Organizers' Collaborative

Once upon a time we had a home phone for personal stuff and a work phone for business; we also had physical addresses for home and work. That is no more!

There are two fairly straightforward attitudes toward Facebook and other commercial social networking services: (1) if that’s where our people are, let’s organize there; (2) Facebook is an extension of corporate power, boycott it. Between these disparate positions there is little common ground and space for nuanced debate.

WHO WINS WHAT IN GAZA ?

This year's Grassroots Use of Technology Conference will feature a presentation by Emerson College Professor Paul Niwa on his work on the BostonChinaTown.org project.

What if the media viewed urban communities in a more holistic way? Instead of presenting a polarized community with one side for and another against this or that issue, what if it was able to capture the nuances and connections between residents, organizers and activists? Would stories be different?

Providing Professional Education in Social and Human Development

PRIA Continuing Education (PCE) has been established by PRIA, an international center for learning and promotion of participation and governance, for transferring its experience, knowledge and learning of over 25 years. This vast pool of knowledge and learning has been synthesized and packaged into distance education programmes.

Overview of Courses starting 1st April 2008:

Duration: 3 months

Eligibility: Bachelor's Degree

Nature: Certificate Programmes in Distance Mode

Key Features:

(a) National & International subject experts;

KnowledgeMessenger (http://www.knowledgemessenger.com) provides a complete set of website components and services that enable elected officials, schools and non-profits the ability to entice::engage::activate their audience. They seem pretty affordable too. Their website components and services include:

Entice
eNewsletters - send electronic newsletters to your audience
Blog - engage in a dialog with your audience with a Blog
Event Calendar - keep your audience informed of upcoming events
Content Management - add and update web pages on your website - no need to know HTML!

The online version of “The Internet Advocacy Book” by Michael Organ is a free resource for nonprofits and socially-progressive political organizations that use the Internet to advocate for their cause. The book is written as a "how better to" guide, with laser focus on the best uses of an organization’s Internet-advocacy time. Readers will find candid advice and insightful recommendations, without the bias or self-interest of sales reps. The “Internet Advocacy Book” is rooted in commercial expertise, but well translated for the needs and interests of nonprofit organizations.

Wonder if you should spend your time campaigning in social networks?

Care2.com has created a useful tool to find out whether using social networking tools is right for you and your organization.

You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.

Need some metrics guidelines? You might check out some of the online advocacy and fundraising benchmark studies. If you don't measure results strictly by fundraising -- maybe your results are based on advocacy or branding only -- you can just look at the "cost per friend" or "cost per email name" to compare with the costs of recruiting people elsewhere. You can also see how that translates into cost per action or email viewed (opened).