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).

• How to Prepare Your Community for a Major Change « The Community Manager – "Change: it’s the one constant in life. Whether you’re introducing a change in ownership, new staff, policy change, technical update, or something else, community members sometimes resist change. Usually, they’re afraid of repercussions that could affect the community they care so much about—so, it comes from a “good place.” That being said, their fears and frustrations can create chaos, and part of your job as community manager is to make transitions as smooth and drama-free as possible. Follow these steps to turn your announcement from a sign of the apocalypse into a community-building win they thank you for."
• Interactive: How America Gives – How America Gives – The Chronicle of Philanthropy- Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas – The Chronicle of Philanthropy has launched a great new tool: an interactive map of giving data in the US. You can look at total contributions, contributions by household, discretionary income by household, and percentage of income given by household at the national, state, county, and local level.
• Survey says: Most noprofiteers blend their personal/professional brands | Big Duck – "Last week I had the joy of presenting a workshop with the fabulous Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation at the 7th Annual Bridge to Integrated Marketing & Fundraising Conference in Washington, DC. To gear up for our session on "Mixing Business and Pleasure: Managing Your Personal Brand in Social Media," we asked nonprofiteers (readers like you!) to respond to a quick survey about their own behaviors. We heard from 209 nonprofit staff, consultants, and the people who love us–and some of the results suprised us. While not scientific, the survey offers some interesting insights and we highlighted the key findings in our presentation (included in the slides below and online here). Here are some of those insights…"
• e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics » How a Twitter Rapid Response Campaign Helped Susan Sarandon ‘Get’ Paid Sick Days – "A coalition of diverse organizations in New York City has banded together to escalate the conversation regarding paid sick days for workers, with an emphasis on getting the NY City Council to pass legislation mandating paid sick days. So far, Council Speaker Christine Quinn has not called for a vote on this issue. But now, it just may happen — after the coaltion (with a little help from their friends) gave us an impromptu course in how to run online rapid response."
• Direct Energy | Direct Energy Contest | Reduce Your Use for GoodReduce Your Use – "Nonprofits, you know it: small changes can make a big difference. At Direct Energy, we’re committed to using our energy expertise to make a difference in people’s lives — so we’re donating up to $100,000 to nonprofits like you to help reduce energy use. Just make a short video of two minutes or less showing us the good work you do in your community. Acceptable submission formats include Windows Media, Quick Time and MPEG (files ending in .wmv, .avi, .mov, .mpg or .mp4). Be passionate. Be creative. Be concise. Tell us about your organization and its vision, how the small things you do make a big difference and why it’s so important that you continue your mission."

Today’s a special day for nonprofits. It started at midnight on the Pacific, when over 200 nonprofits flipped the switch and started racing to see which of them will be one of the three organizations to raise the most donations and win a share of $30,000. They only have 24 hours, when the switch is turned off at midnight tonight.

To get to this point, Twive and Receive nonprofits worked their tails off for weeks building a community and strategizing fundraising tactics. Their goal is to help supporters understand and memorize the simple call-to-action: donate to us on June 14^th.

The Importance of a Strong Community

Building a community takes time and effort. Ideally, you want to get to the point where supporters quickly respond to your calls.

Since the Twive contest kicked off a couple months ago, these nonprofits got to work. They did keyword searches on Twitter to talk to people they have something in common with, began engaging people on Facebook with conversation topics, and pinning images on Pinterest to get the sharing going.

Today, they have people Tweeting links to their fundraising page, supporters strutting the Twibbon and most importantly, donors making their donation. This can only be done with the backing of a strong online community.

The Importance of a Strong Strategy

There isn’t a cookie cutter fundraising strategy that works for every nonprofit across the board. Here’s a collection of what some Twive and Receive participants have done to promote their fundraiser:

The Importance of Doing Good

At the end of the day, these communities win because nonprofits that offer important services benefited. A great side effect is that people are going to feel good about their actions.

If you want to help make an impact, find your favorite cause or city and support them with a donation today on TwiveAndReceive.org. You have until midnight to help that nonprofit be a step closer towards winning an additional cash prize. You’ll be proud of yourself, trust me.

Ifdy Perez is the community manager at Razoo, an online fundraising platform that empowers individuals and nonprofits to meet their fundraising goals through online giving campaigns. She’s also editor of Inspiring Generosity, a blog that gives nonprofits helpful resources on online community management and social media tools.

I knew it was hitting many more people than the average news story when I saw tweets, facebook posts, and other online comments coming from people in my community and network that I rarely see participating online. And just as quickly as people responded with outrage against Komen, the conversation changed to be about the women who would continue to need support and the services that help them. Breast Cancer has impacted my family, like many others, and I grew up participating in Komen’s Race for the Cure in Portland every year with my mom. Komen’s announcement changed people’s minds and it didn’t matter that they later said PP affiliate could apply for funding (whether or not they are granted will be seen then) because the “break up” was final for many.

Jumping into action, Allison Fine, Beth Kanter, Stephanie Rudat, Lisa Colton, and Lucy Bernholz starting moving beyond the updates and long conversation threads and towards a collective call to action. You can read the summary of how the free agent community came together to self-organize and create a public action as well as a full report of the lessons learned and reflections on the #TakeBackThePink campaign in this public google doc.

10 Lessons from Community-Driven Organizing

After the #TakeBackThePink twitter campaign during the Super Bowl, Beth prompted all of us to share lessons and reflections in a google doc to be captured and shared. Here are the lessons we pulled out as a group:

1. We could not plan for an event like this, however as individuals who are  unencumbered by organizational rules or policies, and that we have our own large networks of people to bring to an effort, and that we are comfortable working in a dynamic, flat, environment, we reacted very quickly and nimbly to events as they unfolded and provided avenues for action for other people angry at Komen. A core group of the organizers are fluent with a variety of social media platforms including Twitter, Pinterest (a fun opportunity to take it out for a social change spin, thought Beth!) and Facebook, plus Stephanie’s graphic design expertise. As one participant recalls, “There was an immediate sense of relatedness amongst the group conjoined by leaders.  We all saw something in the uproar and possibility for ourselves and those we care about.”
2. #takebackthepink was a particularly resonant phrase with our group because it represented the opportunity to begin to separate Komen from the color pink. As Lucy would tweet later, “Pink is a color not an org.” A fundamental part of our effort was to reestablish the primacy of women’s health over the branding concerns of a single organization. We believe we created an opportunity for a large number of people to participate in this process, and the momentum to continue the discussion moving forward.
3. There were two moments of tension during the week between a centralized approach and a network approach. The first time, the effort split in two; with one group focused on fundraising and another on advocacy and awareness. The second, a faction chose to opt out of the Super Bowl effort. Both times it was brought up that it was no longer about recouping money to PP (as that was already achieved in the first 48 hours) but was about redirecting people’s emotional responses, keeping people connected to causes and organizations even if they weren’t Komen, and demonstrating the importance of knowing what the orgs do that you support.
4. There was a flow of people in and out of the effort depending on their interest and availability. A public thread rather than the private email thread would have been more in keeping with our interest in and value of transparency. We chose the email vehicle believing that the element of surprise would be important to our efforts. It turned out not to be the case.
5. Finding the messaging middle ground in a fast changing environment was very challenging. Take Back the Pink was seen by some as Komen bashing and by others as “too nice.” We did our best to find a positive place for Super Bowl Sunday: there are a lot of organizations and way to support breast health, here are options in addition to Komen. It was harder to communicate than, “Screw Komen, fund Planned Parenthood” and it’s unclear how successful we were in explaining the shift and making the message clear.
6. We could have done a better job of looking for other hashtags in real-time and piggy-backed on them in order to weave together different conversations.
7. We developed and shone a spotlight on nonprofits and transparency, an unusual element to a discussion of pro-choice and women’s health issues.
8. Defining success in a very fluid situation was also very challenging. If fifty people retweeted with our hashtag was that success? Five hundred people? Five thousand people? An interesting model to use for comparison is Occupy Wall Street. Rather than using numeric outputs as goals, perhaps our effort, simply being and spreading, was successful. We are still wrestling with this question, although perhaps one answer is that if a single person learned about a new resource or organization that was success. Having the single largest media event of the year on the immediate horizon made for a great leverage point.
9. It would have been great to have advocacy organizations sign on as participants and partners in this event, however, when we did bump up against organizations they were unable to move fast enough with their approval processes to fully participate. This will continue to hamper the ability of organizations to work with “free agents” like us who need to meet an opportunity like this with speed, agility and a lack of concern for traditional message controls. Perhaps organizations can more fully participate in the next phase of development of the Facebook page.
10. This group is open to continuing the Facebook page and the conversation about general breast health and the array of organizations and resources available to women.  Clearly, there is a void in the digital space for being a resource to those who want to learn, contribute, volunteer, receive services but don’t know of all of the options or how to vet. Our capacity is stretched, though, we all participated in this effort as volunteers.

Observations & Reflections

Additionally, I want to pull out a few things I keep reflecting back on from the campaign and the organizing process that I think are influential to how we plan for and execute actions as community members and how we support them as organizations.

How do you evaluate and recognize “critical mass” of a free agent community? As Allison points out in her reflection post, after she created the Causes campaign and witnessed the response, she knew there was enough interest and people to do something bigger. But how did she know? How does your organization evaluate, on the fly in real-time, what critical mass is around a piece of news, an issue, a campaign, or even just an idea? How do you then say “this is it” and move to the next stage? In this case, I think critical mass was established by having more than just two or three, but actually five, six, even seven or eight people willing to jump in to help – and help by organizing and thinking and planning, not just sharing the message or plan once it was created. For organizations working on evaluating critical mass in real-time, it may be different as you would also factor in staff capacity to support the organizers from the community.

In a crisis, there are two versions of reaction: one against the perpetrator (in this case it was Komen, “how could they?”), the other in support of the victims (PP at first, and then quickly women in general). It is hard to switch the focus of a campaign after it is launched, so it’s important that you frame the story, your calls to action, and the actions themselves consistently. It was discussed openly and repeatedly on email chains and Facebook threads whether the focus was against Komen or in support of PP or even in support of women’s health. It was agreed every time that the focus was really on women’s health and redirecting people’s outrage, emotion, and attention so that instead of giving up on Komen and all breast cancer or women’s health issues, people would continue to participate, donate, and support organizations working on these issues. That’s why the resources on the TakeBackThePink wiki point to nonprofit and donor directories so people can research all the organizations working on breast cancer and women’s health, for example.

To organize and operate nimbly, you need to leave a crumb trail for others to join and follow you. This is incredibly important. It was necessary that the group collaborating on email and across multiple comment threads on Facebook create a cohesive place to refer new people when they jumped in, and a place for people to follow if they had to jump out. To the lesson above about the flow of participants in and out of the group, creating some central places to point people would support the people consistently reaching out to engage people as well as those who did not want to be involved but wanted to share the plans with others. To that end, I helped quickly create a shared google doc so that the messaging, calls to action, and other important links could be docked and shared easily. I also created a customized bit.ly link for the google doc so that sharing the information and inviting people to participate would be easy to do. Furthermore, it wasn’t just the google doc of messaging and information that was helpful, but that in the doc and on Beth’s wiki we provided direct links to the Twitter search for #takebackthepink and places to engage like the Facebook page, Allison’s Causes space, and Deanna’s Tumblr. Creating shortcuts like this by aggregating all the related links or resources together helped both the “main organizers” and all those coming in and out of the thread.

What do you think?

What other lessons or observations do you have from this campaign or others? What have you tried or experimented with? Would love to learn from you!

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).

• Can Members of Congress Keep Up with the Digital World? – Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media – – "Let’s face it, the world is no picnic these days. We’re facing climate change. The world’s oceans are on the verge of being irreparably damaged. One of the worst humanitarian crises continues to escalate in the Horn of Africa, where famine, war and drought are threatening 13M+ people. Thankfully, we have some incredible nonprofits on the ground who continue to tackle these issues everyday, raise awareness and mobilize people into action. And now more than ever, people are reaching out to their members of congress through online channels to voice their concerns about some of these very issues. But how is Congress responding? Are they adopting new methods fast enough to respond to their constituents in the digital age? Is the fear that their responses could be modified with malintent valid? The Congressional Management Foundation new study, Communicating with Congress: How Citizen Advocacy Is Changing Mail Operations on Capitol Hill provides some good insight."
• Donate Your Account | HelpAttack! – "Well how about that – after Epic Change’s use of JustCoz, and Al Gore’s campaign with Climate Reality Project in September to get folks to donate their status updates, someone has gone and open sourced the concept.  Donate Your Account seems to allow anyone to set up a campaign, and allow others with Twitter or Facebook accounts to automatically re-broadcast messages from that campaign."
• 92% of Americans Take Action for Social Good [INFOGRAPHIC] – "Ninety-two percent of American’s took action for social change this past year, according to the Social Change Impact Report from Walden University. The report was created as a kind of barometer for who is engaged in social change, what issues matter to them and how they’re working together. Surprisingly, tech did not play a huge role. According to the report, people from Generation Y were more likely to get involved through traditional means than digital. Only 52% of the demographic posted a comment or expressed an opinion through a blog or website (it’s unclear if this also includes Facebook or other social networks). This, however, butts up against more promising stats such as 80% of respondents believe technology is getting more people involved in social change than ever, and 65% of adult respondents say that social media is not just a fad."
• The Case for Innovation in Advocacy | Association Advocacy Chick – "I am not an innovator. Correction: I have been convinced that I cannot be an innovator. If you were to play word association with advocacy, I’m sure innovation is not the word you’d come up with.  But why is that? Many associations insist that it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  Yes, traditional lobbying, grassroots advocacy, and political involvement are effective ways of moving or defeating legislation.  However, what if there’s a way to make those methods even better?  Fly-ins are great, but expensive.  Political action committees are prohibited for many cases.  What does that mean for the in-house lobbyist who needs to convince a few key people to support their legislation?"
• How The Seemingly Chaotic But Wildly Successful Fringe Festival Makes It Work | Fast Company – "This has been an explosive summer–markets in turmoil, cities in flames, politics in meltdown. So it's a relief to enjoy and learn from an explosion of a different sort–the explosion of creativity taking place this August in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The festival, a one-time icon of artistic rebellion, is now the largest arts gathering in the world. It is also an entertaining case study in the power of grassroots innovation and open-source creativity, a positive symbol of how unchecked human energy, shaped by a few simple rules, can unleash truly amazing results."

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).

• The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Visualizing Prominent Information Flows during the Tunisia and Egypt Revolutions – This is a very cool visualization from danah boyd pulling together twitter accounts and displaying tweets, reactions, and much more. Really interesting to see the combination of various kinds of information sources – from traditional media outlets to individuals.
• Too Many Messages and Only One Facebook Page: April 6th Movement in Post-Mubarak Egypt | technosociology – Check out this great guest post by Susannah Vila on the technosociology blog! "This post draws from over 30 in-depth, semi structured interviews conducted with coordinators of and participants in the Egyptian revolution between March and August 2011."
• A Roundup of Valuable Twitter Tools – Noupe – A great round up of Twitter tools – some great long-time favorites and some newer tools. Any others you'd add? "It is hard to argue against the value of Twitter these days, especially for businesses and professionals looking to network and stay ahead of the curve. Like the throngs of designers and developers that have flooded this social media outlet’s streams and sapped its API since its inception. And with so many amazing tools available to expand on, and enhance the overall user’s experience, Twitter is becoming even more useful and handy than ever before."
• How Much Money Do Americans Give Online? [INFOGRAPHIC] – "Everyone says it’s hard to measure social good success. Well, non-profit consultancy Convio begs to differ. The firm recently put out an infographic showing that the Internet is the fastest-growing channel for non-profits. The graphic compares money raised, awareness gained and a variety of other factors across a three-year period. Since 2008, non-profits have cracked the $1 billion mark for online fundraising. In 2010, the average online gift jumped up to $91.94."
• Five Ways for Human Service Nonprofits to Reset their Funding Models – "…most nonprofits have in effect two customers— the beneficiaries they are supporting, and the funders who are paying for the work. In most instances (unlike business) these are not the same parties. … But this is a balance that very few nonprofits manage to strike; the lion’s share of their energy and focus goes into their program model, not their funding model. The big empirical finding runs counter to the conventional wisdom that nonprofits need to diversify their funding across multiple funding sources— foundations, high net worth donors, small individual contributors, corporate philanthropy, government, etc.— in order to grow and become more sustainable. What we have found instead is that for the vast majority of large nonprofits, especially for those with budgets of $50 million and up, it pays to focus, not diversify across different sources."

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).

• Groupon Case Study: Jolkona’s Groupon Experiment | Community Organizer 2.0 – Check out this great interview by Debra Askanase with Laura Kimball, discussing their experiment using Groupon! "Jolkona ran a Groupon deal as an experiment to try to raise money for a specific campaign using Groupon. Jolkona partnered with the Seattle International Foundation (SIF), which pledged to match every donation, dollar for dollar, up to $25,000. Starting July 26th, Groupon Seattle’s G-Team allowed subscribers to join Jolkona and SIF in making an investment in women’s leadership by pledging support in increments of $10. For each $500 collected, Jolkona would fund one week of training for a woman leader to come to Seattle and participate in a 10-week fellowship program, run by iLEAP: The Center for Critical Service."
• Year-end appeals have you stumped? Four quick tips to get the ball rolling | Big Duck – "This is the time of year when most people I know are thinking about ‘back to school’ and beginning to plan their fall/winter holidays and vacations. Of course for us Ducks and most of you, this time of year is dominated by the ever-glorious year-end fundraising appeal. These days, the year-end giving season starts as early as October. In fact, as I write this (in mid-August), we’re already at work on several year-end campaigns. If you’re not quite there yet, here are a few quick tips I hope you’ll find useful to get your fundraising wheels in motion."
• When Communities Identify Their Own Poor, Aid Has The Most Effect | Fast Company – "When governments and NGOs plan on giving assistance to the most needy, how do they know who needs the most assistance? It's a question people are at great pains to answer, yet social welfare programs around the world are still plagued by error and abuse. That has not deterred the development of programs to help people escape extreme poverty. But because the poor–especially those earning less than $2 or $3 per day–typically hold informal jobs with no official records about their earnings, conventional ways to determine need are ineffective. MIT researchers in a recent study (PDF) looked at two alternative methods for establishing who needs assistance."
• 7 Things Nonprofits Can Talk About on Facebook Besides Themselves « – "Recently I met with a client who was sensitive about what they posted on Facebook, because they not only had privacy issues to be concerned with of their constituents, but they didn’t think that the other things they do would be applicable to their fans on Facebook. In other words they didn’t think that their fans on Facebook cared about what their organization was doing other than fundraising."
• Complex and Contradictory: A New Way to Think of Digital Activism | The Meta-Activism Project – "The effect of digital technology on political contention is neither good nor bad, it is both.  Yes, the Internet can help activists mobilize and re-frame public issues.  It can also distract citizens and feed apathy.  It can also help repressive governments watch and censor their citizens.  The sooner we accept digital technology’s complex and contradictory effect of political power dynamics, the sooner we can move forward to answering more interesting questions about those effects.  What contextual factors lead to these different outcomes?  Why does one factor win out over others when all three are in play?"
• 5 Reasons Social Media Measurement is Making You Lie to Yourself | social media measurement | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert – I love the comparision Jay makes here between Twitter and email, followers equals sends and actual Twitter reach (people reading and responding) equals open rate. Really changes the impact of those Twitter numbers! "Social media measurement causes unsavory (and ineffective) marketing behavior because unlike the rest of our marketing key performance indicators, social media metrics are out there for anyone to see."

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).

• SignOn.org Beta – Have you seen the new petition tool from MoveOn.org? "SignOn is a service provided by MoveOn.org Civic Action to allow anyone to set up their own online petition, share it with friends, and stay in touch with the signers of their petition using email." What do you think? Have you tried it yet?
• 30 Super Useful Nonprofit Hashtags – Twitter Chats, Too! « Company K Media – Kerri has an excellent round up of some of the most popular hashtags on Twitter related to the nonprofit and social impact sectors, as well as hashtags to follow to join in regular Twitter chats. Check it out and add yours to the list!
• Women Deliver » Updates » Winners Announced for the Women Bloggers Deliver Competition – Congratulations to my friend Toyin Ajao! Check out this very cool initiative and follow the stories of the three women selected to blog for Carbon for Water! "We are so excited to announce the winners of the “Women Bloggers Deliver” competition! Over the past few weeks, we received over 250 applications from bloggers around the world – from California to Kenya, and from Mexico to Iraq. The competition, a partnership between Women Deliver and Vestergaard Frandsen, was held to draw focus and attention to the just launched Carbon for Water project, a public health intervention that will contribute significantly to health and development efforts that are transforming the lives of families and communities hard hit by the lack of clean water. The three winning bloggers will accompany community workers as they distribute LifeStraw® Family water filters to almost a million households in Kakamega, Kenya."
• What We Lose if We Lose Data.gov | Freedom to Tinker – "In its latest 2011 budget proposal, Congress makes deep cuts to the Electronic Government Fund. This fund supports the continued development and upkeep of several key open government websites, including Data.gov, USASpending.gov and the IT Dashboard. An earlier proposal would have cut the funding from $34 million to $2 million this year, although the current proposal would allocate $17 million to the fund. Reports say that major cuts to the e-government fund would force OMB to shut down these transparency sites. This would strike a significant blow to the open government movement, and I think it’s important to emphasize exactly why shuttering a site like Data.gov would be so detrimental to transparency."
• Social Actions Transition: Introducing the GuideStar Team – My Social Actions – As Peter and Christine announced in March, Social Actions has a new home in Guidestar – here's an update of where the transition is at and introductions of the two Guidestar staff who will be instrumental in pushing Social Actions into the future!

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).

• Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks – This new report from the Knight Foundation and Monitor Institute explores engaged communities: "Ten years ago, a tiny web site asked people to volunteer to write their own encyclopedia. Today, Wikipedia is the most widely used reference work in the world. Rapid advances in digital media and technology are changing how we connect to information and each other. The way we engage in public dialogue, coordinate, solve problems—all of it is shifting. New networks are emerging everywhere. It’s exciting—and frightening. What is this new network-centric world? What does it mean for community change?"
• The US will use Twitter and Facebook to issue terror alerts – "The U.S. government is working on a new warning system to replace their oft criticized five-color coded terror index, and according to a new document obtained by The Associated Press, they're turning to Facebook and Twitter." How do your social media channels fit in your organization's emergency communications plan?
• Repair Interview: Joe Solomon of 350.org on Climate Change and Building a Movement – "Social Media Coordinator, Joe Solomon took some time to explain what 350 really means, talk about transforming community inspiration into political power, and share a story about how his work with 350.org inspired him in ways he never imagined." Check out this terrific interview with Joe – I'd love to hear your ideas, reflections and stories about how you are inspired to make change!
• Mobilizing online communities in the Face of Disaster: Tips … – "On the 12th of March, one day after the tragic earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan Ichi – Hiroyasu Ichikawa – the NetSquared Local organizer from Tokyo sent an e-mail to our NetSquared Local Organizer listserve asking for the best practices for mobilizing online communities in the time of a disaster. In the weeks that have followed, Ichi’s e-mail provoked a series of responses from all over the world. In this post, we hope to voice many of the tools, resources, and tactics that have been shared, in hopes of encouraging others around the world to get involved with the digital relief efforts."
• 6 questions to prepare you for a social media crisis – "In social media, the disasters people talk about most are fundamentally crises of public relations. These fall into two types: crises that originate in social media, and crises that originate offline. In the era of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, both types of crisis require a rapid, social media response. Looking at the most recent social media crises is one way to think about the kinds of challenges for which you need to prepare. But social media has a way of ensuring that each crisis is different from the last, so if you’re prepared to handle a YouTube meltdown, you’ll probably get served with a FourSquare nightmare. That’s why it pays to look for principles of online crisis management that will be relevant in the long run."