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).

• Semphonic Web Analytics Consulting: The X Change Non-Profit Analytics Challenge – "The Non-Profit Analytics Challenge is a rare opportunity for the brightest analysts in the digital measurement field to collaborate & assist non-profit organizations to optimize their websites. The Analytics Challenge is a ½ day event at X Change conference on September 13th. Semphonic President and Conference Founder Gary Angel says " What a gift to have the best minds in the industry to work together and the big bonus is helping 2 chosen non-profit organizations."" Apply today!
• Twive and Receive Reveals the Top 20 Most Generous Cities & Who Would Win In A Fight Between the Hulk and a Kitten | Razoo Media Room – "Julie Nations, the Executive Director of The Ellie Fund said “It’s been the best communications outreach program we’ve ever done. Like every nonprofit, we wanted that prize money, but this was a bigger opportunity. It got us using social media in a way we hadn’t before, and our supporters loved it. This was a real chance to harness social media across all platforms. We reached out to people we’ve never met and got them onboard. Martin Luther King Jr. said ‘Everybody can be great because everybody can give.’ I say everybody can be great because everybody can Twive!”"
• What Are We Accomplishing and How Do We Know? | NTEN – Here's a great run-down from Amy Luckey of the process to use in exploring and evaluating your organization's impact. And she uses NTEN as an example so you can see all the work we've been doing to figure this out for our strategic plan, too: "What does your organization do?" That is a question most nonprofit folks can answer pretty easily. We have our elevator pitches ready to go. "What is your organization accomplishing?" Now that's a different question, one that's not as simple to answer for most of us. It's also one that is increasingly being asked by potential donors big and small.
• 7 Social Media experiments we tried with the 99% Power Coalition | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org – Joe Solomon does a great job sharing the tools, tactics, and mini-campaigns used in the recent 99% Power Campaign. I don't necessarily agree with all the tactics, but I SO appreciate him sharing their work! What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts.
• 75% of Young Adults Gave to Charity Last Year, Study Finds – News – The Chronicle of Philanthropy- Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas – The new Millennial Donor Survey is out! "Charities rarely make deliberate efforts to solicit young adults because they think people in their 20s and early 30s are unlikely to give. But a new survey of more than 6,500 people ages 20 to 35 shows they are inclined to give—and are more than willing to ask their friends and relatives to do the same—when they feel passionately about a cause. About 75 percent of young people who provided data for the 2012 Millennial Impact Report said they gave money to a nonprofit in 2011, while 70 percent said they have helped solicit donations by encouraging colleagues and others to support a cause."
• Case Study: Feeding America and the Spark Generator | Call2Action – Great case study about Feeding America's recent multi-channel campaign: "Feeding America is the nation's leading domestic hunger-relief charity. They work in tandem with a nationwide network of member food banks in the fight to end hunger. Their annual September campaign, Hunger Action Month, is a massive effort to educate communities on the scope of hunger issues in the United States and empower them to take action. Feeding America has utilized numerous Call2Action Sparks. This time, they had a variety of videos featuring well-known celebrities like Matt Damon, Taye Diggs, and Ana Ortiz. They were looking to harness the power of all the local food banks' (over 200) online communities."

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).

• Reflecting on “Make It Your Own” « A. Fine Blog – “The Case Foundation has just released an evaluation of their innovative “Make It Your Own” program. The assessment was conducted by Peter Levine, Peter Deitz and Cynthia Gibson. One would be hardpressed to find more knowledgeable, thoughtful folks on civic engagement and social media. The Make It Your Own program was a grant program in 2007 created by the Case Foundation to promote “citizen centered” approaches to local community building. With nearly 5,000 applicants and more than 15,000 voters. It was one of the first efforts, perhaps even the first, to use online voting as a way to crowdsource grantmaking.”
• NYC Startup CatchAFire.org Launches Site To Match Skilled Volunteers And Charities – “Catchafire.org, a service to find and match volunteers with professional skills and charitable organizations in need of their help, will open its website to the public today after about a year in private beta testing.”
• Broadband for everyone » ext337 – “The Broadband Commission for Digital Development is, as ArsTechnica puts it, the world’s broadband plan… I’ve been thinking for a while that nonprofits, ngos and community-based organizations should be online hubs for their communities. If we are looking for pictures of our communities — the digital education needed and accessed, the policies that need to be addressed, the services being offered — then we need to include the views of all members of our communities.”
• Net2 Think Tank Round-Up: Finding Volunteers Online | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org – Looking for ways to recruit volunteers online? Check out the Net2 Think Tank for ideas! “For this month’s Net2 Think Tank, we asked you to share your tools, tactics, and best practices for promoting your volunteer opportunities online. There are many tools and resources available – so finding the ones that work best for your audience, and finding the ways that you can use them effectively can be a task. Below is a list of networks, tools, and best practices that will help steer you in the right direction.”
• Citizen-Centered Solutions: Lessons in Leveraging Public Participation from the Make It Your Own Awards | Case Foundation – As Case’s director of communications, Allyson Burns, explains, the report “takes a look at public participation / grantmaking programs and in particular the lessons learned from our Make it Your Own Awards. When we launched MIYO, our aim was to introduce the concept of citizen-centered philanthropy. The program challenged people from all walks of life to discuss what matters most, decide what kind of community they want, and take action together, all while being completely immersed in the grantmaking process.”

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).

• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? | Blog | design mind – "Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view."
• The internet: is it changing the way we think? | Technology | The Observer – "American writer Nicholas Carr's claim that the internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains has sparked a lively and ongoing debate, says John Naughton. Below, a selection of writers and experts offer their opinion."
• Emergency Social Data Survey Results – americanredcross's posterous – Check out the slides and data from the American Red Cross's survey on Emergency Social Data!
• In Case of Emergency, Update Your Facebook Status | Beth’s Blog – "In January, after the Haiti Earthquake struck, if you were participating on social networks, you couldn’t help but notice the many, many Tweets and Facebook status messages about the Haiti Earthquake. The messages included pleas for support or retweeting the news, but beyond that the stream included pleas from people on the ground in Haiti asking for emergency assistance or letting loved ones and friends know they’re okay. A new American Red Cross survey shows many web users would turn to social media to seek help for themselves or others during emergencies—and they expect first responders to be listening."
• Monitoring and Evaluation NEWS » Most Significant Change (MSC) – "The most significant change (MSC) technique is a form of participatory monitoring and evaluation. It is participatory because many project stakeholders are involved both in deciding the sorts of change to be recorded and in analysing the data. It is a form of monitoring because it occurs throughout the program cycle and provides information to help people manage the program. It contributes to evaluation because it provides data on impact and outcomes that can be used to help assess the performance of the program as a whole."
• Transparency: Where the Stuff on the Internet Comes From – Transparency – GOOD – "Every day, thousands of stories are passed around the internet on blogs and via Twitter. A new study by Journalism.org has examined the source of those stories. It turns out, most of them come from old-school media. We may like to share information via Twitter, but the information we share comes from the morning's newspaper. This is a look at where blogs and Twitter users are getting their stories, and what kind of stories their users are most likely to link to."
• Marshall Ganz: Why Stories Matter « Friends of Justice – "Learning skills and practices is not like learning a formula; it’s more like learning how to ride a bicycle. You can read 10 books about it or listen to someone lecture about it all day, but how do you really start learning to ride a bicycle? You get on. And you fall. That’s how you learn practices. That’s how you learn organizing." Thanks to Joe Solomon (@engagejoe) for the link!

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).

• Social Media Today | ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media – A great post from Brian Solis on Social Media Today discussing the ROI of social media. This is a really great post to read for anyone thinking about how to measure, evaluate, and even consider the impact of social media use (and that should be everyone). "Over the years, Social Media experts attempted to redefine ROI for a new era of influence. While some introduced alternative philosophies for measuring the nuances tied to social media, others wondered aloud whether ROI simply wasn’t necessary as the tools and methodologies for analyzing yields didn’t yet exist. And furthermore, by focusing on justification and metrics, we were distracted from the primary objective of building relationships and cultivating dialogue. … But that was then and this is now. In 2010, we enter in to a new era of social media marketing, one based on information, rationalization, and resolve."
• Cause Fatigue #4Change Recap « 4change – Did you miss the recent #4change twitter chat? The February chat focused on cause fatigue, but if you missed it, Zero Strategist has done a great recap of the conversation and highlights. Check it out!
• The Collaboration Prize – Search Database – Wow! Check out this great resource – a database of collaborations! "The first phase of this database of nonprofit collaboration models (currently consisting of the 176 nominations deemed eligible for The Collaboration Prize in 2008) contains the information submitted by each nominator in response to specific questions about the nominated collaboration. Additional models of collaboration from The Collaboration Prize will be added soon. While the contents of the first phase are limited to data contained in the nominations submitted in 2008, the next phase of the database, to be launched in the next few months, will have an interactive component, whereby the existing data can be updated and the database can be expanded by adding new collaboration models that were not part of The Collaboration Prize project."
• Welcome to Kopernik – "Kopernik — www.thekopernik.org — a new non-profit venture that provides life-changing technology to the poor, launches today. Kopernik makes technology designed for the developing world accessible through the Internet and by harnessing the power of individual donations. Kopernik’s aim is to bring this technology to the poor in developing countries via the site, and link them to individuals willing to make a donation towards the purchase of the products. It is the brain-child of Ewa Wojkowska and Toshi Nakamura who have extensive experience in international development as UN staff members." Check it out!
• New Ideas for Promoting Physical Activity in London – "The Go London social innovation competition is a call for ideas on how to make London more active, the first of its kind to be energised by the groundswell of optimism surrounding London hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012. It is a shared movement to create a city where physical activity is a normal part of Londoners lives and contributes to making London a more livable, sustainable and healthy city.

  The project aims to help improve activity levels of everyone by finding out what's already out there as well as asking people for their ideas on how they think London could become more active. In the same way that stories can come from anywhere to inspire others, and we'll hope to capture as many of these as possible, simple, life changing ideas can spring up too. Through the creative use of social media Go London hopes to capture as many of these ideas as possible."

• Facebook Causes: Not just for Individuals: ICT Hub Knowledgebase – The Knowledgebase from LASA is a great place to find articles on all kinds of topics related to technology for organizations. I wrote an article for them on how organizations are using Causes and it's now up. Visit the knowledgebase if you want to learn more about Causes but also head there to find some valuable resources on hardware, software, social media and more.

Twitter

Mr. Tweet
Want to find new followers and receive useful statistics to improve your Twitter usage? Well, that’s what Mr. Tweet was designed to do!  It’s easy to use: all you have to do is follow the Mr. Tweet twitter account and messages will be sent to you via DM.  Try it out yourself!

Twitter Karma
If you have been using Twitter for a bit of time now, you’ve probably come to the same realization that many others have—that it sure would be nice to be able to see your follows and those that follow you in any way that lets you really understand and visualize the network.  Twitter Karma is a great tool to use if you want to inventory your Twitter community, clean up any nonreciprocal followers, or simply evaluate your lists.  You can sort by users’ follower counts, mutual friends, and so forth.  Give it a try!

Facebook

Groups & Pages
Do you have a group or use a fan page to create a community space for your organization on Facebook?  There have been quite a few changes to Facebook over the last few months (hey, even days!), so it’s a good idea to log in and see if you are using the applications as best as you can be.  Here are a few things to consider:

• are you listing organization or sector-related events within the group or fan page?
• are you keeping the recent news, discussions, and links sections up to date? (an easy way to approach this is by updating information in the group/fan page every time you send out an enewsletter or action alert)
• do you link to your group/fan page from your website?

Causes
Facebook Causes offers a few different ways for individuals to show their affinity for nonprofits, fundraise for them, and spread the word about the work they do.  These are people who may not be on your newsletter or in your Facebook group, they may not follow you on Twitter or even be in your database, but they like what you are doing and want to show it to their friends.  If you work for the Red Cross, as an example, you can search in Causes for “red cross” and find groups that are focused on the Red Cross but also those focused on specific disaster relief efforts and international projects.  Searching for “blood” lets you find groups working on blood donation efforts and local programs – could be great, connected, passionate advocates to connect with!

Listening

Google Alerts
Spring cleaning definitely applies to your Google Alerts!  Have your key public-facing staff members changed?  Do you have any new partners or programs?  What about legislative or policy concerns?  Be sure to update your Google Alerts to include:

• the names of staff members who may be in the news or lead your programs (like your Executive Director, Communications Director, Fundraising/Development Director, any program-related staff, and so forth)
• the names of your organization and programs/projects
• the titles of bills, policies or other political items affecting your organization
• the key words for your sector (like “blood drive” and “disaster relief” if you are the Red Cross)

Delicious / Bookmarks
Check in on your tags and see if there isn’t any cleaning you can do!  If you use Delicious, the social bookmarking tool, you can view all of your tags and how many items have been bookmarked to each of them.  Some of the most common issues that people like to periodically clean up include:

• pluralizations (tag for “blooddrive” and “blooddrives”)
• dashes (tags for “blooddrive” and “blood-drive”)
• numbers (tags for “district10” and “districtten”)
• names (tags for “amy-speaking” and “asw-speaking”)

Communities

Social Actions
Social Actions is an aggregator of 50+ social action-related sources across the web.  Much like searching on Facebook Causes to find groups who are interested in your work, searching on Social Actions can help you find indivudals and passionate communities working on similar issues around the world.  You can use the advanced search to find specific actions (like petitions) or key words.  Happy searching!

Ning
Ning is a platform that allows individuals or organizations to create branded social networks.  As part of your Spring Cleaning, visit Ning.com and search for your organization’s area of interest—you may be surprised to find communities taking shape without you!  If it is an open network, go ahead and join and see if you can contirbute to the conversation and information exchange.

That’s just to get you started; there’s always so much more you can do with all the options and tools out there.  Have you already started your Spring Cleaning?  What tips or tricks do you have that you can share?  We’d love to hear them!

photo by Collin Anderson