Our Community News

Enjoy an all-inclusive dinner at the Fairmont Resort with celebrities, politicians and local, influential women in business. Hosted by Alex from the One FM morning show, the evening will feature some incredible opportunities to network with some of Richmond's finest. You'll also have the chance to bid on a number of auction items, for an amazingly low price!

Photo sharing has become increasingly popular in the last few years as a way for associations, clubs and nonprofits to publish or distribute their digital photos online. As a result, many of the photo sharing websites that host these photos have become useful sources and practical tools for managing photos online.

1. Flickr One of the most well known photo sharing sites is Flickr. Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, as well as an online community platform. In addition to being a popular web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. All you need to do is organize your photos into sets or collections, or just tag them after uploading them onto Flickr and sending the view as a slideshow link of the set or tag to your friends or clients. Flickr is free. However, you may need a Pro account for $24.95 USD per year in case of hitting the monthly bandwidth, file size or other limitations of your free account. To read more follow this link.

Britt Bravo of Have Fun * Do Good has an excellent post about using the social web for social change. In the nonprofit sector, online activism has become much more than sending an email to Congress or making a donation. Organizations today are engaging their constituents to upload pictures, text and videos and share their story with the whole world. Britt feels that a lot of activists know that there are many kinds of social web tools available to them, but they aren't sure how to find them, or use them, and are intimidated by the technology.

Britt shares four steps that will help ease them into using the social web for social change (read the post for more details):

 

1. CONSUME: Writers read, artists go to galleries, reporters watch the news. You need to start by checking out the content that is already being created by citizen journalists and activists about the issues you care about on blogs, podcasts and online video/vlogs. Even if you never go beyond this step, at least you'll have a list of new media to send event announcements to.

2. JOIN: Join a social network, or two, or three! Facebook isn't just for college students anymore. You might be surprised how many nonprofits and individuals are using Facebook groups to organize.

3. PARTICIPATE: "Web 2.0" is also called the "social web" because, well, it's social! It's all about connecting and participating.

4. CREATE Now that you've consumed, joined and participated, you're ready to create your own citizen media (like you consumed in Step 1) and/or your own campaign.

Britt closes her post with some good tips: 

1. Don't be afraid of the tech.
2. Don't feel like you have to use these tools, email is still very powerful!
3. Ask for help.
4. Have fun!

This sounds like a pretty easy way to use the social web for your cause. I did a quick search through for more resources available for nonprofits about how to use Web2.0 tools and here's what I found:

Blogs

• Weblogs: The Promise for Nonprofit Organizations
• 10 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Blogs  
• Using Blogs for Advocacy

Del.icio.us

• http://del.icio.us/tag/nptech
• How Can Nonprofits Use Social Bookmarks and Tagging?

Facebook

• Top-12 Nonprofit Facebook Applications 
• A beginner's guide to Facebook for non-profits
• How to promote your non-profit's cause on Facebook in five easy steps

Flickr

• Ten Cool Examples of Nonprofits Using Flickr!
• Five Ways Nonprofits Can Use Flickr to Reach New Audiences   
• Learn how to use Flickr to Embed Slideshows into your site or blog.

Mashups

• Creating Mashups for Nonprofits
• The New York Coalition Against Hunger has also combined map technology and a database of New York soup kitchens.

Podcasting

• Seven Ways Nonprofits Can Use Podcasts
• How to Record, Edit, and Promote Your Nonprofit's Podcast
• Examples of blog podcasts

 Video Casts

• How to Create, Publish and Promote Your Online Video
• Filmmaking and Story-telling
• 10 Ways You Can Use YouTube to Promote Your Online Content

RSS Feeds            

• RSS for Nonprofits
• Make your nonprofit more effective with RSS aggregation
• The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources

Screencasting

• An Introduction to Screencasting
• Beth Kanter's Screencasting Primer
• Screencasting with Screencastomatic

Wikis

• Wiki Adoption in Organizations
• Web 2.0 and Nonprofits Best Practices Wiki (Password is "nptech")

Productivity Tools

• Web 2.0 Productivity
• 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity
• Zen To Done (ZTD): The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Do you have any other tips for using Web 2.0 and the social web? I'd love to hear about your experiences and what worked and didn't work for you. Please share them below via comments..  

 

Keeping up our development pace, two new versions of Wild Apricot (2.25 and 2.26) were released in the last few weeks. (We typically update the system every 3-4 weeks so please keep your feedback coming - it is critically important for us to know what is missing / not working well for you so that we can appropriately prioritize our very long list of planned enhancements!)

Michael Sola is the Director of Information Technology of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), a nonprofit dedicated to restoring and protecting the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary rivers. For the past 6 months, Michael Sola has been blogging as part of the organization's larger communications strategy. We caught up with Michael to talk about how the CBF Tech blog can help a small organization build community and visibility with new web tools.

Network for Good released a new report called The Wired Fundraiser: How technology is making fundraising 'good to go'. The report written by Katya Andresen and Stacie Mann covers what happens when people with a cause take it to cyberspace; why marketers and fundraisers like us should care; and what we should do about the phenomenon.