Member Appreciation month continues with another NTEN give-away, a free webinar:

Terri Dufner, we're sending you a coupon for a free NTEN webinar so you can build on your nonprofit technology skills and put them to use toward your mission.

Reminder: All NTEN members can attend our special free webinar this Thursday:

> 10 Tactics for Growing Your Online community.

Flickr Photo: bitzceltI just had a conversation with one of the organizers of the Twebinar, a summer series of webinars about social media hosted by Chris Brogan and Radian6. David Alston, from Radian6, picked up the phone (you remember those, don't you?) to respond to some of the questions I had emailed him about the Twebinar format.

I had expressed some confusion about the series, based on the first session I attended, the descriptions they provided, and the discrepancy I saw between the two. David was generous enough with his time to respond to some of these concerns.

Here's what I learned:

Flickr photo: solangelemOne of the great things I've noticed since I started participating in this community of "techies for good" is that not only CAN we support and learn from each other by sharing ideas and resources, but that so many of us actually DO share.

This struck me after a panel discussion I attended last week in Portland (Maine). It brought together representatives from the online campaign strategy teams of five local candidates who had gone head-to-head in the recent primary season. These were competing campaigns who sat on a panel together and shared experiences and specific details about their tactics, tools, and even -- gasp -- list sizes!

It all started with Karin Roland, Web Manager for MoveOn.org, who asked the simple question of herself and anyone who would listen:

Why don't we try to learn something from campaign successes and failures, and try to translate even failed campaigns into something to help future advocacy efforts?

Here is a summary of what struck me as important lessons learned from these campaigns:

Sonny Cloward, NPower NY

[Ed. Note: Some of the information in this article may be a little dated.  For more on the changes happening at Change.org, read our blog.] 

A little over a month ago, social good networking site Change.org launched with exposure few startups, much less nonprofits (which Change.org is not), could dream of - they got Techcrunched. Lots of do-gooders like me jumped on the site and were presented with the audacious yet simple question: what do you want to change in the world? The premise is pretty straightforward - connect people with one another and organizations to push forward common causes (i.e. changes). I perused the site, thought it was a great idea, didn't dig very deeply, felt a moment of kumbaya with my fellow do-gooders and then quickly forgot about it. And based on Change.org's Alexa traffic rankings, I wasn't alone.

So is Change.org just another fly-by-night project of some well meaning people with a good concept - just badly planned and executed - awaiting a slow descent into the dead pool? The site has a nicely streamlined and accessible UI, so it's obvious someone put some thought and resources into it. Yet it has nothing in the way of features that hook me and keep me engaged and active in issues and people that matter to me (via dashboard, email, or RSS). Or is it, as Matthew from theCoup.org said in the comments on the Techcrunch posting, "yet another website for me to log into? Another place to blog and check messages?" While there's a value-based incentive, we are becoming fatigued by social networking sites and more scrutinizing about how they are relevant in our lives and how we engage in them. In a landscape where there are really only two social networking players (MySpace and Facebook), where thousands of nonprofits already have pages where they connect with supporters - not to mention at least a dozen other comparatively minor social good networking sites - why Change.org?

Nathan Rosquist, The Interra Project
Reprinted from WorldChanging with permission

2people.org, a social networking site in the works by West Seattle transplant Phil Mitchell, is what he calls the “MySpace of climate action.” What sets it apart, however, from other social-networking sites (Be Green, Idealist.org, and Change.org) is its focus on action and commitment.

“We’re an online citizen network committed to closing the gap between what’s scientifically necessary and what’s politically possible. If you’re looking for ways to get involved and people and projects to connect with, you can find them here.”

Andrew Hoppin, NASA Ames Research Center and YearlyKos Convention/Bloggerpower.org

Excerpted from Corante with permission

Second Life's greatest utility, to me, is that it better mimics the experience of being offline in the same room together than any other online medium. The experience of interacting there is vastly more social and immersive than, say, an online blogging community. High trust relationships are built quickly. Think Meetup, except that you don't need 40 people to be in the same place on the planet to have an effective Meetup.

Second Life is also a rich medium for content creation that can be "surfaced" to the Web for broader exposure.  More than 100 people participated in an anti-war "virtual march on virtual Capital Hill" that we organized between CodePink and RootsCamp in Second Life recently, and one of our volunteers made a video of the event that went mildly viral with over 50,000 views. The cost of creating it was $0.

Marnie Webb, TechSoup

Beth Kanter, Beth’s Blog

Tagging facilitates the sharing of information among members of a distributed community, and it can also help form or catalyze a community. In some respects the NpTech tag serves as a beacon to attract people interested in sharing resources on nonprofit technology and makes it easier to form connections and relationships with new people. The NpTech tag is also easy to use - the services are free, and many people have already incorporated services like del.icio.us and Flickr into their knowledge management practices. Furthermore, many tagging services encourage connections and conversations around particular tags via embedded social networking features. For more on this, see
Marnie’s blog, and Beth's NpTech Tag presentation.