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.

ast week, Marc Baizman and I offered a workshop at the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network's annual conference this week called "Streamlining Nonprofit Organizations: It's All About the Cloud." Cloud computing allows you to access software from anywhere via the Internet, instead of your hard drive or local computer network (definition courtesy of TechSoup). Within the presentation (below), Marc and I focused on cloud adoption barriers, strategies for succeeding in the cloud, two nonprofit case studies, and a survey of cloud tools. In both case studies that on nonprofits that successfully moved into the cloud, the critical elements were collaboration and management support. It's interesting that these same two elements are critical for social media success as well.

Social media cannot thrive in silos. What is happening online affects the entire organization, not just the marketing department, or the development team, or the Executive Director. And while social media usage has truly penetrated the nonprofit sector, reports and activities are usually not shared throughout the organization. What results is a lack of organizational buy-in, misunderstanding of the benefit of digital engagement, missed opportunities, and role confusion. Instead of siloing information, turn it around. Knowledge sharing results in stronger organizations that have a broader knowledge base about its online stakeholders, and a wide net of useful information to meet organizational goals.

In light of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, free agent communities have risen once again, this time to raise funds for disaster relief in Japan. In this blog post, I feature three blogger communities raising money for Japan. Once again, this begs the question of best practices and whether or not nonprofits are working with free agent communities to establish relationships.

Developing social media in a vacuum is unnecessary. Why not develop a social media support team? Using personal contacts and social networks, one can easily develop a great team to help you develop and improve upon social media concepts.

This guest blog post continues the discussion of nonprofit collaboration, but from the funder's perspective. Guest contributor Ed Nicholson, who manages corporate philanthropy for Tyson Foods, offers his perspective on why collaboration and coopetition is good for the cause and the funder.

Looking forward to 2010, with professional goals in mind: more blogging, starting a social media learning circle, and meeting more of my online friends offline. What are the new platforms to try? This post looks back at 2009, forward to 2010, and asks your opinions as well.