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.

I love looking back on the year in nonprofit technology and thinking about what it has brought us, and what we can learn from it. In this blog post, I review the nonprofit communications practices that saw wider acceptance in 2012, the best of the research reports of 2012 that inform fundraising and communications, and some prognostications for 2013.

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.

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.

If you don't know about NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, here's a few reasons to love them and join them: a fabulous annual conference (the NTC), webinars galore, NTEN listens and help, and NTEN members rock.

Are you going to NTEN's 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference? Here are a few reasons not to miss this fantastic conference, including a few workshops that I've proposed.