Today I read a new post by blogger Amy Gahran on the News Leadership 3.0 blog of the Knight Digital Media Center (a project of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism). Her article reminded me of how easy it is for changemakers to embed third party widgets and gadgets into their blogs and Web pages to promote civic engagement through volunteering.

In addition to the widgets the author describes in the article – SearchLite by VolunteerMatch, Dosomething.org and Volunteering in America by widgetbox – another widget I recently discovered is made by All for Good, a project of Our Good Works. All for Good makes an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. I initially discovered the All for Good tool on Serve.gov, a site set up in response to President Obama’s call for Americans to get out and serve in their communities. The volunteer database is driven by All for Good.

According to the All for Good Web site, the project is driven by volunteers from Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink. As a contributor, Google is hosting the All for Good website and products.

After making a few selections for place, colors and time frame – voila! – here is a dynamic listing of volunteer opportunities available for this week in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Some nonprofit organizations that were early adopters of social media and others confused by the myriad options may not be using these tools to the best of their advantage.

Using Facebook as an example, some nonprofits set up Facebook “Groups” instead of fan “Pages,” the former of which might be limiting for those that want to create more visibility through the viral power of the tool. Other nonprofits set up only a Causes page to invite donations. The most problematic example relates to those groups that set up their organizations as individual people for you to “friend” rather than “fan” (I believe Facebook made changes in sign up to prevent this occurrence from continuing).

Mission-minded posts an informative blog post on this subject, which also links to a Wall Street Journal blog article on the benefits of setting up a Facebook fan page (“Page”) for your nonprofit organization instead of a group. The WSJ story highlights advice from Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, who pointed out mistakes made by nonprofits at a social media conference in New York this past summer. Quoting the article: “Relying on groups, which have been available longer, is one of the biggest mistakes nonprofits make.”

To learn more from the experiments of others and the latest best practices in social media, there are many resources available to nonprofits. In fact, I just got an email from my friend and colleague, Kivi Leroux Miller, about a series of webinars she will host over the next month – from writing for social media to integrating your Web site, email newsletter and social media sites.

Other sources are listed in this blog post: The Explosion of Social Networking

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Recently the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a new report on how adults use sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. One of the report’s main findings was that the share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years – from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to a December 2008 survey.

Overall they found that social networking is more popular for personal use than professional use, and most adults are using online social networks, like Facebook, to connect with people they already know.

Last week Facebook passed its five-year mark and now has over 150 million users (70% joined in 2008 alone). The company suggests that their rapid growth can be attributed to a safe and trusted environment where everyone can have a “voice to express ideas and initiate change.”

Several nonprofits in the U.S. are using social networking as a way to engage and inform constituents. Green For All, a nonprofit that promotes green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged is on many social media channels, including Facebook, where it has over 3,500 “fans.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a nonprofit newspaper, is using the social networking site Twitter, a platform for sharing quick and short updates. Compared to Facebook’s 150 million users, Twitter, the younger of the two, has about 5 million members, and 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts open daily.

Resources for Nonprofits:

• Philanthropy Front and Center blog: A map is worth a thousand words: Guest post by nonprofit technology strategist John Kenyon after a presentation at the Foundation Center in San Francisco on February 26, 2009.
• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media – Creating Your Organization’s Social Media Strategy Map
• Twestival – Feb. 12 Twitter event in over 100 cities worldwide to raise funds for charity: water, a non-profit whose mission is to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Read the New York Times article.
• The Pew Internet Project Data Memo: Twitter and Status Updating (6 pages, PDF)
• Netsquared shares blogs, a Facebook group page and other social media to further its mission “to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.”
• Nonprofits on Facebook
• Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better?
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy – How Nonprofits can Build Awareness and Raise Money with Facebook, Twitter and Other Social-Networking Tools (Transcripts of Live Expert Interviews) – Nov. 2008 and Feb. 2009.
• Why every nonprofit needs a social media strategy | SPURspectives
• We Are Media Project: The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits
• The Essential Guide to Social Media

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Since 1956 the Foundation Center has connected nonprofits to free philanthropic resources. For years I have been attending their events in San Francisco including “Meet the Grantmakers” panels and special events with topics from “Fundraising for Small and All-Volunteer Organizations” to “Trends in Bay Area Bank Philanthropy.”

In recent months, the Center has launched several online multimedia resources to make the invaluable information shared in their free events accessible to communities and organizations that cannot attend the lively presentations in Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, or Washington, DC. I just discovered “Philanthropy Chat,” which is a new online audio series featuring interviews with West Coast philanthropists and fundraising experts. Janet Camarena, the director of the Center’s San Francisco library and learning center, hosts the interviews. In the first pilot edition recorded on October 10 she speaks to Ralph Lewin, associate executive director of the California Council for the Humanities. You can listen to the audio recording or read the transcript on the Center’s website and learn about the Council’s current grantmaking programs and how they are using new media technologies.

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