It’s the Friday Edit, aka, things I’ve been reading or watching around the web that I found interesting, useful, or downright funny. I hope you enjoy them, too.

I have to start with the funny because, well, it’s needed this week! I saw this movie trailer for NGO – Nothing Going On from Poverty to Power and it seems both hilarious, cringe-worthy, and painfully true in parts. Give it a watch below to see what I mean.

The current global cyber attack, built on ransomware, could wreck your communications impact and a lot more. Here’s a great, short post from the Getting Attention blog by Nancy Schwartz on how to protect yourself.

A great recap on the State of Digital Diplomacy by Nancy Groves – Head of #socialUN @UN Dept of Public Info

Here’s a quick two-minute recap on the takeaways from the World Economic Forum on Africa by Devex:

Here’s four creative summertime fundraising projects to focus on over the ‘lazy’ days of summer. ;)

This made me laugh: A guided meditation for nonprofit professionals. Also, Nonprofit AF is both an informative, often thought-provoking, AND hilarious blog. Recommended reading for us nonprofit unicorns.

Have a great weekend!

The post The Friday Edit – Links I’m Loving appeared first on Socialbrite.

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

While a number of promising Web 2.0 social enterprises have launched in the past few years, SourceRise, which just soft launched in beta last week, is showing great momentum right out of the gate. SourceRise, founded by our very own Caroline Avakian (managing partner at Socialbrite), connects journalists and bloggers to sources at international NGOs and nonprofits in an effort to diversify the voices represented in the news and to increase the number of well researched, compelling development and foreign news stories in traditional media.

Last week I interviewed Caroline to find out more about SourceRise and how it’s building bridges between the media and nonprofit sources.

SourceRise is a social enterprise that directly connects journalists to sources at international NGOs and nonprofits. In a time when international news gathering budgets are shrinking at record rates, it is becoming more difficult for major news outlets to independently cover international and development news stories. Via a network of journalists and expert global NGO sources, SourceRise enables development foreign news reporting rooted in real time, accuracy, and deep context

SourceRise is a social enterprise that directly connects journalists to sources at international NGOs and nonprofits. In a time when international news gathering budgets are shrinking at record rates, it is becoming more difficult for major news outlets to independently cover international and development news stories. Via a network of journalists and expert global NGO sources, SourceRise enables development foreign news reporting rooted in real time, accuracy, and deep context.

We connect journalists and nonprofits by sending out source request emails from journalists to sources, and by facilitating digital media briefings on breaking global hot topics or humanitarian crises. SourceRise also holds media call-to-actions around global issues that aren’t getting the media coverage they deserve, by connecting journalists and bloggers to sources who can immediately provide information and context around important issues. In addition, SourceRise matches journalists, photojournalists and other media makers with NGOs able to host them in the areas of the world they want to report on.

A couple of years ago, when I actually started telling people about my budding idea that would eventually became SourceRise, colleagues would tell me, “Yeah, nice idea but aren’t there already development news sites writing about these stories?” I realized that when people free-associate on “foreign” or “development news,” there’s an underlying assumption that it should live on a separate news site, that there’s no place or desire for it in mainstream news. Interestingly, we know that’s not the case. Data shows us that people actually want more international news brought to them on the news channels and sites they’re already watching and reading. It became very apparent to me that there is a perception and language disconnect when we speak about development or foreign news. That disconnect fuels my efforts to mainstream SourceRise and change the way we view and create news.

SourceRise is different in that our focus is on development news reporting, something that other reporter/source connector sites don’t focus on. At a time when foreign news desks are shutting down due to budget constraints, our mission as a social enterprise is to solve that problem by helping journalists connect easily to vetted expert sources they can trust and quote in their pieces, which ultimately provides better, more contextualized development and foreign news coverage.

Mainstream media and NGOs have had a longstanding relationship. Journalists often reach out to NGO expert sources for access to remote parts of the world — they rely on them for quotes, to provide context to political, social and cultural issues on the ground, to give them info and statistics they can reference in their stories. Currently, we are seeing a huge shift in the international reporting landscape that has led to the shut down of many foreign bureaus of even major news outlets. This has led to many NGOs and nonprofits researching and pitching their own stories, sharing sources and analysis and even providing travel logistics, guides and housing to reporters. In short, without the help of NGOs, many foreign news stories would never be told. SourceRise is the result and the logical next step to advancing this mutually beneficial relationship.

A recent survey by MPO Research Group found that American media are missing the mark when it comes to providing international coverage to the public. When MPO asked respondents what they think about the coverage of international news, over half said there should be more of it and just over a quarter think it’s fine just as it is, indicating that there’s a lot of room for improvement from our media outlets.

The bottom line is, we look at the Internet and think we have this wide view of the world, when in fact we’re not really as connected as we think we are. In the 1970s US global news was about 35-45% of the mainstream media we consumed. Now, it’s about 12-15%. Development and foreign news have been relegated to “special” news sites. You have to go searching for that news, because you’re not really going to find much of it on the sites you’re likely already reading. So, we’ve slowly adapted to that shift through the years. I think that’s really problematic on many levels. The real problems of the world we need to solve are global in scale, that require global conversations to get to global solutions. We’re nowhere near that right now.

SourceRise is currently in beta and a social good startup to keep an eye on!

• Sign up on the SourceRise website

• Nonprofits/NGOs can sign up directly here

• Journalists and bloggers can sign up directly here

• Follow SourceRise founder Caroline Avakian on Twitter

• Follow SourceRise on Twitter

• Fan SourceRise on Facebook

The post SourceRise: Connecting nonprofits/NGOs to journalists appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: NGOs, nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, cause and advocacy organizations, educators, general public.

We’re still winding down after a whirlwind day Friday at the United Nations. At the invitation of Amine Lamrabat, Socialbrite sent Shonali Burke and myself to give a presentation on how NGOs (international nonprofits, chiefly) working with the UN can use social media to create impact and advance their causes.

This was one of the most rewarding and invigorating gatherings I’ve attended in quite some time, for both the knowledgeable give and take as well as the astonishing scope of the social good being done by the people in the room. Among those attending were representatives of Mercy International Association, Global Action to Prevent War and Armed Conflict, the Norway Mission to the UN, the American Cancer Society, representations from throughout the UN and many others.

Here’s a Flickr set of 32 photos I snapped. Some of the topics that came up during our talk included:

• How do we scale a campaign to 1 million signatures? Our answer: Set realistic goals. Approach the campaign in phases. Build up a community of support and deputize supporters to participate on your behalf. Learn from past mistakes. Depending on your budget, consider using a large advocacy platform like Care2.

• How should we deal with an autocratic regime? From China to Myanmar to Iran, we’ve seen examples of governments that won’t hesitate to crack down on pro-democracy dissidents. Advocacy groups like Witness have learned a great deal about protecting the identity of pro-democracy activists, so absorb their learnings. (See a Witness official’s guest post on Socialbrite on What are our ethical responsibilities when recording video of people under oppression?) Follow Rebecca MacKinnon on Twitter discussing China and cyber-activism. See the latest Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy. And also see the brilliant work-around Tunisian human rights activists undertook by geotagging stories of human rights abuses around the presidential palace using Google Earth, Google Maps and YouTube.

• Should we launch social media accounts in multiple languages? Readers, what do you think? My advice was to use no more than two languages in the same social stream, but to launch separate accounts in multiple languages when you have both the capacity and market opportunity for it.

• How to improve SEO results? Well, that’s a subject for a return day of training at the UN, I hope.

As always, we welcome follow-up questions and conversations with anyone who attended, or missed, Friday’s session. Email me, email Shonali, or call us at 925-600-7641.

Related

• How NGOs can use social media to combat poverty (Socialbrite)

• Fighting poverty by enhancing social entrepreneurship

• Witness: Putting a face on human rights (Socialbrite)

The post A day of social media at the United Nations appeared first on Socialbrite.

Today my Socialbrite partner Shonali Burke and I are giving a presentation to NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) at the United Nations.

Back in November, an invitation flew into our laps from Amine Lamrabat of the Civil Society and Outreach Unit (CSOU), Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD), Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). By gosh, when it comes to acronyms, nobody beats the UN!

The department is focusing in the new year on marshalling resources to combat poverty — quite a challenge, considering up to 80 percent of the world’s 7 billion people live in poverty or near-poverty conditions. (See stats from the World Bank.) So we tailored our presentation to highlight the work of some international nonprofits that are making an impact, especially in the developing world (or Global South, as some call it), including:

• Send a Cow, a UK-based nonprofit that is helping African farmers create a sustainable ecosystem and a process of paying it forward. Farmers who are helped, with training on how to grow crops in harsh climates, agree to pass that knowledge on to other farmers — along with a first-born calf. Send a Cow helps African farmers grow enough food to feed their families, sell their produce, start small businesses and rise out of poverty. They do a nice job with their website, produce high-quality videos and are growing a fan base on Twitter and Facebook, though we couldn’t spot any online fundraising or mobile efforts.

• USA for UNHCR’s Blue Key campaign, which Shonali is overseeing, has built a nice community over the past year, with occasional tweet-a-thons to raise funds, $5 per key, and awareness about the plight of refugees.

• In my view, charity: water has made the most astonishing use of social media and new media, with breathtakingly good videos, multimedia, photography and smart ways to mobilize social networks. Check out the story of charity: water video they did for their 5-year anniversary as well as the new WaterForward campaign. Also, see the video How charity: water changes lives through multimedia and find your charity: water project on a map — I’ve been using on that in my presentations for years.

We’ll also be discussing:

• Epic Change and its annual To Mama With Love campaign

• 1-to-1 micro-giving and micro-fundraising platforms, including Vittana, give2gether, Razoo, Causevox, Kiva (for loans) and DonorsChoose.

• We’re proud that Socialbrite strategist Ken Banks has created a mobile NewsWatch series for National Geographic online, focusing on use of SMS for social and economic good in the developing world. Also see Frontline SMS mobile case studies.

We’ll be tweeting about our UN appearance on our @socialbrite Twitter channel.

The post How NGOs can use social media to combat poverty appeared first on Socialbrite.