I attended a free webinar last week on the new book, Groundswell: Winning in World Transformed by Technologies, presented by its authors, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester Research.

The book is geared toward the for-profit sector, but the strategies can be adopted by nonprofits in terms of building community, engaging activists, and even raising financial support around a cause or organization online.

I want to provide some of those applications and takeaways from the session:

LOLnptechNTEN members were sharing lots of great tips, checklists, and resources online last week.

Colin Delany, of e.politics, shared his Social Marketing "cheat sheet" for using Web2.0 tools for engagement and fundraising purposes.

If you're a do-it-yourself kind of nonprofit when it comes to designing your web site, you might want to check out Kivi Leroux Miller's "10-Point Basic Website Checklist for Nonprofits".

For anyone plagued by email delivery statistics (or curious about what your organization should be considering when it comes to email messaging), take a look at NTEN member and NTC speaker Bill Pease's helpful tips.

Marnie Webb provides a couple of posts about integrating Twitter into your communications practice: first, she brings Twitter into the virtual tool chest she's building for her readers, then shares a list of Twitter resources that can help you maximize your Twitter-effectiveness.

Speaking of Twitter, Rose Vines is the back-channeling star of the NTEN community. Fortunately for us, she shares her tips for using Twitter for good (documenting and sharing).

In other news, NTEN members are . . .

Every time I turn around, Carie Lewis and the fantastic team at HSUS are doing something else creative and fun that's also a great example of how to use social media for your cause. These NTEN members really get it. (If you're at the NTC, be sure to check out the session Carie is speaking at.)

This time, the folks at HSUS have an LOLcatz-style campaign for seals. To raise awareness about baby seals, they're sponsoring a photo caption contest. The judge? Nigel Barker from America' Next Top Model. (Don't tell anyone that I've seen almost every episode.)

So if you have a funnybone, check out LOLseals and submit your caption today. Over 14,000 others have in last week!

Flickr photo by red5standingbyLet's kick off February with some advice for getting your organization (or yourself) advocating for your cause with free social media tools.

First, there's Twitter. This tool should be familiar to the NTEN community by now, but just in case you're tuning in for the first time, Twitter is a free social networking/micro-blogging tool that allows you to submit short updates to your network via the web, your mobile device, or a third-party application; you also receive short updates from the network you're "following."

How to apply it to your mission:

• Update your volunteers, constituents, and friends with the latest news about your cause (a bill, a candidate, a campaign, an event, etc.).
• Organize attendees or participants at an event or project in real-time.
• Engage a community on a personal level -- Beth Kanter leveraged her network on Twitter to help her win the Giving Challenge.

You may want to read this article on Read/Write Web about Twitter's emergence as a viable communications platform. Note the helpful information and considerations for how to use it!

During my time off this holiday season, I caught up on some online (and offline) reading. As a result, I was able to read several unrelated posts that helped me put the future of nonprofit technology in perspective.

Over at the Wild Apricot Blog, I read Soha El-Borno's post in a series about online fundraising tools for nonprofits, which emphasized what we hear all the time: think about your objective first, then apply the tool that's best for your goal, rather than investing time and resources on a tool just because it's new and "cool".

Soha's blog led me to this post about the development of the PayPal widget -- with the help of a blogger with a dream -- which can be easily customized, embedded, and shared.I also remembered this article about how the charitable sector is adapting and applying social media tools faster than the the business sector.

And -- bear with me on this one -- I happened to catch up on a very old but very interesting discussion about folksonomies vs taxonomies, which led me to think about the effects of online discussions and online collaboration in general.

This all got me thinking about the obvious, really: the future of nonprofit technology is YOU.

Try as I might to keep up with the coolest and the greatest, it's you folks who give me the best tips!

Today I got a Facebook message from Alnissa Allgood tipping me off to a great new movement on YouTube: '07 Project for Awesome.

The first reason I love Project for Awesome: who could possibly be anti-awesome? It's like being against education. I am definitely pro-awesome.

The second reason I love Project for Awesome: it's a fine example of videos-for -a-cause done right. If you want to know how your organization should be using YouTube, look no further than Project for Awesome.

Some quick lessons you can learn from these guys:

• It doesn't have to be expensive to be awesome. They're using run of the mill cameras in their living rooms and doing very little editing. It's what they say and how they say it that matters.
• Their tone is perfect for the YouTube audience. If you don't talk like these guys, don't worry -- but find someone who does.
• The ask is easy and clear. They aren't out to raise a million dollars or save lives. They are out to take over the YouTube most popular section, and they tell their audience how to make that happen. And it's working. Look how many of their videos are in the most popular list!

Are these guys changing the world? I don't know. Are they capturing attention that may inspire action. Absolutely. And that's always the first step.

Last week, I pointed to Britt Bravo's blog post encouraging nonprofits to confront their fear of blog comments. But another NTEN member, Marnie Webb of CompuMentor, brings up some important points in the NonprofitTimes that nonprofits should consider when navigating the new terrain of the social web.

The topic of "social engineering" affects organizations whether they've launched a communications plan using the social web or not because, as Webb puts it, "whether they give their employees permission to or not, [the employees] have social networking sites."

This can be a good thing -- and usually is -- because it's likely that the staff members of a nonprofit organization believe in the cause and will be natural mouthpieces for the mission. But in some cases, as the article points out, there's the potential for sensitive information being released and, depending on the nature of the issue or cause, exploited, even harmfully.

Like Bravo, Webb thinks that nonprofits don't need to fear the social web -- but she offers some good tips in the article to help organizations avoid problems and stay in control.

I sat down at my desk this morning only to discover at least a dozen invitations to "trust" my colleagues over at Spock.com. According to their site:

Spock is a search application that organizes information around people. The Spock vision is to create a search result of everyone in the world.

Of course, instead of working on my next workshop presentation, I immediately spent the next 45 minutes engaged in ar'kadan -- poking around and adding tags to my profile. I can't tell you how useful this tool may or may not end up being, but it certainly had a Vulcan death grip on my attention. (Cue laugh track.)

Have you tried Spock.com? What do you think?

NTEN member (and board member) Michelle Murrain shared an opinion on the Information Systems Forum last week:

Spock does seem interesting in that it uses "trust" rather than "friend" or "connection" as the metaphor for its social graph. This might actually make it more useful - I imagine people are much less likely to put people they don't really know in their "trust" network on Spock, whereas there is a real range of opinion about how well you need to know someone to get to be their "friend" on Facebook.

But what's "missing" (deliberately?) are messaging systems and groups. This means that it's not so useful for advocacy or fundraising as Facebook.

Oh - and hat tip to the Vulcan Language Dictionary. "Tonk'peh" translates to "Hello".

Only 10 years ago, social networks were built quite differently. We might pump a few hands at conferences, place a few phone calls or meet people for lunch. A labor-intensive way of expanding the little black book, to be sure, but that's the way everybody did it. Networks lived in brainspace and on slips of paper.

But a decade is a long time. Person-to-person meetings are still a great way to make connections, but networks have increasingly less to do with seeing people and more to do with outlets such as LinkedIn.

The Overbrook Foundation has just published a report on the adoption of web 2.0 technologies by organizations involved in social change. Based on the responses from U.S.-based human rights grantees of the Overbrook Foundation, the report found that:

• Most of the organizations use the web more as a source of information than as a tool for connecting with others.
• Roughly half of the organizations -- in most cases, the larger ones -- maintain blogs.
• Repondants experienced a great deal of frustration in determining which tools to use and where to turn for help.