PA311-2011

Social media tools, such as twitter and facebook, played a significant part of the overthrowing of Mubarak. With two-thirds of Egypt's population under the age of 30, it's no surprise that internet-savvy, educated, young Egyptians used such tools to break barriers in a country that has been ruled under unjust dictatorship throughout their lives. These tools helped organize and gather the millions of protestors that have sparked revolution in Egypt. Social media and sharing information online has played an almost unimaginable role in this process and certainly poses a threat to governments around the world with dictatorships and a significant proportion of the population who is educated and able to use these tools.

This article is about a new nonprofit being started by two very well known figures Biz Stone of Twitter and Rey Ramsey of TechNet. "ConvergeUS is dedicated to bringing together the technology, nonprofit, governmental and academic sectors to facilitate and accelerate technology-based social innovation - new strategies, concepts, ideas and coalitions - to meet social needs ranging from early childhood education to disaster response and assisting military families, among other issues," said a TechNet spokesman.

I posted an article last week about opposition to whether or not social media makes an impact in countries that find themselves in situations like Egypt's. This article, however, tends to thing Twitter can actually have an effect.

One of the largest App websites available, it is now reaching out to non profits so they can get information on which apps would help at their organization.

QR codes explained in a bit more detail...

BTOP is grant funding program, who is trying to assess every one of these programs

Great article about the inside of working in a community management

Interesting article about a nonprofit purchasing group

It's greta to see how many students are benefitting from such projects

A survey about mobile text messaging found that 86% of donors said they would donate again in the future, either through text messages or some other form of online giving. Most people had a positive experience with donating through a mobile phone and would like to recieve notices about the charity they were donating to. Future predictions say mobile phone donating is going to continue to grow in popularity.

Nonprofits are turning to media such as Youtube. People could rewatch much as they like and the videos for the organizations are all in one area.

With so many organizations out there competing for attention and money, having a solid social media strategy is going to be paramount to success in the future. This Webinar looks pretty interesting, and should help to sort out some of those issues for NPOs of any size. I would be really interested to hear Brooke McMillan talk about managing the Livestrong presence online, and how they look at Social Media as a fundraising tool.