David Levis poses with Dixon, a Ugandan youngster he and his wife supported through ChildFund International. They hold the first photo Mr. Levis received of Dixon. (ChildFund/Jake Lyell)
It was a television commercial that first inspired David Levis and his wife, Stacie, to donate money to ChildFund International in 1999 and become “sponsors” of a needy child–and it was a Facebook post that helped send Mr. Levis to Uganda to meet five of their sponsored children this April.
Mr. Levis, whose family sponsors 13 children through the charity, was the winner of the organization’s “Experience of a Lifetime” promotion, held on Facebook last year. He was selected from five finalists by public vote to win the trip to meet his sponsored children.
“It was one of those things you’re hopeful about, but you…
If your organization’s Web site isn’t up to speed, you could be losing donors and other supporters. But a free online tool, Google’s Page Speed, can help offer a quick analysis of the code on your site to determine whether it is loading as quickly as it can and offers recommendations for changes that can add zip to a sluggish site.
Those recommendations also come with a Page Speed score designed to show how much a site can improve. The score doesn’t measure the actual time it takes for a site to load on a computer screen, because that is influenced by the size of a page in bytes, server hardware, and other factors. But it does help gauge whether a site is performing as well as it can.
Sites that need significant improvements score below 50 out of 100. If a site is more modern, with best practices in place,it will probably score in the 80s or 90s.
Nyla Rodgers is one charity official who is fed up with the way nonprofits represent Africa. Too often she sees depictions of AIDS, warfare, famine, hopelessness, desperation, and dependence on a Western hero. That kind of concern came to the surface when she saw the “Kony 2012” campaign by the advocacy group Invisible Children.
“When I saw the Kony campaign, it made me so mad,” says Ms. Rodgers, founding director of Mama Hope, a San Francisco charity that works in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to start farms and build schools, health centers, and other facilities that strengthen communities.
But long before that campaign, her charity started working to create new perceptions of Africa and to show that it is full of capable people with the potential to support themselves. Her nonprofit has released three videos over the past year as part of its …
Nonprofits Change.org and Kiva are up against Internet giants Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for the People’s Special Achievement for Social Change award.
Other nonprofits nominated for features of their Web sites include:
In online film and video, the arts nonprofit Art21 is nominated for documentary series with PBS’s “Women, War & Peace” series and the Doctors Without Borders “Urban Survivors” series. Human Rights Watch’s “
“The Hunger Games,” the new film based on the popular book by Suzanne Collins, has quickly become a blockbuster. Andrew Slack, executive director of the Harry Potter Alliance, a group of fans of another popular book and movie series, is hoping it can also inspire its fans to help change the world.
Mr. Slack, who co-founded the alliance in 2005, is now working on the Imagine Better Project, an effort to help fans “turn the fictions they love into the world they can imagine.”
One of the first campaigns asks fans of “The Hunger Games” to carry a pledge sheet to join Oxfam International’s campaign to fight hunger when they go to see the film and ask other moviegoers to sign up. The pledge sheet draws parallels between the movie’s dystopian world and problems in the real world.
That campaign was challenged by Lionsgate, the movie company distributing the film, but it eventually …
Armando Rayo, a vice president at the communications firm Cultural Strategies, is a veteran of the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. In recent years, though, he’s noticed that all the discussions about using technology to promote the social good have been missing a key element.
“There’s always kind of this sense of, ‘Where are the Latinos and the Latino sessions?’” Mr. Rayo said. “It’s kind of hard to find.”
That wasn’t the case this year. Mr. Rayo worked with the conference organizers, Univision News, and others to present the Social Revolución Latino Lounge and the Revolucionario Awards to call attention to Latino efforts to help others.
“Revolucionarios” are important in Latino culture, says Mr. Rayo.
“It could be that you’re a cancer survivor and you want to raise awareness, maybe it’s social-justice issues or education, or you want…
A new report offers advice to small organizations on how to manage the time and costs associated with social-media programs.
“The challenge, especially for the greater than 1 million smaller organizations with tight budgets and limited staff, is how to use scarce resources most effectively to reap the benefits,” says the report by the Rita Allen Foundation and the Bridgespan Group.
Small nonprofits could spend 10 to 34 hours on social media a week as a starting point, the report says. For an organization that hopes to be effective in social media, keeping up with Twitter and Facebook accounts could take a minimum of 25 to 50 percent of on…
YouTube has started a new feature that will allow all nonprofits to broadcast live events through their own video channels.
Free live video streaming online isn’t a new technology—one of the best-known providers, ustream, started offering the service in 2007—but YouTube’s new service gives nonprofits the chance to stream video through their existing YouTube channels, with all of the features the site provides for other videos.
YouTube has provided step-by-step instructions to help nonprofits activate the feature, as well as a detailed guide for organizations planning to live stream events.
The American Foundation for Equal Rights, a gay-rights organization that is challenging California’s ban on gay marriage, was one of the first to use the live streaming feature. Two days before YouTube enabled live streaming for all nonprofits, the group broadcast a live performance of “8,…
In the battle over a proposed California tax on cigarettes, Livestrong and other cancer charities are trying to prove that social networks can be as potent an advocacy tool as money.
The proposed tax would add a $1 levy to each pack of cigarettes sold in the state, said Doug Ulman, chief executive of Livestrong, in a session at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin. The tax would pay for cancer research, services, and anti-smoking programs.
Livestrong has already spent $1.5-million, as much as it can under federal tax law, to promote the tax as part of a coalition of charities that plans to invest a combined $10-million in the campaign. Tobacco companies are expected to spend about $100-million to oppose the measure, Mr. Ulman said.
Because a similar ballot measure failed in 2006, Mr. Ulman said he believes this campaign can offer a test about whether adding…
Many organizations worry about sharing statistics on their Web traffic with the public because they might not seem impressive enough, but in many cases those numbers can be a powerful tool, says the co-founder of a social enterprise.
Ben’s Friends, a small social business that creates online communities for people with rare diseases, reports that it has seen a growth in membership since it began sharing its monthly traffic statistics on its home page.
Scott Orn, co-founder of the organization, said at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin that the statistics help to provide “social proof” that his organization is making a difference and getting attention.
People like to be on a winning team, he said, just they like to visit busy bars and restaurants. By showing that a lot of people are using the site, it encourages others to do the same.
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