Top Social Innovation Conferences

Here's a quick-and-dirty list of some of the top social innovation conferences and conversations taking place through June 2010.

This list isn't complete; please share any events we've overlooked. A list of July-December 2010 events will be issued in the spring.



Social Fresh Nashville - January 11 in Nashville, TN

World's Fair Use Day - January 12 in Washington, DC

TheFunded.com's FounderShowcase - January 14 in Palo Alto, CA

Solutions Lab 2010 - Green Innovation in Business - January 28 at Duke University

Catalyst Conference - January 26 at Commonwealth Club in San Francisco

Enterprise Social 2.0: RIP or ROI? - January 27-28 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

World Economic Forum - January 27-31 in Davos, Switzerland

Design Revolution RoadShow - Starting in February and crossing the country

Social Enterprise Coalition's Voice Conference - February 1-2 in Cardiff, Wales

Social Media Week - February 1-5 simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto, and Sao Paulo

Social Entrepreneur Unconference - February 5-7 in Portland, OR

New Partners for Smart Growth - February 4-6 in Seattle, WA

TED - February 9-13 in Long Beach, CA

Online Community Unconference East - February 10 in New York City

Tech4Society - February 11-13 in Hyderabad, India

Free Culture X - February 13-14 in Washington DC

Future of Funding Conference - February 18 in San Mateo, CA

Digital Media and Learning Conference - February 18-20 in La Jolla, CA

IMAGINE Solutions - February 22-23 in Naples, FL

Social Enterprise Conference - February 27-28 at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, MA

2010 Media Summit - March 10-11 in New York City

South by Southwest - March 12-21 in Austin, TX

Social Venture Capital/Social Enterprise Conference - March 16-18 in Miami

Social Networking World Forum Europe - March 15-16 in London

Social Media for Stakeholder Engagement - March 19 in London

Social Innovation Awards - March 24 in New York City

March Madness for the Mind - March 26-27 in San Francisco

O'Reilly WHERE 2.0 Conference on geolocation - March 30-April 1 in San Jose, CA

Digital Now Conference - April 7-10 in Orlando, FL

NTEN - April 8-10 in Atlanta

GEO - April 12-14 in Pittsburgh

Skoll World Forum - April 14-16 in Oxford, UK

GH/Innovate 2010 - April 17-18 at Yale University in New Haven, CT

Global Philanthropy Forum - April 18-21 in Redwood City, CA

140 Characters Conference NYC - April 20-21 in New York City

SOCAP International 2010 Symposium - April 25-28 in Atlanta

Milken Global Forum - April 26-28 in Los Angeles

Revisioning Value - April 26-27 in Portland, OR

Social Enterprise Alliance World Summit - April 28-30 in San Francisco

Web 2.0 Expo - May 3-6 in San Francisco

Finovate Spring 2010 - May 11 in New York City

The New Entrepreneur Conference 2010 - May 13-14 in Dusseldorf, Germany

Gov 2.0 Expo - May 25-27 in Washington, DC

Women Deliver Global Conference - June 7-9 in Washington, DC

Personal Democracy Forum - June 21-22 in New York City

iSociety International Conference - June 28-30 in London


-- Compiled by Marcia Stepanek


(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk for istock.com)

(This post first appeared on Justmeans and is reposted here with permission)

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)

Mobile Volunteers

NYU new media professor and Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky likes to tell the story about a recent day when two of his friends were sitting with their four-year-old daughter, watching a DVD. "In the middle of the movie, apropos nothing," Shirky says, the girl jumps up off the couch and runs behind the screen. Her dad thought she was going to see if Dora (the explorer, from the kid’s cartoon show) was hiding there. But no, the girl was rooting around in the cables. "What are you doing?" her father asked. Sticking her head out from behind the screen, the girl says, “Looking for the mouse.”

For Shirky, it's a tale of the times. “Four-year-olds know a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken,” he says. “Four-year-olds know that media that is targeted at you—but that doesn’t include you—may not be worth sitting still for.”

No question: all social media innovators today are “looking for the mouse”—working to find new ways to let those who use, hear, read, and watch media to participate more fully. The most innovative enlist the use of mobile phones for a cause: the nonprofit National Democratic Institute uses text messaging to spot vote fraud in elections around the globe; Witness.org asks its supporters to photograph human rights abuses with their cellphones; the Zumbido project in Mexico created a mobile social network for people living with HIV/AIDS.

But nobody has cracked the challenge of "on demand" volunteering—until now. Social media entrepreneur and activist Ben Rigby, author of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, thinks he's "found the mouse" for it with Volunteer NOW, his on-the-spot, GPS-aided mobile application that directs people who suddenly find themselves with some free time on their hands to a list of short-term volunteering opportunities near to their present location—be it an airport, an office building, a local Starbucks, or a city park. Rigby's goal: to transform volunteering into an "impulse activity" that, for the cause-wired not otherwise looking to tune out or cat-nap, could be done on the fly. (Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non-English speaker. Or, text for the nearest beach or park clean-up drive and spend your lunch hour in the sun.)

"Projects like SETI@Home showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers' spare CPUs to crunch data," Rigby says. "(Volunteer NOW! ) explores the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human 'CPUs.' We believe it will reveal a massive, untapped capacity to do good."

Rigby is not the only social media innovator intrigued by the idea of spare-time, mobile volunteering. Leaders of Do Something, a New York-based nonprofit, started using mobile phones in March to recruit volunteers. The Beta version of its Do Something NOW! mobile program, funded in part by the Sprint Foundation, invites young people to sign up for volunteering through a form on its Web site; Do Something then sends them one or two text alerts each month with volunteer opportunities that fit their locations and preferences. So far, more than 1,000 people have signed up for the text alerts: Do Something hopes to have 10,000 signed up by year's end. Opt-out rates, says Chief Marketing Officer Aria Finger, are running less than 5%.

Look for more examples of mobile volunteering in the months ahead. Katrin Verclas, founder of MobileActive.org, will be showcasing some at her global summit on cause-mobile technology in Johannesburg, South Africa, October 13-15. Google's recent entry into the mobile phone market will add fuel to the mobile advocacy movement in coming months.

For more on how cellphones and other social media are dramatically changing society's notions of free time, check out the Blip.tv video of Clay Shirky's wildly popular talk at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this past spring. It's about 10 minutes long but well worth the cognitive surplus—Shirky's term for free time—that you carve out to watch it.

(Illustration by Richard Borge c/o theispot.com)