The idea is simple – bloggers commit to staying up for 24 hours, and collect pledges and donations. Well, the idea is simple: in practice, that’s 49 posts and no sleep, which is heroic before you throw in the fundraising. What makes it so attractive as an online fundraiser to donors is that you can support your favorite writers with the click of a button, and it lets you discover new writers blogging for the same cause.

What does your non-profit need to make this happen?

- a popular ringleader and her friends. In Vancouver’s 604 area code, that’s blogger Rebecca Bollwit (Miss 604)

- bloggers, lots of (here’s the list). One great thing about this event is the big age range in bloggers – it’s intergenerational, and there’s a blog for everyone’s interests.

- a secure website that people can donate through. The 2009 Vancouver Blogathon has a perfectly lovely website (logo donated by Kontent Creative), and the bloggers are using Canada Helps as their donation platform

- a space to blog in that has wireless. Workspace donated their downtown space

- food and goodies donated from local businesses to feed the bloggers

Since everything can be donated, including the most precious resource (good writers!), blogathons are an event any non-profit community can try. The possibilities are huge: the Vancouver Blogathon has raised over $40,000 in under 24 hours for a few good causes (including the BC Children’s Hospital, hurrah!)and they aren’t finished yet. Cheer them on by Twittering #blogathon or better yet, by donating on the Blogathon site.

Now, I have two reasons for wanting to get you interested in this. The first reason is: I’m animating this campaign, and I’m excited to take you on the journey with me for an inside look at social media and fundraising. I’m going to post updates so you can see that it’s not a magic trick that only charismatic American presidents can pull off – this is a strategic way to fundraise by building a story with your donors. My second reason is simple: I know a 4 year old who had heart surgery at the Children’s recently. (He’s fine now.) So I have a very keen sense that these are the people who heal our kids, and they need our help.

As time goes by on the campaign I’ll talk a bit about how we came up with the concepts behind it, how the pick-up is going, and what we’re learning. To watch us in action, Fan the Facebook Page I’m animating, or follow @bcchf on Twitter. While this widget is the way Social Signal found to do online micro-fundraising, we know it’s going to take a real community posting photos, stories and videos about their heroes to make this campaign fly. I would love to work with you, gentle reader, so please participate by tagging your mentions of this campaign (by which I mean pictures of yourself in a blanket cape a la my example) with bcchf (or on Twitter you can use the hashtag #bcchf)

How You Can Help:

-  Put the widget on your Facebook profile or donate (do! I designed this special thank you video that will knock your socks off…)

- If you aren’t in British Columbia, spread the word to the people you know in BC by sending them the video. If you’re a blogger, grab the widget and/or write about it. Gillian Shaw from the Vancouver Sun broke the story and posted her widget here.

- And finally, cheer us on! Please fan BCCHF on Facebook, Twitter to us @bcchf, post to our wall or… …take a photo of yourself jumping  with that red blanket cape and tag it bcchf (I’m starting a League of Extraordinary Blanket Capes) or with the hashtag #bcchf if you mention it on Twitter. By donating, you’re  a hero to the children who are patients at BC Kids. So tie on that red blanket cape! Up up and awaaay!

don't forget to tag your blanket cape photo with bcchf or #bcchf so that i can show the children's hospital what upstanding heroes support them. Excelsior!

The craziest thing about this job is that they hired me when I was still writing from Poland – so, yes, if you’re thinking that I moved 9,500 km after a Skype based interview process – you’re right. I did.  You can read their take on how to hire a social media strategist at the Harvard Business Blog, their take on hiring (ahem) me at the Social Signal blog, as well as my tips for getting hired in a social media strategist job (they involve chocolate).

I’m unveiling the first social media project I’ve been working on for them very soon, and I will say this: it’s a fundraiser for a non-profit. There are superheroes. Hang on to your hats! We’ve got a live one!

Here are three key ingredients to creating a terrific YouTube video for your nonprofit.  You can observe all of these at work in a video of a tremendously cute baby rhino  at the Whipsnade Zoo, run by the Zoological Society of London in the UK.

1) Use your unique content
Not every nonprofit has a baby rhino (or giraffe) to show off.  But you are unique, and you’ve got something special to share that no-one else does.  So identify your unique content, and put it out there.

2) Keep it small, simple and cheap
YouTube as a medium has some real limitations – so understand those limitations and make them work for you.  Keep the imagery simple and powerful; don’t waste time with a lot of editing and fancy camerawork; and keep it short – the rhino clocks in at 2 minutes, and that’s all I need to be impressed.  Remember: YouTube videos are the potato chips of digital media.  Keep them small and addictive.

3) State your message clearly
At the end of all of their videos, ZSL has a single frame that shows their logo, and the words “ZSL is a charity devoted to the conservation of animals.”  Can’t get much clearer than that – I’ve seen what they do, they told me what they do, badda bing, badda boom. I get why they are important, in under two minutes.

Mix all these ingredients, and you’ll have a set of effective YouTube tools to push your message out there!

A 404 page is the error page that shows up when you type in a web address that doesn’t exist, or worse, it’s the page that shows up when your favorite blog has dropped a link. Generally it says something like: “404: File Not Found” and then it lists possible reasons this happened. Turns out our old error page – the default WordPress PressRow Template one – showed this to viewers:

Easy, tiger. This is a 404 page.

You are totally in the wrong place. Do not pass GO; do not collect $200.

Instead, try one of the following:

* Hit the “back” button on your browser.
* Head on over to the front page.
* Try searching using the form in the sidebar.
* Click on a link in the sidebar.
* Use the navigation menu at the top of the page.
* Punt.

Ok, kind of funny, right? Except, not so funny for this reader, and her opinion counts since she’s, well, our mom. She pointed out that the text was really irritating and blamed the user for what she saw as the website’s mistake. And, since the default banner was our Archives banner, she found it hard to know whether she was in website limbo (the technical term for a 404) or on a legitimate  Social Ch@nge blog entry. Mom always told us that it’s important to be helpful, and she’s right – a page that hits the wrong note or blames readers for the error is sure to encourage people to navigate away from your site.

Some basic rules for a 404 page that will help your readers, and keep them on your website:

- Make sure your text is short and sweet. It should acknowledge the problem (or apologize) and offer your readers contacting the web master and/or some help getting back to the main website.

- That said, make sure the tone  of your text matches the tone of your site.  If your website is serious and professional, have a serious and professional (but not boring) message. If your site is more relaxed or personal, you can have a snappier 404, or experiment with all the silly one-liners you like. Be creative – just make sure it sounds like the rest of your content.

- Get visual. Make sure your reader can tell they are in the wrong place by posting a different banner, or using other graphical cues. For a list of really well-designed 404 pages, check this out.

The goal of any 404 is to encourage your reader to stay on your website, so put some thought into your page. Cooincedentally, we’re looking for feedback about Social Change’s kinder, gentler (more medieval) 404 page, which you can find right here.

Techies: If you are interested in some technical background or code for improving your 404 page, check out this helpful article as well as Word Press’ forums for loads of advice from other WP experts.

Original Photo: Flickr user herzogbr, CC License A-NC-SS 2.0

Real Life Example: Flickr user herzogbr made this beautiful 404 page for his library (see above) and he also blogged about it – to hear more about how he did it (and to check out his round up of other library 404 pages) click here.

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Reminder: We’re still debating – categories or tags? How do you categorize your website, and which should Social Ch@nge pick to make your search easier. So far we’re hearing comments that tags are “anarchic” – sounds like fightin’ words to us, tag evangelists! Please comment or write us at editor@netfornonprofits.org so that we can get sorted.

“…Creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for clients, partners, and society at large.”*

Surprise: the secret word for your job is marketing. Why is it a secret? When you work as a fundraiser, “marketing” is a bit of a dirty word – it sounds corporate, and insincere. But good marketing isn’t about lying to people or tricking them into your product – it’s about connecting with the people whose values line up with yours.  And a  little cross-pollination is all it takes to save you reinventing the wheel when it comes to, well, getting on with the job of marketing your non-profit.

Where can you access online marketing advice that applies to non-profits?

Some excellent (and amusing) tips are available in the form of The Age of Persuasion, a CBC radio show about advertising. Hosted by Terry O’Reilly, it’s not available in podcast format, but it is available for streaming. While O’Reilly is specifically talking about advertising, truths about considering your target group and doing your homework are made awfully vivid by stealable examples from the corporate world.

Katya Andresen’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog calls this “Robin Hood Marketing”, that is “the concept of stealing corporate savvy to sell just causes”  and offers clear-cut breakdowns of marketing essentials, such as going to where the attention is. Nedra Weinreich’s excellently-written blog Spare Change focuses on social marketing and how it applies to non-profits.

No matter what, though, you cannot do better than getting an expert into your non-profit. Offline, see if your local university has opportunities for marketing students to intern with you and take their knowledge seriously – an intern who helps you learn the ropes of Robin Hood marketing could be a fantastic board member in the making.

Guess where the term "marketing" originated? Original Photo: Flickr user lumierefi (CC license 2.0)

*quoting the American Marketing Association’s definition – you can see the whole definition on Wikipedia.

PR 2.0 – has an exhaustive and frequently updated list of all Twitter features (all the add-ons you’d ever want in order to really get Twitter to work some magic.

Naturally, there’s also Get Satisfaction, which includes a place for Twitter fans to help each other out.

The Twitter Fan Wiki on PB also has some good advice (this is where I learned about #hashtags, which made searching for subjects on Twitter much easier.

And this Twitter search engine has some great operators – learn how to search for a subject by including a positive attitude   or a negative attitude along with your key phrases.

You clearly need to enjoy the benefits of going analog. Here are 3 tips we use all the time to get our projects done.

Original Photo by flickr user Dave77459

Kitchen Timers:

We’re serious. We like to set the timer for half hour or hour long sprints to help us focus on a task. It ticks, it dings, you’re done.  The timer works well for three reasons – the ticking makes a white noise that keeps you on task,  estimating how much time a task will take you helps you to manage it, and timing yourself means that you’re allowed to take breaks. In fact, breaks are enforced, because you have to take your hands off the keyboard to reset the thing.

Task Breaks:

A friend told me recently about a study that showed that humans are evolving to aggregate information better, courtesy of using computers. Unfortunately, we’re the unevolved ones – this generation of humans aggregates poorly. The answer? Take breaks and let yourself process.

The only rules for a break are: you cannot input on a break (so, you can’t read your book, you can’t listen to music) and you cannot output on a break (don’t make notes, don’t go on Facebook, don’t answer your emails).  The best breaks, the ones that will bring you back to your desk with your work processed, are the ones that get you moving. (And this makes sense when you consider that our brains evolved partly from being able to walk.)

However you do it, banish yourself from input/output tasks for ten minutes, and you’ll find yourself sifting through information and coming back to your work with better focus.

Sticky Note Questions

Make your own content filter. Pick three (max) questions that help you define your goals, write them on a sticky note, and keep it where you can see it. This lets you check if you’re spending your time on the right priorities. For example, a funding developer might have this on her sticky note:

a) Will this bring in money?

b) Will this bring in new donor prospects?

This keeps her from going too far off onto websites that probably won’t support either goal.

If you’re interested in doing further reading about productivity (and you’re not on a task break right now) Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com is the site for you. Among other great posts, you’ll find this one on the benefits of using paper (yes, he invented The Hipster PDA). You’ll also find a great digital tool for keeping yourself from wandering off-task; if you’re not a kitchen timer kind of person, you might be a Brain Dad kind of person.  Kim Klein has also written a bit about analog efficiency – the sticky note idea is featured in her book Fundraising for Social Change (2001, Chardon Press) and it’s good advice.

If your non-profit is working on a social media plan, you’re going to need to think about how your non-profit tells stories. If you fundraise, you already know that the best collateral a non-profit produces are stories about their audience. Here’s an example – think about the last fundraiser you participated in. Chances are, it told you a story about what kind of person you are – you are someone who votes for change, or believes in the environment, or supports youth organizations. And the way they did it?  Good sequence, emotion, an unexpected turn of events, a telling detail or two: all bench marks of good storytelling.

If you’re not sure how to get started storytelling, stop by We Are Media (a social media starter kit curated by Beth Kanter for NTEN) where you will find a terrific module on storytelling, including interviews with NPR and essential essays.

If you’d like to see hilarious story telling: better stop by An Excellent Boring Presentation.

There are – literally – hundreds of ways to visualize your ideas, and if you’re skeptical, check out the Periodic Table of Visualisation. See any you use as part of your work process? (Are there any useless ones in there?) Got any how-to links to chase like this one from Beth Kanter? And where do you go online for useful tools for drawing up your brilliant scheme? Comments, emails and drawings welcome:)