional philanthropists, Annie says. “If there’s a charity gala in New York, how come someone in San Francisco can’t learn from that and replicate that model?”

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

The classy site offers a wealth of how-tos, tips, tools and best practices, everything from interviews and profiles of women who are chairing charitable events to strategies for getting corporate sponsorships.

One of the site’s most popular features is its events calendar — you can see fundraiser ideas ranging from a cupcake party to a fashion show. One thing I like is that the fundraisers are real-world events, not impersonal online begathons.

Strategic advice around live fundraising events

Other notable features and services offered by Vivanista:

• http://vivanista.com/parties-for-a-purpose/“>Parties for a Purpose. Says Annie: “If you’re going to do a wine tasting or get your girlfriends together, why not attach a cause to it and raise money for something you’re passionate about?”

• They’ve just selected five 90-second video finalists in their Parties for a Purpose contest. The winning nonprofit will be awarded $1,000. Head over and vote!

• They also provide Fundraisers in a Box, a kit that gives you everything from the outline of your fundraising event to the corporate sponsorship letter to estimates of volunteers, a time frame and a theme that aligns with your mission.

• In the near future they’ll be offering event consulting services to help get fund-raisers off the ground.

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Target audience: Nonprofits, cause and community organizations, foundations, NGOs, businesses, brands, government agencies, conference organizers, educators. First of two parts. Also see part 2: Using Twitter & LinkedIn to promote your event.

Guest post by Tamara Mendelsohn
Director of Marketing, Eventbrite

We often get asked, “How can I leverage social media to promote my event?” So we started collecting best practices from event organizers who use Eventbrite and pulled them into this post to help you get started down the path to social media glory.

It’s important to note that social media is a clunky gun — it’s a channel, not a strategy. The best way for each event to utilize this channel will vary depending on who the target audience is and how they engage online.

Social media: the perfect tool to generate buzz

It’s no silver bullet. That said, social media can be an incredibly powerful promotional tool, allowing you to reach more of the people who care about and ultimately want to attend your event. When people share information about your event with their network, that message carries much more weight than a traditional ad. It’s a personal endorsement of your event. Social media is also the perfect tool to generate buzz, to get people talking about your event in a recorded fashion where others can stumble across it and get caught up in it, too. It’s not a new phenomenon. That’s how people have promoted their events from the beginning: get people talking about it. What social media brings is the ability for anyone to discover the chatter, giving it far more reach and power.

But it can be a game-changer. We’ve built a lot of features into Eventbrite to support sharing of events through social media and we see the results every day. Facebook is the greatest driver of traffic to our site, which means people are sharing your events on Facebook, their friends are seeing the posts show up in their feed, and they are clicking on the links that bring them back to your Eventbrite event page. That’s really exciting, and I hope you can see the powerful implications that it has on the way events are promoted and discovered.

Some guiding principles on promoting events

Choose the platforms that make sense for your event.

1There are a few options when it comes to promoting your event through social media, and each has advantages and disadvantages. For example, Facebook and LinkedIn show who’s attending and they aggregate conversations about the event in one place, while Twitter provides the opportunity for anyone to discover the event. Building your own social network around your event may be the thing to do if you have an appetite for building a richly branded online experience, but it won’t give you the virality of established social networks. Look to strike a balance across several platforms. Most important, understand where your target audience is already engaging. Identify existing communities by searching on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other forums, monitor Twitter conversation, and locate the platforms that have the most activity. This is where you’ll want to place the majority of your efforts.

Define success metrics and don’t underestimate the effort required.

2To new users, online communities might look self-sustaining. They’re not. Facebook, Twitter and the rest all take work, ideally in the form of a dedicated individual who can keep dialogue flowing and seed productive conversations. Continuous new content and engagement tactics are required to grow the vibrant community necessary for achieving buzz around your event. Define success metrics so that you know how you’re tracking — number of fans or followers is a great place to start, but engagement metrics are most important. The Facebook Page dashboard gives good stats and there are some great free Twitter analytics tools (we use Twitalyzer) that can measure engagement levels of your tweets.

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It’s been exactly three years since I last put together a compilation of Blog posts, so another seemed well overdue. Last month also marked the eighth anniversary of my time in mobile, and next month it’ll be five years since I started blogging. And I joined Twitter exactly three years ago next week, too.

The Christmas/New Year break is always a good time to reflect, and look back (and forward) on what’s been achieved (and what remains to be achieved). It’s also a good time for renewal. Perhaps that’s why the end of the year/the start of the next brings up so many anniversaries for me.

So, “Ten from twenty-ten” is a look back – through the lens of ten of my favourite blog posts from 2010 – at some of what I see as the bigger challenges and issues in social mobile today.

Click here to download the document (PDF, 3.8 Mb). Feel free to distribute, republish, discuss, disagree or share – should you feel inclined.

Happy reading, and happy new year!

Amy Sample Ward, Holly Ross and Kari Dunn Saratovsky at the Crowdsourcing Innovative Social Change panel at SXSW 2010. (Photo by JD Lasica)

Superguide to events for nonprofits & social good organizations

Following is a roundup of conferences and events scheduled in the nonprofit and social change sector in 2011, with a few related events tossed in as well. This is now an annual tradition here at Socialbrite.

We’ll be reporting on many of these events and invite you to share your coverage or observations here. Throughout the year you’ll be able to see a list of all these events in the weekly Google calendar at the lower right of nearly every page on Socialbrite. And don’t forget to attend a local Netsquared event!

If you know of other must-attend events, please add them by posting in the comments at the bottom. Note that we’ve also published a calendar of 2011 conferences in social media, tech and marketing on our sister site, Socialmedia.biz. We’ll continue to update this calendar throughout the year.

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