Monday, January 19th, 2009...12:12 pm
Examples of non-profits who rock social media?
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We’re currently working on a story showcasing the best use of social media by non-profits. We’re particularly interested in educational non-profits: schools, museums, community development orgs. Who would you suggest? Which organisations are hip to the jive, as the kids say?
I’ll ante up with the Brooklyn Museum, who have an amazing networked membership program. What have you got?
6 Comments
January 19th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I know I’m a bit biased (since I have been trying to push my own organization, the National Wildlife Federation, onto the social media scene for a while), but I feel that NWF has come a long way in using social media to engage people with our mission. We use social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Mixx. We have also expanded our blogs and are now experimenting with outreach through Twitter. We’ve seen really wonderful results coming from our engagement online. It is our mission to inspire people to protect wildlife for our children’s future, and the web offers up ample opportunities to do this. We now have a growing list of staff who use social media to share interesting information and hold conversations.
January 20th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Thanks, Danielle. I’ll admit that NWF hadn’t been on my radar – but what you’ve done is pretty impressive!
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:19 am
Hey, Sean. Although my organization more monitors how Minnesota’s nonprofits use social media, we’re definitely using Twitter (@SmartNonprofits).
One of my favorite examples of good solid nonprofit use of social media is the Minneapolis-based organization the Nonprofits Assistance Fund – http://www.nonprofitsassistancefund.org/. They’ve got two blogs that rock the house down. The first is Balancing the Mission Checkbook, about nonprofit financial management and another one aggregating/digitally curating resources for nonprofits called the Nonprofit Harvest. I think the Harvest is amazing: http://www.nonprofitsassistancefund.org/blog_harvest/.
NAF does a lot of training with my organization, and we’re close allies, but I don’t have a stake in promoting them other than really liking their work. Check ‘em out!
January 22nd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Brooklyn Museum has done great work, as has Powerhouse Museum in Australia (particularly their work with the commons in flickr). Ontario Science Center leads the way with YouTube, hosting an early YouTube meetup.
I love the stuff that our own Director of Web Experience, Beck Tench, has done at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, chronicled in part at http://useum.tumblr.com/ and also distributed throughout our website at http://www.lifeandscience.org
Others, such as @ninaksimon, are Museum consultants who have done interesting work at a variety of institutions.
January 26th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Wow! Thanks, Nicole and Jeff – great stuff.
Sean
January 29th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
If you want an example of a local non-profit (not a national organization) using social media effectively, I’d like to suggest the organization for which I volunteer–the Central Oklahoma Humane Society (www.okhumane.org and http://www.okhumaneblog.com).
On the national level, Carie Lewis at the Humane Society of the United States is doing some really cool things (@humanesociety on Twitter).
I’m really anxious to read about what other nonprofits are doing!
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