It’s hard to believe now, but in 2007-2008, most people had never heard of the term social media. 

Well, that changed fast. By fall 2008, “social media” was the hot new buzz phrase. And Socialbrite was there to help with activism, advocacy, and advice on everything from apps to storytelling techniques to tutorials on corporate social responsibility and social enterprises. Our Sharing Center won kudos and awards and Socialbrite received a number of honors from the nonprofit community for the service it provided.

But as we approach our 16th birthday, we need to shut things down. We’ll keep the site up for a while longer, so if you have some favorite articles or resources, please download them now.

Founder J.D. Lasica is heading up two different tech startups, Cruiseable and Authors A.I., as well as pursuing a career as an author. And the original Socialbrite team of social media experts has been pulled in new directions. Social media itself is having a bit of a midlife crisis, but there are plenty of other sites out there to fill the gap and help nonprofits and social enterprises fulfill their worthy missions.

If you are interested in purchasing the highly ranked socialbrite.org domain, contact us at (925) 413-3870.

Thank you for the wonderful ride.

The post Socialbrite is shutting down appeared first on Socialbrite.

Redesigned site has a renewed focus on serving nonprofits’ needs

For the past several months we’ve been working behind the scenes on several design changes for Socialbrite that we’ve just unveiled.

We’ve been successful since our founding in May 2009 with becoming perhaps the Web’s leading knowledge hub about how to use social media for social causes and to advance nonprofits’ missions. Beyond our hundreds of tutorials and content-rich Sharing Center, check out our rankings in Google for these search terms:

#1 fundraising tools
#1 free reports
#1 best survey
#1 best online survey
#1 or #2 open source tools
#1 or #2 media dashboard
#1 media strategy example

And several other keywords relevant to the nonprofit community.

New look and a more focused approach

The new site offers more — and a bit less:

• We’ve trimmed down, losing some of the widgets and gadgets from the sidebar and footer, which were nice eye candy but which were slowing down the site, while retaining some old favorites. (We’re still working on upgrading the Category pages over there in the right sidebar.)

• To make things even zippier, we moved from HostGator (so long, we won’t miss you) toWPEngine as our hosting platform.

• We purchased a TypeKit license to make the typography pop.

• We’re still on WordPress, of course, but moved to a versatile new theme, twentyeleven.

• We have a new Clients page, Team page and Services page.

• Most important, we’re eager to hear from you about how we might help with your strategy, online presence or campaign.

What do you like or hate? What should we be doing differently? Drop me an email at jd@socialbrite.org and tell us what you think.

The post Welcome to the new-look Socialbrite appeared first on Socialbrite.

Short answer: Yes for RSS feeds, no for email

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, Web publishers.

I‘ve been bloging since May 2001. I don’t remember when I set up my first FeedBurner account, but it was probably not long after it opened in February 2004 — and well before Google bought it. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters and other web-based content publishers.

Back in the day, FeedBurner was the heaven-sent answer to setting up RSS feeds. Today, creating an RSS feed is still important, but every blogging platform worth its salt has RSS feeds baked in.

Where FeedBurner went wrong, in my view, was in its offer to capture email addresses for your nonprofit or business and send updates whenever you published a new blog post.

What many, or perhaps most, organizations didn’t realize in the bargain was this: FeedBurner captured all of those email addresses — but your organization didn’t.

This became apparent to us here at Socialbrite when we began to take a hard look at our email list. Why, surely we would be able to build on top of the 3,615 people who have subscribed to our email updates since 2009, right?

Wrong.

Since its purchase by Google in 2007 for $100 million, FeedBurner has disappeared into a black hole. There is no support staff — this, from a company that made $10.6 billion in earnings in its most recent three-month period. Development has basically been non-existent for several years. If you have a question, you’re supposed to post it to a Google Apps forum — but even there, more likely than not, no one will answer you.

So, in the next couple of days, we’ll be scrapping our “Subscribe by email” entreaty to you fine readers over there in the right sidebar, because we have no way of communicating with the 3,615 people who have done just that.

If you’re in the same boat, take a look at the email newsletter offerings from MailChimp, VerticalResponse, Constant Contact, Emma and other services, or at full-fledged campaign and community outreach services like Salsa, NationBuilder or Advocate Interactive.

Agree? Disagree? What’s been your experience? Let me have it in the comments below.

Update #1: I’m happy to hear that I’m wrong. We’ve been trying to find out how to do this for months, and no one from FeedBurner has ever replied. So, how do you view and export the addresses of your subscribers? Happy to update our post detailing how this is done. Here is all we see when we try to Export our subscriber list (SingleFeedStats) as either a CSV or in Excel:

Update #2: David Lee King provided this guide on where to find your FeedBurner email subscribers. Never would have discovered this in the FeedBurner dashboard on my own (thanks David!):

• click Publicize
• click email subscriptions
• click subscription management
• scroll down, click View Subscriber Details on the subscription management page
• click Export CSV
• Column A of the CSV gives you all the email addresses.

What’s interesting is that this means we have 1,562 people who subscribe to updates by email (and receive automated blog post updates from us) and 2,053 who subscribe to content updates via RSS. Here’s the screenshot of this page on FeedBurner:

The post Should nonprofits bother with FeedBurner? appeared first on Socialbrite.

Getting your supporters to take the next step when your video ends

This is part two of a three-part series on how nonprofits can create engaging multimedia stories that motivate supporters to take a desired action. Part two describes the use of call-to-action video overlays to boost ROI. Also see part one:

• Creating compelling advocacy videos for nonprofits

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, businesses and their corporate social responsibility (CSR) divisions, video producers, Web publishers.

While the audience for online video continues to grow, the advances in Web video technology are changing at a dizzying pace, making it hard for nonprofits to keep up. There are several good online video platforms and third-party apps available to convert views into actions. YouTube’s call-to-action video overlay, third-party video apps and customized video domains or microsites offer great options for boosting the return on investment of your nonprofit’s video program.

YouTube’s call-to-action video overlay

Most nonprofit Web videos make mention of their organization’s URL either verbally or with graphics edited into the video. But the effectiveness of your message is cut short if you don’t include a clickable call to action that takes visitors to your website, Facebook Page or Twitter page to make a donation or to take another desired action.

YouTube’s nonprofit program offers two such call-to-action video apps that can be easily implemented: overlays and annotations.

If your nonprofit is not already part of the Google for nonprofits program, consider applying. The free program offers many benefits and can become a center for creating effective calls to action and engagement:

• Free or discounted version of Google Apps for your organization
• Premium branding capabilities and increased uploads on YouTube
• The option to drive fundraising through a Google Checkout “Donate” button
• The ability to add a call-to-action overlay on your videos to drive campaigns
• The ability to post volunteering opportunities on the YouTube Video Volunteers platform
• Free Adwords advertising

Examples of video calls to action — in action

Here are a few examples of how nonprofits have incorporated overlays and annotations to drive a specific course of action.

This Angry Kid Greenpeace video is heartfelt and does a great job delivering its message. Unfortunately, the creators stop short by simply offering engaged viewers the opportunity to visit their website at the end with no actionable link:

The Darius Goes West video takes it a step further and adds a call-to-action overlay to visit Darius’ Twitter page as part of the YouTube player:

The use of  annotations to engage the viewer and encourage interactivity can be seen in The Hug The World video (after the initial 15 second ad):

This Greenpeace video celebrating a victory over rainforest destruction also uses annotations in their call to action by encouraging the viewer to “like” the video:

Third-party video player overlays

There are several companies that have emerged recently that market call-to-action video player skins that are designed to be layered on top of players such as YouTube or Vimeo. Viewbix, for example, offers “to put the entire Web experience in the video player.”  Their software allows video creators to add elements of their websites, social networks and more into the video player so that when they share the video on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube they take all their calls-to-action and content with them.

To illustrate, Socialbrite partner Major Multimedia, a nonprofit video training and production company, created a Viewbix overlay for a video created for a client, Chicago Cares, to recognize outstanding volunteers at their awards banquet. This video is housed on Viewbix’s website but can be embedded, copied and shared.

Videos for a customized video domain or microsite

While hosting on YouTube has its advantages for nonprofits, a professional multimedia firm can help you custom-design media-driven websites and microsites that integrate with your nonprofit’s existing organizational website with platforms such as Vmix, Convio, Kaltura or Drupal (compare).

Just a little over two years ago, Pathfinder International had no videos online and little in-house video production. With the help of See3 Communications, Pathfinder launched a microsite that is built entirely around video sharing: Girl2Woman.

Pathfinder shared how they opted not to use YouTube because “we couldn’t control the look and feel as much as we would have liked, we wanted to count the shares of the videos (not the views), and we wanted to focus on integrating features like the call to action share.”  They’ve still posted the videos on YouTube, however, so that others can embed them.

They documented specific objectives for wanting viewers to share their microsite:

1. to raise the visibility of reproductive health needs throughout a woman’s life
2. to raise $1 million (and for each video share, a generous donor is giving $1 to Pathfinder)
3. to leverage the share functionality to increase the number of registrations by constituents

To meet those goals, they needed to be able to count the number of shares and capture the information of people who shared, which they couldn’t do with a YouTube hosted site.

In fact, embedding video on a nonprofit’s own website can be better for your SEO — when a video is published on a third-party site, links to those videos just increase the page rank of the third-party site, not the nonprofit’s own site. If the video is published on the nonprofit’s site they have full control over the links on that site and the corresponding SEO.

Regardless of which of these call-to-action options your nonprofit chooses, remember to:

• first build your social network & encourage conversation before inserting a call to action
• use a clear and distinct call to action that tells the viewer exactly what you want them to do
• connect viewers to URLs that elaborate on your story.

Consider placing the “call” on the skin or at the end of the video to encourage the viewer to watch until the end and follow through on the call to action. Also, because each video hosted is different, the call to action might be different depending upon the content and desired outcome.

The most important part of your call to action is ensuring that it fits with what your audience needs. When it matches the exact needs of your audience, taking the recommended next step will be a natural course of action for viewers.

Please share your own experience with call-to-action video apps and online video platforms.

Related

• Creating compelling advocacy videos for nonprofits (Socialbrite)
• Techniques to add dazzle to your advocacy video (Socialbrite)
• How to find amazing, powerful stories for your nonprofit video (Socialbrite)
• How to use microsites to better tell your nonprofit’s story (Socialbrite)
• 6 ways YouTube is helping out nonprofits, including call-to-action-overlays (Socialbrite)
• Five Nonprofits Maximizing YouTube’s Nonprofit Program (Nonprofitorgs)

The post How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos appeared first on Socialbrite.

Today we welcome two additional social media experts to join the Socialbrite team. Both bring outstanding credentials that will help Socialbrite expand its ability to share free content — tutorials, interviews, articles about tactics and strategy — while also offering their considerable talents to our network of experts who provide consulting services to nonprofits.

Let me tell you a bit about them — they’ve already made their mark in the nonprofit sector, and they now join a team that includes John Haydon, Sloane Berrent, Carla Schlemminger and Ken Banks.

Debra Askanase: Strategies that spur people to action

Debra Askanase, who also blogs at Community Organizer 2.0, provides social media consulting to nonprofits and businesses. Debra has worked for 20 years in nonprofit organizations in many positions, among them executive director, program director, fundraiser and community organizer. She holds a B.A. from Emory University and an M.B.A. in International Business from Bar Ilan University in Israel.

Debra will be taking on a top editorial position at Socialbrite and will be collaborating with us on client projects. In her consulting work, she’s passionate about working with nonprofits to create engagement strategies that move people to action. As a former community organizer, she believes that the best online strategies reflect community organizing principles: Be where your stakeholders hang out, nurture leaders, be transparent and inclusive, create integrated campaigns with your stakeholders not for them, and foster community. Debra has lived in the United States, Nicaragua, Vienna and Israel. Follow her on Twitter at @askdebra.

Shonali Burke: Community-building strategies

With small and large agency experience, as well as a stint as the ASPCA‘s Vice President of Media & Communications, Shonali Burke understands the challenges faced by small and large organizations alike when it comes to building community. Rather than dive straight into tactics, she works with clients to help them identify their strategic goals and builds their integrated communication plans based on measurable objectives. Her client roster includes/has included the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and USA for UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency).

In 2007, PRWeek named Shonali to its first “Top 40 Under 40” list of public relations professionals in the United States. In 2008, she was one of three winners of the Institute for Public Relations’ Jack Felton Golden Ruler award winners for excellence in public relations research and measurement, and she is considered one of 25 women that rock social media. Shonali is also adjunct faculty for Johns Hopkins University’s M.A. in Communication program, teaching a course on not-for-profits in the digital age. Follow her on Twitter at @shonali.

Great to have you both on board, Debra and Shonali!

If you have any questions for Debra or Shonali or for other members of the Socialbrite team, email team@socialbrite.org.

The post Two more social media experts join Socialbrite appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, social enterprises, NGOs, foundations, cause organizations, Web publishers, small businesses.

As regular readers know, I’ve been a longtime proponent of visual storytelling to advance the missions of nonprofits, cause organizations and businesses. (Heck, I co-founded Ourmedia.org before there was a YouTube.) People take action on behalf of a cause only when they feel an emotional connection, and yet nonprofits in particular are famously bad at telling their own stories.

What we tell people in our Socialbrite bootcamps and in our consulting work is this: Every nonprofit is now a media organization (the same goes for social enterprises and businesses). Never before have the tools of visual storytelling been so inexpensive, easy to use and accessible to the masses.

So why aren’t you taking advantage of visual storytelling yet? (Or are you? Tell us in the comments!)

There are dozens of ways to convey your story, and we’ve laid out lots of ways to get started — see the links at the bottom of this article.

Today we’d like to highlight a few best-of-breed examples of visual storytelling so that you can think about how to take a similar approach for your organization. At least one of the examples cited below should trigger an insight — an idea that resonates or an approach that you might consider using with your team or with a production partner.

Remember, it’s not about the tools or the technology. It’s about finding people who encapsulate what your core objective is all about — and conveying their stories with power, genuineness, passion and humility. Some can be elaborate productions, with narration, titling and musical score all working together. Others can be as simple as holding up a video-capable smartphone to capture a moment.

One you have a visual story, or several, that you can draw upon, you’ll be able to begin using it in your public outreach: on your website or blog, on your Facebook page, in your annual report, in your email newsletters. And don’t forget to enter contests like the DoGooder Awards, TechSoup Storytelling Challenge or CurrentTV’s just-ended The Current Cause, where $15,000 in prizes will be awarded.

Here are seven great examples of nonprofit storytelling:

1/ Classic video advocacy

“Breathe,” by Repower America

advocacyLast month’s 5th annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, presented by YouTube and See3 Communications — See3 is at the forefront of nonprofit video storytelling — drew 1,350 submissions from 750 nonprofits, with 16 finalists and four winners.

Among the winners were:
• Best thrifty video: It’s In Your Hands, by Watershed Management Group
• Best large organization video: A Public Service Announcement Not Approved by AJWS, by the American Jewish World Service

Some entries I liked better included:
• Breathe, by Repower America (1:33, embedded above)
• The funny, celebrity-studded Seriously, Serious PSA (featuring B.J. Novak & Friends) by malarianomore (1:01)

Sign up to receive See3’s Daily DoGooder: a daily cause video delivered to your in-box.

And here were the 2010 winners. Observe how other organizations are telling their stories — which style did you like: earnest, funny, polished, grassroots?

2/ Digital stories using photos & narration

“Mountaintop Library Expands Horizons,” by Room to Read

digital storiesI’ve been involved in the digital storytelling movement since 2004. A vastly underutilized medium, digital storytelling uses photos, video, film or found materials, combined with voice-over narration, to convey powerful, evocative stories with a rich emotional dimension.

Our in-depth tutorials Digital storytelling from soup to nuts and Digital storytelling: A tutorial in 10 easy steps offers some great examples. But for a simpler way to do this, look no further than the winner of February’s TechSoup Storytelling Challenge.

The first place winner, Mountaintop Library Expands Horizons, by Room to Read (embedded above), took advantage of visually stunning photos taken in Nepal and weaved together a simple 60-second story about the San Francisco nonprofit’s global literacy mission. Nicely done — with no video at all. This is something your organization can do on its own, no?

3/ Videos with a call to action

call to actionSince YouTube rolled out a free “call-to-action overlay” feature for nonprofits in March 2009, a lot of nonprofits (but too few) have made use of the technique. Nonprofits can place an “ask” in the opaque pop-up overlay. As YouTube explains:

“Adding a Call-to-Action overlay to your video is easy. First, run a campaign to promote your video on YouTube. Then, go to the Video Details page under My Videos and fill out the fields in the section marked ‘Call-to-Action overlay.’ All you have to do is include a short headline, ad text, a destination url, and upload an optional image, and the overlay will appear whenever someone watches your video. Clicks on the overlay will be tracked in YouTube Insight.”

YouTube also offers tips on how to run an effective campaign.

Two examples:

• World Water Day Video from charity: water, with a 15-second ad overlay at the beginning, earned charity: water $10,000 in a single day, largely thanks to YouTube placing it on its home page. The overlay url takes users to its Donate page.

• StillerStrong, stealing great ideas from other charities to build schools in Haiti, with an ad overlay throughout. I think we’ll increasingly see requests for text2give mobile donations, as shown above.

4/ Mobile devices: Video on the go

mobileSometimes, simple is better. Video producers and photographers often say, the best device is the one you have with you — and that gadget is increasingly a smartphone — an iPhone, Android device or Nokia phone — or a Flip cam or other portable device.

Here are two examples:

• Flip Video and Save the Bay

• Save Our Sounds, by J.D. Lasica, interview conducted in London with a Flip HD Ultra.

5/ Animation

“Do You Own Stuff Made by Slaves?” by Call + Response

animationSome subjects are best told using evocative imagery or animation rather than documentary or traditional video techniques.

Six examples:

• The Girl Effect, by girleffect, is almost without peer.

• Do You Own Stuff Made by Slaves, by Call + Response (2:01) doesn’t have celebrities, but it contains a compelling, little-heard message and inventive animation.

• The EACH Campaign, by LegatumMedia, is visually arresting, though may lack a sufficient emotional impact.

• Prospera: A new way of doing business in Mexico: a social enterprise story.

• 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds, by the Post Carbon Institute, won the Best large organization video in the Do Gooder Nonprofit Video Awards.

• Closed Zone, by Ground Report: life in Gaza.

6/ Creative mashups

mashupsOne of my favorite flavors of nonprofit storytelling is the kind that takes advantage of the visually interesting styles you can get by using sites like RockYou, Slide, Animoto and Stupeflix. (We covered them in Mash up a visual story for your nonprofit.) The creative possibilities are boundless.

One example is the Will Steger Foundation Mashup Video, showing climate change made accessible.

7/ Personalized videos

personalized videosThis is a risky technique — the line between engaging and gimmicky is a thin one — but I’m still a fan of videos that let viewers insert themselves into the storyline. For young people in particular, personalization is part of the new media ecosystem.

Note: These videos have been removed.

• beyond oil, by Moving Beyond Oil, lets you “make this video about you” by adding your name and email address and forwarding it to President Obama.

• Glenn Beck Attacks Progressive Voter, by cnnbc (aka MoveOn.org), is a funny takedown of the wacked-out Fox News show host — using clips of his own rants — who was recently fired by the network. One lesson: Someones humor works in a field where we take our work very seriously.

8/ High-end professional productions

Trailer of Burbax, Ethiopia from A Glimmer of Hope on Vimeo.

high-endI saved the high-end professional productions for last because most nonprofits look at these, throw up their hands and say, I can’t do that. Well, two answers. First, maybe you can, by partnering with an organization like Storytellers for Good, a small outfit in San Francisco that’s doing some amazing work with nonprofits (see video at top). Second, don’t get distracted by productions whose budgets outstrip your budget — people don’t expect every visual story to be a masterpiece.

If you hook up with the right storytelling organization — ActiveVoice in San Francisco and Free Range Studios in New York are also good places to start — or if you have a decent budget, then find a local video production outfit and go for it.

Here are seven high-end professionally produced videos that caught my eye:

• LTBH Feature – Austin 2009, by A Glimmer of Hope, at the top of this story. A Glimmer of Hope also offers some wonderful examples of storytelling with images.
• Trailer of Burbax, Ethiopia, by A Glimmer of Hope — the music chokes me up every time I watch it.
• Mama Hope, by Storytellers for Good (above)
• Charity: water’s September birthdays — or almost any charity: water video
• Jai Pausch Public Service Announcement by the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network at pancan.org
• Rooftop Gardens, on CurrentTV — while I love CurrentTV, they could benefit from a big splash of variety.
• And, of course, let’s not forget the Official music video for OK Go’s “White Knuckles,” benefiting the ASPCA — 9.7 million YouTubers can’t be wrong.

I’m sure you have your own favorites — please share. Which kind of storytelling do you like, and why? What did I miss? Let us know in the comments!

Related

• How nonprofits should be using visual storytelling (Socialbrite)

• Visual storytelling checklist (Socialbrite)

• Mash up a visual story for your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

• Digital storytelling: A tutorial in 10 easy steps (Socialbrite)

• Roundup of resources on how to create media (Socialbrite)

• Create video stories for your nonprofit in 6 steps (Socialbrite)

• How to maximize your nonprofit’s impact with YouTube (Socialbrite)

• Vimeo channels for nonprofits

• How to run an effective campaign (YouTube)

• Secrets to Nonprofit Video Success (CitizenTube)

• Kivi Miller’s Delicious bookmarks on nonprofit storytelling

The post 8 great examples of nonprofit storytelling appeared first on Socialbrite.

Welcome to all the visitors from Mashable! We were thrilled to be featured in Melissa Rowley‘s article, 4 Social Good Trends of 2009.

For first-timers, we thought now would be a good time to highlight some of our favorite posts on Socialbrite since our launch earlier this year:

Some of our favorite causes

• Tweet for a cure to end SMA

• Global Voices: Lifting up the powerless & voiceless

• An inventive cause campaign to fight malaria

• Tim Ferriss’ method of supporting causes

• Boxee and the promise of open media

• All for Good: A Craigslist for service

• California’s Secretary of State: Come and collaborate!

• How the National Wildlife Federation uses social media

• Socialbrite’s night at NetTuesday

• UniversalGiving: Tailoring an impact just for you

• Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing

• YouthNoise: Helping young people network a cause

• Kiva: micro-loans to entrepreneurs abroad

• Giving Challenge: Tap your networks to support a cause

Some favorite tools and tactics

• How to make your website more accessible and 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities

• 20 tips for mobile advocacy

• A user’s guide to mobile activism

• How mobile is empowering consumers

• SEO: 9 tips for optimizing a nonprofit site — Search Engine Optimization isn’t black magic, so get your site to shape up

• 8 tips for raising funds online

• The Extraordinaries: Building the ‘micro-volunteering’ movement

• Twitter as a tool for activism

• How to build a Facebook community — 14 levers you need to be pulling

• How to add a Facebook Page Fanbox to your site

• How to use Seesmic Desktop

• Carbon footprints, nation by nation

• Foundation Center: a deep resource for philanthropy

• Guide to shooting photos in public

• How to capture great photos on the road

• Fair use in the digital age

• Seven blogging tools reviewed

• Socialbrite releases Creative Commons plug-in

Thanks to everyone for your support this year! (Don’t forget to follow @Socialbrite on Twitter!) We’re now working with a number of nonprofits and educational outfits — TechSoup Global and Scholastic, to name two — and looking forward to helping others with their social media needs in the months ahead.

The post Mashable & our favorite posts of the year appeared first on Socialbrite.

Last night was the coming-out party for Socialbrite at the monthly NetTuesday gathering in San Francisco. About 40 people turned out for the event at PariSoMa, the coworking space at Howard and Tenth. Here are a half-dozen shots snapped by organizer Sarah Kennon and me.

And here is what the NetTuesday Meetup members had to say about the event.

A few notes from the evening:

• I kicked things off with a rundown of the Socialbrite team and the resources offered by Socialbrite, including the Sharing Center, Social Media Glossary, Web 2.0 productivity tools, directory of social media reports, guides to free photos, free music and free video footage, and directory of cause organizations.

• Jacob Colker, co-founder of the Extraordinaries, discussed the “micro-volunteer” opportunities using mobile devices in their spare time that people could sign up for. The Extraordinaries is now available as a free iPhone app. Socialbrite will publish a video interview with co-founder Ben Rigby soon.

• Schlomo Rabinowitz sketched out VideoCampSF, coming to BAVC Oct. 16-17. Two days of sessions can be had for just $65. (Register here.) The stellar lineup of instructors includes Melissa Rowley, Jen Myronuk, Katrina Heppler, Sukhjit, Markus Sandy, Adam Quirk and Bill Streeter (hey, I know all these folks!).

• Katrina Heppler outlined her promising new venture, envisionGood.tv. (She’s also begun contributing video dispatches to Socialbrite, like the one immediately below this post.)

• Michael Stoll and two of his staffers came by to fill us in on The Public Press (which will be getting a new domain name next month). The nonprofit publication provides noncommercial news for the Bay Area and has been raising funds for story pitches on Spot.us.

• I outlined the mission of the Public Media Collaborative, a group of Bay Area technologists, activists and bloggers who put on training workshops, chiefly for community organizations. Our next daylong workshop will be Oct. 23 in Oakland.

• Program manager Liberty Smith told us about the National Service Learning Clearinghouse. Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.

It was also great to see Hiroyasu Ichikawa again after meeting him at SoCap09 last week. Ichi, a writer-consultant who’s part of the Japan Social Entrepreneur Forum, recently launched NetTuesday Tokyo, with two meetups of about 30 people so far.

The post Socialbrite’s night at NetTuesday appeared first on Socialbrite.

We’ve been big fans of NetSquared and its global series of Net Tuesday meetups for years — check out this map showing the dozens of cities with Net Tuesdays around the world. And our own Amy Sample Ward is NetSquared’s Global Community Builder and organizes the London Net Tuesday group (see her Socialbrite profile).

So we were honored when Sarah Kennon — whom Amy profiled here (pictured at right) — invited Socialbrite to be the featured guest on Sept. 8, 2009, at Net Tuesday San Francisco, and even more jazzed when PariSoMa — “a coworking space that provides desks, wi-fi, coffee, community and stellar events for independent professionals” — agreed to provide the venue.

We’re still planning the event, but here are the details so far:

What: Net Tuesday, spotlighting Socialbrite.org: Social tools for social change
When: Sept. 8 (a Tuesday, natch)
Time: 6-8 pm
Where: PariSoMa, 1436 Howard St., SF between 10th and 11th streets
Refreshments: Light snacks and beer, wine and sodas will be served
Price: Free

Agenda: Spotlighting tools and causes

We’re still mapping out how the evening will go, but Sarah and I have been talking about an almost full-circle setup (leaving room for a short presentation on a projector and giving participants the chance to call up noteworthy sites).

I’ll kick things off by showing off some of the things we’re doing at Socialbrite, including our Sharing Center and community widgets. For the second half of the evening we’d like to showcase some other community-focused organizations with a strong social media component, most likely a 5-minute talk followed by 5 to 10 minutes of questions from the audience. Some possibilities (we’ll send out invitations after this post goes up):

• Your organization. If you have a community-spirited effort that involves social media or uses social tools for social change, drop me a note and let’s discuss.

• Public Media Collaborative, which brings together bloggers, journalists, technologists, media & environmental justice folks, community organizers and activists from around the Bay area to explore and discuss social justice and emerging technology issues in a way that links theory and practice.

• The Extraordinaries, a way to volunteer for worthy efforts by using your mobile phone during your free time (my video interview with co-founder Ben Rigby will go up here soon).

Or, if you have a suggestion about showcasing a group or cause that you’re not leading but think they deserve a Net Tuesday appearance, let us know that, too.

Looking forward to connecting!

The post Socialbrite to appear at Net Tuesday appeared first on Socialbrite.

Socialbrite.org fills a glaring gap in the social media world. While young people and early adopters increasingly turn to the social Web not only to socialize but to communicate, explore new ideas and share new experiences, nonprofits and social change organizations are still generally stuck in the top-down, one-way world of Web 1.0.

The young and the wired are moving at an accelerating pace away from old-school destination Web sites and toward the social media ecosystem embodied in the real-time Web. In this new world of Twitter and Facebook, of citizen journalism and astonishing grassroots campaigns like Twestival, it’s easy to feel befuddled by the dizzying pace of change.

That’s why eight leading nonprofit technologists and social marketing experts have come together to create this learning and sharing hub. Socialbrite is here to offer articles, videos, resources and tutorials on how to take command of all this Web 2.0 jazz and put it to work for your organization or cause. (We created a cheat sheet for you to help tweet our launch.)

And please note: We’re here not only to show how social tools can be used to advance the social good – but to learn from you as well. We’ll be republishing some of these articles on learning wikis, and everything here is released under a Creative Commons license, so we hope you’ll take part in this ecosystem of sharing.

A sharing and learning hub

We invite you to cruise around the site — and we hope you’ll help us spread the word. You’ll notice that we’re not starting from scratch. You’ll find:

• A directory of Web 2.0 Productivity Tools in dozens of categories that can help organizations get a handle on the social Web.

• A Social Media Glossary that offers a deep, friendly introduction to dozens of social media terms in plain English.

• A first-of-its-kind Twitter widget that tracks tweets about nonprofits or social causes in real time.

• A Free Photos Directory, Free Video Directory and Free Music Directory that offers nonprofits, cause organizations and Web publishers a guide to hundreds of online resources for adding legal, high-quality content to their own websites, blogs, newsletters, printed materials or online presentations.

• A Causes widget that points to charitable actions and donations on other sites such as Global Giving and Facebook Causes.

• Scores of additional articles, guides and tutorials to help newcomers and veterans alike get better acquainted with this fast-moving space.

Team members

I (@jdlasica) am joined in this effort by:

• Beth Kanter (@kanter), the author/trainer/strategist behind Beth’s Blog

• Katrin Verclas (@katrinskaya), founder and editor-in-chief of MobileActive.org and past executive director of NTEN.

• John Haydon (@johnhaydon), who advises small non-profits, small businesses and social entrepreneurs on how to implement inbound marketing strategies with the social web.

• Amy Sample Ward (@amyrsward), organizer of London Net Tuesday, who connects nonprofits with new media technologies.

• Ken Banks (@kiwanja), a Hewlett Foundation grant recipient who focuses on using mobile technology to foster positive social and environmental change in the developing world, particularly Africa.

• Sloane Berrent (@sloane, a Kiva fellow, social philanthropy activist and a former executive at Causecast who’s currently serving a three-month tour in the Philippines.

• Carla Schlemminger (@carlainsf, who has more than 17 years experience in marketing communications, branding and strategic public relations.

Credits for our launch

We want to acknowledge some of the people who got us to the launch pad:

• Esteban Panzeri, the brilliant Argentinian developer and tech god who built most of the site based on some sketchy wireframes.

• The team at BlitzLocal in Boulder, Colo. — especially Dennis Yu, Chad King and Austin Stierler — who took us under their wing and agreed to host us for free.

• Beth, Amy, Katrin, John, Ken, Sloane and Carla, who all took a leap of faith in signing onto this team effort.

• Matt Mullenweg and the entire WordPress development community for their open source code and awesome set of plug-ins. And a thank-you to the coders at Intense Debate for the commenting system we settled on.

• Uta Ritke, the Marin County graphic designer who designed our logotype.

• Chad Capellman of Boston, who lent his development help and keen CSS eye to this project.

• Elegant Themes, the WordPress premium themes house that gave us the underpinnings to build our customized theme upon.

Please join the conversation

We want this to be your site, too! Please add your voice — tell us what conversations, articles and resources you’d like to see on Socialbrite.org in the months ahead.

As we explain on our About page, we’re out to bust some silos. When it comes to sharing insights about the tools and best practices that drive the social Web and advance the social good, the nonprofit, citizen media, open source and education communities have more in common than we realize — but we rarely talk with each other.

So one of our goals at Socialbrite is to help people in any sector get up to speed on the social Web and find the right strategy and tactics to help your organization or cause.

We believe that people — not large institutions — will be the driving force behind social change in the years ahead. People want to make a difference, and now we have the tools to help others — directly, smartly, without intermediaries.

It’ll be fascinating to report on those developments — and put them into practice — in the years ahead. Hope you’ll pay us a visit and follow us on Twitter!

Related

• Tweet our launch!
• Site announcement: news release
• About Socialbrite

The post Introducing Socialbrite: Why we’re here appeared first on Socialbrite.