Baratunde Thurston ponders #MLK in Vanity Fair, and comes up with a solid quote: “All too often, Twitter encourages shallow understanding even from those who have your best interest at heart.”

2. Which charities spend the most on administration?

That said, I’ll be interested to see how this rolls out.  Although it’s early days, I wonder how they have found working with the culture of government – which is often so very different from the culture of a tech startup.  Ultimately, this initiative is going to have to do some culture shifting – simply combining the raw ingredients may not yield the desired results.

And – where’s Code for Canada?  As the protests against the centralization of power in this country build online, a little online transparency might be a good idea for the PM right now…

In the coming year, non-profits should…

1. Resist the Shiny Toys
This is not a good year to upgrade – anything. Operating systems, platforms, web services are all in a serious period of flux and reinvention. While it could be argued that change is a constant in the tech field, this year seems worse than others. And when we say “worse,” we also mean “awesome”: new versions operating systems, and entirely new operating systems; rapidly maturing netbooks vs. notebooks vs. smartphones vs. tablets; cloud computing replacing desktop computers. Google Wave is a good example: it’s probably going to reinvent how we all work together on the web. But, right now, it’s still a little cryptic.  In all, there are enormous changes underway this year. From the persperctive of a non-profit with a limited budget, though, best to hunker down for a year and stick with what works.

2. Get Mobile
Your next computer may be a smartphone. More and more of your audience are getting their content through a mobile device. The devices are getting smarter, faster, and more location aware. You should start thinking about how your nonprofit can take advantage of this trend. In particular, consider mobile micropayments – how can your donors make a quick, small donation to your cause through their phone? This might not be a big revenue source this year, but it’s the way of the future.

3. Listen Up
Having your own Twitter stream is great, but listening to other people’s tweets is even better.  Consider how can you take advantage of online tools for to become a better “listener” this year: it could be as easy as some ongoing searches for keywords that matter to your organisation on Tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com). It’s also getting easier to pool all your listening in one place – whether that’s through a free service like iGoogle that lets you rss your blog, podcasts and twitter keyword search returns to a personal page, or whether you invest in integrated social media monitoring on a tool like Radian6 (http://radian6.com/)   2010 is the year you can expect dramatically different use of listening online as a way to reach out to stakeholders – so listen up.

4. Become Transparent – in real time!
Transparency has always been an issue for non-profits, but now it’s important to learn how to be pro-active about putting your data on the web. You need to be actively engaging your audience by making your actions and results available online and in real time. Certain types of donors are much more likely to give once they’ve researched you thoroughly. They’re more likely to give again if they believe you’re clearly communicating/working with them towards your common goal.

5. Manage Your Content
Your office is going to make your social web presence a greater priority. You can’t avoid it – even if your organisation doesn’t have a Facebook page, your employees do. And your volunteers. And your donors. And they are all talking about you. So figure out how to manage and distribute your content effectively with these tools.

6. Plan for Social Media
Social media is not going away. Position your non-profit for success this year by including a social media strategy or outreach plan in any media plan you create. It’s not replacing the traditional ways you reach out to the public, but it is a key component.

There it is: our advice for surviving 2010.  Help add to the list: what are you telling your boss (or your staff) to look out for this year?

Kidding. That’s an excerpt from last year’s post about the UN Climate Change conference, when we did a case study of the Polish website (and Avaaz). It’s just that, when it comes to climate change and making UN information accessible, so little has changed since last year that everything’s feeling, well, a little recycled.

Our criteria last year for a good conference website holds up: conference websites have to be clear, pretty, interactive and useful to thousands of stakeholders with radically different needs. Last year, we thought the Poles had given it a good try. Sure, it wasn’t the prettiest website, but they tried to make complicated information as accessible as they could through an issues quickfinder and a section called “Essential Background”. But they also used a lot of jargon. Can the Danes do better? Well, here’s the conference website.

It is pretty. But clear? Here’s a litmus test: see how quickly you can find these key talking points. Bonus question: Could you understand the talking points once you found them?

- Why are they holding this conference?

- Who’s speaking for the EU at the conference?

- What was achieved at the last UN Climate Change conference?

- What has convinced scientists that humans are largely responsible for global warming?

You get bonus points if you managed to make it through any of the blogs. Now, I am not in favor of dumbing down a message. But I am a believer in in information that’s accessible, clear writing and a conference website that I can use to access the issues. However, by explicitly targeting only the press, ngos, businesses, researchers and delegates, you – the person using the website who couldn’t afford to get to that conference in person – could be forgiven for feeling a little left out.

There’s some decent use of traditional media that does make accessing the conference issue easier (for example, it was a good move to post the news feed prominently and they’ve made it searchable by target audience) There is also an interactive comment tool that lets you send your greetings to world leaders on the main page, then re-broadcasts them at the top and on screens at the conference. But they lose serious ground on information management, and on some of their basic social media offerings by not treating it as social media – besides their heavily managed Climate Change Thinker blogs,  they’ve created a Facebook Page  that doesn’t allow Fans to post to the wall, and a Twitter feed that appears set only to broadcast.

Where they seem to be concentrating their social media efforts is in Raise Your Voice, a Youtube channel that solicits video messages from users as well as from more famous (and unexpected) contributors like Emma Thompson, Jet Li and Desmond Tutu. Part of the channel frames the big issues through selected user comments, and lets you either comment yourself, or vote the featured comment up or down.  This bit works well, but it’s a shame that the rest of the conference website isn’t as welcoming to people looking for information or tools. What if there was a conference wiki, or a collaborative platform available to users where ideas and brainstorming could take place? What if there was an online gathering place where e-delegates could present about their organisations (say an online version of the International HIV/AIDS conferences’ Global Village gathering area?) What if the website’s search engine could link users to academic information or reports. What if – here’s a brainstorm – some of the blogs were written by the rapporteurs for each session?

What if this site was a way for the world to enhance the talks at Copenhagen? Sadly, unlike climate change, constructive use of Web 2.0 for conferences appears to be moving way too slowly.

You could watch this.

You could play this.

You could go here, and look up a question you were scared to ask: (I started you off on a less scary one)

You could throw a party. You could ask all your friends for five bucks at the party and then give it to Head & Hands.

Or you could go to their party (this Montreal Gazette article calls it “innovative” and “edgy”)

You could go to a drop-in clinic in your area. You could get tested. If that freaks you out, you could call here: 514-481-0277.

And if you were too freaked out to talk to the person at Head & Hands about this stuff right away, you could say “Hey, I just threw a party and all my friends gave me five bucks to give to you.” and they would be thrilled, and ask you to drop by so they could thank you. And if you felt like asking some questions once you got there, I’m sure they’d be cool with that.

You could volunteer to be a peer educator at the Sense Project.

If you aren’t quite ready to train to be a peer educator, you could remark conversationally to a friend “Hey, I was thinking, doesn’t it seem to you that AIDS is inextricably intertwined with social justice problems such as poverty, women’s rights, education and globalization?” and they could ask if they could borrow your copy of Race Against Time and then you could lend it to them.

You could wear a red ribbon. If someone asked you why you were wearing it, you could tell them that Dec 1 is World AIDS Day.

I presented about the possibilities for social media and how it was changing the way we play – as well as the way we act as citizens and witnesses. Since my presentation consisted only of screen shots, I airily told everyone not to worry or take notes, that the links for everything I was talking about would go up on my blog. I made it sound like this would happen within about five minutes, might even be up by the time they got home.

And a geologic age later, here it is! So let’s talk about serious games, and how it could make us better citizens. Thanks to everyone at the conference who was kind enough to chat about this in person.

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.

("Brains! Braaaaiiiaaaiiiiaaaiiinns" reprint courtesy Noie to Signal/Rob Cottingham)

There’s something about the grey depressingness of Hallowe’en in Canada that brings out the zombie in everyone. Trying to make your next presentation a thriller? Need some (ahem) braaaaaains to help you through your new duties as social media champion?

Help is on the way.

First, Social Signal (full disclosure: I’m their social media  strategist) has launched Open SoSi - an open sourced, step by step introduction to every bit of their intellectual property – free tools, free methodologies, fantastic ideas. If you want to stay appraised as they release new tools and advice week by week, you can follow them on Twitter, or you can visit their OpenSoSi page to begin from the beginning.

My favorite release so far has been Rob and Alex talking about the Concept Jam workshops Social Signal offers – these are full day workshops used to identify an organisation’s best social media options and get everyone on the path to imagining your strategy. I’ve worked on these presentations, and I still learned something new from this post where they mention an excellent downloadable book by Andy Goodman (”Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes”) Not everyone’s secure about their Power Point skills, but after OpenSoSi and this book you’ll be armed with all the know how you need in order to — zombie metaphors aside — slay your next audience.

Happy Hallowe’en!

————-

Extra extra: Canadians, improve your communities and win big bucks. October 31 is the last day to submit to Round 1 of the Aviva Community Fund, which could fund your non-profit/community organisation/band of inspired people’s next great project to improve the community. Successive rounds will be open to new ideas but it pays to get in it to win it early – winning is dependent on the number of votes you can raise for your project.

For more advice, you might want to check out the earlier post that I wrote when I first started working at Social Signal, which links you up nicely to Alex’s Harvard Business School blog post with her advice, as well as our posts on socialsignal.com about how to get hired.

Their Institute for the Humanities is holding a conference on Oct 15-16 called Witnessing the World: New Possibilities for Citizenship and Social Change. If you’re in Vancouver, please come! Specifically, Channing will be talking about play and the internet, and how saving the world can be serious fun.

(She is only slightly nervous to be doing this in a context where some of the best non-profit advocates will be up there talking about how they’ve dodged bullets as part of their dedication to social change…)

Want to be a part of the conversation? Throw us a comment or email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org. Here are some of the questions we’re thinking about for the session, and we’d love to hear what you have to say:

• What can you witness on Facebook?
• What kinds of social justice is social media good at? And what’s it less useful at?
• Can a memory be a meme? Can a meme change your mind?
• How does social media change the way people witness to history?
• How important is a concept like fun when it comes to social justice?
• Is play a way of activating witnessing? Is it a way to activate citizenship?
• The internet is bad at “forgetting” (stuff gets posted, and it stays posted till you take it down – and that might be never) How does  this kind of perpetuity change the way we remember?

Here’s their description of their conference:
In its simplest form, witnessing involves observing and reporting by a single person of a single act, but on a broader level it can involve documenting human rights abuses or discussing civic issues in popular media. With the rise of new social media, the ubiquity of cameras and the explosion of visual monitoring techniques (from temperature scans to iris recognition machines), the dynamics of watching have dramatically altered how we engage as actors, as viewers, as bystanders and as witnesses in social life. In a series of sessions comprised of journalists, academics, artists and activists, this conference – one in a series of events sponsored by the SFU Institute for the Humanities as part of its Imagining Citizenship initiative – features four interactive sessions to explore aspects of new relations between witnessing, social justice and citizenship.
Channing is part of a panel session called Witnessing Cities  from 11-12:30 on Friday, Oct 16 at Harbour Centre.