RSS
Follow Social Philanthropy through your favorite RSS reader.
Category Archives: Social Media
December 14, 2012, 12:46 am
How Social Media Helped Livestrong Weather a Tough Time
As online community manager at the Livestrong Foundation, Brooke McMillan has been the social-media face for an organization that has spent months at the center of an unrelenting crisis.
Last month the organization announced that its founder, Lance Armstrong, was stepping away from the group’s board and that his name would no longer be part of the organization’s official identity. That decision came after the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency issued a detailed report about Mr. Armstrong’s use of performance-enhancement drugs and the Tour de France stripped him of medals he won.
Ms. McMillan says the constant storm of criticism of Mr. Armstrong meant she was spending time on social networks like Twitter and Facebook almost around the clock—largely working to nurture and protect an online community that still cared about the organization, despite its founder’s transgressions.
“We’re…
November 29, 2012, 5:52 pm
Charity Faces Social-Media Blast for Dropping Gilda Radner’s Name
Gilda Radner as her character Roseanne Roseannadanna on “Saturday Night Live.”
Charities change their names for many reasons.
But when Gilda’s Club Madison, a Wisconsin chapter of the cancer-support organization created to honor the late comedian Gilda Radner, announced plans to rechristen itself the Cancer Support Community Southwest Wisconsin, people on social media howled in dismay.
The Madison chapter, which wanted to make its mission clearer to prospective clients, is the third to strip “Gilda” from its name, but its decision has sparked at least two petitions posted on Change.org (one currently with 1,500 signatures, another with 200) urging the Madison group to reverse itself.
Ms. Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989, is best remembered for her 1970s heyday, when she was a beloved …
November 15, 2012, 9:01 am
Pinterest Debuts Pages for Nonprofits and Businesses
Pinterest this week unveiled new free accounts for nonprofits and businesses to help them make better use of the popular social network.
The new accounts don’t look any different from personal accounts, but people who manage the new pages will be prompted to verify their Web sites by uploading an HTML file to their server. They will also be asked to add “follow” and “pin it” buttons to their sites.
Pinterest also added two features that allow people to embed pins and boards on other sites more easily.
To learn more about the new accounts and see case studies from businesses, go to business.pinterest.com.
Will this change how your nonprofit uses the visual social network?
Send an e-mail to Cody Switzer.
October 3, 2012, 5:51 pm
Foundation Grants Aim to Boost Civic Engagement
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation on Tuesday announced $1.3-million in grants to technology projects aimed at getting people more involved in improving their communities and issued a report designed to encourage more money and attention for such efforts.
The four grants announced were:
• $590,000 to Change by Us, a project of CEOs for Cities, that gives citizens an easy place to suggest ideas to make their hometowns more livable. The grant money will help expand the site so it can accept donations, integrate with Facebook, and make the application available for other cities to adopt. The site already has versions for New York, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.
• $250,000 to Good360, an online product-donation site, to create a marketplace where nonprofits can post their needs, find products, and communicate with individual and corporate donors.
• $236,000 to
September 20, 2012, 3:49 pm
Are Online Philanthropy Contests Worth the Effort?
After this year’s Chase Community Giving contest closed after a troubled start, some nonprofit leaders debated the costs and benefits of participating in these type of vote-driven corporate philanthropy contests in The Chronicle’s LinkedIn group.
Some nonprofit leaders say they have had success with the contests, while others are skeptical of whether the campaigns benefit nonprofits or the corporate donor.
Here are some highlights from the debate:
“My nonprofit won a $25,000 grant via the spring 2011 Chase Community Giving contest… We are interested in a contest if there are good odds and no daily voting requirements, among other things. We did three contests spread through 2011, winning three grants, but we’ve done none this year.” —Anne Bowhay, director of foundation relations at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless
“As development professionals, we need to remember…
September 10, 2012, 6:24 pm
Chase Online Contest Draws Ire for Technical Glitches
The prospect of winning a grant from the annual Chase Community Giving contest prompts many small nonprofits to aggressively encourage their supporters to vote in the online competition. Small charities that get the most votes from their online supporters are eligible to win up to $250,000, and a total of $5-million will be awarded through the competition.
But when some of those supporters attempted to cast their votes, they were turned aside.
A swell of visitors to the JPMorgan Chase’s contest on Facebook Thursday, the first day of the competition, slowed the system and made it difficult for some to vote for their favorite nonprofits.
By Monday, those issues had been resolved, said Erich Timmerman, a Chase spokesman. But many nonprofits are nonetheless using the contest’s Facebook page to post complaints about the competition and raise questions about its fairness, which has…
July 24, 2012, 5:35 pm
Y of N.Y. Uses Social Media to Collect Stories—and Donors
—
A story from the YMCA of Greater New York’s timeline project
To celebrate its 160th anniversary, the YMCA of Greater New York is offering free T-shirts to people willing to share their stories of how the Y has made a difference in their lives.
Within 48 hours of issuing the appeal by e-mail and social media, the organization received nearly 300 stories recounting childhood swimming lessons, triathlon training, exercise programs started after injuries, and long-ago summer camps.
The YMCA has organized the stories—some submitted with photographs—by decade and posted them on a digital timeline. All of the stories that are collected will also be buried in a time capsule beneath the organization’s new Coney Island branch, which is under construction and scheduled to open next spring.
From…
June 15, 2012, 10:45 am
Facebook Fans Increase by 70 Percent at Some Nonprofits
A new report delves into the Facebook activity of 37 large and medium-size nonprofits, including Earthjustice, Easter Seals, and Oxfam America. The organizations in the study had a median of 31,473 Facebook fans, which represented 103 fan-page users for every 1,000 people on their e-mail lists.
The report, which is a follow-up to the 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, was published by M+R Strategic Services, a fundraising consulting company, and the Nonprofit Technology Network.
In 2011, the number of Facebook fans at the charities grew by a median rate of 70 percent from 2010. Growth was highest for wildlife and animal-welfare groups, which had a median growth rate of 129 percent. And only 0.5 percent of fans opted out of receiving the organizations’ messages—either by “unliking” the groups’ pages or by choosing to hide the groups’ posts in their news feed.
The…
June 7, 2012, 5:03 pm
Private Social Networks Connect People With Personal Problems
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are not built for discreet conversations. People who are dealing with health issues or trauma, for instance, probably don’t want to use Facebook to associate themselves with a nonprofit that specializes in such matters, even though they may want to find a good online connection to information and peers.
The Wounded Warrior Project, a charity that works with veterans who have been injured in combat, has solved that probably by starting WWP Connect, a private social network just for the people the organization serves.
“A lot of the issues our warriors and their families deal with are personal. It’s not something that they’d want to walk up to someone on the street corner and tell what they’ve been through,” says Jen Boyce, the organization’s social-media manager.
But in the group’s private social network, wounded veterans can share…
May 10, 2012, 4:26 pm
A Facebook Promotion Connects a Charity With a Loyal Donor
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…
E-mail a Friend
