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The new book I co-authored with Allyson Kapin, Social Change Anytime Everywhere, looks at the way nonprofit organizations can use multichannel strategies for advocacy, fundraising, and community building. It’s a practitioner’s guide for planning, implementing, and evaluating strategies that engage constituents across many channels, wherever they may be, and how we as organizations need to structure our work to deliver that experience.

The conclusion of the book is titled “Disrupting the Nonprofit Sector,” and a question that came up in a recent podcast I recorded kept me thinking all week: Why do I think multichannel strategies will actually disrupt the nonprofit sector?

To successfully use multichannel strategies, we need to stop thinking about how we can operate more like businesses, and instead focus on acting more like our constituents. That may sound strange, but let me explain:

Consultants and others often advise nonprofits to focus on business objectives such as streamlining departments, minimizing overhead, and creating a results-focused organization. While those objectives have merit, they are not directly aligned with creating the best constituent experience. Ultimately, if you cannot build a community because engaging with your organization is so difficult, outdated, or cumbersome, you will not have people to support your advocacy, donate to your fundraising efforts, or champion your mission. And to ensure that you do have a strong community of supporters, you need to make supporting your mission fun, valuable, and easy.

What’s more, thinking more like your constituents isn’t difficult. Try this: Stop working for just five minutes. Imagine that you are you, enjoying some personal, non-professional time, then go online. What do you do? Which tools do you use? For example, maybe you notice that you check your email and then go to Facebook. From there, you may click on a news article that a friend posted and then tweet it out using the embedded sharing options. In as little as 30 seconds, you just visited four different platforms, engaged with potentially hundreds of people, and didn’t stop once to think about what you were doing. That’s how your supporters are interacting (or not interacting) with your organization, other nonprofits, their friends, and their family every day.

Multichannel strategies are your keys to creating campaigns, content, and calls to action that meet your supporters where they are and encourage them to support your organization. Social Change Anytime Everywhere is focused on the way constituents interact with each other and organizations, identifying the opportunities for your organization to not just broadcast a call to action, but also create meaningful ways for your activists to take action, your donors to donate, and your community members to share your message on the platforms they prefer.

Extra: Listen to this podcast with Alison Fine, Allyson Kapin and I discussing why charities should use more kinds of social media.

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Last month, a pop song rose up the charts and quickly became number one on both the iTunes and Billboard Top 100 lists. That song, “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, quickly also became the soundtrack to an Internet meme—that is, an idea that spreads online (“I Can Has Cheezburger?” is one of the more famous). More than a dozen athletic teams recorded themselves dancing and lip-syncing to the song (many in vans, spurring a Romney and Obama spoof). Many more groups joined in on the fun,recording videos and posting to YouTube. One of the more recent to join in is Sesame Street. That’s right, a widely recognized nonprofit organization has created a parody so that it can propagate a meme.

Whether it’s “Call Me Maybe,” “Sh*t People Say,” or any other meme that comes along, here are three guidelines you can use to decide when and how to get your nonprofit involved in an Internet meme.

Why meme at all?

Why would an organization even consider participating in something like this? It’s fun, for one. Just watch Sesame Street’s video (above) or the Harvard baseball team’s. Everyone involved in an organization and everyone online is, actually, human, and fun is a good thing.

But beyond that, contributing to a popular meme can help make your brand and even your staff more visible. It shows some of the personality of your organization beyond the brick and mortar. You can also leverage participation in a meme to build connections and get new supporters.

That said, having fun, gaining visibility, and making connections with new supporters happens only if you do it right.

 3 Guidelines for Nonprofits

1. Above all else, don’t compromise your values and mission. For some organizations, that means never participating in any of this Internet hokey pokey, and that’s OK. For others, it means being aware of what the root of the meme is, why people are remaking and remixing the content, and how your community will respond. With the “Call Me Maybe” example, the song is very popular and many people in the Sesame Street community have heard it (a lot of Sesame Street supporters are parents that grew up with the show and support it as adults). The Sesame Street show teaches basic lessons through stories of characters in typical situations and common scenarios. The meme video uses the same formula, changing the words to the song and using the well-known Cookie Monster as the lead character.

2. Stick to your voice. You don’t want to get visibility and make new connections using one message, tone, or personality, and then surprise them once they join your email list, subscribe to your YouTube Channel, or follow you on Twitter with something altogether different. Just as Sesame Street did, use the meme as a chance to tell the story you want to tell, showcase the character (or people!) you want in the spotlight, and do it all in the voice you’ve established at your organization. Neither Cookie Monster nor Sesame Street would ever really sing the words as they are written to “Call Me Maybe,” but the “Share It Maybe” lyrics are aligned with the lessons (sharing is good!), the character, and the voice of the show.

3. Plan for it to spread. We’re great at planning our communications regularly (or at least we try), and you can’t release something a little out of the ordinary without some planning too. In the Sesame Street video, the logo is overlaid on the video footage and linked (via YouTube’s link overlay option) to Sesame Street’s subscribe channel. There is also a segment at the end of the video that promotes the channel, encourages people to subscribe, and points to more videos. As the denizens of the Internet are wont to do, they createda still image of the Sesame Street video and added text to capture the spin on the meme from Cookie Monster’s lyrics—in this case, “they” was Mashable, which created the still to promote the video to its fans on Facebook. This meant fans could share it on social media sites like Facebook, where it’s easy to share images. Since the SesameStreet.org logo appeared throughout the video, it also appeared in the still, so even though the folks at Sesame Street couldn’t necessarily follow where fans were sharing the photo, it still drove people back to the organization. I suggest creating a still before sharing the video to ensure that the URL and message are correct. Whatever medium the meme is using, plan to integrate your branding and links (as appropriate) ahead of time, just like you would with a campaign video or image.

The results of doing it right? Just 24 hours after it posted, Sesame Street’s “Share It Maybe” video had more than 1,780,000 views!

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The first week of April was like an annual family reunion for the nonprofit technology community as the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) converged on San Francisco. The annual conference from NTEN: Nonprofit Technology Network brought together 1,800 nonprofit professionals, technologists, and service providers for three days of sessions, panels, and workshops covering the gamut of topics related to technology and social impact. With more than 150 sessions and twice as many speakers, plus all of the additional social events, there were countless conversations and ideas buzzing through the airwaves and Twittersphere. Three topics rose to the top with the most interest.

Email isn’t dying, it’s evolving!

A blog post with the proclamation, “Email is dead!” comes around every year or so, reigniting some debate and sparking long comment threads on blogs (and, always ironically, email list servs). But at this year’s NTC, the conversations about email were much less about its impending departure and more about exploring its evolution. Email is still a major component of organizational communication and a channel used by nonprofit supporters and donors; it is critical that it grows and develops to match the changing ways we use it and share messages.

Segmentation (dividing up your list to target specific groups of people with different messages) and tracking aren’t new, but the tools are becoming more sophisticated—and so are we. Lara Franklin of TechSoup Global and Upwell’s Rachel Weidinger started with a presentation about the basics—how organizations can begin segmenting and using email marketing clients to track and manage messages and campaigns. The session by Jeff Shuck of Event 360 took the conversation to the next level, honing in on how to successfully use member data in your communications. Cameron Lefevre of M+R Strategic Services and Lindsey Twombly of the Human Rights Campaign discussed how to optimize email messages for mobile phones in their session, since more and more, we are using email while we’re in line for groceries and otherwise away from our desks.

Drawing is the new Elevator Pitch

Take a minute and go look at your organization’s website, printed materials, and other promotional items that you use to tell people—as quickly and effectively as possible—just what it is that your organization does. Do you see a lot of text? If so, you aren’t alone. At this year’s NTC, the role of “the picture” emerged as a force to reckon with. Dan Roam suggested in his keynote that creating pictures and images that effectively explain our work could be important to gaining more funding. He asked attendees to draw their ideas in lieu of taking traditional notes in later sessions, and we saw people move from thinking in text to thinking in graphics in just 48 hours.

Attendees were also talking about infographics this year. Beth Kanter, a thought leader on technology for nonprofits, presented a great session on data visualization and shared some low-cost tools for organizations to use. The conference also had graphic faciliators, who captured conversations and takeaways visually. (You can see them on the Rally blog.)

Socializing isn’t just for Facebook

I had a few conversations with NTC regulars who remarked that the social media frenzy seemed to have finally calmed. They were happy that it didn’t center stage at the conference and that sessions covered other tools and strategies more equally. But there actually wasn’t less conversation or excitement about social media; it has just been around long enough now that gets folded into other conversations, such as social fundraising.

Marketing experts Katya Andresen, Mark Rovner, and Alia McKee, came at the topic of social fundraising with a scientific lens during their session, exploring human behavior and options that nonprofits have for effectively communicating and fundraising. Blackbaud’s Steve MacLaughlin shared data and trends in online fundraising, as well as how to integrate both social media and mobile into fundraising efforts. Similarly, Common Knowledge’s Jeff Patrick tackled highlights from recent research for online fundraising and social network use by nonprofits. Coming straight at the topic, Cheryl Black of Convio and Margaux Mennesson of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance talked about specific tools and strategies for social fundraising.

In addition, two reports were released during the conference: the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report and the 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study. You can download them now for free.

Fellow attendees: What other popular topics or interesting conversations would you add to the list? For those who didn’t attend, what are some of the nonprofit technology topics, tools, or case studies on your mind lately?

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In 2011, Washington, DC, became one of the first major metropolitan regions to host a multimillion-dollar local giving day: Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington. Nearly 18,000 people participated in the 24-hour, online fundraising event, raising more than $2 million to benefit 1,200 local nonprofits. Seen as a success for the participating nonprofits, the organizers wanted to know more about what worked and whether giving days as a form of regional nonprofit development could be a new trend for the sector. In the report “How Giving Contests Can Strengthen Nonprofits and Communities,” sponsored by the Case Foundation and released today, Geoff Livingston analyzes the impact of Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington and the repercussions for other regions and nonprofit communities.

Training

Just as organizations (usually!) don’t embark on fundraising without a plan for using the funds, we can’t adopt a new fundraising approach without proper training. Organizations I’ve talked to that have participated in giving days in other cities have consistently raised the issue of training and education, saying that to do well during the one-day fundraiser was one thing, but they knew they didn’t have the internal know-how and skills to succeed with online fundraising year-round. I am very glad to see that the Greater Washington event incorporates training into the planning process to boost the capacity of all participating organizations. In the report, Geoff describes the training this way:

The training program treated the giving day as an exercise in best practices. Core elements included using the Razoo giving platform, content best practices, online storytelling, social media strategy, and donor cultivation. Live events included a training conference with nonprofit social media expert Beth Kanter as the keynote, and a series of seven simplified half-day training “boot camps” in Prince William County, Arlington County, Prince George’s County, and Montgomery County. The in-person events were complemented by a free, comprehensive online nonprofit toolkit. Components included video tutorials, suggested calendars of activity, sample materials, frequently asked questions, logos, and a Twibbon for Facebook and Twitter use.

From my experience participating in training events and courses as a speaker and trainer, I see much better results when coupling online and offline learning and resources. While you can learn a lot during a workshop, there is no replacement for really putting what you learn into practice; when you are back in the office trying something out, it is incredibly helpful to have online resources to support your work.

In the report, Geoff also shares these results:

The training program achieved its overarching goals. Eighty-eight percent of nonprofit survey respondents felt the training program helped, and 84 percent reported that the training increased their ability to interact and fundraise online. The training did reveal a social media and online fundraising knowledge division in the Washington nonprofit community, between those who are experienced and comfortable with related tools, and those still learning basic social media outreach.

I am curious to hear what topics or questions organizations will bring up when they participate for a second year, and whether they will inform online fundraising and engagement training provided by other groups.

Benefits

The benefits of something like Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington are really three-fold, according to the report. First, there’s the actual amount of donations—more than $2 million in just 24 hours is certainly no small feat! With 1,200 organizations participating, the report states: “Forty-one percent of nonprofit respondents said their best prior online fundraiser was $2,500 or greater, showing the event rivaled most nonprofits’ prior efforts.” Even though online fundraising is still a small portion of the overall dollars raised by most organizations, it is growing—check out the 2011 Online Giving Report from Blackbaud for data.

Second, the report states that participating organizations benefit from establishing relationships with new donors that they can maintain long-term. This touches back on the need for training—it is important to train participants on how to use online tools and platforms, as well as on understanding donor engagement.

And finally, the 24-hour fundraising drive supported the local nonprofit community as a whole by increasing awareness of all the programs and services contributing to the region. The long-term relationship building that comes from this big one-day event is valuable to both the organizations and donors. This is a chance to contribute to something big while exploring the organizations that are working locally to improve the region. Donors who are familiar with only a specific organization or two before the event have a chance to better understand the entire ecosystem of organizations, and even find additional programs or services to support in the future.

For me, the key to this report is that we can’t determine the success of a major fundraising initiative solely by the amount of funds it raises. We should also measure success according to the increased capacity in the organizations participating and a long-term benefit to the community as a whole.

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Inevitably, January is filled with predictions and resolutions. We ponder the innovations and evolutions that may unfold in the technologies we use, and consider the issues we want to tackle in our work and communities.

Me? I’m focused on data. This year will, I hope, be the year of data. I see more organizations looking for ways to be data-driven in decision making, communications, campaigning, and marketing, and I see a growing interest in and understanding of the value in sharing data. The more we share our data with each other inside and outside of our organizations, the more data-driven we can be in our work collectively.

If you’ve been waiting for an invitation to dive into data, this is it. You are cordially invited to start tracking, measuring, evaluating, and sharing! Here are a few ways to get started:

Data for Promotion

Many organizations use selected statistics, data, or other information in press releases and calls to action, but we may not look at those numbers or statistics as stories that compel us to share, respond, and take action. There are ways, however, to use data to tell a more active story. Here’s an infographic that Points of Light shared during the ramp up to its 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day service events. Looking at the cumulative impact of volunteers is really powerful when it’s presented in this way:

Data for Engagement

Using real-time tools to engage people through data can help increase both the time people spend on your site and the amount of information you can convey quickly. Mapping is one of the most-used and easily recognizable options. It’s easy to see and understand a map right away (especially using something like Google Maps, which most people have seen before or even used themselves). One great example is the wayEpic Change uses a map as the main interface for its To Mama With Love campaign.

The To Mama With Love site encourages visitors, without any written instructions, to click locations on the map, read through the user-created word, photo, and video dedications to moms (or, “heartspaces”), and engage with others’ stories by sharing or donating.

Data for Reporting

Organizations are also sharing data in many ways. Some if it is visual, such as in this terrific infographic that illustrates trends for where we are giving our time and money:

This year, I would love to see nonprofit organizations, service agencies, and local groups working together to share their data in the effort to more accurately map our collective impact and to identify new opportunities for partnership and collaboration. Imagine if you could see a map of hunger in your city that included a broader set of data than what Share Our Strength, Feeding America, or your local food bank has collected. What if the map included information from service providers, schools, and other local organizations? You would get a clearer picture of the issues causing hunger in your community—and be that much clearer about how to tackle the problem. Maps can reveal things such duplicated efforts and can help us understand where to invest. I would love to see that map! And I would love to help.

What are you looking to do this year with your data? What are you working on now? I would love to see or hear about any examples you already have.

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Google+, the social network launched by Google nearly 5 months ago, has recently opened up the platform to organizations and brands with a profile type akin to the options for individuals and Pages on Facebook. Many early adopters in the nonprofit community were already working hard (despite announcements from Google that they would police use and roll-out an organization-specific profile option) to start building a space for their organization’s profile on the new social network since it originally launched. Those same early adopters and others have now jumped right in to create an official profile for their organization in Google+, with many sharing some concerns or complaints about the options and functionality available.

In a sector where we are always trying to do more with less, we can’t be fooled into thinking our strategies for engagement on online networks can be cut and pasted from one space to the next. Here are a few reasons why using multiple social networking platforms doesn’t just mean you repeat your effort.

Community First

Who is using the platform? Is your community largely tech-savvy early adopters? So far, the demographics of Google+ skew toward American males working in technology. By last month, the user ratio between male and female had come up to about 70/30 and the country with the second highest number of users was India at about 13 percent. One of the core principles in community engagement is to use the tools your community is using. If your community meets offline at a local watering hole to share opinions and make plans, don’t bother setting up a Twitter account with the purpose of influencing them. But if they congregate online, on a community news site or blog network, join them in conversation there.

It’s the same with any platform. Pay attention to your community. If they are using the tool, then join them. If they’re not, it’s OK to wait—especially if time and energy are scarce.

The Price of Early Adoption

Organizations that joined Facebook early on endured the “price of early adoption”—they were the guinea pigs for a platform that was still figuring out just what to do with this form of user. Just as Facebook experienced users putting an organizational profile into the system designed for individuals, Google+ attempted to swiftly moderate nonindividual profiles and publicized an application form for first-round brand profiles once the functionality was available. Now that it is here and organizations are jumping in to create their profile on Google+, they’ll need to work through the kinks.

Changes, new functionality, and platform iterations will continue indefinitely—for better or worse. The difference is that in these early stages, changes could mean your investment literally disappears or you need to start over. As many have already complained, you cannot (for the moment, at least) share access to a brand page on Google+. If your current social media plan and strategy calls for staff transparency and shares responsibility across staff, Google+ may not work at the level you need just yet.

Apples and Oranges

Ultimately, though Facebook and Google+ (or any other networking platform for that matter) are both social networking tools, there are important differences. MySpace, Friendster, FriendFeed, Diaspora, Bebo, and others all offer plenty of fuel to the argument that comparing two social platforms has to go beyond the functionality of messaging, commenting, and connecting to your friends. The differences between the platforms are real and important to consider when deciding whether or not it’s a place where you can advance your goals—whether they’re engagement, communication, fundraising, or anything else.

For example, if your organization currently uses Facebook as a major channel for fundraising, you are probably actually using Causes—an application that runs within Facebook—for the management of the campaigns, communications, and donations. That’s an important clarification because it means that your strategy doesn’t use “Facebook” as the tactical level of implementation, and you can’t simply duplicate that on Google+ now. If, instead, you use a private group on Facebook to organize volunteers or champions who are instrumental to your fundraising efforts, but your activity, communications, and donations are taking place elsewhere, then creating a similar strategy for Google+ could work. It’s integral to the success of online efforts to recognize just where these various tools and platforms compare and where they are dramatically different.

What do you think? Are you using Google+ now and have you set up a profile for your organization? Please share the link and your thoughts about the experience so far!

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Whether your organization has had a presence on Facebook for years or just days—or you’re considering starting now—trying to follow along with all the changes to functionality, options, and analytics is incredibly overwhelming. Just when you think you have it all figured out, a new button appears or you can’t find the same options you had before—there’s always something changing!

The good news is that the nonprofit technology community is rich in sharing, and there are lots of online tutorials about this latest wave of updates on Facebook. I’ve pulled a few of them together here. (Note: You can find resources about Facebook on Facebook using its resource center.)

Remember Strategy First

In the midst of all this change, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture and why you are using Facebook for your organization in the first place—instead, we focus on the particulars of how to use new tabs, plugins, or applications. The fact that so much is changing—and will continue to change—should reinforce the idea that our use of Facebook (or any other platform, for that matter) should be guided by a larger strategy with goals that further our missions. Beth Kanter compiled examples of the way organizations are using Facebook for specific purposes. Whether you’re using it for community building, marketing, communications, or anything else, you should have a strategy that extends beyond the “Like” button.

Calls to Action

Most organizations have a call to action, a campaign, or a fundraising push to promote on Facebook and other social media. You may already be using Facebook’s Causes application, which helps you spread messages and fundraise; it also empowers community members to do so on your behalf. If you are using it, then things just got easier; if you aren’t, you may want to try it. Facebook has just made changes that will let you do even more with the Causes application, such as promoting actions directly from a tab on your page. To learn more about it, I suggest going to the source: Causes has a post that walks you through the steps of promoting actions via a dedicated tab. If you’re looking to explore the dynamics of social sharing influencing online fundraising, read Debra Askanase’s recent overview.

Subscribers and Fans

One of the biggest changes shaking up Facebook users is the introduction of the Subscribe option. Much like Google+, Facebook now allows users to subscribe to pages and individuals without being directly connected (as a fan or friend). This means users can share content publicly with subscribers (and privately with their direct contacts). Organizations that have community managers, program managers, or other public-facing staff can now enable individuals to be organizational ambassadors who share news and information about programs, services, events and campaigns publicly. This increased activity in a public channel is increasing search results on Google too. Ted Fickes’s guest post on the Care2 Frogloop blog explains how this new feature impacts the way nonprofits are sharing news and updates.

Metrics that Matter

When it comes to using a third-party platform for community engagement, communications, marketing, and fundraising, organizations often find that they have trouble tracking the data they really want to, or they find it too difficult to get to the numbers that they stop trying all together. One of the new changes to Facebook is the expansion of Insights, the Facebook analytics tool. You can now see beyond the Likes and comments on your page. You can look at the demographics of those engaging with your content, measure your reach (the network of your fans), and get feedback on how well every each of your posts is received by the community. John Haydon has an in-depth video tutorial that will walk you through every report now available. John also outlines 39 questions your organization can now answer with Insights, including where your fans come from and which days your page sees the most activity. Understanding the options now available in Insights to help you track and analyze the way you and your community engage on the Page will dramatically increase your ability to be strategic with your efforts on Facebook. Strategy? Well, that takes us back up to the top…

Other Top Resources:

Here are a few other great compilations to check out:

• Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need to Know from Mashable
• Facebook Updates Could Give Nonprofits Better Visibility from The Chronicle of Philanthropy
• How Your Nonprofit Can Benefit from the New Facebook from Event360
• 10 Recent Upgrades to Facebook Your Nonprofit Should Know About from Nonprofit Tech 2.0

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For over a year now, I’ve been moderating and facilitating a monthly online discussion for people working as community builders and for those looking for feedback on community building efforts. It’s called the #CommBuild chat and was born out of a facilitated monthly Twitter chat called #4change. Often in these chats, participants discuss the online tools they are using and new platform functionality, all with the hope of finding ways to increase community engagement. For example, this month’s online chat, normally coordinated via the text chat platform CoverItLive, tried out a new platform, Google+ Hangout. This video chat application is part of Google+ and allows up to 10 video participants to come together—great for #CommBuild participants because they get real face time with each other.

So when Scoop.it, a new content curation platform, hit the web recently, the #CommBuild network seemed like the perfect place to try it out.

Whether you’re interested in community building, hot air ballooning, or the way robots work, you’re never going to be the only person talking about it online. In fact, the web is so full of information that many organizations are finding it useful to pull together topic-specific content on the web and make it available in one place. These can be useful internally and externally—you can share news with colleagues or create a dashboard of resources for your community. Scoop.it positions every user as a content curator. Unlike a blog, which positions us all as topic experts with a soapbox of our own, Scoop.it makes it possible to pull together media of all kinds—blogs, news, videos, etc.—from many different resources.

How it Works

Scoop.it has an impressively intuitive interface for just being in a beta launch. You pick your topic, add a description of the collection, then you can begin searching for relevant articles and other media to include. Scoop.it provides automated searches to match all the keywords you include on your topic—check out the image below to see automated searches on Digg, Twitter, and Youtube.

You can “scoop” content (add it to your topic page) from the Scoop.it dashboard. You can also browse the web and “scoop” up content about your topic using a bookmark (when you join, you can follow steps to add the Scoop.it button to your bookmarks bar). Once you’ve added information to your topic, you’ll want to share it. Every time you add a piece of content to your page, you have the option of sharing the link to your page via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

For the CommBuild topic, I used Scoop.it’s built-in search feature to add news articles and blog posts to my page—they show up as suggested content, and you can click to dismiss or add to your page. Once I put a handful of items on my page, I clicked Share and tweeted that I’d created the topic to my network. Just like that, it was out there. I then opened Tweetdeck, a desktop application for managing Twitter and other social platforms, and watched the stream of content from Twitter flowing by. As I saw links of interest—especially ones shared by the #CommBuild community, I added them to the Scoop.it page by clicking on the bookmark/browser extension and scooping (saving) it! Almost immediately, people replied with links to related resources, creating a place where the #CommBuild chat could go to stay on top of news and posts related to community building.

Why Scoop.it is Worth a Try

We interact with articles and other media all day long, so pulling it together under a central topic should fit into that flow. Scoop.it makes it easy to collect and share the things you’re reading, talking about, and interested in without the feeling that you’re adding a whole new platform to your daily work. I’m excited to see organizations diving in to Scoop.it to organize news and information about their cause, neighborhood, or organization. One word of caution: A topic name (in my case, “CommBuild”) can only be used once, and your name may already be taken, just like unique URLs on Facebook and user names on Twitter. I think Scoop.it could become a very interesting space for real time data in situations of natural disaster and crisis communications. I would love to see Scoop.it allow for group use so that multiple people can collaborate to maintain a single space.

What do you think? How do you collect and share content now? How would you use a tool like this in your organization or work?

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I’m really excited by tools that enable digital or transmedia storytelling. I think there’s huge potential for organizations to use multiple mediums, content, and locations to help document and advocate for the change they want in their communities and around the world. I recently attended the US launch event for Historypin is a new (and free) application for Android, iPhone, or the web that arranges photos, videos, and text in the context of time and location (leveraging the Google Maps API). I was so energized by the tool—both its current functionality and its potential for future application—that I downloaded the mobile (Android) version and started testing it on the spot. It’s been a few weeks now; I’ve used it to share photos from a work trip to Portland, Maine, and to explore my neighborhood in New York.

In the most basic terms, I see Historypin as the interface between people (you can be in the exact spot you’re looking at on the map, or around the world), places (the geography, the buildings), and things (the events, small and large, that change those people and places over time). It’s a way of interacting with other people, other places, and other times from anywhere you are. So how can social good organizations take advantage of an innovative tool like this? Here are some ideas:

Share Community History – Non-organizational community groups and nonprofits that focus on a specific locality can create hyperlocal community engagement through pictures and documentation. Do you have a hyperlocal online network/space? Encourage volunteers, program officers, donors, or other community members to become social reporters and document events in their neighborhood.

Promote Campaigns – Pull together information, data, and multimedia power (maps, photos, videos) to create a compelling, interactive campaign story for your nonprofit organization. Encourage community members to join, follow, or share their own related media, giving them a way to participate in and connect with the campaign.

Create Digital Classrooms – Education programs—schools, after-school programs, and youth-focused nonprofit—can work with established collections in the classroom; and students can document the area around their school to create their own collections, and potentially trade collections with other schools.

Create a Custom “Tour” – Your organization can arrange pieces of media and information so that they unfold in order—great for telling a story, or walking people through highlights or history of an area or place. People can follow along via the mobile application or the website. Museums, tour groups, and history societies could all make use of Historypin for sharing tours and routes, complete with images and stories. Nonprofits: What if you created a digital annual report that walked viewers through your service area, giving them a tour of your work and impact?

Go explore the map: Use the time slider and address search to wander around the world and check out the 51,000-plus photos already uploaded.

What other ways do you think this tool could be used to support the social sector? I’d love to hear your ideas.