Posted in nptech on 29. Aug, 2008
Beth Kanter has a detailed analysis of why her real-time fundraising experiment at Gnomedex worked. If you don’t know, she raised $3,700 to send a young Cambodian woman to college, simply by tapping into her online social network. Read the whole post, because it’s chock full of great insights about social media and fundraising. But here are some takeaways:
- Beth’s passion for the cause played a major role in people’s willingness to spread the word and donate money.
- It worked because Beth has spent 5 years building a network, and establishing trust, by offering valuable information online.
- She didn’t make a big request. She asked only for $10 per person, and directed folks to PayPal to make the donation easily.
Beth’s post on this is an example of why people trust her. It’s a seminar on social networking in itself. You’ll be glad you took the time to read it.
Technorati Tags: Beth Kanter, social networking, fundraising, blogging, Gnomedex
Let’s say your organization has a Facebook account to help you interact with young people. You’re also on Friendfeed. And Twitter. And you’d like to share a photo of an event with all those social networks. It’s a hassle up upload the photo three times, to get it in three different places. But a new service called Pikchur claims to automate that process. You simply upload the photo to Pikchur and it distributes the photo to several different social network accounts at once.
Technorati Tags: Pikchur, nptech, photos
Steve Rubel writes today that we’re facing an “attention crash.” We have so many sources of information bombarding us, it’s impossible to keep up. That’s why we need someone to help us manage all that information. Rubel calls that person a digital curator.
Every high–interest niche will be met by digital curators who can separate art from junk online and present it in a very digestible form.
As a communicator, the question you have to answer is, “What am I doing to become a digital curator for all the people who share my interests?” We are at an important time when those curation roles are unfilled for 99% of niche interests. You have an opportunity to step into the void and help people find the information they really want. And you can do it even more effectively than the algorithm of Google, because you can personalize it for them.
Establishing yourself as a digital curator — a provider of information — for your organization’s customers (or clients, members, or donors) is the most important thing you can do as a professional communicator.
Photo-sharing site flickr has released a new tool to allow you to embed a photo slideshow anywhere. That means if you have an event you’re covering for your organization, you can upload the photos to flickr, and display them in a cool-looking slideshow on your own website. And you can even include short video alongside the still pictures. If your organization doesn’t have a flickr account, get one. It’s free, and it makes it very easy to tell your story through photos.
Technorati Tags: flickr, slideshows
One of my encouragements from Steve and Jamie at Gnomedex was that I should stop worrying so much about whether every single post to my blog fits into my supposed niche. They’re right. Blogs are about communicating, but they’re also about being personal. And what says “personal” better than a cute baby video? Do not watch this if you are diabetic.
