Slideshare

I use Slideshare for my presentations and other workshop or training materials. It’s easy to use, and it makes archiving and sharing materials with attendees really simple. Column Five has a new infographic about Slideshare user data with some interesting highlights. First and very striking is the 3 billion slideviews/month number! Slideshare reminds me of YouTube in that many nonprofits and even individuals use YouTube as the online storage space for videos that they plan to embed on their website or blog and otherwise share across the web. You benefit by storing the videos in a public and popular place so those that aren’t already watching your website can still come across your video and get engaged. Slideshare, with that many views, is serving a similar purpose where users are uploading content to be stored on Slideshare that they intend to embed or share elsewhere but benefit from those on the platform coming across the material and learning more.

Another highlight is the organic search traffic that nonprofit should take more advantage of. Have you spent days putting together a presentation for your board or a potential funder that highlights your work and impact? Maybe outlines how a new program is going to make a specific change to your community or the world. Putting that presentation on Slideshare where the title and the slide material can be indexed for searches means the next time I’m online searching for “important programs to end homelessness in NYC” I find your slides, your ideas, and ways to get involved with your organization.

It’s also noteworthy the high percentage of business and organizational leaders using Slideshare. Even more reason to expect that those coming across your material there to be potential partners, donors, or volunteers. There is no need to highlight specific case studies here as Beth Kanter has, of course, already ccreated a great list!

Pinterest

wishpond’s new infographic on Pinterest user data has some interesting data but I also know far more organizations experimenting with Pinterest or even using it well already. The first thing that struck me about the Pinterest data is the stat 80% of pins are actually repinned from another board. It’s really similar to the high percentage of content on Tumblr that’s reblogged from another blog. Couple that stat with nearly 84% of the time pinning content and what that really tells me is users enjoy the site and they enjoy sharing and collecting content; they do not, however, probably want to leave the site just to look at your website.

According to the infographic, 57% of the content on Pinterest is also food related! Considering all these dynamics, I think City of Hope’s shared board collecting recipes for mushrooms as part of the Mushrooms for Hope campaign is right on target. It’s a great example of creating content that is mission-supporting, true to the audience and platform, and really creates great opportunities for people to have interaction with the organization that is valuable to them and not just part of an ask.

Are you using Slideshare or Pinterest?

How is your organization creating or sharing content on these platforms? Would love to hear your lessons and stories!

Here are my slides:

To share or not to share

The main conversation focused on publicly sharing information vs trying to keep information private (whether it’s reports, data, strategy or even success/failure of projects/campaigns).  Some conversations point include:

• The culture of sharing in the NPTech community is what creates the most value
• Everyone wins when you share, discuss, create opportunities to learn
• Mistakes are the most important part of charting new territory, need to talk about them
• Sharing takes place formally and informally: presentations at conferences or in reports, online in blogs, in collaborative spaces like wiki, webinars, and so on
• Keeping information private means lots of groups reinvent the wheel without knowing it
• Not talking about mistakes mean more and more time, capacity, and money wasted with groups doing the same things wrong

Why social change fits with social media

Social change relies on communities coming together (whether they are geographic, issue, cause, or characteristic based) to make a profound difference on our world.  Social media allows people to come together online in new ways; the tools are only useful, fun, and successful when used as part of a community (how fun is it to use Facebook without any friends?).  Thus, tools that create community are great for communities making change.

Twitter

During the presentation, I was asked about Twitter; specifically what tools I like to use.  I get this question a lot.  My two main Twitter tools are:

• Twhirl:  I like Twhirl because I can launch a window for both my personal and organizational accounts at the same time, let it run and update constantly whether I am reading it or not (unlike having to visit and then refresh a browser over and over), and let it alert me to replies, direct messages, etc. so I can be as much a part of the conversation as I want throughout the day.
• Tweetscan:  Sometimes I’m just too busy to give Twitter all the attention it may want That’s why I like Tweetscan.  I can set up alerts for different words, like Google Alerts, and have it email me a round up so I can reply when I need to and not miss important opportunities to connect other users to information I may have.

Would have loved to have you all there for Social Media Afternoon!

Let’s keep the conversation going here – what do you think about the world of NPTech (the community that has made a tag a self-identifier) or about social media and social change?

You can see who was there and how it was organized on the NFPTweetup wiki if you are interested in organizing one in your area!

Collaborative Presentations

To add to the educational side of the meetup, Rachel Beer (the woman who wrangled the event together completely) organized a collaborative presentation.  Each of us created a slide about nonprofits using Twitter and sent it to her.  The topic was pretty broad and the slides covered all kinds of information.  Plus, none of us saw the slides, but our own, until the event!  It was great fun to see a new slide pup up and someone surprised to see their work on the wall.  We each took a minute or two to quickly explain our slide and got a lot of discussion going.  Today it was even featured as a Top Presentation of the Day on SlideShare!

My slide is the one focused on The Womens Museum’s use of Twitter.  Here’s what I did:

A bit of Twitter Metrics:

I visited The Womens Museum’s twitter page online at http://twitter.com/thewomensmuseum

I created some categories and tallied the messages into the applicable categories to measure how balanced the messages were.  Here were the results:

Self Promotion with Links: 6
Self Promotion without Links: 6

Questions with Links: 4
Questions without Links: 3

Fundraising with Links: 1
Fundraising without Links: 0

Affinity Promo with Links: 4
Affinity Promo without Links: 0

Information with Links: 0
Information without Links: 3

I think the numbers are quite balanced!  The messages are true to mission/vision of the museum by including retweets (or forwarding on the messages of others), links to websites other than their own, compliments, transparency, and inclusion.  If you use Twitter for your organization, try measuring the messages with the above categories and see how balanced your messages are!

Congrats to the NFPTweetup for a tons of fun, connections, and a great way to share information!