This blog post is part of our series on Social Media for Social Enterprise: How non-profits can earn revenue with Web 2.0.

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This blog post is part of our series on Social Media for Social Enterprise: How non-profits can earn revenue with Web 2.0.

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Welcome to the latest installment in our series on revenue sources for non-profit social media projects. Today, I'm looking at what many non-profits first think of (and often, recoil at) when it comes to earning money online: advertising.

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This week, I return to the questions I recently posed about social media and social enterprise:

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Social Signal has worked with many different non-profit organizations, of varying size and means, to create a variety of social media sites, of varying scale and ambition. One thing that just about every non-profit client (and most for-profit clients) ask is about the return on investment. How can non-profits assess the financial value of their social media investments? And perhaps even more fundamentally, how can they find the money to pay for sites that can be costly to build, and just as costly to run?

Bix is having a competition to find the most inspiring story of charitable giving. And Beth Kanter has nominated, well, the whole dang social web:

Vote for this entry on Bix.com!

It's just one example of the power of microdonations... especially when you combine them with a compelling story:

I raised money on my blog to send Leng Sopharath, a Cambodian orphan, to college via the Sharing Fdn. 81 of my blog readers made a donation. We raised her tuition in 24 hours and raised enough to support a 2nd college student. This is the power of the social web to do social good and where a lot of small gifts can make a huge difference.

So, social web, head on over and vote for yourself. (Oh, and for a terrific cause.)

Just how much should you fear the Social Signal vendetta of the week™? Not that much, it turns out: no sooner had I written my tirade against LinkedIn Answers than I spent the evening answering them. The key to my change-of-heart? The discovery of a groundbreaking technology known as cutting and pasting. Sure, I'd rather have pulled my LinkedIn Answer with the miracle of RSS, but this is a decent plan B.

So, without further ado, here is my answer of the day, in response to the following question from Seth Rosen:

Which nonprofits are using Web 2.0 technology in an innovative way to listen and talk with their clients and constituents and further their missions?
A lot has been written about Web 2.0, or the social web, to communicate and share information. Have you seen nonprofits do this effectively? How are they using the power of the web to spread information and have virtual conversations with their supporters?

Here's my response:

We work with a wide range of non-profit and change-oriented for-profit organizations who are using the web to deliver their message, but more crucially, to engage audiences in a conversation. Some of the best practices we note:

1. Focus your site on a particular goal or conversation, rather than a general mandate. For example, the UN Foundation has had a dazzling success with its Nothing But Nets site, which focuses specifically on providing malaria nets to kids in the developing world.
2. Invite your community to make contributions other than money. Non-profits often experience "donor fatigue" because so much of their public interactions hinge on asking for money. The web is a great place to ask for other kinds of contributions -- whether that means connecting people directly with people who need their expertise or services (as in Nabuur) or asking them to share their personal experiences (as with the March of Dimes' Share your Story project).
3. Play nicely with other non-profit (and for-profit) organizations. The web is just that: a web of interconnections. Succeeding in an internetworked environment means working effectively with others, colllaborating, and interacting -- it's not just about getting your own message out there. So being a good 2.0 non-profit means engaging with conversations and ideas on other blogs. Change Everything, a project of the Vancity credit union, is in the middle of a contest that will award $1,000 to a non-profit organization -- and the contest has fuelled a great deal of interest and awareness of non-profit activities in British Columbia.
4. Don't feel that web 2.0 means building your own online community. In fact, it's a lot easier to ease into the web 2.0 culture by making effective use of existing web tools -- whether that means fostering internal collaboration by choosing a common del.icio.us tag to use when storing your favorite web sites, or creating an iGoogle page that lets you constantly see the latest news in your key issue areas, or creating a photo-based petition on Flickr (check out the Oxfam example). Or try setting up a Facebook group -- we attracted 1300 people to a Flickr group within 3 weeks of launch. Once you're comfortable with the idea of web 2.0, you can starting thinking about whether it makes sense to build some community features into your own site.
5. Be gentle with yourself, and your colleagues. It's a big challenge for most non-profits to shift from message delivery to conversation, or from approaching your members as donors to seeing them as content contributors. For organizations that have been all about the message, and have approached that for decades from a paradigm of message control and careful rollout, it is a genuine (and at times frightening) adventure to bring your audience into the conversation in public, and before you've got everybody lined up to stay "on message". Be patient with colleagues who need to get comfortable with this new approach.
   
6. Stay current with how other non-profits are using web 2.0, and learn from their experiences. A great way of doing that is to track the "nptech" tag on del.ici.ous, where people from all across the nonprofit sector share the latest resources on nonprofit technology activities; it's a great place to find blog posts or tech developments to comment on. And Compumentor's NetSquared project is dedicated to helping non-profits make the most of web 2.0.

 

Okay... so there was this fantastic conversation on the Progressive Exchange mailing list, all about Facebook deleting the Ranger Rick profile because they only want real people's identities as user profiles, and the pros and cons of the policy in light of the desire for authenticity, and the implications for activism and online mobilization...

...and I was going to tell you all about it...

...and Beth Kanter beat me to it with exactly the blog post I was going to write, only hers is better, so go read it.

As I write this, Irene Weiser from Stop Family Violence is on stage at NetSquared, telling the story of how she discovered e-activism seven years ago, in a campaign that sent more than 164,000 messages to Congress and triggered the reauthorization of the Family Violence Act. Her story is electrifying... and hers is only one of 21 amazing projects that will present this morning.

They include:

• Aspiration Social Source Commons
• Big Brothers Big Sisters AIM System
• FamilyFarmed.org
• Farmer 2 Farmer Learning
• Genocide Intervention Network
• Global Women's Leadership Network
• Grassroots.org Toolbox
• HELP International Telemedicine Humanitarian Emergency Mobile Clinic Network
• Innovatorz Media
• Kabissa 2.0: Space for Change in Africa
• MAPLight.org: A Light on Money and Politics
• Maps 2.0: Geospatial Tools for Nonprofits and Humanitarian Relief
• Miro: Open Source, Open Standards Video
• MyKenyanSpace Project: Addressing Africa’s Problems through Social Networks
• NABUUR: The Global Neighbour Network
• Stop Family Violence
• TakingITGlobal
• The Freecycle Network
• WiserEarth
• Yankana.org: Social Web Tools for Developing Countries
• YouthAssets

Those projects are vying for a share of a large chunk of prize money that could make a substantial difference in their ability to press their stories forward. But it's already becoming clear that the prize probably means less than the opportunity to meet people with complementary capacities, ideas and assets – not to mention a certain number of funders and venture capitalists in the audience. 

It's a pleasure to see those connections develop, and to play a small role in helping to make a few happen. But it's an even greater pleasure to hear all of these stories.

It's so very easy to get caught up in the technical minutiae of modules, configuration settings, clever design tweaks and nifty new features. But the important thing, as this morning is reminding me, is what the technology we work with can enable. And for me, the big prize is what our work allows non-profits and socially-minded businesses and governments to accomplish, in close collaboration with their supporters, clients and publics.

If you feel the same way, why not check out the 21 featured projects? And then have a look at the other 130 projects that entered the NetSquared 2007 process. Find one, two or several that resonate with you... and then get in touch, and ask how you can help. Whether it's with a financial donation, technological expertise or time, maybe you'll find an opportunity to make a difference, and tell a story of your own.

(Want to see it live? Check out Beth Kanter's video stream.)