My guess is that 99.99% of nonprofits (or more) have not yet been invited to beta test Google+ (sign up here), but if you are a regular reader of Mashable, TechCrunch, or The Next Web, you might be feeling like your missing out on the fruits of being an early adopter (before the site is even out of beta...
At about the time I quit working for the day (6pm in Missouri, USA), nonprofits in New Zealand, Australia, and Asia are coming online for another work day. Then, over the next 12 hours, on comes nonprofits in India, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. It’s amazing what happens on Twitter during our off hours and while we are...
Source: Social Good: Charity and Technology in the Online Universe Written for the March 2011 issue of Fundraising Success Magazine, where I am writing a quarterly column throughout 2011. * * * * * * * * * * * In the summer of 2000, I launched an e-advocacy portal called eActivist.org. It was a fiscal project of the...
A Few Words of Caution: Small to medium-sized nonprofits should take Facebook case studies and best practices based on the success of large nationally and internationally well-known nonprofits (with huge email lists and multiple communications and development staff) with a heavy dose of skepticism. 99.9% of nonprofits just can not duplicate their success, and such case studies and best...
Email is still queen. No doubt about it. The vast majority of online donations come from a click in an e-newsletter, as do most new Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, and text alert subscribers. It’s even the number one activity on the Mobile Web. E-newsletters will likely be eulogized at some point, but for now and in the near future,...
Written for the June 2011 issue of Fundraising Success Magazine, where I am writing a quarterly column throughout 2011. For the past six years I have spent 50 to 60 hours a week utilizing Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Foursquare to promote nonprofits. I’ve watched the early adopters of MySpace in 2005 propel themselves into the...
The time is ripe for the early adopters in the nonprofit sector to embrace m-Advocacy, otherwise known as mobile advocacy. Odds are a year from now pitches to subscribe or join “Mobile Action Networks” will be commonly seen in Facebook Status Updates, Tweets, blogs posts, homepages, and e-newsletter subject lines. As social media taught us, those nonprofits who act...
As I have said many times, I was a reluctant blogger. I did not think the Internet needed another blogger. But I was wrong. So wrong. Blogging has transcended my ROI (return on investment), primarily from simply featuring my e-newsletter “Subscribe” option and social networking icons in the upper right column. Sadly, the vast majority of nonprofit blogs do...
You got to give it to the social good entrepreneurs. Seemingly every week a new fundraising or cause awareness tool hits the Web for nonprofits to experiment with, and though donation processing fees must be applied or ads sold for these social enterprises to be sustainable, it’s clear that their motives are altruistic. That said, here are six new...
While writing Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits, I visited over 500 nonprofit homepages looking primarily for links to their social networking communities. A rough guesstimate would be that less than 30% of those homepages included links or icons to their Facebook Page, Twitter Profile, YouTube Channel, etc., and of those, many placed them along...
Over the last 18 months I have subscribed to over 50 nonprofit text alert campaigns from a wide variety of organizations, but it wasn’t until this past April 28th that I finally received a text alert from a nonprofit that linked to a mobile website: That the text came from the Humane Society of the United States was not...
Finding your Twitter voice is an accomplishment only earned through a process of trial and error and conscious experimentation. Even the best social media managers often go through an initial period of puzzlement and frustration as they try to figure out how Twitter works and what to tweet. That said, the nonprofits below have discovered a nice balance of...
Nonprofits pioneered social media. They were on Myspace and organizing via Facebook Groups years before corporate brands, higher education, and broadcast and print media. That said, I am starting to worry a little bit that nonprofits are falling behind on mobile communications and missing out on some exceptional opportunities to tell their nonprofit’s story to the mobile masses. One of the...