Does this chart make you want to rethink your Facebook strategy?

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I came across a blog post today that made me smile (and not just because of thejustgiving.com great vocabulary used across the Pond). It's a simple and straight-forward example of how easy it is for someone to use free, fast, online tools to raise money for his or her favorite cause. Here's an excerpt:

"I've just had a rather intense week of trying to use social media to raise funds and by and large succeeding. Inevitably this story involves blogging and tweeting and people I don't know very well being incredibly generous...."

David Harte, Digital Central project manager at Birmingham City University and contributor to the Birmingham Post's Business Blog, decided to try a spur-of-the-moment fundraising campaign one week before he ran in the London Marathon. He didn't have to raise money for a charity, but he decided he wanted to try to help his favorite, St. Mary's Hospice. His goal was £495, and he ended up raising over £300 (and he's still raising money for his cause online).

Back when everyone was saying Al Gore "invented the Internet," no one rolled their eyes more than the Brits. Back then, the very notion of Internet-based technologies was enough to send British eyes into one-eighties, never mind the marriage of politics and social media. The idea of the Queen appearing on YouTube? Patently ridiculous.

What a change a few years can bring, because there she is, on YouTube's Royal Channel, with her annual Christmas speech and video clips of Prince William flying a plane.

With the next general election looming in 2009, politicians are beginning to mirror their American counterparts in hopes of winning more votes.

Brian Reich, EchoDitto

We are only part way through the 2008 election cycle and there have already been dozens, perhaps hundreds of articles written, TV hours spent, and blog comments posted about the role that the internet and technology are playing in this election cycle. The general consensus among the pundits seems to be that this is the year that technology, particularly social media, has had a significant impact on the outcome of the presidential election contest.

Unfortunately, that consensus is wrong and those pundits don’t know what they are talking about.

We used Sproutbuilder.com -- more on them later --to create an easy way for you to send a little light-hearted love (and the gift of NTEN) to your favorite Techie for Good.

You can help:

• Send your techie friend an e-Valentine. Your message will be broadcast 'Net-wide through the Sprout.

• Install our "Love Your Techie" widget (below) on your Facebook profile, blog, or whathaveyou to help us get the word out. It's simple! Just click the Sprout's "Share" button.

• Invite all of your socially networked friends to install our widget, as well.

On Love Your Techie Day (February 14th -- if Hallmark can create a holiday, so can we) we'll wrap your message in a pretty package and send it along with a coupon good for 10% off a new NTEN membership; they can use it themselves or pass it on.

You can even send it to yourself. We won't judge.

Thanks for helping us spread the L-word!

[Ed. Note: As you probably know, the Case Foundation, together with Facebook Causes and Parade magazine, is going to award $750,000 to charity. To help illuminate the process and generate discussion and ideas, the NTEN Connect Blog will be posting occasional updates from actual participants in the Challenges. You may want to read Ruby's first post, as well.]

Ruby Sinreich, Fellowship of Reconciliation

First, an update: My attention to Facebook recruiting fell off during the holidays and has not recovered much since. In addition, the realization that we not going to win any prizes has been demotivational. Our cause, "Peace and Justice through Nonviolence", is now up to 81 members and $235 in donations. As Beth Kanter recently pointed out, social networks are often not as effective for fundraising as they are for awareness raising.

This week, I bring you some advice for marketing your cause on Facebook, or anywhere else: Write a personal note!

[Ed. Note: As you probably know, the Case Foundation, together with Facebook Causes and Parade magazine, is going to award $750,000 to charity. To help illuminate the process and generate discussion and ideas, the NTEN Connect Blog will be posting occasional updates from actual participants in the Challenges.]

Ruby Sinreich, Fellowship of Reconciliation 

Ten days ago, a colleague forwarded an e-mail saying that the Case Foundation would be giving $250,000 to the nonprofits that generated the most supporters through the Causes application on Facebook. A week earlier, another colleague had discovered that some folks had started a "No War Iran" Cause and designated our organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, as the recipient. They had already recruited over 5,500 supporters and generated $210 in unsolicited donations, so we were feeling pretty open to the potential of Facebook.

[Ed. Note: As you probably know, the Case Foundation, together with Facebook Causes and Parade magazine, is going to award $750,000 to charity. To help illuminate the process and generate discussion and ideas, the NTEN Connect Blog will be posting occasional updates from actual participants in the Challenges.]

Mark Miller, Children's National Medical Center

I was the vice president for communications at the Case Foundation from 2005 to 2007. During that time, I led the development of www.casefoundation.org and helped the team explore ways to get everyday people involved in giving. A big part of that was studying new tools for online fundraising.

Because my daughter has received such great care at Children's National Medical Center, I took a job doing fundraising communications there in June 2007. When I heard the Case Foundation was sponsoring the Facebook and Parade.com giving challenges, I immediately jumped at the opportunity. It fits our strategy perfectly to use the latest technology to raise national awareness and dollars in new and innovative ways.

New York Times technology correspondent Saul Hansell recommends trying the following exercise:

• Search for "lawyers" on Google. Take a look at the ads on the right side.
• Now, search for "malpractice".
• Finally, search for "lawyers" again. Notice the change in the ads.

As Mr. Hansell notes, this limited implementation of behavioral targeting isn't too bad:

"So far this is largely harmless. It’s hard to imagine any violation that comes from Google having access to what you did 30 seconds before. What’s interesting is what comes next. As Google moves to place advertising on sites like MySpace, which have no natural advertisers, there is ever more pressure for it to use other sources of information to raise the prices at which it can sell those ads."

This is precisely the morass Facebook waded into with their creepy Beacon advertising program. The NYT has a great blow-by-blow of the changes Facebook has made to Beacon over the past 5 weeks, highlighting its slow acceptance of the privacy issues inherent to behavioral targeting.

There was a lot of hoopla over the recent announcement by Facebook about its Social Ads program, called Beacon. And by hoopla, I mean near hysteria-level complaining. The blogosphere was aghast at the idea of the opt-out based advertising scheme. Apparently, the fine folks at FaceBook have seen the error of their ways. Mark Zuckerberg posted to the FaceBook blog yesterday:

About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.

In response, they are implementing a couple of interesting changes:

First, you will have to opt-in to display any Beacon advertising in your news stream, etc., instead of having to opt-out. Additionally, if you fail to respond to the opt-in request that is generated when you interact with a Beacon site, the system does not display the advertising. This is a significant and good change.

Secondly, you can opt-out of the dang thing to begin with. Just go to your FaceBook privacy settings and click on the link for External Websites.