Plague: You can check out and report to Ushahidi’s H1N1 (swine flu) map, a crowdsourced way to track unverified citizen reports of the pandemic. In British Columbia, the provincial health authority is using Twitter to try to push out information about H1N1 to a confused public.

Hurricanes: Ning is a customizable social networking site highly recommended for non-profits suffering Facebook fatigue, and The Hurricane Information Centre and associated wiki are a great case study of how flexible Ning can be as a platform for moving info out about your cause. These pages are entirely volunteer informed, and a fantastic source of local information on where to get information such as where evacuations are happening, and hurricane preparedness.

Earthquakes: A mash-up is when data from two web pages are combined into one place – among their many uses, they’re a great to visualise large amounts of data.  For example, in this mashup real time data about earthquakes from around the world is visualized on a map so that it’s easier for users to see where earthquakes are happening and how big they are.  If seeing this sort of thing makes you nervous, why not get inspired for the big one by practicing with The Great California Shake Out? In the largest virtual earthquake drill ever, nearly 7 million Californians participated on and offline in October 2009. Using information from the site, they all practiced preparedness by reacting on the appointed day exactly as if an earthquake had hit their state (local media helped with the drama by broadcasting realistic updates over the website) Afterwards, they posted their photos and stories about the experience – you can check them out here.

Snowstorms: As winter gets underway in the Northern Hemisphere, expect to see more snowstorm reporting tools. Snowbird, a project from a group of University of Waterloo students, uses Twiter and Google Earth to visualize snow fall reports around the world. Though it’s meant more as a way for people interested in snowfall measurements to quickly broadcast information to the web using Twitter, it’s easy to see the implications of creating sites where people can update information about their climate – sounds like a powerful tool for raising awareness about climate change if we ever heard one.

Have you got better sites to add to this list? Please leave your links in the comments or email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org.

The New York Times asked 200 people in an unofficial poll what their hopes were for the Obama administration. But it’s how they represented that information that’s really fun: they combined cloud tags, ‘liking’, podcasting and their original poll into ‘I hope so too.’ To use it, click on any of the speech bubbles (tags) hanging over the group – you’ll hear the voices of the people who responded to the poll. If you agree with them, you can click ‘I hope so too’. You can also regroup the speech bubble tags by using the tabs to get an idea of which are the most popular.

This is a really appealing and pretty way to combine several types of media into a tool that makes you want to linger. It made me wonder what would happen if a platform was kicking around to make this kind of feedback or participation ubiquitous. What if your organization could poll its community about the issues it works on or the mission it’s working on, and receive multilayered feedback? Hope something like this is out there? I hope so too.

Meanwhile, I’m interacting with Obama in a slightly different way this week: I’m headed to the New Media Conference in Warsaw this week, hosted by the US Embassy in Poland. Joe Rospar (the director of New Media for Obama’s campaign) is going to be speaking there, and I want to hear from you before this Friday about any questions you have for him – I’ll try to ask him for you!

Email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org, or simply leave a comment at the bottom of this post.

Still – have you heard of “social media visualization?” This a rapidly growing subset of network visualization and modeling – that is, trying to make sense of the mountains of social tracks we’re all leaving on the internet.

There’s a great article in the magazine Seed this month – which, by the way, is another terrific recent find – which discusses how social researchers have never had access to “live” data on how people interact.

Want to see how people are move around a city when a disaster strikes? Plot their Twitters and track their cellphones. Want to see how disease spreads? Look for people typing “flu” into Google, and plot their locations on a map.

A small-scale, but beautiful, example of this can be seen in the software of Christopher Baker. He created a killer app to map every email he’s ever sent – it’s a little obsessive-compulsive, but also fascinating.

And if you’re really serious, check out the 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. It’s not all visualization stuff, but pretty amazing ideas. The full papers aren’t posted, just enough to give you a taste.

So, what does this have to do with your nonprofit? Imagine being able to map and track how your donors interact with your organisation, and with eachother, in real time. I’m actually working on a tiny version of this: taking our donation data and placing it on a map, so that we get a sense of what effect locality has on our membership. But what if we took it further – what if, like Christopher Baker, and mapped all the emails between staff, donors and volunteers? We could see where the nodes are, the connectors and hubs who hold our social network together. At the very least, like Nolan, we could create some great art. What do you think? Have you come across any great social media visualization tools?

“…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.

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:)

1) Why did NWF decide to start using Twitter?  Was it championed by an individual, or did it “bubble up”?

Two years ago, I was tasked by my boss to “join social networks.” I had started out managing the National Wildlife Federation’s Facebook and MySpace profiles and more, and discovered Twitter while attending the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference. I didn’t fully understand it, but I did see potential for NWF because I knew we had interesting and meaningful information to share. I signed NWF up and started tweeting random wildlife facts and links to NWF action alerts and more. I didn’t really know how to start the conversations yet–but I knew that NWF could be a reliable resource for anyone who wanted to follow us.

NWF’s Twitter account was always fun and useful, but I soon wanted a more personal voice, so I created my own account @starfocus and encouraged other people at NWF interested in tweeting to do the same. I knew it would give a personal voice to our programs and I hoped it would open up conversation more and encourage people to feel connected to the organization.

Things did bubble from there! We have two programs on Twitter, @campusecology and @greenhour, along with numerous staff members. @NWF still serves as our main touch point. I think it is great to have people and programs also serve as Twitter accounts because conversations can be more personal and targeted.

2) Do you have a Twitter strategy?  How do you ensure there’s a steady stream of meaningful information, as opposed to lots of “noise”?

Initially no, there wasn’t much of a strategy. As Twitter has grown within the organization, we just fell into a groove that generic, NWF, wildlife-related content would be tweeted through the NWF page. Our Campus Ecology and Green Hour programs get a bit more specific. As for the staff’s personal accounts, I encourage anyone who is interested to tweet as much as they want to about what they do at NWF or what they’re interested in. We develop our own networks of like-minded followers and those followers get connected to the people of NWF on Twitter and throughout other social networks.

On my personal account, and when tweeting for @NWF, I simply try to listen and answer questions–while also asking questions! This has proven incredibly valuable to me and I believe to the organization. When it comes down to it, NWF does fantastic work, but we can do even greater work if we are serving what people need and also connecting with them in the most effective ways.

3) How do you use other online sites/social media in conjunction with Twitter?

I am active on Digg, Mixx and Reddit and will occasionally tweet stories to encourage support. NWF also has a Ping account so we can update Plurk and identi.ca as well. I also make sure to post National Wildlife magazine articles on a number of social networks and will point to them through twitter. I use twitter to push people to our social media hubpage– which right now lives at http://online.nwf.org/socialsites and will hopefully encourage them to at least follow us for a while and see if there is potential to grow the relationship.

4) What benefits has Twitter brought to NWF?

NWF has gotten a lot of value from Twitter. We use it as one of our top listening tools because we get to join in the conversation and also get a glimpse of how we are doing our jobs. We have mended relationships because of Twitter, we have made new friends because of Twitter, and we have helped spread important messages and increased our online activism all because of the way this social media tool leads people to things that interest them. We hope to be very available to anyone who wants to follow us in the future.

5) What piece of golden advice would you offer to a non-profit considering using Twitter?

Start slow, listen and understand the space before you jump in. Don’t follow too many people initially–but follow people who share your interests or who are local to your area. Grow organically and be authentic. Talk to people like they are your friends, not like you are trying to advertise. I think the most important thing you can do is be real and ask for help when you need it.

If you’re not familiar with it, Google Trends ranks the search terms most commonly typed into Google. It’s an hourly snapshot of what has the attention of users across the internet. Often, it’s a weird mix of things – it’s sort of fun to try and figure out why “recipe lasagna” suddenly shot to the top of the charts. My guess is that it’s often related to big media such as TV programs – for instance, Oprah may have just mentioned her recipe for lasagna, and her fans want a copy.

Interestingly, Trends is a good way of monitoring the news, albeit a little cryptic. The Mumbai attack, for example, started popping up in Trends before many of the big outlets started catching the story. Of course, if you really want to be in front of the latest news, search Twitter. There’s even a brand new mash-up to search Twitter for news stories called TweetNews.

You can also dig into broader trends in searches using Insights for Search, analyzing by region or by time. For instance, take a look at social media as a search term, focusing in on Canada as a region.

The result shows you how, as a search term, social media has increased steadily in frequency since 2004, with a surge in the last year. It also show, unsurprisingly, that Ontario, BC, and Alberta have the highest volume of searches. Finally, it shows related “rising searches” which include “social media marketing.”

All of these tools offer you a chance to better understand what your audience is looking for, be it potential donors, clients, or stakeholders. The only danger is that you’ll spend all your time trying to figure out why “banana sunshine r2d2″ is the internet’s fixation du jour.

I’ll ante up with the Brooklyn Museum, who have an amazing networked membership program. What have you got?

But Facebook users are all 20-somethings. Our supporters are all in their 40s and 50s. We have an older audience – they wouldn’t know how to use Facebook!

Not true, according to the latest stats. Facebook isn’t just grabbing the youth demographic, it’s gobbling up the baby boomers as well.

First, keep in mind that Facebook became the world’s largest social network about 6 months ago, with about 150 million active users.

Second, the demographics of Facebook are changing fast. According to istrategylabs.com , in the U.S. alone the 35-54 year old segment grew an astounding 276% in the last 6 months. That means this group has roughly doubled in size every 2 months. As of right now, there are about 7 million of these greying hipsters online across the United States.

Of course, my naysaying friend was still sort of right about Facebook being a young person’s game: In the U.S., 18-24 year old still make up the bulk of Facebook users, forming about 40% of the total population. But you know what? In Canada, the gap is much smaller: we have about 3.6 million youngsters (18-24), compared to 2.3 million boomers (35-54.) In Canada, our grown-ups are cooler.

So things are changing fast. For a non-profit, this is further proof that social networks are going to play a bigger role in the near future: it’s a huge audience, and it’s your audience.

ps. If you’re a numbers geek like me, you can get your own data straight from Facebook. It’s a little clunky, but by using the process for placing an ad in Facebook you can extract demographic stats that, presumably, are drawn live from their own system. Try it out…

Also check out Comscore for more stats…