Plays Better with Others

In a recently-released social media survey of 200 of the largest charities in the United States as designated by Forbes Magazine, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research found the following:

* 89% are using some form of social media—including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis—to drum up new funds, friends, and awareness.

*45% of nonprofits surveyed said social media are very important to their fundraising strategies.

*Social networking and video blogging are now the most common forms of social media being used by nonprofits (79%); blogs are used by 57% of the charities surveyed, and 16% are using wikis.

*The use of video is up 38% over 2007; the use of social networking is up 47%, and blogging is up 23% over the previous survey. Of the nonprofits surveyed, some 90% reported that their blogs have been successful in keeping supporters up-to-date on their work and in engaging members and donors.

*About 1 in 4 of nonprofits with blogs use WordPress as their platform.

*Nearly two-thirds, or 65%, of the nonprofits surveyed use video on their blogs and upload their videos to YouTube.

*Nonprofits are "out-blogging" businesses and universities by nearly 2 to 1.

*Some three-quarters of nonprofits surveyed said they monitor the Internet for buzz, posts, conversations, and news about their institutions.

"Social media have become an incredibly important part of the communication strategy for U.S. charities," says survey authors Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson in their report. "The largest nonprofits are continuing to outpace businesses and even academic institutions int heir familiarity, use, and monitoring activity. These top [charitable] organizations ahve found a new and exciting way to win the hearts (and maybe the dollars) of potential donors."

(Illustration by istock.com)

Social Actions Roundup 3

The use of social media for social change is proliferating rapidly. In that vein, we at Cause Global are starting to share this weekly round-up of social action links and varied tech news bits from Social Actions and its passionate, cause-wired team—Joe Solomon, Christine Egger and Peter Deitz.

Here is Social Actions' second round-up of the new year, covering January 3-10:

SocialEdge is taking applications for its annual Global Social Benefit Incubator Competition; RisingVoices is taking applications for its annual new media outreach micro-grants of $5k; Nabuur is accepting applications for volunteer online project managers, and ModestNeeds invited the newly unemployed to apply for bridge grants.

TakingItGlobal launched a personal fundraising campaign to support its work in 2009.

Kiva announced plans to launch an open API for its micro-lending platform.

PolicyPitch became a December 2008 Ideablob finalist.

Stephen Colbert joined the board of directors of DonorsChoose.org.

Convio asked nonprofits for their 2009 technology resolutions.

Gina Bianchini of Ning shared her company's three-month roadmap.

Leslie Poston wrote on Mashable a guest post, Give Back With Social MicroFunding in 2009.

Rachel Cunliffe wrote on Mashable a guest post, 10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009.

Firstgiving shared three online fundraising resolutions.

Beth Kanter recapped her social media birthday fundraiser on behalf of the Sharing Foundation.

Kimberly Brock wrote about how one can protect consumer rights by becoming a citizen blogger.

Christine Prefontaine wrote about the importance of investing in a community facilitator.

Paul Lamb, writing on mySociety, discussed the value of creating a social credit card (from 2006).

Peter Deitz announced that Convio, NTEN and CauseWired Communications will co-sponsor Social Actions' Change the Web Challenge, and Social Actions won Reddit's FeedANeed contest.

Recent Discoveries

2009 National Conference on Volunteering and Service

GivingGame - Do good. Pass it on.

Service-learning - Using structured reflection to enhance learning from service

Ignite format presentations

Inviting Change consulting

John Haydon's social media coaching

Economic Xchange - how the current economy impacts philanthropy

Eric Cooper explains how to build a Social Actions powered application.

What are Social Actions Round-Ups?

Each week, Social Actions community members post links and news about online social action applications and nonprofit activism. This round-up is a summary of just some of the links that surfaced in the last week, through January 10. You can share links and news for future Social Actions round-ups in the Peer-to-Peer Social Change FriendFeed Room. You can also check out past round-ups here and can tag your delicious bookmarks with "p2pchange" or include "#p2pchange" in your tweets; Social Actions will scoop them up and review them.

Social Actions round-ups are syndicated on CauseWired, CauseGlobal, TakePart, and NetSquared.

(Illustration © KonstantinosKokkinis - Fotolia.com)

Collective wisdom

Like this photograph? Join the crowd. It is the top choice of some 3,344 people who answered an open call by the Brooklyn Museum of Art to curate 389 crowd-sourced photographs that best fit the theme, "The Changing Face of Brooklyn." (This photo was shot in 1979 by Marcia Bricker Halperin from a street in Brooklyn, through the front window of the legendary, long-gone Dubrow's Cafeteria.)

Halperin's photograph—the reflection of a Checker cab on Dubrow's window that appears to mingle with the patrons seated inside—joins nine others in the Top 10 "cut of the crowd" that comprise the museum's show, Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition. Entirely Web-sourced and Web-curated, the exhibit represents the first use of "crowd-sourcing" by a nonprofit in this way. The museum's goal: to build community, woo potential donors, and raise awareness of its work.

Organizer Shelley Bernstein, BMA's dynamic new manager of information systems, was inspired by the 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds. In it, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki offered the world a simple but profound idea: a large, diverse group of people will make better judgments and smarter decisions than an elite few—no matter how individually brilliant.

Bernstein set out to test that theory in the context of visual art. First, she displayed the images anonymously on the museum's Web site, where anyone interested was invited to log on and rank them, one by one, on a sliding scale from "least effective" to "most effective" in fitting the theme. After a six-week rating period, Bernstein posted the top 20 percent of the images selected—78 photographs in total—on the site and they were pared down further by the crowd. Finally, Bernstein grouped them on the site into various lists, including "Most Discussed" and "Top 10 Compared."

"I wanted to build our community, expand it, and ask it to participate in what we do in some way," she says—critical for engaging new, cause-wired donors and patrons in advocacy today. Bernstein said she was "amazed" that many people who identified themselves as novices selected some of the same photographs as did the experts. (To hear more about what worked and what didn't in Bernstein's experiment, click here for the podcast of a June 28 discussion, which included Surowiecki and fellow crowdsourcing expert Jeff Howe.)

Here's another Top 10 photograph from Click! Called Just Girls, it was shot by photographer Donna Aceto last year at Coney Island:


For more on the wisdom of crowds, click on the video below, in which Howe talks about his new book, Crowdsourcing. It goes on sale next week in bookstores around the country:



Watch this site for more on the lessons of Click! I'll be moderating a September 23 panel on Web 2.0 technology and nonprofits that will include Bernstein and a discussion of her experiment at the Harvard Business School Club of New York's Social Enterprise Summit.

In the four years since Surowiecki's book, the phrases, "the hive mind" and "crowd-sourcing" have entered the lexicon: those inventing the next, "2.0" version of the Web are testing ways that companies, educators, and social change advocates can tap into their thousands of new and expanding social networks—on demand—for better ideas, more money, and greater influence.