Find like-minded people to share your vision. Online services like VolunteerMatch , Idealist , Craigslist and the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network make it easy to find volunteer opportunities and events near you. Social networks like the Omidyar Network can connect you with folks who want to collaborate with you on your vision. Global Warming. Election Fraud.

Many people view online social networking tools, such as Facebook , LinkedIn , and Myspace as time-draining distractions. Facebook also has the benefit of having your installed audience, your network of friends at your fingertips, so you can easily announce new activities, campaigns, and events to your self-selected constituency of like-minded individuals and groups, without having to email a large group of people and risking the effects of a spam filter's black hole. If you haven't heard of Facebook, I'm sorry to break it to you, but you are living under a rock.

But if you need an active, educated and effective movement, organizing through social webs has the potential to create much more lasting change." --Ivan Boothe, Organizing Rather Than Mobilizing: Using Social Networks for Constituency Building I'm filling in for a panelist on Sunday at the Bioneers Conference for the session , Alternet Presents: Social Media Activism/Web 2.0 Networking for Change. "If you just need bodies at a rally, names on a petition or donations in your coffers, mobilizing through traditional means will work great. I thought I'd share

Photo from ACLU of Northern California Earlier this week I participated in a convening on Network Effectiveness hosted by Packard Foundation and the Monitor Institute ( reflections here )  One of the participants, Catrina Roallos, New Media Strategist from ACLU of Northern California, gave me a laptop sticker for their DotRights Campaign for online privacy.  One of the questions that came up during a discussion of concerns at the beginning of the day, was "We have 5,000 friends on Facebook, now what?  How do we activate the online activists to take action offline?"   I was not presenting,

PR Blogger Stephen Davies thinks we’ll start to see a fragmentation of social networks. As people begin to tire with the vast, general nature of MySpace et al , they may migrate to niche social networks that are more relevant to them, their passions and their lives. Niche social networks can be tapped into for more relevancy in online engagement. He asks: So what does it mean for brands?

very insightful. Ivan Boothe pointed me over to a blog post by Lina with an intriguing tweet " Transmedia activism with a co-creation network." Now to dig into this topic because it combines a couple of interest - storytelling with social media and working in a networked way. Lina offers a concise definition of Transmedia Storytelling , a concept and term coined by Henry Jenkins. Transmedia storytelling is storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share and create Diagram by Gary Hayes See See also this set of diagrams

Nonprofits can easily design their profile on change.org to match their website and other social networking sites. Get active in Cause communities! Not only can you link to all your social networking profiles on your Change.org profile, but they have also created a tool that will allow you to grab the html for these icons to post them on other social networking sites. Please Note: All nonprofits in the United States that have an entry in GuideStar.org are also on Change.org. You can access your nonprofit’s profile and the Change.org tool set by signing

He gave a presentation about how Surfrider Foundation is striving to make its grassroots network more effective.    He touched on how they are using social networks/media in this effort. One of the slides that struck me was a map that look at the full range of their activities offline and online (including social media) using two data points (numbers of people and ladder of engagement ).    The levels of engagement included:  stranger, friend, supporter, member, activist and leader.   Today I attended an informative lunchtime presentation by Chad Nelsen who is the Environmental Director at the Surfrider Foundation where he has worked since 1998.  (He's

But 70% of folks 18-21 years old - an incredibly high number to be doing anything -were using social networking sites. We have a Business Week diagram in our Considering Social Media for Your Organization seminar that everyone keeps asking me for - so here it is. The data shouldn't be considered gospel (I'm pretty sure it's the same Forrester data everyone uses for this, so it's from 2006, and only describes "online consumers", whatever that might mean) but it provides a really useful talking aid for thinking about what folks are doing with social media across age ranges.

This is a follow-up to Creating a Social Networking Strategy (Part 0) that originally appeared on this blog and also as a guest post on Beth Kanter's blog . method for putting together your social networking strategy. Social media and social networks are fundamentally a communications and relationship building channel. One of the key takeaways from Part 0 is that once you stop just playing around with social media then you need to start putting together a strategy. The first place to start is a proven and solid framework for your strategy.