See What’s Out There

This is a great widget made with the Sprout technology. Sprout is a tool that lets you easily build your own widget. What I love about this widget is that it includes a link to video — using the See3 logo as the key. Check out the menu on the right side. If you are going to the NTC in New Orleans, let me know, would love to see you. And if not, you should!

Thanks to Deborah Elizabeth Finn for pointing it out.

Heather Mansfield over at DIOSA | Communications give us the heads up on how the MySpace experience is evolving:

MySpace soft launched Apps yesterday… a list of those currently available can be found here:

http://apps.myspace.com

I am testing the “Rate My Page” and the “iThink” Apps on my page:

http://www.myspace.com/nonprofitorganizations

It’s definitely going to have a huge impact on how people use MySpace… and MySpace design… I’ll be curious to watch how nonprofits on MySpace use Apps. Anyone else out there experimenting?

Heather will be demonstrating the new MySpace Apps in a webinar in April. You can learn more about her webinars here.

This is just a little preview of what we are working on with EarthFirst.com. Stay tuned for more.

Allan Benamer over at the Non-Profit Tech Blog has a podcast with Tara Kirchner, the Senior Marketing Manager of Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo! If you don’t know about Flickr, it’s a popular photo sharing site that can be used by nonprofits. They just announced a program to give nonprofits some free “pro” accounts.

So what can nonprofits do with Flickr? Well, check out what our friends at the Humane Society of the United States are doing. The concept is simple: you choose a photo of a baby seal, create a caption for it, and upload it directly to their Flickr account (using Flickr’s interface that is built into the Humane Society’s site). They have a celebrity judge and a seals prize pack up for grabs for the best.

Why do this? It’s fun. It gives your supporters something to do other than give money. It helps educate people about an issue. It gives people a good feeling and they associate that feeling with your organization. It gives you search engine mojo - because all the Flickr goodness is indexed heavily. It brings in new people who first hear about you through a funny (viral) photo.

You can see the Humane Society Seal Photo caption contest here.

And all of the entries can be seen here.

Here’s one I liked right away:

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is currently looking for a New Media Manager. This is a newly created position. The individual will be responsible for developing and executing new media strategies to support the Foundation’s organizational as well as internal and external communication goals and objectives.

Below and at this link is information on the position:

*POSITION OPEN*

POSITION: New Media Manager

PURPOSE: Responsible for developing and executing new media strategies to support the Foundation’s organizational as well as internal and external communications goals and objectives. Work with the Public Affairs team to identify, develop, and execute communication tactics via the organization’s website, including video streaming, blogging, RSS feeds, subscription systems, social networking media, and other forms of electronic communication and convening. Work collaboratively with peers in the Public Affairs and Technology departments, as well as with staff from the Foundation’s programming areas to provide information about the Foundation and its funding interests to a variety of critical audiences, including internal staff, grantseekers, grantees, policymakers, the media, and the general public.

APPROXIMATE MARKET SALARY RANGE: $68,100 - $93,600

Actual starting salary of candidate chosen will be within the above-posted range and will be dependent on a variety of factors of analysis. Salary determination will be commensurate with years, breadth, and depth of relevant experience (internal and external to WKKF), education, certifications, credentials, special skills, accomplishments, and other factors relevant to the position.

EDUCATION/EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS:

· Bachelor’s degree in communications, marketing, journalism, public relations, English, information management, information technology, and/or related field.

· Minimum of five to ten years of communication, media or marketing experience with an agency, corporation, or a nonprofit organization, including internet, web design, and online media development.

· Five to ten years of project management experience.

· Experience working effectively with persons from diverse cultural, social and ethnic backgrounds.

· Demonstrated expertise with Web publishing technologies (social networking tools, content management systems, image optimization, message boards and forums, etc.).

APPLICATION DEADLINE: Review of applicant materials will begin immediately and will continue until finalist candidates have been identified.

APPLICATION PROCESS: If you are interested and qualified for this position and would like to be considered, please submit all written or electronic information to Human Resources. Electronic application materials can be submitted to employment[at]wkkf[dot]org or via www.wkkf.org.

MoveOn is inviting the public to make a commercial on behalf of Barack Obama. They are inviting the public to make a spot and then the winner will get a national airing of their spot as well as $20,000 in video equipment. Nice. This is just the latest example on having your community create content for you. $20,000 is a low budget for a single professionally produced spot. It is nothing at all compared to the likely hundreds of entries they will get as well as the PR value of the whole thing.

Here are the details:

MoveOn.org has a message for all filmmakers, writers, directors, actors, editors, composers, graphic artists, and animators: Whether you’re a total amateur or a total pro, now is the time to use your creativity to help Barack Obama win. We’re launching an ad contest: “Obama in 30 Seconds.”

Powered by grassroots enthusiasm, Obama has won the most states and the most delegates. But the race isn’t over, and we’ve got to pull out all the stops to help him across the finish line.

We’re counting on you to make amazing ads in the next three weeks. Then, MoveOn members and the public will rate the ads, and a panel of top artists, netroots heroes, and filmmaking professionals will pick the winner from among top ads. We’ll air the winning ad nationally, and the winner will receive a gift certificate for $20,000 in video equipment.

Platform is all the rage. Facebook is a platform — meaning, you can develop your own applications on top of their functionality. YouTube is now a platform. What this means is that you can do more embedding YouTube into your site, allowing people to upload video to your YouTube channel from your site and having people leave comments on your site that will end up in your YouTube comments. What this does not do it give you a white label service like Brightcove. You will still have the YouTube watermark and still be part of the YouTube community. So if you are committed to YouTube as an organization you could create landing pages that encourage your constituents to comment on your site, making the video more valuable back within the YouTube community (because comments are an indication to search of relevance).

Here’s the details from TechCrunch:

In case there was still any doubt that Google wants to use YouTube to host all the video on the Web, it’s announcement earlier today to broaden its APIs makes it clear that is its goal. Once again, instead of making it easier to search videos elsewhere, Google is making it easier to host videos on YouTube. Except that the new APis allow people to upload, watch, search, and comment on the videos on other Websites. The key here is that the videos themselves are hosted on Youtube’s servers. This brings Google back full circle to the initial strategy for Google Video, which originally required videos to be uploaded directly to Google in order to become indexed. YouTube is gradually replacing Google Video—that is where most people upload videos anyway—but getting as much video from the rest of the Web onto its servers allows it to do many more things with it than if it simply indexed the videos elsewhere. It can search them better and throw up ads against them.

Specifically, the new APIs allow Web developers to:

* Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
* Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
* Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
* Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
* Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free. This could prove highly disruptive to other video-hosting platforms such as Brightcove, Maven Networks (now part of Yahoo), and Move Networks. Partners already using the APIs include Animoto, Casio, Electronic Arts, Helio, KickApps, Slide, and TiVo. Yes, you can now watch YouTube on TiVo.

Of course, it is not exactly free. The videos will also be available on YouTube, where Google will make money from any associated ads. It is not clear how the ad revenue will be split, or even if it will be. There is nothing in the API that allows for a Website to insert their own ads. So that is a big question mark. (More on that after I speak with a YouTube exec later in today).

Update: YouTube product manager Jim Patterson confirms that there is no revenue-sharing built into the API, although he also points out that the API is open to YouTube Partners, who do share in the advertising dollars. He says:

“We are not introducing any fundamentally new way to monetize. Any video that is uploaded through our API is treated exactly as on YouTube.com. In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.

It is not a white-label service. We do offer a hosting service, but it is not a direct alternative to the companies that you mention. There are some big differences. It is a YouTube-branded experience. It is free. The price you pay for using it is you must participate in the YouTube community.”

In other words, YouTube feels that for the most part it is enough to direct traffic to third-party sites and let them tap into YouTube’s huge audience.

Firstgiving is a service that allows individuals and organizations to set up personal fundraising pages. They just added the functionality to allow users to embed YouTube videos on those pages — another step in the general recognition that video is effective for fundraising.

Here’s the release:

Somerville, MA (PRWEB) March 12, 2008 — Firstgiving, a leader in providing Web-based fundraising services for individuals and charities, today announced the ability for its users to add YouTube™ video and Flickr photos to their personal Web pages. Mark Sutton, Chief Executive Officer of Firstgiving stated, “Experience shows us that the more personal the appeal, the more successful the fundraiser. Therefore, we made it easy for people raising money on Firstgiving to add their personal videos and photos to their fundraising pages.” The end result he says is more people raising more money for their favorite charitable causes.

Firstgiving fundraisers can choose from among hundreds of thousands of U.S. certified 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations for which to raise money. Many individuals use the pages for event-based fundraising such as marathons or polar plunges. Others set up pages to raise money in lieu of birthday or wedding gifts or in memory of a loved one. Charities themselves can also use Firstgiving’s fundraising pages for events, special appeals or general donations. At any given point, there are 15,000 - 18,000 active pages on the Firstgiving Web site. Since 2003, they have helped over 100,000 people raise more than $50 million for more than 12,000 charities.

Experience shows us that the more personal the appeal, the more successful the fundraiser. Therefore, we made it easy for people raising money on Firstgiving to add their personal videos and photos to their fundraising pages.
Sutton noted that there is no “right” tone for the videos or photos that people post, but rather that it’s more important that they reflect the personality of the individual making the appeal. “Some are funny, others are serious and then there are those that are so inspiring they knock your socks off,” he said.

Sutton added, “Firstgiving’s goal is to make raising money for non-profits as easy and simple as possible for our users. By putting the right tools in their hands, we can help them make a positive difference for the charities they support.” For more information on how to set up your own Firstgiving fundraising page visit www.firstgiving.com.

The New York Times Magazine on Sunday was all about philanthropy.

Here’s what you need to read:

What Makes People Give?

This article is really about how some social scientists, economist types are looking at why people give. It turns out that much of what fundraisers think they know is right, but there is a lot of subtlety. The main example in the article is about matching programs. The research suggests matches lead to more giving, but the type of match — whether 1x or 2x or 3x the gift — had no impact at all. The article looks at the psychology of giving.

Some highlights:

For a long time, philanthropy was mostly ignored by social scientists. It’s not an especially large part of the economy, and most charities operate on a shoestring, without the resources to finance research projects. But this is starting to change. Americans gave $295 billion to charity in 2006, equal to 2.2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, up from about 1.8 percent from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Most philanthropy still comes in the form of small gifts, but there is also a growing group of donors, like Bill and Melinda Gates, who are interested in bringing some of the quantitative rigor of big business to philanthropy.

Academics, for their part, have come to realize that charities provide an excellent laboratory for studying human behavior, in part because so many of them are desperate for the kind of free-of-charge consulting Karlan was offering. When charities are designing their donor appeals, they often go by nothing more than a few rules of thumb, some of which may be profoundly insightful and others a good deal less so. “I think some fund-raisers have developed terrific intuitions, passed on through the fraternity of fund-raisers,” says Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, Calif., which often works with charities. “But a lot of the intuitions don’t work. Look at how much junk mail you get.” Matching gifts were another good example. People figured that they worked, because — well, how could they not? They seem so sensible. …

…Last year, Princeton University held a conference at which List, Croson, Andreoni and others who study charitable giving got together with fund-raisers from Africare, the National MS Society and elsewhere. I spoke with three people who listened to the academics present their work, and all said they found it invigorating. “We all have different strategies and takes on how to reach out to potential donors,” said Nicole Eley of Africare, which sends development and relief aid to Africa. “Many of them work, some don’t — it’s a trial-and-error process.” It’s easy to imagine that the academic research may eventually serve as the building blocks for a unified theory of how to raise money.

The Celebrity Solution

This article is about celebrity involvement in philanthropy and specifically looks at Natalie Portman, someone who has become the spokesperson for the growing field of micro-lending.

Some highlights:

In 2004, Natalie Portman, then a 22-year-old fresh from college, went to Capitol Hill to talk to Congress on behalf of the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or Finca, a microfinance organization for which she served as “ambassador.” She found herself wondering what she was doing there, but her colleagues assured her: “We got the meetings because of you.” For lawmakers, Natalie Portman was not simply a young woman — she was the beautiful Padmé from “Star Wars.” “And I was like, ‘That seems totally nuts to me,’ ” Portman told me recently. It’s the way it works, I guess. I’m not particularly proud that in our country I can get a meeting with a representative more easily than the head of a nonprofit can.”

Well, who is? But it is the way it works. Stars — movie stars, rock stars, sports stars — exercise a ludicrous influence over the public consciousness. Many are happy to exploit that power; others are wrecked by it. In recent years, stars have learned that their intense presentness in people’s daily lives and their access to the uppermost realms of politics, business and the media offer them a peculiar kind of moral position, should they care to use it. And many of those with the most leverage — Bono and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and George Clooney and, yes, Natalie Portman — have increasingly chosen to mount that pedestal. Hollywood celebrities have become central players on deeply political issues like development aid, refugees and government-sponsored violence in Darfur.

For Good, Measure

This article is about how foundations have found Jesus in metrics.

Some highlights:

The question that troubles many of the newest philanthropists, though, is whether their bequests will have a notable impact. Much of their money either goes into or comes out of private foundations, those largely opaque institutions with huge endowments that, in the jargon-rich environment of philanthropy, differ from charities like the Red Cross in their tendency to engage in long-term “strategic grant-making.” Such foundations do not exist to give emergency aid during crises arising from war or natural disaster; instead, their purpose is to attack social and scientific problems at the root, a process that sometimes requires substantial allocations of grant money over 5, 10 or even 20 years. That’s a long time to wait before you know whether your money is doing any good. As Judith Rodin, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation since 2005, puts it: “Critics have talked about the field of philanthropy and said: ‘Has it really made a difference. And how would you know?’ ” To Rodin, these are perfectly legitimate questions, even when they’re posed indiscreetly by business titans who only recently entered the genteel world of charity. “If we really want to do work that makes a difference, work that has some effect, then we have to know whether it is working,” she told me recently. “And if you really do it well, you don’t only want to know what works; you want to know how it works.”

Faces of Social Entrepreneurship

You can learn about and see some social entrepreneurs.

Michael Gainer started Buffalo ReUse to creatively salvage materials from the 10,000 abandoned houses the city is demolishing over the next 10 years.

Other Articles worth reading include:

Self-Made Philanthropists

This is a profile of Herb and Marion Sandler

How Many Billionaires Does It Take To Fix A School System?

“Last month, The New York Times Magazine invited five interested parties to lunch to discuss the new world of educational philanthropy. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.”

The folks at Pangea Day made a great video that puts us the viewer in a situation we never thought of. As a result, it’s very powerful. How can you find that missing perspective and use it to create empathy and understanding in your audience.