Craig Newmark at yesterday’s Boot Camp (photo by JD Lasica)

The Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp, now in its eighth year, is always a great gathering of nonprofit thought leaders, community activists and others under the banner of social good.

This was, I think, my fourth straight year in attendance, and it was great to see folks like Arthur Coddington, Beth Kanter, Peggy Duvette, Micki Krimmel and others lead an interesting array of sessions.

I created a small Flickr set, including the shot of my compadre Craig himself, above. Here are a few other small snippets from the day.

LikeMinded & other highlights from the Boot Camp

• Booths everywhere were showing off LikeMinded, a new initiative of the Craigslist Foundation, with some financial backing from the Knight Foundation. It’s a promising site that spotlights community success stories and lets people share news about the projects they’re working on at the local level.

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Huddle, Tungle.me, Dropbox & 7 other Web 2.0 solutions

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause and volunteer organizations, NGOs, businesses, brands, Web publishers, educators, project managers.

As nonprofits get more efficient and leaner in managing a 21st century workforce, they’re discovering that all kinds of Web 2.0 collaboration tools can help team members in multiple locations communicate smarter and faster with each other. The tools also can help you work closer with partner organizations and volunteers.

Here are five tools that we’ve encouraged our nonprofit clients to try out. Not all of them may be right for your needs, and not all are free. We suggest testing them out with small teams to see how they can help you become a more social and collaborative organization.

Want to share this with your team as an easy one-page downloadable flyer? See our Team Collaboration flyer (shortcut at http://bit.ly/teamcollab).

Huddle: Free workspaces

1Habitat for Humanity, UNICEF and World Vision are a few of the nonprofits using Huddle, an online collaboration workspace that’s free for nonprofits with budgets under $7 million. We used Huddle as the online workspace for New Media Lab, 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. Huddle won the Best B2B/Enterprise Start-up at the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009. Follow Huddle on Twitter.

Tungle.me: Collaborative scheduling

2To be honest, we think Microsoft Office is so 1996. Need to figure out when everyone on the team — and your outside partner’s team — is available for a call or meeting? Doodle isn’t bad, but Tungle.me is the best of breed, offering the most intuitive way to schedule meetings and to see what openings work best for everyone. After I get five or six emails proposing a counter-time, I now say, tungle.me instead.

Picnik: Edit your photos online

3Picnik lets you edit all your photos online. Picnik is great for quick editing, cropping and enhancing of photos published to the Web. Unlike Photoshop, Picnik is free and browser-based, so you can edit photos quickly from anywhere.

DeskAway: Project management via mobile

4DeskAway is a Web-based project collaboration software that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage, share and track projects. With its mobile component, you’ll know that your work is going on smoothly when you’re in the field or away from your desk. 30-day free trial with a 30 percent discount to nonprofit organizations on all pricing plans.

Pidgin: Connect across chat applications

5Connect instantly with staff, volunteers and the rest of your community regardless of which instant messaging application they use with either Pidgin (for PCs) or Adium (for Macs). Both are free, open source downloadable applications that allow you to connect with almost anyone running AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, IRC, Facebook and other chat networks.

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Mass notifications remain a key selling point of Facebook groups

Ilove Facebook groups. Really. They can be the center of great community engagement and a campaign if used correctly and strategically. Facebook groups serve a different purpose than Facebook pages; groups are great for encouraging niche topic discussions and action, while pages are generally more focused on general agency communication and general community engagement.

One Israeli organization, NATAL, so effectively used Facebook groups that Facebook featured it on its own Nonprofits page. NATAL, the leading trauma center for victims of terror and violence in Israel, created a highly successful Israeli blood donor awareness and registry campaign that successfully leveraged Facebook groups.

One of the most urgent needs in case of emergency is quickly locating blood donors, and NATAL wanted to find a way to both convey that need for blood donors and solve it at the same time. They created a website, bloodgroups.co.il, to publicize the campaign and offer information about who should give blood and why it is needed and launched the campaign in April 2010. The most prominent feature on the site is a call to action to identify your specific blood type by clicking on a blood donor type on the left side of the page (screenshot below).

Once you click on your blood type, the Facebook Group for your blood type opens in your browser. NATAL created eight Facebook groups, each one with the name of the blood group. In marketing terms, this is brilliant, because NATAL is now closely linked to the marketing keywords “blood donor.” According to the  video that NATAL created about the campaign, “we used groups and not pages because of message-all-members function is only available in groups.” (I have been saying for years that this is the unique selling proposition of Facebook groups.)

About 4,000 people, mostly Israelis, have joined the groups. Whenever the Israeli Red Cross sent NATAL a message with an urgent request for blood, NATAL used the message-all-members function to ask for donations from group members.

It didn’t hurt that the campaign received a lot of exposure in the Israeli press, or that they were awarded free coasters to distribute to pubs throughout Israel with information about the campaign. However, the most interesting thing about the campaign is how they took advantage of Facebook groups and how the groups are being used.

How NATAL rocked Facebook groups

One thing that NATAL understood at the time was Facebook groups’ message-all-members feature, which Facebook pages does not offer. Facebook no longer offers the message-all-members option. However, groups launched a similar feature, which shows new group postings as notifications and sends emails to members with links to new postings. (Of course, members can choose to turn off the email notifications through their settings.)

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A scene at the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp.

Events guide for nonprofits & social change organizations

It’s a busy month! Here’s a roundup of conferences and events scheduled in the nonprofit and social change sectors for the month of June. I’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow for the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp. Then I’m heading to New Orleans this weekend for the National Conference on Volunteering and Service and giving a Social Media for Social Good bootcamp there on Sunday.

For the full year, see our Calendar of 2011 social change conferences. If you’re interested in social media, tech and marketing conferences, see this month’s calendar on our sister site, Socialmedia.biz.

If you know of other events, please share by adding the info in the comments below.

Cause Marketing Forum	June 1-3	Chicago
Highlights of the ninth annual forum include presentations full of news you can use from the cause marketing masters, dozens of topic roundtables and small breakouts that promote learning and networking, and Cause Marketing Halo Award presentations that go beyond the kudos to share key learnings.
Connecting Up	June 1-3	Melbourne
Connecting Up 2011 is the nonprofit interactive event for learning and thinking strategically about how innovation and technology can improve our operations and outcomes.
Fundraising Day	June 2	Toronto
The Association of Fundraising Professionals represents 30,000 members in over 200 chapters in Canada, the United States, Mexico and China working to advance philanthropy through advocacy, research, education and certification programs.
Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp	June 2	San Francisco
Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp helps people learn how to make a positive impact in their communities and neighborhoods. The expanded focus aims at community builders and people engaged with their neighborhoods and social good across all sectors.
Personal Democracy Forum	June 6-7	New York City
The annual gathering of people interested in how technology is changing politics, governance and society.
MyCharityConnects	June 6-7	Toronto
Join nonprofits from across Canada and social media experts for the premier social media and online fundraising learning opportunity of the year.
National Conference on Volunteering and Service	June 6-8	New Orleans
I’ll be speaking at this annual event, which provides attendees with an opportunity to learn, connect and be inspired through plenary sessions, workshops, special events, service projects, exhibits, specialized corporate tracks and more.
Net Change Week	June 6-10	Toronto
Net Change Week 2011 is a week dedicated to exploring the intersection between social technology and social change.
Social Change Institute	June 8-12	Cortes Island, BC
SCI gathers seasoned and emerging leaders with thinkers and trainers from the change-making world. Designed to strengthen capacity, collaboration and success of the sector, SCI offers invaluable workshops, creative practices, dialogue circles and community building that will enhance your organizational effectiveness.
North by Northeast	June 13-19	Toronto
In its 17th year, North by Northeast Music Festival and Conference (NXNE) has become the Canadian festival destination for new and emerging talent: unsigned bands, indie favorites and major-label headlining artists. Seen as the most anticipated summer music event in Canada, NXNE Music, NXNE Film and NXNE Interactive are essential gatherings for artists, industry reps and fans.
New Media Consortium	June 15-18	Madison, Wisc.
The NMC’s Summer Conference is an opportunity to learn about how higher-education institutions are using new media to improve teaching, learning and research. The conference offers presentations, workshops and networking opportunities and attracts an audience of hundreds of highly skilled professionals interested in the integration of emerging technologies into teaching, learning and creative inquiry.
bigBANG!	June 16	Dallas
Last June bigBANG! convened a community of investors, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders and others who want to helped catalyze positive impact. This year the organizers will continue to advance the agenda of social innovation in North Texas.
Netroots Nation	June 16-19	Minneapolis, Minn.
Netroots Nation amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate.
Games for Change Festival	June 20-22	New York City
The festival brings together leaders from government, philanthropy, civil society, academia and the game industry to explore the increasing real-world impact of digital games as an avenue for social change. The festival is also a showcase for some of the most innovative new games in development.
Allied Media Conference	June 23-26	Detroit
The conference seeks to cultivate strategies for a more just and creative world. Attendees come together to share tools and tactics for transforming our communities through media-based organizing.
International Development Design Summit	June 27	Ghana, Africa
IDDS 2011 brings together people from a variety of backgrounds to learn about design and practice it alongside users in villages in Ghana. The summit will focus on designing and developing products and the ventures to disseminate them via village-based market research, iterative design, field testing, user feedback and co-creation.
Aspen Ideas Festival	June 27 -July 3	Aspen, Colo.
The Aspen Institute has been the nation’s premier gathering place for world leaders to engage in deep and inquisitive discussion of the ideas and issues that both shape our lives and challenge our times. The institute now seeks to engage a broader audience in a discussion of the significant issues that touch all parts of our society.
Tällberg Forum	June 29-Jul 3	Sigtuna, Sweden
With the theme “How on earth can we live together – How can we agree to agree?,” 500 leaders from all over the world and from different sectors of society will gather for a conversation about the whole – and in the interests of the whole.

Image at top by jengee on Flickr