The American Red Cross in Washington had, until recently, prevented its employees from using social-networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace during work hours.

But a funny thing happened when the charity changed its policy earlier this year.

Instead of witnessing a loss in employee productivity, the Red Cross actually found that it was able to find new and creative ways to raise money, writes Beth Kanter on Beth’s Blog.

In fact, the Red Cross was able to win a $50,000 grant from the Western Union Foundation through a campaign on the popular networking site Facebook.

“Since the great wall fell, we’ve been able to promote initiatives like the Western Union Foundation contest to all of our chapters and blood regions,” Red Cross social-media specialist Wendy Harman said in an interview with Ms. Kanter. “When 700+ entities across the country are all asking their supporters to...

Milk, the new film about the late politician and activist Harvey Milk, has been a critical darling.

The film, which stars Sean Penn, chronicles the life of the nation’s first openly gay public official and is being described by many critics as a serious Oscar contender.

According to the nonprofit marketing consultant Nancy Schwartz, the film also offers lessons to nonprofit leaders who want to be more effective in communicating the importance of their causes.

Among the lessons: use humor.

“Sometimes it’s the only way to move through,” Ms. Schwartz writes on Getting Attention. “When Milk met with a group of union members (big, tough guys) to build their support for his candidacy, his first words were, ‘You probably haven’t met many people like me, so I left my heels at home.’”

What other lessons can Milk teach advocacy groups about spreading their message? Click on the comments...

How can your organization more effectively use social-media tools to spread its message and raise money?

Allison Fine, an expert on technology and communications and the author of A Fine Blog, is setting out to answer that question in her new Chronicle podcast series, Social Good.

In the first episode, Ms. Fine talks to Jonathan Colman, of the Nature Conservancy, and Carie Lewis, of the Humane Society of the United States, about their social-media strategies and offers some tips on how organizations can learn from these examples.

New episodes will go online the first week of each month.

What questions would you like to see discussed in future installments? What tips can you offer others who are using social media in their advocacy and fund-raising efforts?

Click on the comments link below this post to share your thoughts.

What will Barack Obama’s Presidency mean to the nonprofit world?

The Chronicle asked its followers on the social-networking site Twitter.com that question and received a flurry of enthusiastic responses.

“I hope that we are entering a time of better grassroots action in general,” responded Karen Becker. “I think President Obama will inspire more involvement.”

Andre Blackman of Washington also expressed optimism.

“From the nonprofit health world perspective, there might be more money available for programs that are needed,” Mr. Blackman writes.

Carina Ruhlandt, a grant-proposal writer at the Salvation Army in Minneapolis, writes that Mr. Obama’s presidency will bring new energy to charities.

“He has helped to renew interest in the democratic process and civic engagement,” writes Ms. Ruhlandt. “More grass-roots involvement [is] good for NPO’s [nonprofit organizations.]”

To ...

See What’s Out There, a blog produced by See3 Communications, points out some striking similarities between a charity video campaign and a new advertisement by the Starbucks coffee-store chain.

The charity campaign — which promotes an advocacy effort called The Girl Effect — features the use of creative typography set against the music of a piano.

“Starbucks released a new ad during Saturday Night Live this past weekend that’s shockingly similar,” notes the anonymous author of See3’s blog. “I don’t know if it’s done by the same people, mere flattery, or a total rip-off.”

See3 is a Chicago consulting firm that specializes in nonprofit fund raising and communications.

Roy Elvove, a spokesman for BBDO New York, which produced the campaign for Starbucks, said the advertisement is based on a fairly standard formula that isn’t unique to The Girl Effect.

“The idea of using type in...

Conde Nast Portfolio magazine is taking a new approach to measuring big-ticket philanthropy.

The magazine has ranked the world’s biggest givers by comparing their philanthropy with their fortunes to create a Generosity Index.

To compile its ranking, the magazine relied on several sources of data, including the Chronicle‘s database of major gifts.

While the list will probably draw applause in the world of philanthropy for creating another scorecard for affluent donors, the magazine is equally likely to raise the hackles of some observers for a feature in which it attempts to guess who is responsible for some of the nation’s most prominent recent anonymous gifts.

A feature called Anonymous—Not! speculates on the identity of who is responsible for recent anonymous gifts to groups such as the University of Chicago, the Erie Community Foundation, and the New World Symphony.

Do you ...

Will charities someday scrap their written annual reports in favor of video reports?

Kivi Leroux Miller, a marketing expert, thinks some charities will do exactly that.

And she points to the corporate world as evidence that the medium is changing.

“All print publications, including annual reports, are being reevaluated as online and multimedia tools become much more affordable and easy to use, and rightly so,” Ms. Miller writes on the blog Nonprofit Communications.

To help nonprofit groups learn more about these changes, Ms. Miller, president of a marketing firm in Lexington, N.C., interviewed Timothy Carey, senior vice president for digital media at ICR, a Bridgeport, Conn., financial communications consulting company, about how some corporations are using video to produce their annual reports.

Mr. Carey says charities have the potential to connect more effectively with...

An expert on nonprofit governance says nonprofit groups should be more careful about limiting the power of their leaders in wake of the recent embezzlement scandal at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn.

In May year, a whistle-blower in the organization forced the disclosure that Dale Rathke, brother of Acorn’s founder and chief executive, Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1-million from Acorn.

Dan Prives, an expert on charity finances, writes on Where Most Needed, that the situation raises significant questions about how much authority should be given to nonprofit leaders.

Mr. Prives writes that Wade Rathke, who founded Acorn in 1970, set up the organization in such a way that other employees and its board of directors could not easily follow its financial structure. That structure helped enable the embezzlement scandal, he says.

Worse, Mr....

The social-media expert Beth Kanter is frustrated with the popular news networking site Digg.

Digg — which allows readers to highlight news article, blog posts, and videos that they find interesting and recommend them to other people — has become a highly influential traffic source for many news organizations and blog writers.

When an article gets a high number of “diggs” — or votes — from readers, it rises in prominence on the Digg Web site.

The higher it rises, the more likely it is to get noticed by other Digg viewers.

Stories about nonprofit groups and philanthropy tend to score low on the site, in part because there is no category on Digg for such stories.

Digg uses broad categories — and many philanthropy stories end up getting tagged as “business and finance.”

Ms. Kanter, on Beth’s Blog, writes of a campaign to persuade Digg’s creators to create a category called...