facebook – Nonprofit Commons

September 14, 2010

Nonprofit Commons Weekly Update for September 13, 2010

Weekly Update from the Nonprofit Commons

Events this week:
The new and improved TechSoup.org site is live!
Check it out and let us know any feedback you have. http://ow.ly/2Dy2n

8:30AM Friday meeting at Plush Nonprofit Commons Amphitheatre
Join us this FRIDAY AM http://bit.ly/nonprofitcommons

Weekly Networking Event:
Wharf Ratz, Aloft every Tues., 8PM SLT
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Aloft%20Nonprofit%20Commons/162/236/2

The next Online Community Managers Meetup in San Francisco will also be available in Second Life!
Don’t miss guest speaker, Randy Farmer, creator of the first virtual world, speaking on reputation systems.
Join us live September 22 at 7PM http://www.meetup.com/octribe/calendar/14233243/

Last week at the NPC:
Ellie Brewster came to share the Women’s Virtual Community Project:
http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/collingwood7/minerva/events.html
Events for 2010-2011 will be announced on 9/15 for inworld classes and events.

In the meeting we discussed Heat Maps, metrics and visits to NPC, how we can look at engagement on our sims and where people flow through and stay involved.

This is one example of a heat map at NPC from the Summer of 2010. We can get a good glimpse of the walkways and main traffic patterns (typically walking along designated paths around event/common areas) and see what offices are most popular for visits.

We discussed where people leave from and arrive to (typically advertised spaces and event spaces) and also looked at the demographics of our visitors by country – 22 countries involved in NPC this summer.

We have a handful of tenants and guests who have been to the commons hundreds of times, most come for a visit every 1-7 days. We will contact tenants who have not been back in the last few months to encourage return visits and online organizing at NPC. Evonne (In Kenzo) will work with Parhelion Parou, Buffy Beale, Brena Benoir, Ninlil, Kali & YOU to make sure that pathways and public spaces are easy to navigate as we find interesting ways to spotlight NPC. Ideas are welcome.

Ninlil Xentiltat followed up brainstorming about how to better provide services in this community. Do you have a suggestion to add? Email nonprofitcommons@techsoup.org or start a conversation online. If you want to volunteer or find a volunteer to help you with a specific endeavor, visit our wiki page: http://npsl.wiki.techsoup.org/volunteers and find Ninlil inworld.

More on Statistics, Insights & Engagement

We are processing the insights on our primary social media sites: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life & Google. We are finding that there are over 300 of you who are active here with 339 “likes” on Facebook. On average 50+ of you are actively engaging with us on Facebook. On Twitter we have 780 followers! In 2010 the TechSoupVideo YouTube pages are getting the highest traffic on our Second Life-related videos and machinima.

Here’s our Facebook page demographics for age and country/languages:

Reminder: Submit your Projects to the FACT Social Justice Challenge at NetSquared
The French American Charitable Trust (FACT) and NetSquared are pleased to announce the second annual FACT Social Justice Awards. Submissions are now open for your innovative Projects that leverage web and/or mobile technologies to foster collaboration around social justice issues. Learn more about the Challenge and how to participate here: http://netsquared.org/challenges/fact-social-justice-2010

TechSoup Talks! Webinars take place on September 21 and 30.

Inworld we share these links to our community sites:
Nonprofit Commons blog
http://www.nonprofitcommons.org/
LinkedIn:
http://linkd.in/NonprofitCommons

Thank you for your contributions to the Nonprofit Commons! Stay in touch: nonprofitcommons@techsoup.org

~In Kenzo, Nonprofit Commons Scribe~

Written by: InKenzo

March 25, 2010

TechSoup Wins Financial Times 2010 Social Innovation Awards

NPC is happy to share that TechSoup Global won the open-vote portion of the Justmeans/Financial Times 2010 Social Innovation Awards . There were 88 other contenders for this Citizen’s Choice Award, but because your participation, we went from 116 to 1,545 votes . Great work everybody, and we deeply appreciate the help from the entire virtual community.

To win the vote, NPC/TechSoup employees and volunteers sent emails to personal contacts and deployed a grass-roots social media campaign to reach out to supporters around the world.

Volunteers rallied fans to take action through Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Avatars United, as well as through private email campaigns and on blogs.

NPC’s Layal Rabat wrote a powerful blog post which was tweeted to get folks psyched, and as voters left comments about TechSoup, we captured and tweet-shared these from Tweetphoto .

The response was phenomenal! The tweets went viral, Facebook and LinkedIn groups shared the message with other groups, and residents of Second Life reached out to their constituencies in the nonprofit, education and business communities.

What We Learned from Barack Obama’s Social Media Strategy

So how did we win when we were up against multi-million dollar companies with hundreds of thousands of employees and fancy PR firms?

First, we learned from Barack Obama’s social media strategy. For his presidential campaign his team used email, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and many other platforms to get his message out. He maintained a consistent message for his audience, centering around “Hope”. He connected with specific groups and encouraged supporters. Since his supporters believed that he could deliver on his promise, they actively helped him get his message out.

For TechSoup, the words “Social Innovation” fit naturally with its core mission. This was easily apparent to the members, constituents and partners that engage daily with us on many social media platforms. So when we reached out to our global network to help us get the votes, they were there to deliver and help us get the message out.

Thank you everyone. In both the real and virtual worlds, this was truly a Citizen’s Choice award.

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Written by: DustyArtaud

January 5, 2008

Using FaceBook to Raise Funds!

Got FaceBook? Then please help us to raise $1,000.00 to send school supplies to our students in Lesotho, southern Africa.

SOLID, the organization supporting the Gardens of Hope project, has a presence in Second Life. You can find us on Better World Island. With the Gardens of Hope project we support the building of food gardens, tree nurseries and greenhouses in Lesotho. One of our projects is at a disabled centre where, just last year, we built the 1st fully integrated school in Lesotho. This primary school meets the educational needs of 330 orphans and vulnerable children. Integration of special needs students into the classroom affords disabled and mentally handicapped children the opportunity to learn, and fosters a culture of tolerance and compassion. 40 of the students at Mamello English Medium School have special needs, from physical to mental handicaps. Enrollment in the primary school is free and the children are not required to have a uniform … more 1sts for Lesotho!

This month FaceBook is sponsoring a Razoo Speed Grant and the top prize is for $1,000.00! Please consider logging in to your FaceBook account and voting for our proposal “A New Year for African Students” which you will find here: http://apps.facebook.com/speedgranting/proposal.php?pid=553&ref=NTUzfDc3…
Then recruit your friends to vote!

In world you will find posters in the gardens at Better World Island, at the Prim Perfect offices and various other locations in Second Life. Saffia, editor and owner of Prim Perfect, Second Life Style for Home and Garden, has been a wonderful promoter and supporter of the Gardens of Hope project. You can find her blog entry for the FaceBook campaign here: http://primperfectblog.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/using-facebook-to-raise-… The posters contain a direct link to our proposal on FaceBook and are copy-able. If you have a space in Second Life please consider taking a copy and putting the poster up to promote our campaign.

This $1,000.00 will go a long way to provide our students with the tools they need for learning.

Contest closes January 14, 2008 so please vote soon. Thank you for your support of African students in Lesotho.

If you have any questions please IM Zeke Poutine in world.

Wishing you all the best to you and yours in 2008!

XoX Zeke

Written by: Zeke

October 23, 2007

In Praise of Interoperability: Facebook finally goes to SecondLife

After the Virtual Worlds conference, the universal mantra seemed to be “we need interoperability!” Well, guess what folks? It has started. Enter Facebook in SL…although the entry in a little awkward (you have to TP in to the Facebook headquarters inworld and then verify yourself and then leave again to complete your profile, which is somewhat limited and doesn’t integrate well with your original FB profile), it is still a step in the right direction.

So, why would you want to have interoperability between virtual worlds and other online social networks and other virtual worlds? Because it would allow you to find the place location for where you want to post/interact/connect and work within that environment, without having to constantly jump around between locations to talk about it to your other existing networks.

To quote Christian Renaud, in his must-read piece, Ode to Interoperability The benefit to business of interoperability is that you have freedom of choice to pick a provider of the environment that best suits your use case (simulation, training, collaboration, etc.) without it being segregated from the benefits of the network-effect of the Internet and the many tens of thousands of active users of other virtual worlds. It doesn’t have to be an ‘either-or’ decision, with all of the risk of sunk development costs shouldered by the customer, but rather ‘and also’ as the platform you choose can interact with other virtual world platforms.

So far, the app. doesn’t do that much, IMHO. It allows you to display your avatar on your profile, which I did anyway, in my RL facebook profile, and it indicates when you’re inworld (which secondlife.com has done for ages). I am not really sure of the advantages of being able to see images of your friends’ avatars, since we already all know and love our friends’ avies. However, on the plus side, it also allows you to share your picks and favorite SL locations and it has SLurls embedded, so you can easily TP to the places.

Apparently, this is old-hat to some, and there are actually two applications that do this…not sure why I found out so late in the game. For more information about these two apps, check out Giving your Facebook profile a Second Life. I have asked Fire Centaur, the creator of Second Life Link that I just joined to speak at our weekly Nonprofit Commons meeting this Friday.

How could you see interoperability benefiting your work in SL?

Written by: Glitteractica_Cookie