I’ve included my interview below, but you can also read it and join the conversation on the NetSquared blog. The other interviews include Sylwia Presley from Gobal Voices, and Claire Sale from NetSquared. I definitely recommend them both!

Q: What does “online” add to the community organizing?

Successful community organizing across history has always been networked. It may have been a network of organizers in various towns or locations coordinating with each other and then operating locally. Or a team of volunteers that manage communications (from phone trees to canvassing). Or even the networked influence from news coverage and stories from one group or city to the next.

When you bring the Internet, online social tools, mobile technologies, and all the rest into the equation, you do not fundamentally change how communities organize or make change. You do, though, change the scale and the opportunity. Online networking means communities can form that aren’t based in the same physical place. It means community organizers and leaders can communicate with their communities and with other leaders asynchronously. It even means that individuals and groups who thought they “were the only ones” before, are now able to find each other, work together, and do even more.

In the most basic sense, online organizing gives figurative legs to impact and reach.

Q: What makes a community?

To me, a community is a group of people (even if it is organizations, it is still the people within them) who have opted in to participate. It may be a community of geography, cause, or topic. But the opt-in is essential. Simply because I live in a given city, does not mean that I am participating in organized decision making, meeting and collaborating with my neighbors, or even communicating with those around me. Similarly, because I am a certain age, have a certain allergy, favor a specific political party, or even care about a certain social issue, I do not automatically belong to a community with a shared experience. I find that community (today, most likely online) and opt in.

Q: How do you combine working on the ground with online organizing?

We should approach offline action as one of many channels available to us to reach our mission. Many organizations and groups currently consider multi-channel approaches for a message to include email, website, social media, and blogs. We should expand that view and definition of multi-channel to include offline action and mobile messaging/text. If we put out a call to action and want to organize our community to not just respond but share and distribute the call, we need to think both about where we send the message, but also how the action can be completed. For many organizations and groups, the offline actions are most critical and yet most often forgotten.

Q: What are the current trends in the online community organizing? What is changing and why?

The biggest shift with cause-specific organizing is that organizations don’t necessarily need to be involved. This can be great, or it can be scary. With campaigning tools readily available, and the economy of the web centered on content and adoption, if passionate individuals work together to create compelling content, achievable and measurable goals, and clear calls to action, they can make an impact – from fundraising to policy change – without an organization being involved. Note, though, that those same steps to success are true for an organization. Basically, online organizing tools have leveled the playing field between for-profit and nonprofit groups, as well as between organizations and communities.

Q: Any advice you’d like to share with the other online community organizers?

Start small. Don’t be afraid of failing. And invite people to lead with you at every stage.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, questions, and feedback!

(Photo credit: Flickr jakubsteiner)

I recently facilitated a day long meeting with a group of 7 different community media centers in California. Our objective was to develop grants and programs as a group to strengthen our individual community media centers and support the movement as a whole.

To modify the steps of the game to help tell the story, here’s how Ericha used the Community-Driven Social Impact game with her network of Community Media Center participants.

Who was the community that you were working with?

I am part of the Digital Arts Service Corps, which is an initiative of the Transmission Project that pairs tech-savvy AmeriCorps Vistas with organizations dedicated to supporting community media and technology. My project this year is to create a collaborative among seven different community media centers (CMCs) in the greater bay area. The purpose of the collaborative is to share best practices and resources to create greater sustainability and more impact within our individual organizations and the CMC movement as a whole.

The community I am working with is comprised of the seven CMCs in the collaborative: Community Media Access Partnership (based in Gilroy, CA), Davis Media Access (Davis, CA), Access Humboldt (Eureka, CA), Access Monterey Peninsula (Monterey, CA), Community Media Center of Marin (San Rafael, CA), SF Commons (San Francisco, CA), and Community Television of Santa Cruz County (Santa Cruz, CA).

What were your goals for engaging with them?

During our first meeting as a collaborative, we identified four priority areas to focus on throughout the year. They are: productions, youth media/education, fundraising, and technology. I design and facilitate a day long, in person meeting every other month dedicated to one of these topics. We had our fundraising meeting on March 25. The goal of the day was to develop a collaborative grant proposal for a project that would be pertinent and beneficial to each CMC. This was a challenging undertaking considering the diverse populations served by centers in the collaborative. I used the CDSI game to get everyone thinking about the communities they work with, hear about other communities, and generate ideas about how we could work together to meet their needs.

How did you modify the game to match your community and goals?

I allowed everyone two minutes to write down their responses, then about seven minutes to share with the rest of their group after each question. After the final question was discussed, I brought everyone back together and collected some of the program ideas each generated by each small group. This ended up being a great way to jump start the brainstorming process. Ultimately, we were able to concentrate the broader ideas into three focused projects and chose one we wanted to move forward with.

What did you learn and what would you do differently next time?

I really appreciated the structured and in depth discussion this activity created. One thing I would do differently next time have better examples of the types of responses I was looking for with the first two questions. While there is value in having such open ended questions, some people needed a little more clarification and guidance to get them started. Overall, The CDSI game was an effective utilization of time that yielded meaningful results.

Share your story!

Have you run the CDSI game in your organization or at a workshop? Share how it went! The Community-Driven Social Impact game, like all of the content and resources on this website, is licensed for reuse and sharing with Creative Commons so you can feel free to put it to use in your organization!

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Photo credit: Michael Wesolowski

I recently caught up with Mazarine and asked her, “If there was one example or story you could share that exemplifies why you wrote this book, and a few examples of the kinds of content and resources included in the book, what would it be?” And here’s what she shared:

Mazarine Treyz, The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising

When I was growing up, people loved to argue around the dinner table about how people could try to change the world, but every nonprofit was corrupt. (No one in my family has ever worked at a nonprofit, and we definitely don’t have a tradition of giving to causes in our family.) After I graduated from college, I thought about all of the conversations I heard back at home, about how there was just nothing you could do to stop injustices. That you just had to let things go. And I thought, “Wow, really?”

So, I moved to Asia, learned Indonesian, and volunteered at Yayasan Emmanuel, which had just started to run mobile health clinics in Jakarta’s poorest slums. My first day in the clinic, we picked up the doctors who were donating their time, and got to Tanjung Priok, a slum on the water in the center of Jakarta, in the early hours of the morning. The smell of garbage and burning hit my nose as I climbed out of the van. People were living in concrete boxes with only a door, no windows, and sleeping on pieces of cardboard. When the slum flooded, their houses got flooded too. People made a meager living picking garbage and selling what they could. I had all kinds of preconceived notions about what I would find in Jakarta, but nothing prepared me for the massive skin diseases, people with all of their skin flaking off, people who had leprosy so badly that most of their fingers and toes were gone, and their skin was so mottled it looked like it was sliding off their bodies. I didn’t know that you can get leprosy from having a cut on your foot and then stepping into some dirty water, but you can.

Standing far away, I had no idea what people needed. Being there, I realized that people clearly needed access to clean, fresh water. Now WatSan has helped people in Tanjung Priok get filters for creating fresh clean water, and they have started selling it to other slums, creating income, a cottage industry, and money for uniforms for their children to attend school, breaking the cycle of poverty. All from water.

It was an experience that changed me forever. I realized that I could help make people aware of these situations overseas by writing about them. When I returned to America I began my career as a nonprofit consultant. I co-founded a nonprofit called “The Moon Balloon Project” and worked for arts in healthcare nonprofits.

But what I found was that the books for getting started in making a difference with your writing were just DULL. I tried some courses at the Foundation Center, and looked at some books, but couldn’t really get into anything I read. All fired up from my time in Indonesia, I thought, “Changing the world is so exciting! Why do these fundraising books have to be so BORING?” So flash forward to seven years later, I’ve worked full time at nonprofits and consulted part time with nonprofits, and I’ve raised a lot of money. In 2010 I completed my book, the book that I wish I had had when i first started. This book is about every fundraising method, tip and trick that I’ve learned on the way, for people who would like useful fundraising advice written from a cheerful, fresh, graphically rich, interactive perspective that they can immediately apply to their cause.

Some examples of things you’ll find inside my book:

• a CD with 80 pages of templates, FAQs and more that you can open up and instantly customize for your fundraising office.
• a series of quizzes and worksheets for your board members designed to get them to help you fundraise
• a sponsorship letter that has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for me in sponsorships. And it’s helped readers too! Example? Heather writes, “I customized your corporate sponsorship ask letter to put together a package for an event we have coming up, and I’ve already gotten two sponsorships.” -Heather Davis, The Telling Room”
• a cover letter that has generated many interviews for me and others who got nonprofit and government jobs.
• a chapter on how to manage conflict at your nonprofit, something I really wish I had learned in the beginning!

Free Book Giveaway

Want to have a chance at a free copy of The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising? Simply leave a comment here sharing your biggest hurdle or burning question. Mazarine will be weighing in with the conversation and one commenter will be selected at random to receive the book. We will select a winner from the comments on March 7th.

Thanks to Mazarine for providing a free copy and for participating in this valuable conversation!

Interview: Rob Wu, CauseVox Founder

What inspired you to start CauseVox?

A few years ago, Jeff and I went on a pro bono IT consulting project to Uganda to serve a Action for Children, an NGO that fights poverty by preserving families and delivering micro-finance. Like a lot of pro bono projects, we had to fundraise our way to get there, but there weren’t any good tools to make that happen. Long story short, Jeff built a prototype fundraising platform, and we were able to raise more than enough funds to go. We saw the power of grassroots and peer-to-peer fundraising and the impact that it can have. From there we were inspired to scale social good through technology.

Let’s start at the beginning: What is Social Actions and where does the API come in?

I describe Social Actions as an aggregation of actions people can take on any issue that’s built to be highly distributable across the social web. We pull in donation opportunities, volunteer positions, petitions, event, and other actions from 60+ different sources. That’s today. A few years ago, we had just a handful of pioneering platforms in microphilanthropy.

The Social Actions project began in 2006. I wanted to make some kind of contribution to the world of microphilanthropy. My intent was to inventory every interesting action I came across to make it easier for people to engage in the causes they cared about. There wasn’t much scalability in the way I was pursuing the project.

In 2007, I realized that a much more effective way to aggregate interesting actions would be to subscribe to RSS feeds from trusted sources. I wrote about the potential for aggregating RSS feeds of giving opportunities in a blog post called, Why We Need Group Fundraising RSS Feeds. Three months later I had a prototype platform aggregating actions from RSS feeds, with a search element around that content.

Around  the time of the Nonprofit Technology Network’s 2008 NTC conference, an even brighter light bulb went on. I remember sitting in a session by Kurt Voelker of ForumOne Communications, Tompkins Spann of Convio, and Jeremy Carbaugh of The Sunlight Foundation. They were talking about API’s. (API stands for Application Programming Interface, and refers broadly to the way one piece of software or dataset communicates with another.) In fact, the name of the session was “APIs for Beginners.”

I knew I wanted to be in the session even without really knowing why. It was there that I realized my RSS-based process for aggregating actions could be so much more with a robust distribution component. I wrote a blog post called, Mashups, Open APIs, and the Future of Collaboration in the Nonprofit Tech Sector. I left that session knowing exactly the direction I wanted to take Social Actions.

And what would you describe as the social definition of Social Actions API – the purpose?

There’s a groundswell in interest, on the part of “non-nonprofit professionals,” to engage with social movements and causes. It’s well-documented at this point that people are hungry to engage with causes they care about in various forms.

The premise behind Social Actions is that there are enough actions floating around on the web that nonprofits produce, but that they’re not linked up properly or adequately syndicated. There are a million opportunities to take action on a cause you care about, but it’s not easy to find them. The Social Actions API attempts to address the distribution and syndication challenge while also encouraging nonprofits to make their actions more readily available.

What were the limitations that Social Actions and its API were hitting up against before the recent updates?

We have encountered a number of challenges over the years. Originally, adding actions manually. was difficult. That challenge was resolved by creating a platform that used RSS feeds to pull in opportunities,  which in turn evolved into the Social Actions API, allowing people to access the full dataset from any application that connected to it.

The vast majority of applications that have been built since 2008 match actions with related content: for example, by reading a blog post and searching the Social Actions dataset for related actions. The quality of the search results were limited by our querying capabilities and relevancy ranking. The results we were able to produce didn’t reflect the full contents of our database. They tended to reflect only the most recently-added actions, not the most relevant. As a result, we weren’t equipping developers with a platform that allowed for more accurate location- and issue-based searches. Until the recent enhancements, producing the best possible search results for a given phrase or keyword was a biggest challenge.

What did the recent updates accomplish, and how did the opportunity to make them come about?

The updates introduce Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to the Social Actions API and begin to connect Social Actions to the wider Linked Open Data community.

The enhancements effectively put Social Actions back on the cutting edge of social technology. These were changes that we had wanted to make for a long time. In Spring 2009, we were approached by a group that was building an advanced video + action platform and that wanted to draw on the Social Actions API. Link TV, in prototyping their ViewChange platform, noticed that the Social Actions API wasn’t producing the best possible results. They invited us to explore with them what would be involved in updating our platform so that ViewChange could feature more relevant results.

Link TV, along with Doug Puchanski and Rob DiCiuccio of Definition, helped us articulate the changes that would need to occur and then connected us with a funder who could underwrite what amounted to a very significant enhancement to our code base. In one month, we had approximately as large an investment in the technology as we’d had in total up until that point. It has been incredibly exciting to see how open source projects like Social Actions tend to grow in fits and bursts, depending on the demands and resources made available by users.

What do “Semantic Analysis” and “Natural Language Processing” mean, and how do they make the Social Actions API better?

Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing both have to do with the process of identifying the meaning of a collection of words together. Semantic analysis, for example, can help to identify the meaning of a phrase like “poverty relief” as distinct from what “poverty” and “relief” mean independently. The Social Actions API now uses a tool called Zemanta to apply these processes when searching the actions contained in the dataset. As a result, we can say with more confidence what an action is about and where it is taking place. When searching for the phrase “poverty relief,” for example, not only are the search results more accurate, but Zemanta helps us to identify other actions that might not in fact use that phrase but are nonetheless linked in meaning to it. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but hopefully this makes sense.

And what does “Linked Open Data” refer to?

Just like in 2008 when I had an “aha moment” about APIs, in June 2009 I had an “aha moment” about Linked Open Data. I was presenting Social Actions at the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech), describing how Social Actions was an open database and how we encouraged developers to build open source applications that distributed this data widely. Ivan Herman from W3C listened to the presentation asked, “Why are you building something that’s so closed? Why aren’t you publishing this data in RDF?”

I was surprised to the say least. Defeated in fact. I had spent close to three years trying to build this open platform only to have someone more tech-savvy than me explain that what we had built was in fact still a closed platform. It turns out I was at the epicenter of the Linked Open Data community.  Their mission is to link the world’s knowledge in the same way that all of the world’s web pages have been linked to one another.

If you can imagine that today the web is a collection of links between pages, the web of tomorrow (proposed by these folks and Tim Berners-Lee) will be a collection of links between discreet knowledge, or datasets. Anyone will be able to follow the connection that’s been made between one repository of data and another the same way people can now hyperlink between one web page and another.

Linked Open Data essentially refers to building connections between these repositories in a standard format not unlike HTML and hypertext.

What role do API’s, and the people who build them, play in Linked Open Data?

The stewards of databases are no longer just asked to open up their datasets but to make them available in such a way that they link with other data repositories by design. In the case of Social Actions, Ivan from the Wc3 was effectively saying, “It’s great you have all of this data on actions people can take, but what are you doing to link that data with other datasets? What are you doing to help people make the connection between ‘poverty relief’ as an issue, for example, and existing data sets on the prevalence of poverty in a specific location?”

The Social Actions API now cross-references issues and locations with universal identifiers that have been assigned to them. Just like you might cross-reference the subject of a book with a Dewey Decimal number, we are now cross-referencing each action with a universal identifier that helps to link it to related data. Using Zemanta, we are able to provide URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) from Freebase and DBPedia that make the connection between actions in our system and other material on the web that relates to the same topic.

You can see examples of this at http://search.socialactions.com. Search for any phrase. Below each result you’ll see a link to “Entities.”

Can you tell me more about what ViewChange has done?

ViewChange is an example of an application that queries our actions using Freebase and DBPedia URIs as well as traditional keywords and phrases. The application says to Social Actions, “Show me everything that matches this URI.” The same query is submitted to the Social Actions API as is submitted to any data repository – news articles, videos, blog posts, etc. It’s truly commendable that Link TV, through the ViewChange project, has driven these enhancements on our platform.

A lot is also owed to Doug Puchalski, a programmer with Definition who helped lead the development of ViewChange.

To you, what might the future look like for people who want to take action on the causes they care about?

The technology exists for us to do really amazing things when it comes to matching people with actions they can take to make a difference. The technology itself is advancing, opening up more possibilities for even smarter applications.

The future of social technology, specifically creative implementations of the Social Actions API and similar open source platforms, is very exciting provided nonprofits and foundations continue to make rich data available and link it up with other repositories in the way I’ve attempted to described. The future is also very bright if we continue to experiment with how these linked data repositories can be deployed for forms of community engagement that we would not have thought possible a few years ago.

If everything goes incredibly well in the coming years, what might emerge is ubiquitous infrastructure of enabling technology and complementary applications that continuously present individuals with meaningful and relevant opportunities to enact change.

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The Social Actions API – a pioneering open source project since 2008 – continues its boundary-pushing agenda by embracing the semantic web and contributing to the Linked Open Data cloud, encouraging the sector as a whole to leverage open source software and linked data for greater impact.

Visit socialactions.com today to learn more!

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Kedar is an activist of sustainable living and collaborative creation. He is involved with BarCamp events, TwtrTales, a twitter based story writing project and Picky Polly. His learnings come from experiences that span an education in electronics and telecommunications, multi-cultural professional engagements in software development and communications, a business administration student life in pretty Paris and experiments in implementing technological solutions for social challenges.

Since turning vegetarian over a year ago due to self consciousness about the unsustainable nature of meat production, he has been trying to think of solutions that could better engage people to change their current habits for collective good.

Where did the idea for Picky Polly come from?

Since moving to Dubai over 3 years ago, I’ve observed that this city is the epitome of excessive consumption. UAE residents also have one of the largest ecological footprints on our planet. Using this behavior among residents as inspiration I felt compelled to do something about it.

Taking the lead from other measurement tools like the Google Power Meter that helps people take control of their energy usage and alter behavior, I felt mobile devices could act as an even more powerful tool in providing information and changing they way we shopped and used things in addition to household energy consumption.

Thus came along the idea of a personal ecological footprint measurement tool that helps people make better choices and transform lifestyles, Picky Polly.

What’s your goal for the new tool?

As a society we have largely stopped being picky about things we consume. But as co-inhabitants of this single planet we need to take more control and responsibility for the types of lives we lead. This consciousness and reason to change for our collective sustainability can only come from the awareness of our individual impact due to over consumption. Picky Polly aims to deliver that information for every item used by us and also help transform us by learning from our peers’ behaviors.

What’s different about Picky Polly from other “consumption + competition” tools people may have used before on facebook or elsewhere?

Numerous websites and mobile applications currently exist to help us get a rough idea of our ecological footprints by asking us questions to approximate our lifestyle patterns e.g. number of people in a household, distance driven in a month, miles flown in a year, vegetarian/ non-vegetarian, etc. These are good measuring tools in raising awareness about the ecological disaster that lies ahead, but they do not sufficiently motivate me to alter my behavior with using plastic bags at the corner store or buying a cup of coffee on my way into work or eating a burger from a popular fast-food chain. These are the kinds of purchases or behaviors, if changed will result in significantly larger social change.

I have not yet come across a robust and handy mobile solution that takes all the disparate pieces of information available to help people track their current impact and alter it based on self improvement, peer reviews and expert recommendations.

Picky Polly is simply an open and collaborative technological tool, firstly providing people a better way to measure themselves and secondly to provide relevant and contextual feedback (with incentives/ rewards) to alter their lifestyle patterns/ choices.

What are the implications of such a tool on our production-heavy consumption-driven society?

There are numerous way this tool can improve the way the consumption cycle of our society change. It is meant to work it’s way from the conscious measurement of people’s behavior.

1. Social Change: Better inform people to make the right choices
2. Information Transparency: Better labeling of products and inquiry into resource usage, labor use, toxics, health, etc
3. Government policy: Rewarding citizens for their behavioral changes and better regulating toxic products.
4. New product development: Helping businesses learn from changes in social behavior and better adapt products/ packaging to people’s sustainable needs.
5. Community production: Encouraging entrepreneurs to find community solutions to meet the localized needs.

These are just some ways, that come my mind, Picky Polly can assist the different parties mentioned from its measurements of local lifestyle patterns.

What help could you use at this stage?

I am no expert in the field of sustainable living, rather a passionate fellow citizen of this world who could use help and collaboration from

• the Netsquared community in the form of feedback on the idea,
• experts in understanding the footprint life cycle consumables,
• game designers to help design compelling social incentives,
• 3. mobile application developers to build a robust prototype.

Additionally, I’m aware that such a project requires reasonable commitment of time from the above people and hence any financially support from a believer in the idea for the creation of a working prototype is also most welcome.

PS: Financers will of course be rewarded a stake in the eventually funded entity.

What else are you working on?

I’m also involved in TwtrTales, a project that would like to leverage the creative potential of twitter users in writing collaborative stories. This project has many similarities with Picky Polly, like co-creator credits, collaboration between participants and peer reviews which I’m learning more about as I go along.

How can readers get involved or follow your work?

I have recently started a Tumblog at www.pickypolly.com to document efforts by others providing practical information on sustainable living and to include podcasts with individuals and organizations that help make better everyday choices.

Additionally, I’m can be reached on Twitter, would also love to converse with you over email at kedar dot iyer at gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.

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Kivi Leroux Miller helps small nonprofits and communications departments of one make a big impression with smart, savvy communications and marketing. She’s a blogger, trainer, coach, and consultant. Her new book, “The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause,” is part survival guide and part nitty-gritty how-to handbook for nonprofit communicators.

What’s your story; how did you get started with nonprofit marketing?
Ever since college (which is going on 20 years ago), I don’t think more than a couple of months have gone by where I wasn’t serving on a nonprofit board, funding nonprofits as a grantmaker, or working for nonprofits as staff or as a consultant. When I moved from California to Washington DC in 1998 to be with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, I decided to start my own consulting company, which originally focused on writing for environmental groups, thus EcoScribe Communications was born. In 2007 I started to transition away from consulting for a few clients at a time to more writing, online training, and public speaking, which lets me connect with thousands of nonprofits every year. I love it!

What kind of organizations have you worked with?
My degree is in environmental science, so I started with environmental groups and then branched out to other progressive causes like animal welfare and HIV/AIDS support organizations. I’ve always preferred to work with smaller organizations because I felt like my impact was always greater there. Now that I’m doing online training, I’ve had small nonprofits in all 50 U.S. states, in nearly every Canadian province/territory, and more than two dozen other countries participate in webinars. They represent every kind of nonprofit you can think of!

What’s the difference between online and offline marketing – or is there one?
I think they are more alike than many people think — at least the people who get tied up focusing on the tools, rather than what they are trying to do with the tools. Good nonprofit marketing is all about knowing who is on the other side of the conversation and talking with them about your cause in ways that are meaningful for them, regardless of whether that conversation is taking place in person or over email or social media.

What are the biggest obstacles organizations face when it comes to successful marketing?
If you put aside basic resource issues of time and money, I think fear is actually one of the biggest obstacles. Nonprofits seem to be more acutely concerned than small businesses, for example, about what someone might think or what someone might say about this or that, and it makes them too cautious and conservative in their marketing. It’s like they just want to quietly blend in, when what they really need to do with their marketing is stand out! I talk about several ways to deal with that kind of fear in the book.

We know storytelling is important for grant applications and fundraising appeals, how is it most useful in marketing?
Stories are the best way to bring to life for people what it is you do. So many nonprofits have long lists of programs and services that are laden with jargon, and after you read them, you still don’t really understand what happens day in and day out. Stories provide the examples and the context for what nonprofits are doing. They are essential from a marketing perspective, because they are so much easier to remember and to pass on to others than straight facts and figures. They also usually contain an emotional punch that grabs you and sticks with you. The staying power of stories is really underestimated.

In your book, you use the term “Attitude of Gratitude” – just what does that mean?
It means that you embed being thankful into your everyday approach to your work. It’s easy for all of us, in both our personal lives and in our professional lives, to take others for granted. We all get too busy; we all start to expect more from the people who are good to us than we really deserve to (yes, I’m speaking from experience!).

On a practical level, having an attitude of gratitude means putting higher priority on getting your fundraising thank you letters out to your donors than on producing a newsletter that goes to your entire list. It also means reciprocating the generosity of others, which you can do with something as simple as a retweet.

With so many options for tools, products, and channels today, how do organizations keep marketing to a reasonable budget (while still making a big splash)?
Online marketing is so affordable that managing the time budget is actually a bigger challenge than managing the money budget. It all goes back to focusing on specific groups of people who you need to reach and selecting the tools that make is easiest to connect with them. The book is full of cost-saving and time-saving tips because all of the groups I work with have very limited quantities of both!

How can readers learn more about your work, your book, and follow the conversation?
NonprofitMarketingGuide.com is the home base. From there, I write a weekly e-newsletter and I  blog a couple of times a week. You can also find me on our Facebook Page and I’m kivilm on Twitter and Slideshare.

The book is available at Amazon.com and other online booksellers.

Submit your questions about The Nonprofit Marketing Guide today:

• Simply leave a question in the comments here to participate
• I’ll submit all questions to Kivi on June 5th, so only questions posted before then will be included

I’m really looking forward to gathering great questions from you all and hearing and learning from Kivi as she responds! She’s a great voice on nonprofit marketing and I think participating in the virtual book tour will be fun and valuable.  Let the questions begin!

In Richard’s words:

“I am a lucky man, and basically because I do not dare make mistakes, so correct. Even drafting of this writing, is manipulated to criticism and change. Perhaps one of the things that is m’incomoda not suffer the discomfort of change. The experimentalist spirit and desire to meet new experiences and new friends I can always enjoy. The only problem is the inability to catch everything.

Now I’m a councilman in Copons, where I live for seven years, a very pretty village of Alta Anoia. Councilman and Economic Development of New Technologies and Communication. I also vice president of the Consortium for the Economic Development of the Alta Anoia, we are working on the issue of new technologies, especially GPS routes.

I have a study of communication & web design, called Redall. With two friends Gemma Urgell and Jordi Mas.”

What are the various projects you’re working on now?

Copons 2.0: When I became a councillor I put into motion a project of digital inclusion and citizen participation using free web tools: Copons 2.0. It was one year before we could see benefits, problems, results… We’ve progressed by trial & error and now we are engaged in more projects like ours in villages near Copons. copòns.net

La Teva Alta Anoia: The main objective is to create a new web portal of Alta Anoia, through which an innovative way to serve as a benchmark for tourism promotion as a tool of identity and cohesion of a country and a brand: Alta Anoia.

How did your work getting the local council online get started?  What’s been the reaction of your community?

Copons 2.0: approach to consensus decision making
What’s the idea?

Really, it’s easy. We proposed a new path to take decisions. Until now, when a citizen had a problem they went to the Council to explain it or filled out a form. Only sometimes the citizen received an answer and a lot of times it was difficult to solve the problem. Now when somebody wants to solve a problem, they have a new way: publish their problem on Facebook. More citizens can get involved to give their opinion, and of course, the council too.

What are benefits?

Not just seven people at the council give solutions. Everybody can participate in solving a problem. Sometimes, citizens who have had the same problem in the past give their opinion and this is fantastic! Another benefit for the councilis to have a space to propose projects for the future, and see the opinion of the citizens.

The premises of the project:

– Everybody can participate with their digital profile -anonymity is not allowed – Everybody can start a discousion to solve a problem – The Council must alwaysgive an answer – Work to involve maximum of citizens in a digital space – Offer training sessions to avoid the digital divide – Share the project with other villages to increase open government

Results & lessons learned

– More digital profiles in the vilage – More ICT in the village – More dialog – More knowledge about the limits of local administration – More who is who wants to help and who is who wants to put obstacles – More analogic dabate – More knowledge about the real problems of citizens – More long tail of problems – More people involved in a specific search for solving problems – More accountability – More transparency – More proximity – More co-creative (administration-citizens) solutions – More feedback & demands.

Who or what topics have been more interesting in the TalkingAbout series?

A mosaic of experiences, stories and projects with Web 2.0 as a backdrop.

People follow people on Twitter, we have dozens of friends in Facebook, read many blogs, we take an idea about the people we admire, that surprises us, which enriches knowledge. Why not go one step further and stay with them? Why not talk face to face with people who pass through the network to be part of our day without having shared a conversation out loud.

This is why Gemma Urgell and I started talkingabout. Now, after a year interviewing different people and creating the platform, you can share your talkingabout topic and create, together, a mosaic of experiences, stories and projects with Web 2.0 as a backdrop.

Culture, politics, education, business, economy, cooperation, youth, journalism, the new values on different facets of Web 2.0 (share, distribute, create value, co-create, disseminate) are present thanks to people that extend and amplify this new way of understanding life and the relationships between people. You also have much to tell us about this paradigm shift and how to apply it in your day, and obviously also like to know or know someone who read a blog, or following on Twitter … therefore propose to you a # talkingabout here and share it with us. Passes from 2.0 to-face conversation and, through a short video that summarizes the meeting and share.

To learn more about Ricard’s work with government transparency and community building, connect with him directly at:

• Twitter: @ricardespelt
• Web: http://www.theplateishot.com/