Friendly Web Tools Blog

I mentioned earlier this week that nonprofits should think more carefully about web marketing, not only because they should think of marketing as a way to build and sustain their community, but also as a relatively inexpensive ways to do so.

One of the best examples I’ve seen for creating online community that makes a difference is the We Campaign, the project of The Alliance for Climate Protection — the nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Al Gore.

I love the action alerts, the blog, which they call “What’s New,” and the get-active, community-driven effort, which is online.

Think about your organization and how you might reconfigure your online presence to build community. Can you offer up your own action alerts? Can you start a What’s New blog? What about Facebook or MySpace - is there a way you can increase your reach by starting a group there?

Bev Freeman over at the Boston chapter of the American Marketing Association has been working on a great series about nonprofit marketing. Check out her posts on:

Nonprofit Marketing….Really?
Using marketing to enroll people in a significant program or initiative, increase awareness about an agency’s mission, its services, or the response to a crisis in your community, and/or raise the visibility of an organization as a basis for successful fundraising or “buy-in” (acceptance) by your constituencies.

Nonprofit Marketing – Using a Plan, Considering Social Media
Outlines the benefits of a plan, encourages you to engage in planning and helps you understand where social media may fit in.

Nonprofits—Begin to learn about the social media
Set aside time every week to learn more about the social media. Nonprofit communicators have a unique opportunity to employ any of an array of social media tools – these are low-cost (often downloadable for free) and very often effective.

Very nice! Our friends at STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal) have launched a new YouTube Channel to promote their programs and to aid in their ongoing quest to educate synagogues in the powers of technology.

I believe one of the tools they use to put together their web videos is the Flip camera, which I’ve mentioned here in the past.

Check it out and click Subscribe so you can receive updates from this great organization.

One of the most frequent questions we get at Talance is, “Why does social media matter to my nonprofit?” Well, it matters for many reasons, which I regularly expand on in these pages.

N-TEN is also trying to address the relevance in a new curriculum project called We Are Media. Here’s a blurb from a release I received on my Facebook account:

We are Media is NTEN’s Social Media curriculum project where the community is the curriculum! We invite you to join the conversation each week as roll we out a new theme related to social media and nonprofits.

The first module looks more in depth at social media any why it does (or doesn’t) make sense to fold it into a social media strategy for a nonprofit organization’s overall communications plan.

It’s an interesting initiative, and one that aims to provide some guidance for a question that’s commonly asked but not so commonly answered.

If you’re anything like me today, you’re obsessively checking the clock waiting for July 4th and the long weekend to get here already. The last thing I feel like doing is to find a new friendly web tool to help me with my work.

So, with that in mind, I give you We Feel Fine, a brilliant time-waster that contains a hidden lesson about social media and how we’re all interconnected online.

Here’s information on the project’s mission from co-creator Jonathan Harris:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

Enjoy!

The best thing about the Web - and Web 2.0 in particular - is that you have a direct link to millions of people around you. When it comes to finding answers to questions, it’s like having access to a huge brain.

Nothing says “huge brain” to me more than MetaFilter, a loosey-goosey blog/forum that anybody can post a comment or question to. It’s open to the masses to read or use.

My favorite part is Ask MetaFilter (AskMeFi). People from all over ask the most random questions, many of which you’d actually like to know the answers to. Such as:

• “I won a trip! But where should I go? I’ve got six choices.”
• “My former employer is telling me to make my COBRA payments directly to them (the employer). That doesn’t seem right to me. Is this common/legal/legitimate?”
• “Should we do anything about our neighbors stealing our cable and crippling our broadband for the past 2 months?”

Our clients ask me why they should have a forum or discussion board, and this is why. This is a forum in the most wonderful sense. It’s clean and couldn’t be simpler. It’s just people putting their brains together.

It’s long been my holding that the nonprofits that stand to gain the most from use of web technologies are the least likely to use them. Here are three pieces I’ve come across lately that encourage nonprofits - secular and faith-based - to step it up, and examine how the field is evolving. Good reading:

1. Aaron Spiegel, who’s the IT guy and a former congregational rabbi at the Alban Institute, wrote about how synagogues need to use more technology.
2. Aaron references a great list from Rich Melheim on why churches should be using more technology. Feel free to apply this list to whatever nonprofit you’re working with.
3. A great article from Giulio Quaggiotto, program officer at the IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, and Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski, a member of the World Bank’s Central Web Team. They wrote “Development 2.0: A New Paradigm for the Non-Profit Sector?” for me in my role as editor of FreePint.

Stay tuned, because this is a topic I’ve proposed to The Forward, which should be appearing this fall.

I’m very pleased to report that NTEN cited my article “How Nonprofits Can Be LinkedIn” as one of the best articles they ran in 2007. Santa came early!

Read the whole article on this blog or on NTEN.

(Also, if you happen to be an NTEN member, Talance has a partnership that lets you save on online training.)