Amnesty’s Dan McQuillan has made a rallying call for a Netsquared this side of the pond – which could be an “incubator for web-enabled social change in the UK & Europe”.

Dan identifies some possible goals:

• To stimulate web-enabled social innovation
• To create a an online-offline community for learning skills, sharing experiences and developing expertise
• To sustain socially progressive activity through alternative business & organisational models

I like the emphasis Dan gives to “activism”, and “the organisational question” in particular…

Perhaps, like the second Netsquared conference, it could aim to incubate a new generation of web-enabled non-profits that use new forms of organising to deliver more directly on their missions.

There is a very real tension between where social media is taking us and how charities are responding (although there needn’t be). Web 2.0 requires Leadership 2.0. Surely two sides of the same coin.

All this may well dovetail with the initiative soon to be unveiled by Bertie Bosredon, the Head of New Media at Breast Cancer Care. Bertie gave me an update earlier this week.

Yesterday, I happened to get a call from Richard Saunders, who is head of website development at NCH, the children’s charity. He also hinted he would welcome a forum along these lines. And Rob Bowker at the BTCV has flagged his interest to me via this blog.

I also know from many of the conversations I had in Brussels last week that there would be an appetite for this elsewhere in Europe, too. Paolo Ferrara left a comment on my recent Buzz Director post to let me know that they are starting to unpick this concept in their own Italian context.

I hope many others will be up for it. But it won’t all be plain sailing; David Wilcox recently held up a mirror to reflect that in the UK at least, the sector has not always been good at being generous in this way.

I’m optimistic. At the start of the year, when I was considering some of the trends that might drive charities in 2007, I wrote that I was “thinking of co-organising an open-space event for those championing social media tools (and change management) within their organisations.” But Dan is right, this is much bigger than a single event.

I would only add that I’d like to see people from all ‘disciplines’ involved in this – I’ve had enough of silo-thinking .

Thank you, Dan; count me in.

First post in a while for a number of reasons. Anyway, this stroked my ego.

The three images I uploaded to the “All photographers now” exhibit were showcased in the Musée de l’Elysée galleries in Lausanne, Switzerland recently.

How do I know (given that I’m in the UK)? Well, I received an email informing me that my images were exhibited. But that’s just the half of it: attached to the email were some installation views of my images in situ, showing them projected on the gallery wall – like the one pictured (and here’s the original photo on Flickr).

I wasn’t 100 percent sure what might have happened to my images once I’d uploaded them via this form.

My mate Nigel (who knows about these things), reckons the photos would go into a database that gallery downloads, gets stuck into some sort of slideshow and then just projected, as you would a presentation.

What made this different to, say, the Flickr Peep Show in Amsterdam a couple of years ago was that they have linked it all together – by taking a photo of my photo being shown… and email that back to me – although probably not that sophisticated, really. Maybe a webcam capture linked with my name and email address.

For a not-for-profit, maybe this is something a commercial partner might want to sponsor for a few grand (my emails from the Musée de l’Elysée suggested they had done a partnership with Hewlett-Packard).

My Flickr buddy Ed Fladung recently suggested that Yahoo! develop a micro-payment system for Flickrites who wish to sell their photos. Even better, a way of funnelling the payments to their favourite cause – although you (the not-for-profit) may want to vet the photos ‘donated’ in your name. Anyway, you get the picture!

This isn’t altogether new. I know of the Big White Box, which was set up by Brunel University student, David Bailey (must be another one), as part of his research into “how the collaborative power of the internet can be used to raise money for charity”. Profits are donated to a handful of UK charities, although I couldn’t get word from David on how much, etc.

And let’s not forget the brilliant DoggySnaps.com. I interviewed Tim Malbon about how the Dogs Trust will benefit from selling the rights to the cream of the crop posted there. As an aside, I actually met Tim for the first time at the Goodness 2.0 event the other evening (see Ian Delaney’s write up on the NMK site).

Greenpeace are at the top of the innovation tree with some pretty awesome participative campaigning. Take the GreenMyApple and Defending our Oceans campaigns, which give people a voice and a platform.

I followed the Greenpeace ship “Esperanza” as she voyaged the Southern Seas, via this stunning photostream on Flickr.

The whole DIY phenomenon has certainly been spurred on by Flickr, other photo-sharing communities, and the explosion of Creative Commons.

If you’re not doing this already, ask your supporters (and their networks) to submit some photos for the front cover of your annual report. You can even draw upon the freedom of the commons, and invite photo remixes.

Have you seen the ‘naked’ covers to some Penguin Classics in the bookstores? The publisher invited readers . There’s an online gallery, and some of the best ones can be viewed on Flickr, too. Great innovation.

There are so many other examples. For example, my mate Ed Mitchell will have one of his Vietnam photos on the next WWF calendar. One of my own photos of corn drying out on the roof of a church in rural Mexico (rather mundane you might think) recently accompanied a news article on citizen journalism website, NowPublic. And I could talk all day about the impact of the After Wilma group on Flickr.

The remarkable and omnipresent Beth Kanter has pulled together Ten Cool Examples of Nonprofits Using Flickr. These include a few of my own favourites and is a must-read.

I particularly like how the ONE Campaign explains to those without a Flickr account just what they need to do to add their face to the Faces of ONE Group.

In February, Flickr released a bundle of improvements for Group administrators, including the very cool ‘Invite a Photo’ feature:

You’re surfing through the Flickrverse and you find a photo that would be perfect for your group. This new feature will allow an administrator to invite that particular photo to their group without membership requirement. You’ll see a new link under the comment box that says ‘Invite this photo to…’

I hadn’t spotted this until this week.

Amazing to think that just two or three years ago, sourcing photos for a website was a real headache.

I only recently stumbled across the Dog Trust’s photo-sharing community, DoggySnaps.com. I’m not a dog owner, and frankly have no particular affinity with dogs, but the fabulous design, adoption of features such as tagging, and impressive attention to detail all made an instant impact on me.

I encouraged Tim Malbon, Creative Director at Interesource, to share a few juicy morsels from the website’s first six months…

The Dogs Trust seem to have embraced user-generated content with gusto. Has this been an easy journey?

We have a really close relationship with Dogs Trust. We first suggested the idea at the end of 2005 and while it took some time for the charity to come round (the growth of services like Flickr and Photobucket, and social networking websites like MySpace helped here), the people there embraced our vision pretty quickly. It’s brilliant working with people who ‘get it’.

It was also an exciting way for us to work: generating an idea and then selling it to a client – instead of waiting for clients to ask us to solve their problems. You can only work like this when there’s a lot of trust and respect.

Is DoggySnaps.com the UK’s first charity photo-sharing site of its kind? Did you ever consider a service like Flickr?

Yes, and yes. What we initially thought though, was that there is an opportunity to generate some revenue from crowd-sourcing dog photos.

Consider there are millions of dog owners who are taking billions of photos of their dogs, but have nowhere to put them. We thought these photos would start a ‘conversation’ about how much they love dogs: simple as that. That’s what we saw happening – particularly on Flickr and Dogster.

What we added was the idea that you can create value from this by asking the user to donate the rights to their images in kind. More about that later.

Could you give some measures of the success of DoggySnaps?

The success of DoggySnaps has been overwhelming. With practically no PR or marketing, and from a standing start in October 2006, we now have over 40,000 photos of dogs and this is rising steadily everyday. The website received 164,000 visits in January from a truly global audience. The average visit lasts 16 minutes. We have an active community who are emotionally engaged and very responsive to the website, newcomers and new features, which is fantastic for such a young site.

What has the charity learned about engaging with dog lovers in this entertaining way, compared to more traditional forms of supporter communications?

The most important thing – I think – is that the charity gets better results when it engages supporters on their terms, instead of trying to ‘interrupt’ them in order to ask for donations.

DoggySnaps is now a part of their lives, not an interruption. I think we’ve only just started to explore ways to translate this into donations.

What are your plans for enhancing the service… and how much is this informed by user feedback?

A large proportion of feedback from users is incorporated into new developments – ‘emoticons’ in the new forums, private and public messaging in ‘kennels’, information about the actual owner… and a number of forthcoming projects have all been driven as a direct response from feedback from the community.

To be honest, these guys are on the site 24/7 so it makes sense to listen to them, as they work with the DoggySnaps front end the most.

We are also planning to launch a beta community that will allow us to engage the most active users specifically to test new ideas and features.

Have you identified how the user-generated photo library might generate donations to support the work of the Dog’s Trust?

The Dogs Trust developed the website for the primary purpose of raising money and awareness of the charity, its dogs and the message. It can monetise the user-generated content by creating a rights-managed photo-library… selling images to advertisers, brands and publishers. If you think about it, dogs are one of the most popular themes in advertising and marketing.

There are lots of other ways, too – e.g. premium ‘treats’ and on-demand printing may turn out to be the most effective, but there are others: an online dog show… pulling in some of the Dogs Trust website… Who knows? There’s so much to try. We’re also experimenting with advertising.

How is the service managed? Is there a full-time Community Manager?

We have two editors; one who deals mainly with website maintenance issues, and another who responds to emails and requests. They work to make sure there is a consistent service.

What’s your favourite feature on the site?

I personally love giving treats – I think it has so much more potential. People really feel like they are contributing and involved with the site, as they all affect the stats. Also looking forward to video.

I notice Clarissa Baldwin has a blog. Did she take much convincing – or coaching – to start blogging?

Clarissa is so passionate about her dedication to dogs and verbalising this, I’m surprised she didn’t request a blog sooner!

Have a good sniff around DoggySnaps.com yourself… and check out Clarissa’s blog, too.

Last year, Hawaii-based ChipIn launched its “social ecommerce” service designed to help individuals connect with people in their social network for collection of money for a personal cause, to purchase a gift, or for community fundraising.

In recent months, the business has morphed into a “distributed fundraising widget management company”. Shel Israel blogged about this following a breakfast meeting he had with Carnet Williams, CEO at ChipIn, last December.

Now, if you want to find out how the ChipIn widget works, then you should read Beth Kanter’s case study, who incidentally interviewed Carnet in his pre-ChipIn days.

I think that distributed widget fundraising is a hugely important development and is set to sky-rocket this year… something I asked Carnet.

Do you agree that 2007 will be the Year of the Widget?

Yes! But I have a caveat on the term ‘widget’. I think in 2007 we will see a trend moving away from pure consumer-based widgets that act more like banner ads, and see the rise of the “smart” widgets – actual mini-applications that are embedded on both websites and desktops.
We are moving towards a more business-oriented rationale for widgets. Some good examples are the box.net widget to access and upload your files. It also plays mp3′s. This is a widget that serves a clear business purpose. That is where we wanted to position ChipIn – as a transactional widget that helps collect money. We will soon move beyond just tracking the collection of money, and onto tracking many different actions.

How do widgets offer a brand-building opportunity for not-for-profits?

When we think of widgets, we should be thinking of online branding and advocacy. It is not just the widget or the donations that not-for-profits should be seeking, but building a network of advocates that will carry a particular message. If the message is compelling, the donations will follow. Not-for-profits have an amazing ability to harness the power of their constituents’ social network through well-designed widgets that offer compelling value (content, actions, etc).

What is the blueprint for a successful widget strategy?

Just like selling your organisation’s mission, a widget strategy must start with a compelling message / reason to create a widget in the first place. It must cater to the stakeholder who is going to carry that widget around with them. It has to offer value in terms of changing content and help an organisation’s advocate make their case for support.

Definitely check out Beth Kanter’s Sharing Foundation case study, mentioned above [and listen to Nick Booth's podcast of Beth talking about her widget fundraising].

How do you measure the effectiveness of a widget?

We look at the number of widgets created, how many times they are viewed, and most importantly, we track the parent-child relationship between widgets. This allows us to track the word-of-mouth impact a widget is having, and the best advocates at spreading the message.

Can you identify some successful distributed fundraising activities and blog-raising campaigns?

DonorsChoose ran a great widget campaign last year to get bloggers to support school projects. I think they were one of the first not-for-profits to jump into this space themselves.

There are other campaigns running now, such as Network for Good’s SixDegrees.org campaign.

What are the main barriers to the adoption and spread of widgets (e.g. those sites which operate as ‘walled gardens’)?

I think the main barrier is going to be a crowded space and widgets that do not provide tangible value. For example, widgets that are just fancy banner ads will get old and tired very quickly for users.

The web is now all about user-generated content and changing content. Widgets need to follow this trend and provide a robust and rich media channel between the organisation and their supporters.

The walled gardens of the larger social media sites (MySpace, TypePad) will be an issue for groups, but we [ChipIn] are working to provide an aggregated approach to this problem by working with the larger sites to allow our system to work across the board. Everyone is always holding their breath to see what MySpace is going to do… but the desktop widgets may take some pressure off.

What’s behind the repositioning of your product as a Widget Management System?

Very simple. We had so many clients asking us for the platform that it made sense for us to shift our business from a consumer-facing product, to a back-end widget platform. We designed our core system to integrate very easily with our clients’ payment systems.

So, we are poised to fundamentally change the way online fundraising and advocacy will work within social media. We want to go far beyond just fundraising and see that as measurable benefit of our system. We want to see ChipIn become an online organising tool unlike anything else seen before. You’ll see a totally new and revamped ChipIn in the next month or so!!

(Wow… is this something for Comic Relief to try, perhaps?)

Measuring ‘engagement’ is like eating an elephant: it’s a big job and you’re not sure where to start.

I’m no exception, and my thinking on this topic still feels heavy and a little clumsy. So, please indulge me for a moment…

At the start of the year, I wrote:

The page view is dead, long live, err… something else! Hmm… web metrics just do not cut it (and just when you’d got to grips with it!). But what should we be looking at now? In 2007, the sector needs to identify new measures of ‘engagement’ online. This work is urgent, especially as charities need to show accountability for everything they do.

In one sense, this may seem a pointless exercise – preparing to get the tape measure out as the social web gets widgetised, atomised, and more distributed.

But engagement was a key theme explored at the Future of Information Summit ’07 presented by Experian recently. Last month, a Factiva roundtable reached to figure out how to measure social media the best way, and Robert Scoble (no less) had already added his call for a new metric for engagement.

I’m equally aware that some people do not care for the term, ‘engagement’ (possibly because of all this attention). Anyway, for want of anything better, I’m sticking with it for now. More importantly, a lot of people whom I listen to in the sector are using the e-word. So there.

So, why all the talk about social media measurement? Well, it’s one thing to have an engaged website, but more and more the action takes place in other places, in existing communities and social networks. Charities must turn from ‘owning’ their cause to enabling networks to run with the ball. Yet again, this was reinforced to me over the weekend after reading Robin’s Hamman’s post about BBC 2.0.

So what are we measuring? Influence? Reach? Audience…?

Brian Oberkirch helped me make some more sense of this conundrum, although he admitted it was tough: “Like nailing down a shadow”…

That’s why I have a bit of trepidation over the rush to quantify and reify ‘engagement’ as the baseline by which all social media work should be evaluated. JKO called these ‘the holy grail’ as part of the discussion, and that’s what is problematic. ‘Engagement’, like ‘conversation’ is one of those terms that feels like it means something, but really is mushy enough for anyone to bend it to their will.

Check out Brian’s excellent post for some things we might want to measure. This certainly goes beyond the standard (and not so standard) toolset on web metrics deployed and listed here by Beth Kanter. To pick out one snippet from Beth’s post:

Metrics alone are not very meaningful – they need to be put into some context. Context to me means outcomes, intent, and audience. No matter what type of metrics you trying to figure out … that’s a universal metric standard.

Outcomes. That’s it. Or “Return on Objectives” (ROO) as my friend Richard Sedley is justly keen on saying.

It takes two to tango

For me, the term ‘engagement’ suggests a two-way street – it implies not simply a ‘connection’, but a reciprocal action. As Mark Ghuneim et al say in their mini-essay on the Wiredset blog, Terms of Engagement: Measuring the Active Consumer…

In the traditional sense, engagement is the period between proposal and marriage

True. Many (most?) people will rebuff your advances. Others may be content to donate cash, but not wish to be ‘engaged’ in anything. A few will get mobilised into taking some form of action for your cause.

These ‘degrees of engagement’ (is there a better way of saying this?) remind me of Dick Carlson’s comment on the aforementioned Scoble post.

Dick proposes a four-level model for measuring engagement:

1. Click – A reader arrived (current metric)
2. Consume – A reader read the content
3. Understood – A reader understood the content and remembers
4. Applied – A reader applies the content in another venue

Now, let’s put some meat on the bones – with thanks to Mark Ghuneim for allowing me to reproduce this terrific graphic (original here).

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Work with your buzz director to create milestones and targets for activity for each engagement ‘type’. Roll your findings up into monthly progress reports (which should get as wide a distribution as possible). And remember, ensure what you are measuring is aligned to your organisation’s strategic goals.

The ‘goalposts’ haven’t moved; it’s just that there are now many more pitches on which you must play (a bit like Hackney Marshes on a Sunday morning).

I’m sticking my neck out with some of these (sort-of) predictions.

If I’m honest, I share Bertie’s view that next year, 2008, will be the real breakthrough year when charities get ‘social’. This is partly because budgets have largely been fixed for activity this year.

Never mind, there will be plenty of elbow room to experiment and innovate in 2007.

As always, comments (especially additions to this list) and challenges (be nice) are positively encouraged!

• 2007 will be the year of the widget. Charities will benefit from the downloadable fundraising widgets offered by Justgiving (launched just before Christmas) and Bmycharity (on its way).
• The desire from donors (especially major givers) for more involvement and information will intensify and the need for accountability will further erode the sacred cow of the general fund. Note: most charities will be dragged kicking and screaming down this road. Initiatives like the ImpACT Coalition seem more concerned about reputation management than championing transparency. This is disappointing.
• Social entrepreneurs and venture philanthropists will have an even higher profile this year.
• The page view is dead, long live, err… something else! Hmm… web metrics just do not cut it (and just when you’d got to grips with it!). But what should we be looking at now? In 2007, the sector needs to identify new measures of ‘engagement’ online. This work is urgent, especially as charities need to show accountability for everything they do. Engagement + accountability = effectiveness. Note: numerous conversations in recent months tell me that there’s a lot of head scratching going on around this one. Get in touch and maybe together we can figure something out.
• A blended media approach will gain ground and charities will reach and engage stakeholders where, when, and how they want to be communicated with. This means greater cross-departmental collaboration.
• More charity employees (and virtual volunteers) will identify with the roles of buzz director / community steward / social reporter. Charity managers will sit up and listen (and even start blogging). Note: I’m thinking of co-organising an open-space event for those championing social media tools (and change management) within their organisations.
• Charities will get better at reporting their achievements and aggregated update reports via RSS feeds will become standard. Podcasts will become commonplace.
• 2007 will provide some high-profile stunts and more cause-related avatars in Second Life, but remain a peripheral activity.
• Some well-equipped charities will learn to use these tools for storytelling and weave user-generated content into their own content, thus giving stakeholders more of an authentic voice.
• The distinction will become more apparent between those charities wishing to build hosted communities for supporters and activists and those who have accepted the inevitable loss of control of ‘their’ cause and become active in existing communities and social networks.
• Furthermore, by the end of 2007, many charities will register that they need to slim down their websites, and create a more personalised, targeted, atomised (but consistent) presence on the web.
• One or more of the popular social networking sites will tap into the desire for members to identify with a cause and create a “My Causes” tab.
• We’ll end 2007 with some excellent case studies (I’ve high hopes for Red Nose Day in March), some disappointments and a great deal of learning in the process.
• The novelty of ethical gifts will begin to tire by the end of the year (there are too many copycat catalogues out there).
• Not really a prediction as the One Laptop Per Child project looks set to really happen this year. Interesting to read about the look and feel of the UI.

Continuing my Second Life thread, Kathryn Parsons at Ogilvy has tipped me off that “LittleToe Bartlett’s” Two-Headed Yak (pictured) has been selected as the winner from last Saturday’s “Yak Show” (see my earlier post).

David Thompson of World Vision also got in touch with me this week. The relief and development charity has now joined SCF in Second Life.

Second Life ‘inhabitants’ can see and interact with some of the gifts in World Vision’s Alternative Catalogue, which this year supports 53 of the charity’s community projects around the world.

These include a school building with classroom desk, chair, books and pens, and a tractor (for hire) pledged to a bridge construction project over the River Thondwe in Malawi. You can milk a cow destined for Kenya, pat a sheep needed by a community in Senegal, and even sit in a toilet latrine, required to improve hygiene facilities in a school in real-world Armenia.

Clicking on these items, or the sign boards next to the gifts in the ‘village’, will display more information and take you to the charity’s catalogue online.

Jason Suttie of London-based Copper Industries is working with World Vision on this one. He hinted to me that while there is definitely an interest in Second Life among charities, the “uncertainty and newness” is a barrier to many actually making a commitment.

I guess we’re at the “proof of concept” stage. Second Life may take your charity to infinity and beyond. Then again, it may not.

Last week Allan Benamer wrote a curmudgeonly post (not my words, but one of the commenters) giving some reasons why Second Life “is a waste of time for not-for-profits”.

Well, that may be so. It’s simply too early to tell.

I recall a recent post by Mark Chillingworth; he describes Geoffrey Bilder as saying Web 2.0 is “the edge is the new centre… with content being generated around the edges.”

And there’s much to be said for this assessment:

Bilder describes the deployment of tech as having to pass through processes that includes a hype, failure and then re-emergence phase. The trouble with this, he says, is that we focus on one instance of a technology during the hype time.

I’m still not sure what to make of cause-related avatars myself. For instance, I have particular concerns about their sustainability. I (just about) remember the hype surrounding VRML2.0 after attending a couple of meetings of the London VR Group ten years ago.   At the moment (and I may change my view) I identify with Susan Wu’s comments about Second Life:

Second Life is interesting to me – I truly respect the service, but I don’t love it. That is, I have a lot of intellectual respect for the way they’ve run their business – they’ve been bold, innovative, and relentlessly experimental. But the service doesn’t grab me emotionally. I also think that their high technical barriers to participation and the fact that SL is a closed standards system ultimately deters them from reaching mass market adoption. Yes, they get a lot of publicity and their logins are growing at a fast clip – but I suspect there is a significant amount of churn. I spend a lot of time in the area of virtual worlds – because I think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg here.

So, the first wave of trailblazing charities have taken the plunge. The majority watch and wait. But what are we waiting for exactly? What will ‘success’ look like? How will we measure it? The number of clickthroughs to the charity website? Number of gifts purchased?

Hmm… we’re back again to the conundrum of how to measure ‘engagement’, something I’ll return to in a future post.

I’ve often considered how online job search could be made more effective for recruiters and job seekers. Perhaps tagging is the answer. Employers could add tags to opportunities that would be used to power job searches.

So, check this out. Breast Cancer Care are looking for a Web Content Manager to join their New Media team and have created a web page using tags to convey the nature of the role.

I like the way that they have made the tags active links to appropriate sections of their website (and external sites). This could be extended to include links to photo sets on Flickr illustrating the charity’s activities.

When you think about it, this technique is also common sense; as more and more tech-savvy, socially-orientated graduates enter the marketplace, Breast Cancer Care are making themselves stand out from the crowd.

It’s a particular crusade of mine to encourage not-for-profits to identify an internal champion (or recruit a virtual volunteer) to take on this role. Call it what you will, and David Wilcox and Beth Kanter, have both had a go at (re)inventing job labels. I like Beth Kanter’s “Social Media Coach”. But how about “Cause Evangelist”? Anyway, you get the idea.

Interest in social media among not-for-profits right now is high. A good many are researching good practice and developing their strategies for participating in and monitoring social networks and the blogosphere.

With this in mind, I thought I’d have a stab at unpicking the role of “buzz director” (or whatever). What follows reflects my belief that social media is more of a creative discipline than a technical one:

• Before you get your feet to comfortable beneath your desk, remember that you should maintain a 360-degree joined-up view of your organisation at all times. Work across teams and departments.
• Research the key blogs that cover the issue areas in which your organisation works, the related policy arena and other relevant topics. Find out what others are writing about your organisation.
• Talk to everybody. Listen. Make it easy for colleagues to find you, or manufacture the conditions by which serendipity is more likely to occur.
• If you see the never-ending strategic review dragging your new colleagues down, remind them of the reasons they joined your organisation in the first place. Get them passionate (and close) to your cause once again. Share their passion. Be energetic. Be useful.
• Your role is to create a buzz around your cause (and secondarily, your not-for-profit ‘brand’). But resist any desire (or pressure) to “own” the cause. Far better to identify the communities where your supporters and activists are already and join in the conversation. After all, whose cause it anyway? Again, David Wilcox hits the button:
  

  Many of the first round of tools – Web 1.0 – were linked to existing social structures and ways of doing things. Web sites would be like magazines online. Forums online would be places you went to, just like physical events. It was quite costly and difficult to create online places, so they tended to be collective rather than personal. You now need to be in all places at once.

• Get into web widgets. While you’re not in the world domination business, your own website can still be a magnet. Create something useful (e.g. your events calendar, appeal running totals) that your dispersed supporters can add to their own blogs. Beth Kanter can tell you more about widgets…
• Work with legal to write your blogging guidelines. Anticipate more scrutiny into your organisation and its work (which you should welcome) and identify the possible pitfalls. Balance risks vs the opportunities. Get ready for some tough love.
• Coach your colleagues on blogging. Help them through the inevitable rough patches. Continually give feedback on how to write, and how to be generous.
• Talk to the press office/pr/media dept and work with them to identify key bloggers and build relationships with them to get your news and stories out. Explore the options for podcasting and video from emergency locations to get across your side of the story. Blogs can be a good way to break news that the mainstream media can pick up on and amplify. Try letting people post comments to the press releases your organisation publishes online and introduce colleagues to the concept of the social media press release.
• Set up a group photo pool in Flickr to upload, tag, and share photo stories online with your activists and fundraisers. Create a unique tag and invite your fundraisers to post photos on Flickr using this same tag. Build a visual archive your organisation’s work. This will all have a cumulative effect over time.
• Take baby steps and start small by blogging around an event. Josh Hallett tells you all you need to know.
• Include blogs and social media in your next supporter survey.
• Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t neglect those traditional methods that have served your organisation so well. Appearances can be misleading: the average age on MySpace is 35.
• Develop social media optimisation across all your online communications. This means working tirelessly with communications, fundraising, campaigns…
• Your role is to help colleagues to plan, deploy, monitor and refine your blogs and social media activities just as you would for any other communications and engagement tactic.
• Share what you learn with colleagues and network with people in other organisations who sit in seats like yours to identify new ways to calculate the benefits, costs and risks of blogging. Work with them to create a framework for measuring the ROI of your blogging efforts. Join the search for a new metric for engagement.
• Explore ways to keep in touch and to share ideas and insights and share links to new developments. Embrace opportunities for collaboration.
• Don’t stall on starting to use this stuff until you “know the ROI of blogs”, but continually refer to your organisation’s mission and ensure that this activity aligns with your strategic goals. Plan for 6-12 months time, but start experimenting sooner. Set realistic expectations.
• Don’t get too big for your boots and call all this a ‘project’ because it will run into the rails. Don’t call it a pilot as no one will take it seriously enough.
• Do prepare a monthly report of activity and ensure it is distributed widely within the organisation.
• Not-for-profits unwilling to consider some or all of the above, risk becoming irrelevant. How will your organisation be different in three years time?

Of course, this is only a start. Comments most welcome.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has a long history of embracing innovation to raise awareness of its cause. Way back in the 1930s for example, the Society was one of the first charities in the UK to screen fundraising films in cinemas.

The child protection charity is now using Google Maps in the latest phase of the hugely ambitious Full Stop campaign to end cruelty to children, which it launched in March 1999.

The “Be the Full Stop” website shows how the actions of individual fundraisers, donors, campaigners, volunteers link up across the country “to create an unstoppable force against child cruelty.”

To get on the map, you sign up to the following statement:

I believe child cruelty can be ended and I want to get on the map and take action now

Once on the map you can:

• Invite friends to join you and create your own, personal network of support
• Explore the map and see how other people are taking action in your area and beyond
• Visualise how you are part of a committed and active community of NSPCC supporters

I like the way you can easily view the map without first having to add yourself to it, and the tag cloud of people mapped to actions, making you feel you are standing up and being counted.

Since “Full Stop Week”, which ran from 2 – 8 October, an online gallery of photos has been added using a Flickr mashup.

An accessible version (no map of course) allows you to drill down to your own postcode.

The NSPCC has one again teamed up with its digital agency, DNA, to create a wonderfully innovative way to visualise the aggregated actions of thousands of supporters.

This is far from being a full stop, of course; you’re not interrupted by a call to make a donation. This is all about raising awareness, making connections and building deeper relationships with potential supporters.