To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Five Social Media Must-Haves for Crisis | Social Media Today – "Organizations and businesses that don't plan for crisis will be left behind when the inevitable happens. Thorough crisis plans don't have to be 50 pages long, but you need to have one. Your organization's crisis plan should include a social piece in the communications section. Real-time is the fastest way to join the conversation, provide help and information, and direct the messages. Social helps you be your own media. So, how can social media play a positive role in crisis? Here are five social media must-haves in crisis."
• Online Competitions: Lessons from MIT’s Service Innovation Challenge  – Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media – frogloop – "For the last three years we’ve worked at the MIT Public Service Center – in collaboration with the MIT Alumni Association, MIT150, and numerous stakeholders – to translate a campus-based innovation competition into an online platform that engages the worldwide MIT community. We’ve cracked the competition process open, leveraging a combination of workflows and social tools to produce a compelling experience of real participation in key activities. We’d like to share a few of our major aims and reflect a bit on some lessons learned that we hope will guide our approach in the future and prove helpful to others designing competitions, challenges, and prize giveaways online – in particular those focused on social benefit and public service. We are indebted to our partners at Idea Couture for their thoughtful, patient, imaginative, and generous work with us. "
• Azavea – Augmented Reality for Cultural Institutions – Augmented Reality by PhillyHistory.org – What do you do with 93,000+ historical photographs and the power of Augmented Reality on smart phones? Azavea explores this topic in a newly released whitepaper and documents how they built a prototype mobile app (for iPhone and Android) that overlays historical photos on the modern city streets of Philadelphia.
• Making Stories Work for Your Org: What the Data Says | NTEN – "Don't count on a personal story to transform your fundraising appeal. Instead, tell stories that explain your mission and your impact. Recognize that these stories aren't enough to compel someone to give. In the story that gets people to give, the donor — not the organization — is the hero."
• Twin Cities marketers queuing up with QR codes – TwinCities.com – A great example of an interesting way to use QR codes! "Visitors to Chino Latino restaurant in Minneapolis recently found something new sticking out of their drinks. The paper umbrellas were gone, replaced with a diminutive, square-shaped code made up of black and white rectangles. If this had happened two or three years ago, the visitors likely would have been baffled. But now, a rapidly increasing number of them know what to do: Whip out their smart phones, fire up an app that can decipher the code and discover where it leads. "

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Open Source Zanby Announcement | Zanby.com – I'm so very excited to see this group/community platform go open source! If you aren't familiary with Zanby, I encourage you to read the news and check out the platform today! "As of May 13, 2011, we are releasing the code for our community software platform, the Zanby Enterprise Group Family System, under a GPLv3 license. We are also launching a community to encourage software developers to collaborate with us to evolve and improve the Zanby codebase. We hope you will join us."
• Nonprofit Uses QR Code, Quora to Make Cause Marketing More Transparent | Cause marketing for nonprofits – Here is a really interesting case study where an organization is using both a QR code and the answer platform Quora to engage and inform supporters. "This month my fellow Dummies writer Joanna MacDonald and I are putting Quora to the test with a QR code on our latest pinup that will be sold at iParty and Fuddruckers locations throughout New England. Trying scanning this QR code with the QR reader on your smartphone. When consumers scan the code with their smartphones (try it yourself!) it takes them to this Quora page where they can comment or ask a question about the campaign. We plan to monitor the page regularly so we can answer questions quickly and accurately."
• How To Use Hashtags on Twitter to Spread, Share and Organize Information | Movements.org – Looking for a resource on hashtags, what they mean, how to use them, and how to really get value from them? Look no further! This is a great run down that you can share with colleagues or reference yourself as you dive into the world of Twitter, join a twitter chat, or start swimming in the stream of real-time information!
• Hey Admins, Get A Load Of The New Pages Dashboard – "Facebook has added some more organization for administrators, in the form of a new dashboard that shows complete details about all of the pages an admin manages. A tab labeled pages now appears on the home page, in the left-hand set of navigation links…"
• Demand Dignity: Amplifying Voices Across Multiple Platforms | MobileActive.org – "Amnesty International has launched a campaign to amplify the voices of poor people around the world. Demand Dignity is an economic, cultural, and social rights campaign for the organization and the online platform, DemandDignity.org, was launched in May 2009. Since then, the site has collected 57,384 comments, or “voices,” from people around the world, via SMS, Twitter, and on the Demand Dignity website. "

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• New Report: 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study | NTEN – "A high unsubscribe rate is bad, right? Not necessarily, according to the 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, just released at the 2011 NTC by M+R and NTEN. As it turns out, a high unsubscribe rate correlates directly with high fundraising results. People unsubscribe because they read your message and decide your cause isn't interesting to them; people donate because they read your message and decide that it is. That's just one of the fascinating drops of knowledge in the "2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study"."
• Twitter Blog: #numbers – "Five years ago this week, a small team of people started working on a prototype of the service that we now know as Twitter. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet. Today, on every measure of growth and engagement, Twitter is growing at a record pace. Here are some numbers…" Some very interesting numbers from Twitter – what are you most surprised about? When did you join Twitter, or what has kept you from joining? Would love to hear your thoughts!
• A Global Conversation: Free Agents and Nonprofits in a Networked World | Community Organizer 2.0 – "I am attending the South By Southwest Interactive panel discussion entitled “A Global Conversation: Free Agents and Nonprofits in a Networked World.” Beth Kanter of Zoetica Media is the moderator, along with fellow panelists Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), Mark Horvath of Invisible People and Jessica Dheere, of Social Media Exchange Beirut in Lebanon. During the session, I captured the presentations and audience Q & A. This blog post is merely a recording of the session, with highlights of the key points. On an editorial note – the session surfaced some incredible pearls of wisdom from both panelists and audience members about how to work with free agents and nonprofits, and those are underlined."
• Amazing use of QR Codes by NYC’s Central Park – "I’ve been writing about and using QR codes quite a bit of late. I think the potential of this technology is staggering and we’ve only begun to imagine what is possible. Take a look at what New York City’s Central Park did last Arbor Day and begin to ask yourself… how could QR codes serve my customers, my employees and my business’ growth. I suspect you’ll find some pretty fascinating answers."
• Checkins (CI) Experimental Functionality – The Ushahidi Blog – "As we announced in January, we are working on a new checkins feature. We are really excited about simplifying the reporting process for those situations where you don’t need a full blown report. The checkins functionality in the Ushahidi Platform is one of the first open source checkin products that crosses multiple mobile platforms. We’ve been hard at work laying out the basic functionality ahead of SXSW and it’s now available for your deployment in the Ushahidi Repository on GitHub and is already active on Crowdmap."