When most people saw a joke, Alison McQuade saw an opportunity.

The joke came in late January, when Apple announced the forthcoming release of the iPad.

Twitter users started calling the new device the "iTampon" – joking about the obvious parallels between the iPad's name and a certain feminine-hygiene product.

The opportunity came when Ms. McQuade noticed a connection between the off-color jokes and an effort by her organization, GlobalGiving, to raise money to provide eco-friendly feminine products to girls in Uganda.

Ms. McQuade, GlobalGiving's online marketing manager, decided to jump on the Twitter trend to raise awareness about the Uganda project.

On GlobalGiving's Twitter page, she tweeted a post that linked the iPad jokes to the Web page for the Uganda project.

"#iPad and #iTampon jokes are funny," she wrote to GlobalGiving's Twitter followers. "But in #Uganda girls leave...

Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, made headlines recently when he announced that he will soon unveil a new social-networking site called Jumo.

The site, which is scheduled to debut in the fall, has a simple mission:

"Jumo brings together everyday individuals and organization to speed the pace of global change," according to its Web site. "We connect people to the issues, organizations, and individuals relevant to them to foster lasting relationships and meaningful action."'

That description got us thinking about some other social-network-style sites that have similar mission statements.

Let's see if you can tell them apart.

Match the following Web sites with how they describe themselves:

1. All for Good
2. GlobalGiving
3. Idealist
4. CauseCast
5. Causes

a. "An interactive Web site where people and organizations can exchange resrouces and ideas, locate opportunities a...

I've been playing around recently with Foursquare—the location-based social-media Web site that is being called "the next Facebook" in some circles.

The idea behind the site is simple: people can update friends in their network on wherever they are. If you're at the corner Starbucks, out for dinner at your favorite sushi joint, or getting your oil changed, you can tell the people in your network.

And, if you're lucky, you might just find out that one of your friends is there, too.

To provide incentives for using the site, Foursquare gives people virtual badges when they check in. Those badges are displayed on each person's profiles.

And, if you check in at certain locations a number of times, you can become the "mayor" of that location.

Some businesses have latched on to Foursquare as a marketing tool. For example, they offer a personal barstool to the mayor or discounts to people who...

Dan Zarella, a writer who calls himself the "social media and viral-marketing scientist", has a tasty little piece of research that could help time-strapped charities get more mileage from their Facebook posts.

Mr. Zarella tested more than 5,000 stories posted on Facebook and found that the percentage of people who shared the items was significantly higher on Saturdays and Sundays than it was for stories posted to Facebook on weekdays.

"If you want your article to be shared on Facebook by your readers, try posting it over the weekend," he writes.

The Haiti relief effort brought home the concept that savvy charities can use effectively use text-messaging to raise money.

But a New York Times report Thursday on the plight of the group Catholic Relief Services provides another warning that nonprofit groups should look before they leap with both feet into the world of texting.

Catholic Relief Services, like many other groups, is learning that the text-message fund raising process has not yet been fully defined—and there are plenty of bureaucratic potholes that can trip up even the most well-intentioned groups.

Other challenges await smaller organizations, which typically don't have the money or the scale to support effective text-message campaigns.

Allison Fine, a consultant and the host of the Chronicle podcast Social Good, covered some of those challenges in an interview with the consultant Geoff Livingston and Wendy Harman,...

It's almost impossible to imagine the online world circa 2006.

In today's era of 140-character Tweets, Facebook status updates, and Foursquare check-ins, it's hard to believe that less than four years ago it was a challenge to find even 100 blogs devoted to the nonprofit world.

But that was the state of the online world in December, 2006, when I wrote Blogs on the Rise, an article that explored what was still uncharted territory for even the most savvy charity-minded folks.

Today, the idea of starting a blog seems almost quaint.

Yet we're doing just that.

In this space, I'll be leading a discussion about how nonprofit groups, foundations, volunteers, and donors are using social-media tools to advance their causes.

I'll be pointing to best practices, interviewing nonprofit workers and other social-media experts about what's working, linking to interesting items about social media, and...