This past Tuesday, I attended the Social Media for Nonprofits Conference in NYC. There’s always great content and discoveries to be made at the #SM4NP Conferences.  They tour around the country and are focused on providing great content and practical, tactical workshops and tools that nonprofits can put to work the next day. Full disclosure: I’m on their Leadership Council but I still know a good conference when I see one.

One of my favorite presentations came from Jereme Bivins and Jay Geneske from the Rockefeller Foundation. They were presenting one of their latest projects: HatchforGood.org. I had known about HatchforGood for a little while now but hadn’t given it a deep dive yet, so I was super excited to get this in-person primer at the conference.

Well, it’s really pretty great and it’s free. As the site tells us, Hatch acts like a concierge, connecting you to a suite of tools and a growing community to help you leverage storytelling to drive social impact and improve the lives of the poor and vulnerable around the world. The concept being that nonprofit’s stories don’t just materialize—they’re strategically planned, they’re creatively crafted, and they’re designed to achieve measurable outcomes.

Hatch has five sections, each designed to help you strategically craft, curate and share stories to drive social impact. As you answer questions, you are provided with suggested tools, case studies and resources that are customized to your needs. These recommendations will always be saved to your profile so you can access them later.
As you build your storytelling profile, you can explore case studies, look for ideas from storytelling thought leaders and even contribute your own. These resources can also be saved to your profile for later use.

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of Hatch is that it has an ‘Evaluation’ section, which helps you measure the effectiveness and impact of your work. That’s great news for data-driven organizations and an impetus for those who struggle with metrics to wrap their heads around the impact of storytelling.

Great storytelling tools that make us smarter as organizations don’t come around often so go ahead, sign up and see how others are telling stories. It may inspire you to explore new ways of telling yours.

Hatch is currently in Beta. You can learn more at HatchforGood.org

The post HatchforGood.org helps nonprofits tell their stories appeared first on Socialbrite.

Tips for leveraging the power of Facebook at your nonprofit or school

Target audience: Nonprofits, universities, colleges, associations (including alumni associations), cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Web publishers — and anyone with a Facebook page.

Guest post by Frank Barry
Director, Professional Services, Blackbaud

We already know that Facebook is crushing it, and that schools have an incredible opportunity to use the platform to deepen relationships with families, students and alumni. But is your school or nonprofit getting the most out of the platform? Are you using Facebook to its full potential?

Based on what I’ve seen I’d say there’s a high likelihood that you’re not.

But there is hope!

Among the countless schools I found using Facebook poorly, there were plenty of shining examples of schools doing a great job of utilizing Facebook to build lasting relationships with families, students and alumni (both university and K-12).

Here are some of the key findings and takeaways from my recent presentation on how schools can leverage Facebook.. Keep in mind that these tips also apply to any nonprofits trying to effectively use Facebook as part of their online strategy.

Make the most of your cover photo

1Your Facebook cover photo is prime real estate. It’s the thing that people will see first when they visit you on Facebook. Treat it like you would that area on your main website – you have two seconds to grab the attention you’re looking for.

When thinking through your Facebook cover photo, make sure you keep your brand in mind, but try to also show off your culture, history, mission and values. You might also try having a little fun with your cover photo. Here’s a few ways you could go about communicating these things:

• Show off your campus
• Highlight what you’re known for
• Include your students
• Show off landmarks
• Give parents an idea of the community they’ll be joining
• Promote key alumni
• Go off campus

Make sure the photo is high quality and sized correctly (851px x 315px).

Spice up your ‘About’ page

2One of the first things a new visitor will do on your Facebook page is check out your profile, even if it’s only a quick glance at the small box located right under your profile picture. Make sure you take full advantage of this area.

Here are a few tips to ensure your Facebook about section is filled out in a way that makes it useful to those who check it out:

• Tell your story (keep it short, but get the main points accross)
• Add your mission statement
• Make sure to include all your contact info (email, phone, etc.)
• Enter your address with map
• Include links to your website and other social networks
• Include calls to action just like you might on your website
• Add milestones

Tell your story by filling in your history and milestones

3Milestones give you the ability to tell people more about your history. Most schools (and nonprofits) have a long history of helping the community through impacting the people they serve. With that in mind, do your best to tell the world about the work you’re doing.

If you haven’t yet, think of at least five milestones that help tell your story then hop over to Facebook and fill them in. Use photos as much as possible.

Here are a few quick ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

• Date when school was founded
• Significant accomplishments, awards, recognitions, etc.
• Famous or well-known individuals/students
• Launch of new programs, colleges/schools, community work, etc.
• Significant sporting events
• Graduations
• New deans, principals, presidents, etc.
• Significant community outreach/serices/programs

Set up a few apps (the Facebook call to action)

4Apps (the icons you see above highlighted in the red box) are Facebook’s version of a call to action. Nonprofits (and schools) understand how to use calls-to-action in their appeals and other forms of asking their supporters to mobilize. Think about these “apps” in a similar way. Use them to get your Facebook fans to take the actions you want them to take.

Apps are also a great place to continue reinforcing your brand (see how well LIVESTRONG has done it in the image above?). You have the ability to use your own icons so you’re only limited by your imagination.

What types of things could you do here?

• Quick links to key resources
• News / Important info for students/families
• Social media policy
• Special offers, discounts, prizes, etc.
• Custom pages focused on what you know parents/students want
• Donate, subscribe, register, volunteer buttons

Make sure the photo is high quality and sized correctly (111px x 74px).

Get the most out of your posts

5Before you can engage your nonprofit’s or school’s supporters, students, teachers, families or alumni on Facebook, you have to build a relationship with them (on Facebook). This means that you can’t simply rely on them being fans, you have to get them to engage with your posts on a regular basis.

If your supporters don’t engage with you regularly, then even when you do post to your Facebook wall they won’t see what you’ve posted.

So how do you create more engagement?

• Pin posts you want people to see for a while. Pinning posts allows you to keep your more important message at the top of your Facebook page for seven days.
• Highlight your best posts. Highlighting posts give you the opportunity to make certain things stand out more than others on your Facebook page.
• Promote posts that need to reach the masses. Promoting posts gives you the opportunity to reach a much larger portion of your Facebook fan base. You can easily see a 50 percent increase.

There are a lot more factors that matter when it comes to creating engaged fans on Facebook. Check out 22 Ways to Stay Connected with Your School’s Alumni on Facebook for more on this topic.

Pay attention to your fans (a lot)!

6Getting your nonprofit’s or school’s Facebook fans to create content in the form of pictures, videos, status updates, questions, etc. and sharing on your Facebook page is arguably the top thing you should focus on when trying to build an effective presence on Facebook.

Facebook made that slightly more challenging with the introduction of Timeline. For brands (nonprofits, schools, etc.), Timeline makes it such that fan-initiated engagement and content takes a back seat to brand-initiated engagement and content. This means Facebook no longer puts fan posts directly into your wall now that they’ve rolled out Timeline to everyone.

If a fan posts something directly to your Facebook page (i.e., not in response via a Like, comment or share to something you’ve posted), it will show up in a small box that lives below the “number of people who like this” section in the right column. That means you need to actively monitor what your fans are doing on your page and, when appropriate, highlight their content.

Here’s how to highlight fan content: Go to the Admin bar at top of your page (you need to be logged in as an adminisrator for this). Then hit the Edit page button and Use Activity Log. You will see a screen similar to the one shown below.

Dig through the activity log to find posts from your fans that you want to highlight. Once you find something, you can select the little circle located to the right of the activity, click on it, and select Highlight on Page.

Bam! You’ve just made one lucky fan very happy!

The post 6 simple steps to create a Facebook page that just works appeared first on Socialbrite.

Digital tools and mobile apps take productivity to the next level

Editor’s note: With college students now back on campus, we thought this would be a good time to update our past articles on top tools and mobile apps for fall 2012. Thanks to Emily Sawtell and Angela Santiago of McGraw-Hill and Jessica Haswell of the Socialbrite team for their contributions to this roundup.

Target audience: Students, educators, nonprofits, writers, researchers, journalists.

The school year upon us, and we’ve rounded up some of our favorite digital tools and mobile apps to start the semester off right. With so many tools on the market to increase productivity, there are bound to be a few to make your life a bit easier.

Tell us in the comments which tools you think should be added to the list. What can’t you survive without?

Wikipanion: Who needs a textbook?

1Who 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.

Evernote: A revolution in note-taking

2This 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.

iTranslator: Translations at your fingertips

3You can use iTranslator to connect to Google Translator, Babel Fish or Free Translation to help with your language courses. Or, maybe it’ll help you figure out what language your prof is speaking.

Study Tracker: Chart your performance

4Study Tracker, the iPad app by GradeGuru, helps students track their class performance. Students can record their study times and grades per class to monitor their effort and outcomes — and adjust accordingly.

Google Docs: A complete collaboration solution

5Google applications such as Google Documents, Calendar and GMail have become a standard suite of tools enabling college students to collaborate – it really hits the spot for group work. Other apps in the suite include Google Talk for chat, SMS for mobile, Desktop to index your computer, Scholar to find scholarly works and Picasa to edit and manage photos.

Skype: Video chat in the classroom

6Traditionally a software app that allows users to make free voice calls to one another, Skype has a group video chat service that’s being used by professors and students to engage in classroom discussions and host virtual office hours. And, of course, use Skype video to keep in touch with a long-distance significant other — and maybe even the family back home.

Twitter: New levels of engagement

7Twitter is longer just a social network. Students and academics alike are starting to leverage this network to crowd-source questions, gather research and increase classroom engagement levels.

StudyRails: Focus, focus, focus

8StudyRails is an online study tool that helps with time management by allowing students to schedule their study time and block out access to sites that might distract them.

Mindmeister: Brainstorming made easier

9Mindmeister is a cool online mind mapping and collaboration tool that will help with your group projects and presentations. (You’ve done mind mapping before, right?) The basic version, for three mind maps, is free.

GoDocs: Essential for your Google docs

10View, 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.

MyHomework: Digital planner in your palm

11Make 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.

Kindle: Save money on textbooks

12Digital textbooks are for sure the way to save. With thousands of 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.

FlashCards++: No more 3x5s

13There are a lot of flashcard apps to choose from. FlashCard++ is the best bang for your buck, going for $3.99, less than a deck of 3x5s. This stand-out study app makes it easy to study anything anywhere with your mobile phone. It can sync with Quizlet and also back-up your cards to Dropbox. If you’re not pleased with this one, check out CoboCards, Cram or Flashcards Deluxe.

Citation Manager: Making assignments easier

14GradeGuru Citation Manager is a bookmarklet & FireFox add-on that helps students collect and manage citations for papers, essays and assignments. Just highlight the info you want in any online source and Citation Manager will automatically capture the associated citation data from your browser. It’s a real time saver for course work.

Update: GradeGuru doesn’t seem to work with the latest version of Firefox.

Cliqset: Consolidate your stream

15Sharing, 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. Cliqset is closed.

Other mobile apps to check out

Other interesting apps that have come across our desk:

• gFlash + Flashcards and Tests: Create your own flashcards and share them with classmates as you study.

• Alarm Clock Pro: No need for that annoying alarm clock sound, with this app you can create an alarm clock with customizable themes and the app lets you set an ITunes playlist to wake up to.

• Graphing Calculator: Not only does this app have all of the functionality of a graphing calculator, a screenshot of the work can be taken and emailed to anyone.

• Convertbot: This app converts currency, length, mass, time and much more. It supports over 440 units of conversion to help with any assignments.

• MyGPA Calculator: Calculate your GPA per semester and cumulatively.

What tools or apps help you bring your A game? Share them with us below!

The post Top 15 tools & apps for college students appeared first on Socialbrite.

Build expertise & reduce info overload by processing Web content in new ways

This is the first of a two-part series. Also see:
• Top tools for content curation

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

Guest post by Beth Kanter
for NTEN: Change

Heard of content curation? It’s the process of sifting through information on the Web — from articles to images to videos to tweets — to organize, filter and make sense of content and then to share the very best material with your network.

Rather than another potential recipe for information overload, content creation can actually be a means to tackle this problem. We now create more data in just seven days than in all of human history up through 2003. So we need help sorting through all of the info flotsam and jetsam that we’re splashing around in.

Benefits of content curation for nonprofits

A curator needs to have superb social media monitoring and listening skills. That means knowing the right keywords on the topic and sources, agility with “aggregator” tools and the daily discipline of foraging for the best content and evaluating your finds before sharing.

Whether you have a staffer monitoring and aggregating blog posts for internal use or posting to Pinterest or providing value to the community by pointing to useful tweets, content curation holds benefits for both nonprofits and the people who work for them:

• Improve staff expertise. It used to be that we could be trained to do our work and we wouldn’t need to update and synthesize new information on a daily basis. That’s less true. One 21st century work place literacy is sense-making of information together and alone. Good curators can spot and highlight content related to their mission.

• Improve thought leadership. If your organization is curating content on a particular topic, it can help with branding your organization as thnught leaders in the space.

• New sources of content. Curation forms the base of your content strategy pyramid. It’s about curation, creativity and coordination across channels. Your content strategy is essential to the success of an integrated social media strategy. And content curation can help increase the shelf-life of your content you’re already producing.

Techniques for efficient, focused curtation

As you encourage content curation activities for your staff, you may also want to remind them of techniques for being efficient and staying focused:

1Manage your attention, not just your time: Don’t just create a to-do list; lay it out on daily and weekly schedules, breaking down key tasks of the project into chunks. Consider the level of concentration and focus that each type of task or chunk requires and schedule accordingly. For example, if I have to do some writing that requires a higher level of attention for me than does scanning Twitter or reading and responding to email, I schedule my writing time during peak concentration hours in the day. I also use a timer when I’m scanning my networks and limit those activities to 15-20 minute bursts.

2Visualize on paper: Over the past 10 months, I’ve made a return to paper and markers and using mind maps or visualization techniques to reflect and to plan my week or day. I use this as a pre-writing exercise as well as a reflection exercise. It’s a way to cope with getting “content fried.”

3Establish rituals: Rituals in your work life are valuable. A mind map offers a lot of good suggestions for rituals, from decluttering your workspace to healthy habits like sleep and exercise.

4Reflection: Reflection doesn’t have to take up a large amount of time to be effective. I take 10 minutes every morning to practice some visual recording skills like drawing to create my “3 Most Important Things for Today List.” At the end of the day, I look at it, reflect on what I did and plan for tomorrow.

5Managing email and other distractions: I try to avoid email first thing in the morning. And I’ve turned off notifications that pop up on my computer screen or send me a text message to my mobile phone.

6Managing physical space: When I see clutter in my physical work spaces, I try to take that as a sign that I need to hit a pause button. Usually it is because I’m doing too much.

7Just say no: Maybe you are going to say no to social media for a day and go to meet with people, take a class, read a book or take a walk. When I’m feeling most overwhelmed, I take a break. At least get up from your desk!

Content curation can not only benefit your organization but also enhance staff expertise in the subject area being curated. This can have additional returns for your organization’s programs and services and positively impact your stakeholders. It can also help staff avoid the problems of lost productivity that information overload causes.

Best of all, it can help your nonprofit overall by strengthening your communications strategy and positioning your organization as a thought leader in its domain. But it requires a solid content strategy and training in the hard and soft techniques of content curation.

Related

• Top tools to help you curate business content (Socialmedia.biz)

The post 7 smart techniques for content curation appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Educators, entrepreneurs, app developers, family members, iPad owners.

At the first Launch Education and Kids held this week at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley outpost in Mountain View, VC/entrepreneur Jason Calacanis launched a new conference series that showcased 30 inventive startups — some of which will likely change the face of education or learning games for kids. Or both.

The most interesting person I met was Semira Rahemtulla, CEO and co-founder of a cool new tablet app called PlayTell. The San Francisco-based startup on Tuesday launched the private beta of its new app, currently available for the iPad, which lets loved ones share a reading experience over the Internet. Grandmas and grandkids, aunts and nephews, soldiers and young children, you now have a way to experience reading a book together online, even if you’re thousands of miles apart.

PlayTell (tagline: “Play together, even when you’re apart”) lets you read a book with your loved ones while you’re in a video chat. While we grown-ups use GoToWebinar or WebEx for collaborating online over business, until now there wasn’t a way for families to share reading materials at the same time, and then to capture their shared experience through photos or video (a feature coming in a few weeks). The reading catalog is understandably small at this early date, but it will grow over time as libraries and book publishers come on board.

Check out my 5-minute interview with Semira (conducted, by the way, in a very noisy hallway without a tripod). She had some wonderful insights about how children as young as 2 interact with the iPad and how children as young as 3 and 4 come to expect to reach out to their parents or loved ones at any time through our always-on connections.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo

Congratulations to Jason and his team for another successful Launch conference — it’s become perhaps the best venue to see top-flight emerging startups that have the potential to be game-changers.

The post PlayTell: Video chat and storytelling that connects loved ones appeared first on Socialbrite.

PTA conference: Embracing community outreach while protecting student privacy

On Friday I flew down to Anaheim to give a 90-minute presentation, “Communicating in a Networked World,” to a packed room of about 250 attendees at the California State PTA Convention.

We had a great give an take about how social media can be used, by Parent Teacher Associations and other organizations, to advance schools’ and school districts’ business goals. I present at a lot of workshops and it was great to see the amount of interaction throughout the session — not just questions to me but PTA reps pitching in to help their colleagues.

Topics covered Facebook, Twitter, storytelling, Pinterest, Scoop.it, community strategies and more. More than half the workshop was spent on Facebook — probably 80 percent of the PTAs in the room had a Facebook page, compared with 20 percent that had a Twitter account.

Business reasons for using social media

Why use social media if you’re a PTA or educational association? I suggested these reasons as a starting point:

1. Enhance the educational experience at your school (this needs to be the main reason, and one that you revisit time and again)
2. Promote your PTA, school or school district
3. Involve the community in decision-making
4. Feedback loop with community
5. Enlist volunteers

1. Build an online community of supporters
2. Raise funds for a cause or campaign
3. Get people to attend your events
4. Enhance existing communications programs
5. Connect with peers at other PTAs or potential partners.

A fair chunk of the workshop was spent addressing issues of student privacy and legal liability. Legal waivers, understandably, are a part of life in the social media trenches at local PTAs. The best solutions I heard were these:

• Get students’ parents to sign a waiver form when you’re at an event where you capture images of the students for use on Facebook or elsewhere.

• Make sure the waiver doesn’t just cover the school but also the PTA, which is in most cases a separate legal entity.

• But I also pointed out that a fair amount of outside content can be shared on Facebook and Twitter, including student groups like Hiki No Student News, a network of more than 70 public, private and charter schools, from elementary level through high school, in Hawaii. There are a number of interesting student-run citizen media outfits whose updates are worth sharing on Facebook — without a waiver of any kind.

A resource page for PTAs

I created a PTA landing page on Socialbrite to help PTA reps and educators access resources and tutorials on how to monitor key terms, how to create media and tell stories, how to strategically use Facebook and Twitter, and how to enlist the community on behalf of your organizational mission. Feel free to download the presentation on SlideShare.

The post How to use social media for students & schools appeared first on Socialbrite.

Free Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook helps you define a policy, roles & messaging

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, cause organizations, brands, businesses, educators.

Last month I sat on a panel at SXSW Interactive with three fellow nonprofit community managers to discuss boundaries in online community management. Organizations and community managers are grappling with this, and the active Q&A (documented here) during the session was a testament to this fact. Idealware and Darim Online, with support from Balance Interactive, have just released a free Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook for nonprofits trying to figure out how to get a handle on the personnel side of social media.

Why do you need a social media policy? The workbook introduction sums it up clearly:

“A good social media policy will provide clear guidelines as to what staff should and shouldn’t do when posting and interacting with the community on a day-to-day basis, freeing them up to think more strategically. It’s also likely to help leadership feel more comfortable with the less-formal nature of social media by letting them establish boundaries for its use.”

In this simple yet complete guide, the authors walk through many of the critical social media policy issues with which organizations struggle: the reasons for a policy, applying organizational values to the policy, social media roles, what to say online, social media monitoring strategy, responding to criticism online, responding to other comments online, privacy and permissions, and thinking through copyright and attributions. Each section offers at least one highlighted example from an organization that has struggled with the same issue, and how the issue was resolved.

When I was an online community manager, I was left to navigate the online community without guidance. I found myself making judgment calls on the fly about how much about myself to reveal personally when interacting within other online communities, how to deal with negative criticism, staying on message when developing personal relationships with community members, and whether or not to use my personal social media accounts to promote organizational efforts. The Social Media Policy Workbook is a godsend for organizations grappling with just these issues.

What I love about the workbook

• It is non-judgmental and approachable. There are no set rules or strictures; policy positions are laid out along a continuum of choices that best fit an organization’s values, mission and culture.
• It is hands on. It’s really a workbook, and every section of the workbook includes probing questions, guided exercises and space for answers.
• Real-world stories and experiences from organizational staff support each section of the workbook.
• The companion social media template is terrific. The online template is not a duplicate of the workbook; it’s a companion piece  of sample language taken from existing social media policies of other organizations.
• It is short, sweet and to the point. At 20 pages, it’s just the perfect length not to intimidate.
• For every decision, there are guided questions, simple worksheets and space to add organization-specific data. For example, it includes a stellar worksheet intended to help leadership consider social media roles and responsibilities within the organization.
• It includes provocative questions. As the introduction says, “chances are good that you’ll find the conversations you have as a team are every bit as important as the product you end up with.”

Drawing the line between personal & professional

The workbook could benefit from a section about how personal you want your organization to act or appear online. I struggled with this same issue as an online manager: Do I sign the organization’s Twitter updates with my initials? Should I add my name to any/some/all of the Facebook posts? Should I put my name at the top of our Foursquare account?  It would be helpful to include in the workbook a list of the social media channels, and ask which circumstances in which it is more or less appropriate to connect as a person rather than “a logo” online. Chapter two, “Your Organization’s Social Media Values,” could easily be modified to include this discussion.

I also wish that the workbook had included a discussion or decision-tree around posting within other professional spaces (LinkedIn groups, other Facebook Pages) as a staff person. How and when to identify the fact that you also work at a certain organization is an issue all staff encounter at times.

The Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook is an essential resource for initiating, discussing and drafting your organization’s social media policies. Download it here.

If you are looking for a starting point for your social media policy, look no further.

The post Sort out your team’s social media roles appeared first on Socialbrite.

Free series will help you kick-start your social enterprise

This is Earth Week, and Green Marketing TV is putting on the first Green Business Entrepreneurs Success Summit, aimed at uniting purpose and profit for a sustainable planet. Socialbrite founder J.D. Lasica is participating Thursday at 11 am ET, 8 am PT.

Guest post by Lorna Li
Founder, Green Marketing TV

Are you a green business owner or social entrepreneur who believes you can make a positive impact in the world without going broke? Have you always longed to start a sustainable business, but you’re not quite sure how to do it or don’t know what you want to sell?

Whether you’re an aspiring social entrepreneur or already have a sustainable business you want to take to the next level, you’ll get valuable information just by attending this free virtual event series.

The Green Business Entrepreneurs Success Summit

The Green Business Entrepreneurs Success Summit is a free virtual week-long series (let’s call it an alternative Green MBA), featuring the visionary leaders who are defining the green economy and ethical marketplace, plus marketing gurus who will help you take your business to the next level.

Here are the details:

When: April 16-20 (Monday to Friday), 2012

Cost: Free. Brought to you by Green Marketing TV

Registration: To get access to the calls, please register

Who should attend

• Established green business owners and green business professionals
• Mission-driven entrepreneurs who believe in sustainability
• Green marketers & green product designers
• Forward-thinking intrapraneurs driving corporate sustainability initiatives
• Early-stage green startup entrepreneurs
• Aspiring green and social entrepreneurs researching innovative business ideas
• Change-makers seeking to unite purpose, passion and profit

What you’ll learn

• Evaluating the marketplace & identifying your niche
• Developing your visionary business idea
• Raising capital through business plan competitions, crowdfunding & VC investment
• Growing your business without going crazy
• Marketing your business on a bootstrap budget

Panel topics for the summit

Monday April 16 | Track 1 – The Growth of the Green Economy & Ethical Markets

Here we cover the state of the sustainable economy and socially responsible markets. We’re going to look at the size of the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) market and uncover the hottest market opportunities. We will discover extraordinary companies that are solving the world’s most pressing concerns, and learn how they succeeded.

• What will it take to co-create a green economy?
• The greening of mainstream business in non-green markets
• Ways sustainable business is going global & improving social conditions
• Hottest opportunities in the $290 billion US LOHAS market
• Making green sexy: Guerrilla marketing tactics for small green businesses

Register now

Tuesday April 17 | Track 2 – From Visionary Business Idea…

This series will help you identify your unique genius, leave your day job, create a business plan, and embark on your journey to financial freedom. From business plan competitions, to online fundraising tools and social venture funding, we also look at some funding options for social entrepreneurs and what it takes to attract investors.

• Keys to manifesting entrepreneurial success using the law of attraction
• Hacking social enterprise business plan competitions
• How to attract VC investors to fund your social enterprise
• Who’s funding what in the social capital marketplace
• The art of defining your niche & attracting your perfect-fit clients
• How to launch a successful crowdfunding campaign

Register now

Wednesday April 18 | Track 3 – …To Thriving Green Enterprise

Once you’ve launched your sustainable social venture, what does it take to reach your target audience and scale your business, without going crazy? In this track, experts talk to us about what it takes to succeed as an emerging entrepreneur. Plus, we’ll cover some high impact green businesses that are coming out with innovative products to feed your creative mind and keep you inspired.

• The new rules of green marketing: What green entrepreneurs need to know now
• Small companies creating cool green products
• How to power-network your way to a more sustainable world
• Online productivity tools every small business should know about
• Innovative social entrepreneurs who are creating scalable solutions

Register now

Thursday April 19 | Track 4 – Grow Your Good Business With Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a powerful and free way to grow your business, expand your reach, and create a community of fans around your business who will promote you and buy from you over and over again. But many small businesses don’t see the ROI in social media and have a hard time getting it to work for them. In this track, we will show you what you are doing wrong, and how to do social media right.

• Your small business social media command central
• Cracking the code to profitable social media marketing as a small business
• Your social media launch blueprint & advanced strategies for savvy marketers
• Facebook – From social time suck to lead generation machine
• What it takes to build a 6 figure business for good blogging empire
• From green blog to green business – creative blog monetization strategies

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Friday April 20 | Track 5 – Bootstrap Internet Marketing for Green & Socially Responsible Business

Small businesses have smaller marketing budgets, but this doesn’t mean you can’t compete with big brands, and even out market them. As an SMB, you have the advantage of strategic agility, while big businesses often take months to execute on a simple web strategy because of the politics and bureaucracy. This track focuses on your optimizing your website and content marketing strategies that drive organic web traffic.

• Creating your first small business website on a bootstrap budget
• WordPress SEO strategies for time-strapped small businesses
• The art of turning website visitors into adoring customers
• Why local SEO matters for your small green business
• Grow your sustainable business with green affiliate marketing

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28 speakers

Here’s the speaker lineup. Speakers include:

Alisa Gravitz, Executive Director Green America & Green Festivals
Andrea Vahl, Social Media Consultant and author of, “Facebook Marketing All-In-One For Dummies”
Bob Doyle, CEO Boundless Living & Wealth Beyond Reason, Law of Attraction and “The Secret”
Daan Elffers, Founder ELCAMEDIA Cradle to Cradle Marketing Agency
David Mihm, Co-Founder of GetListed.org & Local SEO Consultant
Elena Christopoulos, Interim President Green Chamber of Commerce
George Kao, Holistic Marketing Coach
Greg Wendt, CFP and Founder of Green Economy Think Tank and Co-Founder of Green Business Networking
Jacquie Ottman, Author of The New Rules of Green Marketing
JD Lasica, Founder of Socialbrite.org & Socialmedia.biz
Joey Shepp, Founder Earthsite and Sustainable Programs Director of Dominican University of CA School of Business and Leadership
Joost de Valk, Founder Yoast.com & Creator of WordPress SEO Plugin
Karen Lee, Founder EcoKaren and Eco Etsy Team Captain
Katrina Heppler, Founder 77webstudio
Kriss Bergethon, Founder Solar Sphere
KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz, CEO & Founder of Sustainable Life Media & Sustainable Brands Conference
Kyle Rutkin, Author and Founder of Palooza Press
Lorna Li, Founder Green Marketing TV
Morgan Morris, Co-Founder Inspire Green
Nick Aster, Founder Triple Pundit, Co-Founder TreeHugger
Nikki Pava, Co-Founder EcoTuesday
Rich Brooks, President Flyte New Media
Scott Cooney, Founder GreenBusinessOwner.com
Shawn Berry, Co-Founder LIFT Business Coaching
Shel Horowitz, Author of “Guerilla Marketing Goes Green”
Tyler Gage, Co-Founder Runa Amazon Guayusa Tea Company
Tad Hargrave, Founder Marketing for Hippies
Warren Fligg, Founder Performance-Based Green Affiliate Network

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Related

• 4 ways nonprofits can learn from social entrepreneurs (by Lorna Li on Socialbrite)

The post A Success Summit for green business entrepreneurs appeared first on Socialbrite.

A game with a serious underlying message about joining the marrow donor registry

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, cause organizations, do-gooders, private citizens.

Guest post by Lynn Treadwell
BeTheMatch

Be the Match, run by the National Marrow Donor Program, is tapping into people’s online social networks to educate in an entertaining way. And we just launched a fun new social media campaign called My Social Strand that we hope you’ll find not only worth sharing but perhaps worth emulating with your own organization.

Through Facebook Connect, users can create a dynamic and highly personalized infographic that reflects, with some good humor, the individual’s personality, activities, relationships and more.

For example, my own personal My Social Strand profile shows me to be an optimist. Some 25% of my friends are, like me, Nerds & Proud. And the No. 1 song on the day I was married is “My Life Would Suck without You,” by Kelly Clarkson (and it’s so true!). Woefully, I also learned that three of my Facebook friends are likely to be affected by leukemia during their lifetime.

And that’s the point. Woven through this social network game is education about the need for people to join Be The Match Registry operated by the National Marrow Donor Program, which has been helping patients receive the transplants they need for more than 20 years. If you don’t know anyone who’s yet been affected by cancer, you likely will. In fact, each year, more than 10,000 patients in the United States are diagnosed with a life-threatening leukemia or lymphoma, and their best or only hope of a cure is a transplant from an unrelated adult donor or umbilical cord blood unit.

Ultimately, the goal of My Social Strand is to show people that everyone is unique, yet connected in some way. So any one person could save a life by joining the Be The Match Registry.

Visit mysocialstrand.com and learn more about the new effort. Better yet, why not join the 9.5 million other registered potential marrow donors at BeTheMatch.

The post My Social Strand: A social media campaign worth sharing appeared first on Socialbrite.

Education-focused social media conference comes to SF April 4

Editor’s note: Socialbrite attended last year’s edSocialMedia Bootcamp in San Francisco, and we’re media partners for the edSocialMedia Summit coming to Fort Mason in San Francisco on April 4. Get $50 off your admission by using discount code ‘Socialbrite.’

Target audience: Educators, students, nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, cause organizations, Web publishers, general public.

Guest post by Madeline Senkosky
Community Manager, edSocialMedia

With the edSocialMedia Summit fast approaching, we wanted to share some insight into the thinking behind our collection of presenters and topics. Founded in 2008, edSocialMedia explores the role of social media in education by putting on a series of workshops and professional development events at schools across the nation and facilitating training at regional and national conferences. We expect the Summit to be the biggest event yet.

Hear from presenters who deliver practicality

1We’re ready to hear from the pros, the ones who do this for a living and can tell us where we should spend our time. Our goal with the Summit is to deliver an incomparable slate of speakers with a seasoned track record. We found presenters who would share their personal playbook and their own experiences, leaving you with practical strategies to implement in your own organization. They have tested (and sometimes broken) the methods that they will share. You can be confident that their approach to social media is defined by real experience.

Just take a quick look of who is on the docket:

• Brian Carter (@briancarter), best-selling author on Facebook, promises to deliver 99 ways that your school or organization can encourage your fans to listen and interact.

• Rand Fishkin (@randfish), the CEO of SEOmoz, is often dubbed as one of the best names currently in the inbound marketing and SEO space. Rand will talk about how organizations can best manage the creation and promotion processes for their social media content, including how to effectively use analytics to gain better traction.

• Georgy Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy), founder of Crosstown Digital Communications and co-founder of MeetContent, will focus on how you can tap the resources of your community to craft a more accurate and authentic story for your organization.

• Erin Swanson (@explodingsoul), the marketing programs manager for Water.org (@water), is going to talk specifically about how nonprofits can leverage their social networks to raise money for a great cause.

• John Hill (@linkedinjohn), the higher education evangelist for LinkedIn, will talk about how organizations can leverage their alumni to make stronger resources for current students and development offices.

• Andy Shaindlin (@alumnifutures), the Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations & Annual Giving at Carnegie Mellon University, will share his thoughts on how education and nonprofit leaders can balance the weight of creativity in leadership roles.

• Ian Symmonds (@symmonds) will talk about how organizations can employ video to show their story in a more compelling light. His examples will provide creative and content standards to shoot for.

At the end of the day, it would be hard not to walk away with a head full of ideas about how to elevate your social media strategies to help create an active, giving community.

Carve time out of your schedule to network and brainstorm

2We can all relate to the notion that we’re short on time. That’s why the schedule for the conference is designed to maximize networking time along with professional development. Attending the conference will give you the inspiration to come up with new ideas on how to generate stronger, more engaged social communities, and the time to talk it out with other’s who are looking for the same thing. This is time well spent, and it will pay dividends.

Give and get with the same ticket

3edSocialMedia is donating 25 percent of the profits to local, education-focused charitable organizations. As an attendee, you can get and give back with the same ticket.

Know a good organization that could use the support? Send us a note or leave a comment below.

The post 3 reasons you should attend the edSocialMedia Summit appeared first on Socialbrite.