If you work for, volunteer your time for, or consult to a mission-based organization, you are already thinking about using social media channels to promote it. Authors Amy Sample Ward and Allyson Kapin bring together how organizations can utilize social media channels cohesively to raise money, promote organizations, and create killer advocacy campaigns.The book is full of digestible information, appropriate for anyone working in communications, fundraising, programming, volunteer management, and leadership at an organization. This post offers an overview of the key points in the book, who should read it, and what you'll get out of it. In the a follow-up blog post, to be published Wednesday, April 10, co-authors Amy Sample Ward and Allyson Kapin answer six follow-up questions about the book, including "what inspired you to write the book," "what assets should an organization have in place before planning a multichannel campaign," and "what does it take to raise money online using social media."

Behind every successful social media campaign is a community of partners that teach, guide, support financially and contribute to the campaign. Everyone wants to know what will "get them 5,000" likes and "how to grow really big" on social media. Organizations read about and aspire to replicate viral online campaigns such as the Kony 2012 campaign, or Blame Drew's Cancer. In this blog post, I look at the Kony 2012 video campaign, and how it complies with Gladwell's theory that creative genius needs a patron and community. Patrons and community not only support creative geniuses, but they are critical internal elements of an organization's digital communications growth and learning.

There's a way to build a movement, and it begins with personal engagement. Carter Gibson, one of the most personal, most social, most transparent Google Plus users, announced the launch of his new nonprofit LittleBigFund yesterday. I vehemently believe that, in order for nonprofit organizations to thrive on social media channels, they have to be personal. That starts from the top (Executive Directors must use social media personally), and continues through messaging that connects personally with supporters, and finishes with real engagement between stakeholders and the organization. New organizations take time to grow and thrive, but I'd bet money that LittleBigFund understands how to be personal, and is ready to soar right out of the gate. The reason is Carter Gibson.

Last week, I presented on the topic of "Bringing Social Inside" through Nonprofit Webinars. I developed the presentation out of a belief that successful social media strategy and implementation must also have certain supportive foundations inside the organization. The core components are staffing, budget, a supportive culture, and some basic social media policies. Most organizations I've worked with have at least one of these four components, and very few have all four. This blog post walks through these elements, and includes a slide presentation illustrating many of the core components and supporting research.

  Social media used to be all about assumptions: who is online, what they are doing, how much they love you, whether or not your content resonates. When nonprofits and companies began rapidly adopting social media in the late 2000s, activities were based on assumptions and experimental ideas. Fast forward five years, and we now [...]

Idealware and Darim Online, with support from Balance Interactive, have just released a free Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook for nonprofits trying to figure out how to get a handle on the personnel side of social media. In this simple yet complete guide, the authors walk through many of the critical social media policy issues with which organizations struggle: the reasons for a policy, applying organizational values to the policy, social media roles, what to say online, social media monitoring strategy, responding to criticism online, responding to other comments online, privacy and permissions, and thinking through copyright and attributions. If you are looking for a starting point for your social media policy, look no further. Read the full blog post for my review of the workbook.

If you do anything professionally related to online technology, you understand the immense amount of data you need to sort through daily. Daily email roundups blogs to read, Facebook posts and to check, tweets to scroll through, news sites, and that doesn't include whatever else arrives in your inbox. I literally cannot keep up with all that I want to know about social media technology and its use for engagement, fundraising and advocacy. It's really...too much to know. That's when I began trusting the curators.

I had the privilege of joining three seasoned social media community managers on the "Personal/Personnel Policy: Social Media Boundaries" panel at South By Southwest this year. Vanessa Rhinesmith (Director of Outreach at Start Some Good), Jess Main (Director of Operations at National Center for Media Engagement), Amy Sample Ward (Membership Director at NTEN) and I presented examples of how we have negotiated the boundary between personal and professional involvement in social media. The panel offered a lot of great examples of these situations, and the engaged audience asked even more questions. Key takeaways from the session included planning for the future of your social media presence, sharing social media account information internally, don't be afraid of the customer service aspect of engaging online, and create a guidelines document for how staff should represent the organization online.

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of social media ROI, and how to measure it. Can we measure effective engagement with stakeholders, and how we move them to action? For social media, the ROI is actually Return on Engagement (ROE). All other activities are those leading to ROE.

What prevents ideas from happening? What can you and your organization do to shepherd ideas into action? This blog post summarizes some of the best ideas presented by Scott Belsky of Behance.com in his SXSW Interactive 2011 session.