What if everyone who works at an organization, or cares deeply about a cause or organization, acted as a network weaver? How would that change the way that organizations communicate? How would that change how and the extent to which organizations raise funds online? That was just the conversation that I had in mind when my colleague Scott Remington and I presented a working session at the Jewish Federation Young Leadership Conference. We had one overarching goal: to empower every person in the room to become a network weaver. In this blog post, I overview the presentation and its five primary segments: redefining leadership, developing your own brand, mapping your own network, the network weaver and online fundraising, and two case studies of network weavers succeeding with online fundraising.

While some organizations used Giving Tuesday as an opportunity to ask for donations during the nationwide event, the American Diabetes Association took the opportunity to plan an extremely creative peer-to-peer fundraising opportunity, Step It Out. While it was a fundraising campaign, I was intrigued by how the organization used it as an opportunity to deepen and engage its community. The result was bountiful: $21,000 in donations, increased involvement from fundraisers, and deeper fundraiser loyalty to the American Diabetes Association. For more, read this guest post by Shana Masterson, National Associate Director for Interactive Fundraising and Engagement with the American Diabetes Association.

What is the Seattle Public Library doing that is so radically different than 90% of the Facebook Pages out there? Offering value. In the case of the Seattle Public Library, they've clarified the intersection of what they can offer, and what their Facebook fans want. That intersection is a personalized, customized, online library experience. And boy, are they offering value for a Like.

Lynne Wester, Director of Stewardship and Donor Recognition at Yeshiva University in New York City and a fundraising stewardship consultant, conducted a brilliant donor user experience test this week during Giving Tuesday, effectively doubling the value of Giving Tuesday for 15 organizations. She donated to all, carefully documenting the experience, assessed the donation process, and blogged about it. This is what she found...

Today, more than 2,000 bloggers from over 200 countries are collectively writing about The Power of We ​for Blog Action Day, "a celebration of people working together to make a positive difference in the world, either for their own communities or for people they will never meet halfway around the world." One of the reasons that I participate in Blog Action Day is because I believe strongly that blogs have a role in social change: motivating interest and stakeholders, through offering resources and news, inspiring people to share and act, and as a marketplace for ideas and conversation. This post reviews 11 social media campaigns that have leverages "The Power of We" for success. In addition, I'm giving away a copy of Beth Kanter and K.D. Paine's new book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit (donated by Hubspot).

There's a new social media campaign going around, and if you're not living underground, you may have heard of it: Beyonce is promoting this year's World Humanitarian Day on August 19. In this blog post, I dive deep into what the REAL message of the campaign is, its storytelling element, and the lost opportunity to develop a community around the campaign. Lastly, I take a look at what is being measured, and why. This campaign will make a big social media splash on August 19th when all the messages will be released on Twitter and Facebook...and what happens after that?

From March through mid-June, I had the privilege of working with the Boston Alliance for Community Health (BACH) on a youth-focused social media advocacy training campaign. I write "training campaign," because the campaign's goal was to train BACH member organizations and their teens how to use social media for advocacy. The campaign posted 460 photos to Flickr, 72 posts to the blog, and excited the youth and youth organizations involved. Most importantly, we offered a skills training to teens seriously affected by the digital divide, and we saw them take to the idea and run with it. In this post, I discuss the constraints of this type of campaign, successes, and lessons learned.

This Spring, the Multnomah County Library Levy Campaign Committee and consulting firm Winning Mark created and ran a successful place-based advocacy campaign to pass a library-preservation ballot measure. Emphasizing check-ins, recommendations, and making personal connections online, the campaign strategy paid off in a 4:1 win. This blog post walks through the strategy, complete with screenshots, lessons learned, and approach.

How can Twitter work for you? Do you need more volunteers? Jersey Cares recruited over 1,000 new volunteers using Twitter in just one month. Last year, Jersey Cares doubled our volunteer participation in MLK Day of Service with the extraordinary work of a few AmeriCorps members. When MLK Day of Service finally arrived, Jersey Cares had a record turnout of over 2,000 volunteers – over 1,000 of which were new volunteers to the organization! In this guest post. Jersey Cares staff Sherry Lynn Fazio and Siobhan Tiernan offer a step-by-step blueprint of how they moved their twitter following from 800 to 1,600 and brough 1,000 new volunteers to their MLK Day of Service 2011.

presented at this year's Grinspoon Institute for Jewish Philanthropy's annual conference November 13-14 in Springfield, MA, and walked away impressed with some of interesting things that camps are doing with technology. Kevin Martone, the Institute's Technology Program Manger, wrote this guest post highlighting how three camps used technology creatively to meet their goals: online/offline relationship building through blogging and Facebook, engaging current families with an unique iPad/iPhone app, and social fundraising through livestreaming a phone-a-thon. As Kevin writes, "These camps evoke incredibly strong emotions in their alumni, campers, and parents. They need to use the tools available to harness these emotions and connect them to the real world.