Nonprofit fundraising solutions | SimplyRaise | Crowdfunding Are you crowdfunding? If not, consider the many advantages of this engaging approach to fundraising and friendraising. First, what exactly is crowdfunding? By definition, crowdfunding is a technique that uses existing social networks to increase brand awareness and raise money. Charitable organizations use crowdfunding to create viral campaigns targeted to networks of advocates in order to increase awareness and fundraise for their causes. More importantly, crowdfunding is a cost-effective yet highly creative and interactive tool for charitable organizations. Finally, crowdfunding using a tool such as SimplyRaise is a safe means of fundraising. To learn more please see our Crowdfunding White Paper.
20 Cities Want Your Innovative Ideas A gym that lets humans generate energy for a Spanish city; open data about obesity levels in the Netherlands; a smart bus network navigation system in Japan, and a wireless network to control street lights; monitor car parking spaces and more in San Francisco. These are just some of the solutions being asked for by cities around the world as part of the Living Labs Global Award. Living Labs Global is a non-profit association which promotes new technologies and services in cities. In all, twenty cities have partnered with the organisation to identify innovative solutions to problems around tourism, transport, health and open government. The twenty cities are currently looking for ideas to be submitted, with winning solutions set to be announced in May. From there, pilot projects will test out each winner’s viability. Previous winners of the competition have included a smart real-time peer-to-peer parking system in Stockholm and an open data citizen participation platform in San Francisco.
Do Something Recycle old or worn-out clothes to help our planet. Run a workshop for your friends to teach them personal finance tips. Challenge friends to stand up to bullying on their phones Collect peanut butter for your local food bank. Send friends a text baby to start the convo on teen pregnancy. Give your custodian a yearbook signed by everyone in your class. Host a gardening shindig in a local green space. Run a dress drive so everyone can feel their best at prom. Demand high-speed Internet at your school with a badass photo. Protest styrofoam by making petitions out of cafeteria plates. Host a dance class at your local senior center. Host an Oppression Monopoly game night to learn about inequality. Skip presents: have friends donate to animals for your b-day. Locate and unplug energy vampires at school. Host a board game night to collect games for a family shelter. Host a Twitter debate with friends about a hot news headline. Challenge your sports team to a trash-pickup relay race.
Developer Workshop: Crowdstory Developer Workshop is a series of profiles exploring the current state of the mobile marketplace from the point of view of the software developers mapping out its future. Each profile focuses on a developer with a compelling story to tell, and offers their perspective on what the industry's doing right, what it's doing wrong and how to make it better. Check out our previous workshops on Shazam, InfoMedia, Viigo, Meet Now Live, Shortcovers, Pint Sized Mobile, Geodelic, Spark of Blue Software, Tarver Games, People Operating Technology, Booyah, Bolt Creative, Thwapr, Monkeyland Industries, Rocket Racing League, Vlingo, Advanced Mobile Protection, PapayaMobile, Taptu, GameHouse, Avatron and aisle411. Sign up for our FREE newsletter for more news like this sent to your inbox! This week FierceDeveloper profiles social networking vendor Crowdstory. None of us on the team knew each other when we started, and no one had worked on real-world software development projects before.
Six Online Fundraising Tools You May Have Never Heard Of You got to give it to the social good entrepreneurs. Seemingly every week a new fundraising or cause awareness tool hits the Web for nonprofits to experiment with, and though donation processing fees must be applied or ads sold for these social enterprises to be sustainable, it’s clear that their motives are altruistic. That said, here are six new fundraising tools for nonprofits to explore: 1. SwipeGood enables donors to round up all of their debit or credit card purchases to the nearest dollar and allows them to donate the difference to the charity their choice. 2. You know those daily deal sites? 3. GiveBack allows donors to create their own foundations (giving portfolios) where they can follow their favorite nonprofits, donate directly, and allocate dollars raised through their online shopping portal. 4. Give a Tweet was founded to leverage the real-time power of Twitter to make it easy to donate to non-profits. 5. 6.
Amazon Streamlines Mechanical Turk With Automatic Categorization App The idea behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is pretty simple - break programming work down into bite-sized chunks, and put it in front of a large workforce that can do the work quickly and cheaply. Part of the challenge of that is making it easy for requesters to create the bites that workers are chewing on. The new categorization app from Amazon removes some of the hurdles of creating HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that ask workers to pick the best category for items. The result could make the crowdsource coding marketplace even more usable and popular. Creating a request for Mechanical Turk isn't overly difficult, but it takes a bit of time editing HTML and answering a lot of questions for which first-time users don't have a lot of context - for example, deciding the qualifications for workers, or whether they need to be "masters" to take on a task. Right now, Amazon is providing an app only for categorization questions. Boosting MT Revenues Better Requests One problem?
Robert Egger On Why Nonprofits Need To Re-Think Marketing | Eloqua Blog This article is the final installment in our Knowledge For Nonprofits series, which is made up of articles, interviews and tips for the nonprofit sector. The previous articles can be found here, here and here. Robert Egger is an iconoclast in the nonprofit sector. Egger is the author of Begging for Change: The Dollars and Sense of Making Nonprofits Responsive, Efficient, and Rewarding for All and a frequent speaker on the nonprofit industry. Egger provided me with an extensive interview about nonprofits, why they need to shift their thinking about marketing, and how the next generation of professionals is already changing the game for everyone. You spend a lot of time not only working with nonprofits, but talking about how the rest of world view them and how they view themselves. As much as I love this sector, and will fight for it, I recognize its limits. People don’t want to talk about that. The response is shared by the nonprofit world, the business world and political world.
How To Organize A Social Media Day Meetup Mashable‘s third annual Social Media Day is on Saturday, June 30, 2012! Social Media is quickly changing our world by bringing people closer together. So, in true Mashable style, we celebrate it! In previous years, we have had incredible Social Media Day Meetups created by event organizers around the globe. To keep that tradition alive, we invite you to once again bring your fellow social media enthusiasts together in person by hosting a Social Media Day Meetup in your area. Like any event, Social Media Day Meetups require planning. Step by Step Because we use the Meetup Everywhere platform, there is already a Social Media Day event set up for the over 1,500+ Mashable Meetup Everywhere communities. Here's how to find and edit your local Meetup: 1. Find a Meetup Community Near You Browse through this list to find a Meetup near you! Get The Word Out Make sure your community knows about your Mashable Social Media Day Meetup! Here are a few ideas to get you started promoting: 1. Inspiration Photos:
Creating the sustainable city: Are imagination and leadership enough? Without imagination, humans would be incapable of innovating. So it’s no surprise, with over half the population worldwide living in overcrowded and resource-strapped cities, there are vibrant movements to re-imagine how a city of the future could be more sustainable and livable. For example, Dowser recently reported on ioby, a New York City-based organization that funds local community-based environmental projects. Currently ioby is intervening in the urban landscape with their public art project, Reimagine Your City, which suggests what could be in place of what is. The trend of imagining became apparent again at the Festival of Ideas for the New City, a four-day event May 4-8 that aimed to generate ideas for a city of the future, a networked, reconfigured, sustainable, and heterogenous future city. Each panelist told a story of how he had diligently accomplished radical social change in his city. It’s also an interesting choice to have a panel entirely consisting of mayors.
Going beyond grants: Eight new ways news nonprofits are raising revenue This post is the third in a series about a Knight Foundation roundtable that brought together news start-ups and tech entrepreneurs. A report is forthcoming. Journalists are notoriously averse to math, but there’s no equation in which nonprofit news organizations can survive for the long term without a steady mix of revenue. The more diversified a revenue portfolio, the greater promise of stability. Generally, financial sustainability plans for all the organizations include a mix of membership (small donors), advertising and underwriting and grants. Tribune CEO Evan Smith interviews Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White before an audience. In-person events are emerging as a growing source for nonprofit startups. Other ideas abound, and nonprofit news organizations remain a lab for testing new revenue ideas. Previous posts: -How news sites can keep readers engaged - Seven lessons for journalists from tech entrepreneurs - Getting local: Ponder the future of news engagement