Social Actions “connects individuals with actionable opportunities. By helping people to take action, our work is increasing the scope and impact of the citizen sector,” while the Social Actions Labs builds web applications that draw on the Social Actions API.
Great, but why am I interested?
What Social Actions is really doing is combining the ‘what-you-can-do’ stuff of the social change web into one place that you can search, link to, rely on, and even (with a widget from the Social Actions Labs) integrate into your web site or blog! How great is that?!
Social Actions helps individuals and organizations use social media to plan, implement, and support peer-to-peer social change campaigns so that grassroots solutions to local and global problems can flourish.
Toward this end, Social Actions:
- Provides a search engine of peer-to-peer social change campaigns;
- Aggregates peer-to-peer social change campaigns from 14 unique social action platforms;
- Publishes materials for individuals on planning and implementing peer-to-peer social change campaigns;
- Distributes materials for nonprofits and foundations on engaging constituents;
- Connects technology consultants and thought leaders with nonprofits and foundations;
- Encourages collaboration among social action platforms.
I may be biased (full disclosure: part of the project mentor group), but think I’m understandably excited.
That IS awesome! What can I do?
Do you want to take action now?
Maybe you want to help identify the 3 -5 initial applications for the Social Actions Labs!
Try out the new (beta) search interface to find social actions you are interested in!
Or, you can sign up to stay abreast of more developments!
Wanna hear more?
Social Actions founder, Peter Deitz, has a great interview with Corey Pudhorodsky on the 501c3Cast from July 14th. You can listen to it here! If you don’t already, you should also add Corey’s awesome 501c3Cast podcast to your itunes or RSS library!
If you were able to integrate actions for volunteers, supporters, and interested citizens to take part in, where would you put it? On your organization’s home page, blog, action center page? Would you want it on your personal site or other social networking pages? What about the social networking spaces for your organization?
Hi Amy, Thanks for the shot out. We encourage people (especially friends of Amy Sample Ward!) to join our Google group. Allen Gunn has been pressing me to define the use cases for this tool. What are we building exactly? And who can it serve?
Anyone can help us answer these questions on the Social Actions Google group.
http://groups.google.com/group/social-actions
Thanks again for the blog entry.
All the best, Peter
Amy, what a great write-up! Thanks for the crystal clear explanation of what Social Actions is all about, and why the whole initiative gets me excited, too. Just posted a link to this in the Social Actions round-up (http://tinyurl.com/62dwm7).
Thanks Peter & Christine! I’m thrilled to be even a small part of Social Actions and hope that others will jump in as they can, too – especially in the Google Group or the wiki. Thanks for the links!