These are some links I wanted to share from June 23rd. Find me on Delicious for more!

• Aardvark – Take a look at this tool that leverages the extended networks we all have to get answers to questions that you may not know who to ask, but your network does! It's an interesting idea and I'd love to talk to people or organizations that have used it – have you?
• Exploring Social Media for Social Good #FindingTheGood – Have you been following Mashable's Summer of Social Good? This week they are rounding up and highlighting examples of social media use by WWF, The Humane Society, Livestrong and Oxfam America – plus, you can add your organization to the list!
• Reflections on America’s Giving Challenge – Did you follow or participate in the America's Giving Challenge from the Case Foundation? Check out the evaluation report from Beth Kanter and Allison Fine. "The research presented in this report reflects the attitudes and experiences of Giving Challenge participants, from cause champions to individual donors to nonprofit leaders. We think it helps paint a picture of what worked particularly well and what could be improved in future challenges — both here at the Case Foundation and at other organizations experimenting with similar online competitions."
• Is Twitter a Social Network? – What do you think? What do you consider to be the differences between a social networking platform and a communications platform or something else? Interested to hear your responses!
• Why Non-Profits Are So Good at Social Media – Conversation Starter … – Alex Samuel, the CEO of Social Signal, has a great post on the Harvard Business Review discussing why nonprofits are early adopters/good with social media. The key lessons she includes are:
  1. Engage your audience by speaking to their core concerns.
  2. Put your audience in the driver's seat.
  3. Offer a mix of tangible and social benefits.
  4. Embrace emergent value propositions.
  5. Innovate within the bounds of your core mission

… Continue readingGreat reads from around the web on June 23rd

These are some links I wanted to share from June 19th. Find me on Delicious for more!

• Stanford Social Innovation Review : Articles : The Profit in Nonprofit … – Here is a great (long!) blog post from the SSIR opinion blog about why Kiva (http://kiva.org/) chose to be a nonprofit and the story of how it started.
• Study: Nonprofits flocking to social media – Fall River, MA – The … – "The study, conducted by CMR Director Nora Ganim Barnes and marketing consultant Eric Mattson, found 89 percent of charitable and nonprofit organizations are using some form of social media: blogs, Facebook, Twitter and others. Fifty-seven percent reported activity in blogging. … Barnes stressed that social media use by nonprofits is eclipsing any other business’s use of the relatively new media category."
• 21 Community Foundations That Tweet " Philanthropy411 Blog – Here is a great list of Community Foundations on Twitter – if you work for a foundation and are curious about how a foundation may use the micro-blogging tool in your work, check out these groups! I'd also throw @meyermt (The Meyer Memorial Trust) into the mix, a regional private foundation in Portland, OR. Are you already tweeting from a foundation – what has your experience been?
• The Kid at the State Department Who Figured Out the Iranians Should Be Allowed to Keep Tweeting – A great profile on the man (not kid!) who works for the State Department to advise it on social media use specifically around the Middle East. What a life he has already had!
• Facebook readying live search featured – In the next step to rival Twitter, Facebook has announced on their blog today that they are "beginning to test new versions of Facebook Search with a small group — just a fraction of a percent of the people on Facebook. Those of you in the test group will be able to find content from the people, organizations and public figures that matter to you as soon as they share it on Facebook." Anyone in the test group want to share your review?

… Continue readingGreat reads from around the web on June 19th

These are some links I wanted to share from June 16th. Find me on Delicious for more!

• Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online – NYTimes.com – Watching the #IranElection hashtag stream on Twitter, more and more videos on YouTube and the BBC, and the way citizens create and the global networks share updates about the reality of post-election mayhem in Iran has distracted me from work and ignited many conversations with friends about both what we've seen or read so far each day and what the power of social media has unlocked. Here's a story from the NYTimes addressing just that.
• Association Jam | Association Management News :: Submit. Vote. Learn. – I'm checking out this new "Digg for associations" from Wild Apricot. It looks like users can find, read or submit stories and vote on them; have discussions; and generally network. Interested to see if any readers here are part of an association and what you think of this new news portal!
• Junction49 – Junction49 want to challenge the negative perception that young people don't volunteer in traditional ways anymore. They do this by giving them the chance to do something they believe in, when and how they want. The site has become a place for young people to showcase the work they are doing to make a difference.
• Mozilla Service Week! – Are you a techie who could donate some skills? Are you a nonprofit that could benefit from some techie help? Check out the Mozilla Service Week, taking place September 14-21, and sign up to participate – whether you want to help, or want to get some help!
• Summer of Social Good by Mashable – "Summer of Social Good is the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet. The goal is to use the power of "Social Influence" via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogs and other online media to raise an unprecedented amount for our fund benefiting The Humane Society, LIVESTRONG, Oxfam America and WWF from June 1st until August 28th, 2009."

… Continue readingGreat reads from around the web on June 16th