Make it easy to participate, make it mobile — and don’t forget the fun!

One of the great success stories of online advocacy has been DoSomething.org, a not-for-profit that encourages young people to use the power of online to “do good stuff offline.”

Last fall I moderated a panel at BlogWorld Expo with DoSomething chief technology officer George Weiner, and last month I co-presented a Social Media for Social Good bootcamp at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service with George.

So during a brief break in the action I got him to talk about how DoSomething spurs 1.2 million young people a year to take action on behalf of a social cause they care about.

“Young people have this amazing thing they can do that doesn’t require car, money or an adult,” he says. Simply put, any young person — 25 or younger, with a sweet spot of 16- to 17-year-olds — can launch a social cause campaign about any cause they feel passionately about.

The nation’s largest cause site for young people, DoSomething has about 30,000 cause projects started by young people.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Success comes down to a combination of factors

The annual DoSomething Awards airs on VH1 in August.

The site’s success comes down to these factors:

• They make it easy to participate by lowering the barriers to entry.

• They’re laser-focused on catering to young people.

• They make it easy to take part in campaigns via mobile devices.

• They try to make causes fun by emphasizing use of participants’ social networks.

“This generation is far more engaged than anyone can possibly understand or measure due to the amount of conversations going on in social media,” George says.

For instance, DoSomething partnered with Better World Books on the Epic Book Drive, a campaign that collected more than 250,000 books to benefit the Recovery School District in New Orleans.

Head to DoSomething to find a cause that resonates with you. And don’t forget to look for the DoSomething Awards on VH1 in August. Have a question or need help? Text HELPME to 30644.

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Smart ways to tap into the fast-growing business network

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, cause organizations, companies, brands, start-ups, citizen publications. This is part two of a series on how nonprofits, businesses and other organizations can take advantage of LinkedIn. Also see part one:

• Highlights of LinkedIn’s new program for nonprofits

Last month I presented a webinar to the Darim Online community about how to use LinkedIn for Nonprofits. The program is so new — it just launched on May 9 — that most nonprofits don’t even know it exists.

When I was preparing for the webinar, two things struck me: why cause-focused groups may not work well on LinkedIn (more on that below), and how much LinkedIn offers. The presentation focuses on five ways to best utilize LinkedIn professionally: be goal-oriented, optimize both your personal and company profiles, utilize groups, and use LinkedIn Answers.

With more than 100 million users, 44 million of them in the United States, LinkedIn is a social network you can’t afford to ignore. If I had to offer three tips about using LinkedIn effectively, they would be:

• Think about why you and your organization want to be one LinkedIn, and how you use it will follow.
• Identify a combination of 10 keywords and keyword phrases that best describe you, and 10 others that best describe the organization. Integrate these keywords and keyword phrases into your personal and organization profiles.
• Complete all employee personal LinkedIn profiles to 100%, as well as the organizational profile.

Start with your goals

The key to using any social media platform effectively is to use it to meet your goals. Decide first why you (or your organization) would want to use LinkedIn (such as finding collaborators, funders, or colleagues). Once you know why you want to use LinkedIn, how you will use LinkedIn follows. For example, if you want to use LinkedIn to connect with foundations then you might:

• Search for people who work at those foundations.
• Join groups that they have joined and participate.
• Ask for introductions through mutual LinkedIn connections.
• Use LinkedIn Answers to ask a question about contacting foundations.

Identifying your goals will dictate your LinkedIn strategy.

Optimize your personal profile

One aspect of optimizing your profile is completing it fully. Be sure to include your photo, a summary of who you are, keywords and interests, and a summary of what you’ve accomplished in every position. It’s also important to have at least five recommendations, since you can search LinkedIn by number of recommendations.

Use the “advanced search” option to understand how you can be found, and include those in your profile. Some of the search parameters are by industry, geographic location, number of recommendations, and position titles.

Optimizing your profile also means placing important phrases and keywords within your profile. Think about 10 to 15 keywords and keyword phrases that describe you professionally. Specifically, place keyword-rich content within the summary, specialties, and interests sections.

Optimize your nonprofit or company profile

If your organization doesn’t have a company profile, create one on LinkedIn. Identify the 10-15 keywords that best describe your organization, and integrate them into the company profile for the profile to be search-ready. If your organization has a blog or Twitter presence, be sure to add those to the company profile to personalize the organization.

Here are five things you can do to optimize your organization’s presence on LinkedIn right now:

• Identify 10 – 15 keywords that describe your organization and its interests.
• Set up a company profile.
• Feed blog posts and Twitter into the profile.
• Highlight products or services using the Products/Services page.
• Assign someone to update it regularly.

Take advantage of the power of groups

Real connecting happens within groups. Search for groups related to your profession and industry. I also recommend joining groups your professional colleagues belong to as well. If a group is inactive or not valuable, leave. If it is, spend time within the group answering questions and offering help. When you find yourself in an interesting discussion, invite your colleagues to connect with you personally on LinkedIn after the discussion has concluded. I tend to see the same group of people commenting on group discussions, which helps me to know them through our participation.

When groups are managed by nonprofits, and the discussion is about the nonprofit or a specific cause, they tend to be inactive. I looked at many public nonprofit-administered groups while researching this presentation, and most were very inactive or not lively. (I cannot comment on private groups, though.) I suspect that cause-specific or nonprofit-specific groups aren’t very active because LinkedIn users want to discuss professional issues, not organizational mission. I also think that mission-based discussion has limited appeal while industry-based discussion has much broader appeal and basis for discussion. Additionally, LinkedIn is not best used as a platform for recruiting people to become direct stakeholders; there are other platforms much better suited to cause-focused discussions.

There appears to be two exceptions to the inactive nonprofit-administered groups rule: One is Autism Speaks, which has a very lively LinkedIn group, though I’m not able to comment on why this is the case. The other exception seems to be professional associations. For example, the alumni group of the Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust (a youth business mentoring program) is a very active group for business class alums to connect with others and possibly do business together.

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers is both a wonderful research tool and means to find new connections. By subscribing to the RSS feed of a certain category of questions (such as Social Entrepreneurship), you can stay up to date on the latest industry discussions, and also answer questions yourself. If your answer is selected as the “best answer,” you win the “best answer” designation, which enhances your professional credibility. Also, questions reach the entire LinkedIn community, not just your personal connections.

Here are five ways to take advantage of LinkedIn Answers:

1. Set up RSS feed subscriptions for your area.
2. Stay up to date in your field of expertise.
3. Become an expert with “Best Answers in” designation.
4. Ask the questions you really want to ask.
5. Search Answers for great information, insights. potential collaborators and colleagues.

Other LinkedIn goodies

I love looking at what’s going on in the LinkedIn labs. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed LinkedIn Maps (visualize your own network) and Signal (trending news stories shared by your connections) from the labs. Check back each month for new labs products.

Resources

Joanne Fritz of nonprofit.about.com published a great article with many tips for nonprofit professionals using LinkedIn. Fast Company also published an article with five LinkedIn tips you didn’t know. Read the excellent Net2 Think Tank discussion about using LinkedIn for change. Allison Fine interviews Amy Sample Ward and Estrella Rosenberg on how nonprofits can use LinkedIn on the December Social Good podcast. LinkedIn has a nonprofit learning center you can visit, as well. Drop in on the informative weekly LinkedIn Twitter chat at 8pm every Tuesday, hosted by @LinkedInExpert and @MartineHunter.

If you’d like to watch the recorded webinar that I presented with Darim Online, you may view it here.

What is your LinkedIn tip? What is the most useful thing about using LinkedIn that you’ve found?

Republished from Community Organizer 2.0.

Related

• Highlights of LinkedIn’s new program for nonprofits (Socialbrite)

• LinkedIn for Nonprofits

The post Nonprofit strategies for getting more out of LinkedIn appeared first on Socialbrite.

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.)

Another thing NATAL understands is that groups can generate fabulous conversation when the conversation and idea exchange is focused. A group about diabetes, for example, is likely to have too many discussion threads, and possibly a lot of spam. Alternatively, a group about diabetes research will be very focused on that topic and encourage discussion about the latest research by members who care passionately about diabetes research. Within the individual NATAL groups, the discussions are about the need for blood, the campaign and how people can help.

NATAL also made the campaign very personal. When you are talking about your own blood type, and you’ve self-identified as a specific blood donor, it’s personal. Given that, the discussions within the group will tend to be more personal, and the connection with the cause will be personal as well.

What do you think about the use of Facebook groups for things like blood donor campaigns? Do you know of other organizations that are successfully using Facebook groups?

Related

• Facebook tutorials on Socialbrite (free)

• 10 ways nonprofits can get more out of Facebook (Socialbrite)

• The differences between Facebook Pages and Groups (Socialbrite)

• 15 ways to enhance your Facebook influence (Socialbrite)

• Facebook 101 for nonprofits (Socialbrite)

The post How your nonprofit can make the most of Facebook groups appeared first on Socialbrite.

Amy Sample Ward on nonprofit technology from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Just before we launched Socialbrite.org, I met Amy Sample Ward in person for the first time. Amy’s a whirlwind of energy and passion about all things np tech (nonprofit technology), and I was so impressed that I immediately asked her to join the Socialbrite team.

But not before I got her to sit still for a few minutes to talk about nonprofit tech, Net Tuesdays — Amy is the global community builder for NetSquared — and being a catalyst for social change.

NP tech is social change work, whether you’re a nonprofit or an individual who wants to change her community or you’re a corporation that’s working on social benefit through a corporate social responsibility campaign, she says.

More than 36 cities around the world now hold monthly events as part of Net Tuesday, the offline component of NetSquared, and if you’re within driving distance, you should stop by and meet other change agents in your community. (Sarah Kennon does an outstanding job of organizing the Net Tuesdays in San Francisco.)

You don’t need to be a nonprofit org to get value out of Net Tuesdays, Amy says. Being able to convene offline shouldn’t be underestimated as a motivational force.

“Just to see how excited people get when they come together, it’s so rewarding,” she says.

She also discusses the nonprofit sector’s penchant for sharing knowledge. “I think people realize that we’re all going to get better if we share our knowledge instead of locking it down,” she says.

Amy offers tips for people who want to get involved in the social change movement. “Just start reading blogs and newsletters. … It’s such an infectious sharing community.”

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

The 9-minute video interview was conducted at NetSquared 2009 in San Jose, Calif. We’re so glad to have Amy on board as a partner in Socialbrite.

The post Using nonprofit tech to benefit society appeared first on Socialbrite.

As part of our silo-busting effort at Socialbrite, we’ll be showcasing cool technologies that haven’t received enough attention in the nonprofit and social change worlds. So here’s a one-minute video, announcing the launch of Socialbrite, that I created last night on Animoto:

Introducing Socialbrite.org. Nonprofit tech + Causes + Open source + Social media.

We’re using it at the top of our Media Center.

Check out Animoto: They’re doing amazing things with a very small staff. You can try out a few remixes for free, and choose from music and images on their site; after that, it’s 3 bucks a video or $30 a year.

I chose to upload Enur: “Calabria (Club Mix)” — given that it’s only a 60-second snippet and has a noncommercial context here, it clearly falls within fair use. (One image included in the video is Creative Commons licensed: Muchilottu Bhagavathy Theyyam ceremonial mask by freebird (bobinson).)

The post NPtech + causes + open source + social media appeared first on Socialbrite.

Nonprofits + technology = NTEN from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Holly Ross, executive director of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), talks about the organization’s mission in helping nonprofits learning how to effectively use technology and social media.

She talks about three new reports that should be of interest to nonprofits — including the just-released 2009 Nonprofit Social Network Survey Report and Small is the New Big: 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study — as well as We Are Media: Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits, a workshop/training series led by Beth Kanter.

All of the conference’s sessions are available as free audio downloads (plus PowerPoint presentations). In addition, several webinars are available as well, such as Using Facebook Pages for Social Good, $30 for members, $60 for nonmembers.

The interview was conducted at the conclusion of NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco on April 28, 2009. (Holly’s a friend, so we got a little silly at the end.) We had to find a makeshift “set” on a staircase at the San Francisco Hilton because there was no place anywhere to shoot with decent lighting and that wasn’t crazy-loud.

Next year’s NTC will be held in Atlanta in early April, and I hope to be back.

Coming up before that: ForeSee Results’ Nonprofit Website Study: Building Donations and Loyalty through the Web Channel, a free webinar on May 27.

Watch or embed the video on Vimeo
Download the video in H.264 at Archive.org

The post Helping nonprofits grapple with technology appeared first on Socialbrite.

The internet connection here is such that I don’t think a live blog portal will sustain itself.  So, I’m going to trouble shoot and just take some live notes here and post them as soon as possible.

Here goes…

Takeaways:

• How to use listening
• The right metrics
• Analytics tools

Panelists:

• Wendy Harmon: social media manager, philosophy is to use social media to execute mission
• Danielle Brigida: using social media to increase, reach, engagement and revenue
• Qui Diaz:Livingston, recently did research for the Philanthropy 2.0 report
• Sarah Granger: advise nonprofits on using social media for advocating and communicating

Themes that people want to learn:

• new metrics structures can bubble up
• funders of a 20th century mindset – what metrics speak to them
• what things need to be measured
• obama reach vs local reach
• industry benchmarks
• how to integrate tools without reinventing the wheel
• success stories

List, Learn, Adapt – concept from David Armano: “Insight must come before investment when implementing a social media project.”

Visualizing: number of months along the bottom, insight, return and dollars up the left

• Listening: hearing what people are talking about your issue or sector
• Learning: evaluating what is being said and what information is needed
• Adapting: using the listening and learning to inform how you change

Listening

• use monitoring tools
• know your keywords
• use your RSS reader
• engage and monitor responses
• engage internally

Discussion:

How/why does listening provide value?

• at ARC, listening has been the core value of our last three year’s of social media (mentioned online over 400 times a day), learn what people want and expect from us
• at NWF, listening has been the foundation of our social media movement, we are nothing unless someone thinks we are something
• everything before lays the foundation, everything during and after helps you improve and change your strategy
• listening has been to the community and to the quantitative results

How do you use a RSS feed like a rockstar?

• pull in hashtags from Twitter into the RSS reader (pull in the RSS of a search.twitter.com result)
• skim a lot, mark all as read liberally, don’t feel like i have to ingest everything

Listening based on location?

• ARC does for blood drives, etc.

How do you share your data?

• ARC – gather data every morning and share with organization via email; issues that seem sensitive or are newsworthy will contact subject matter experts to follow up
• ARC – social media team evaluate/watch everything and then send summary and highlights to team
• NWF – tag mentions in delicious with which programs or projects are mentioned, can share link to that tag on delicious with staff to see their section
• Sarah – use google alerts and a page that we update with mentions
• Qui – for clients that are larger, we set up media citation reports (like a word doc with titles and links and relevant info about the mentions and how they should respond)

How much time is spent listening?

• ARC – 33,000 employees, budget is over a billion $, 2-3 hours of concentrated listening every morning and then ambient listening all day
• NWF – 363 employees, budget is around 90 million, one hour every morning and then throughout the day (google alerts and rss every morning, then if there is something that happens throughout the day)
• Livingston – encourage small nonprofits to have at least a half time person doing listening and response (10 hours a week)
• Sarah – budget is 100,000s, 50% of the time we are listening, 15-20 hours a week personally listening

Listening tools:

• Netvibes
• Feed digest

Learning

• Think like a rocket scientist, document or journal your learnings
• Observe and sift through qualitative data like a primatologist or anthropologist

Beth’s learning process:

• document on the fly
• test and teweak
• pick the right metrics
• harvest insights
• look at what other nonprofits are doing in the space
• pause for reflection time before next reiteration: how to improve results?

Engagement metrics:

• create
• comment
• click
• collect
• critic

Think about which things you really need to track and measure those, not everything you could possibly track.

Discussion:

What is your learning process from social media? How do you involve the org?

• NWF – ad hoc, if you look at programs individually it is based on qualitative over quantitative, we adapt when we hear people saying i wish it was like this or i could do this
• Livingston – listening is everyone’s job, might start with social media person or dept but eventually want to make sure everyone is out there and closing the feedback loop
• Sarah – share by email because we are an online organization, can have a spreadsheet with stats and how they are growing, organization wide as well as campaigns, etc.

Examples:

• Yammer for internal sharing, it’s a Twitter for groups
• Delicious

What are some specific stories for using the right metrics:

• ARC – the right metrics are those that help you identify if you have reached your goals, so if you have a goal to offer real time information to the public in times of disaster for example, the measurement is if peole get the info they need (not fundraising or anything else), so we do that by asking them and collecting metrics like how many people retweet information on Twitter, etc. over time have gotten other metrics and impact from working on this goal
• NWF – focus on engagement, program called Wildlife Watch and is a space for people to share wildlife they see so asked people to use #nwf on twitter when they see wildlife, will track how many times the hashtag is used each day (hashtags.org) we use bit.ly and pop.url for tracking retweets (Check out Laura Lee Dooley’s URL shortener report!)
• Livingston – corporate example, Network Solutions, negative perseption issues related to their brand (google your organization’s name and “sucks” and see what comes up!), assessed the conversation and they had a 58% negative blog/conversation ratio (used manual researching, icerocket, forumtracker, search.twitter, etc.), new that was the metric/goal to track and 6 months later there was only 18% negative ratio
• Sarah – presidential commition on women in legisltation, legislator read our email wanted to do it and wrote a bill, so to raise awareness and support we asked people in membership what they wanted to see, asked them to come to us, gave qualitative feedback, had a tweetcast with feedback on Twitter, used facebook and tracking membership and

WeAreMedia Project (http://wearemedia.org/) has a listening toolbox!

Distinction between what you think they want to hear and what they want to know – can you address those separately?

• Livingston – HHS, wanted evaluation of pandemic flu conversation online, point was to understand what they were saying about the government and so on to really know what to address as an organization to that community

Culture change:

• NWF – social media is good for engagement but not always the engagement you expect, users on myspace and did a survey with all the members but only 400 responded and the boss wanted to discontinue social media work; don’t always need to hear what every person needs if you have that one person who will really tell  you useful things; there’s still community on myspace so we still update that blog and use the platform
• Sarah – a lot of resistance to social media in political groups, the key is biting off small pieces and educating people one at a time, finding someone to train and working with them so that they can educate another person
• organizational change is slow, you have to have patience, opinion starts to change once you find influencers within

Nonprofit staff are so overwhelmed, how many groups have someone to measure social media?

• survey in room: most prevalent is 20 hours/week with other job duties

Co-creation Networks, look at the ladder of engagement and the number of use and the level of engagement – need all of them in your ecosystem

Clicking = good – a change in knowledge doesn’t equal a change in behavior; can you measure that?

• NWF – greenhour.org so we share it with people in a newsletter and then see activity in a blog – we can’t see that they really did it in their home, it is hard to measure, but we are still seeing what seems to be real actions – don’t be afraid to ask!

Are there ways of catching offline datapoints?

• NWF – every program we have has an offline component, i try to integrate a social media strategy that leverages and encourages the offline part; like #nwf wildlife watch, raises your awareness offline if you can see something and tweet it, etc.
• ARC – it’s easier for us to suck in what people are already doing because we have found that it’s nearly 100% chance for people to give blood and then talk about it online if they have a space online
• Livingston – if you don’t have their email, call them, keep asking questions but it is labor intensive

Adapt

Fail formally – protesting Wendy’s with a photo sharing with a protest sign but only got a few people doing it, heard so much about how hard it was for people to participate, etc. but didn’t stop doing photo contests; instead they adapted.  next, with LOLseals campaign, they made it as easy as possible for people to participate, used the Flickr API to allow people to upload from their website instead of going to Flickr, etc. this time they got 3,000 photos and 2,500 email address.  But don’t do it again just because it worked, keep evolving. Facebook app for spay day, upload a photo of your pet and then do fundraising for the Human Society with people voting on your pet’s animal. 13,000 installs of the facebook app, and $600,000 raised.

Discussion:

How have you reiterated?

• Livingston – Network Solutions, free online video event, know who will send the most traffic second time around
• NWF – we are still very new at this, there haven’t been a lot of programs, the photo contest is slowly moving online; we tweak all the time though, you can’t be satisfied because you can always make it better, like with #nwf as it got more participation we moved the stream onto our website
• ARC – we have very few campaigns like Carrie’s at HSUS, but we tweak constantly, today everything is 100% different than a year ago but it was all very small tiny changes
• HSUS – integrated it with everything else, email campaigns/newsletters, offline, etc.

Any resources to move from national to local?

• ARC – we are set up similarly, Robin Parker does Oregon Trail chapter for example

How do you change around from failure?

• NWF – there is no failure. everything can be taken to scale. you have to learn from everything, if it doesn’t work one time it could still work another time. have to decide if it is worth investing in.

Have you seen examples of your org changing?

• NWF – initially i was the outcast, driving traffic but being sneaky; you need buy in to really do it. for some people it’s intuitive but others it isn’t. we had a COO who noticed social media was important and moved me to the education dept, if you are in marketing and someone says not to do it, keep doing it! i have changed my role a bit so that i serve as a consultant internally to get people started. i don’t want to force people, if they don’t want to do it, then they don’t have to.  if it isn’t natural then it won’t work.
• Sarah – worked with a tech oriented nonprofit, had an old tech faction and the new tech faction; eventually we just got new people on and they wanted new, too so you just move on.
• Beth – learning a lot from resisters now and strategies for it. have to have bottom up way of organizing social media but also evolve into a star fruit so that it goes all directions.

What is your ONE takeaway?

• be more intentional
• failure is adapting
• tools in context
• when you miss in battleship you take another shot
• want to embrace failure
• all about relationships
• delicate balance between involvement and take over
• take chances
• they can’t control people when they are taking part
• metrics spring from your goals
• listen more
• even one voice can give you great insight
• if you are really interested in this stuff and you see the opportunity at your organization, just try it and see what happens
• metrics bubble up
• even if people say the same thing loudly doesn’t mean the minority isn’t speaking too
• reminder to talk to each other

Thanks!

This post originally appeared at Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech.

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