Social Media

Here are six rules for implementing a successful social-media strategy in your organization and for-profit examples nonprofits can model themselves after.

AFP CEO Paulette Maehara shares her thoughts on Convio's positive 2010 Holiday Giving Survey findings.

There's been an explosion of online intermediaries promising to help nonprofits raise money and awareness. Crowdrise, Jumo, Causecast, Causes on Facebook and others try to use social networking and crowdsourcing to build interest in charities and causes, and help them attract donations.

But for many nonprofits, the value remains to be seen. For one thing, they hand partial control over charity brand names and trademarks to users who are often unknown to the nonprofits they support. And virtually all of them ask users to pay to donate.

The NSPCC has received donations totalling £100,000 from a Facebook campaign that it did not initiate, it has revealed.

The campaign asks people to change their profile picture on the social networking website to their favourite cartoon character as a way of showing their support for an end to violence against children.

The children's charity said last week that it had nothing to do with the campaign, but it had resulted in the number of people supporting it on Facebook jumping from 65,000 to 115,000.

The RSPCA is to tweet animal emergencies all day, with followers getting the chance to view the wide range of calls the charity receives.

The RSPCA's cruelty line received more than 1.25m phone calls last year and, on average, the charity responds to about 1,000 incidents a day.

RSPCA inspector Tony Woodley set up the Twitter account feed as he wanted to publicise the work of the RSPCA's 288 inspectors, 119 animal welfare officers and 74 animal collection officers.

As you plot your fundraising strategy for 2011, it will become important to give some thought to how and if mobile giving might fit into your overall planning.

In the spirit of holiday giving, Little Cupcake Bakeshop has teamed up with charity:water — a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations — to launch “Jingle Wells” holiday campaign with the aim to raise money to fund clean water projects such as building water wells

Here are six more online fundraising communications takeaways gleaned from the 2010 elections.

Based on the findings from The Online Giving Study, Network for Good offers four tips to maximize online fundraising.

Ever wonder how you can ramp up your charitable-giving efforts? Monica Oxenreiter, a 16-year-old in Pittsburgh, might provide some inspiration. People who give $100 to the nonprofit Oxenreiter started can “buy” their ZIP code — and, on a bright-yellow map on her website that details donations nationwide, that ZIP code turns lime-green.

That’s the ingenious idea behind Oxenreiter’s Zip the Cure, a nonprofit she created to generate contributions for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, or JDRF. See ZiptheCure.com.