NetSquared recently followed up with the N2Y3 Featured Projects to develop these short case studies, with the goal to expand the knowledgebase of best practices for applying social media in the nonprofit context. We interviewed participants from the N2Y3 Featured Project teams to gain a better understanding of the way they used social media to increase their reach and carry out their missions. We are very happy to bring you their stories!

Today's spotlight: Genocide Intervention Network!

Project Details:

• Name of Organization: Genocide Intervention Network
• URL: http://www.genocideintervention.net
• Location: Washington, DC

Project Description:

The Anti-Genocide Action Tracker would create a single aggregate site of information on legislators' records on anti-genocide legislation, the status of current legislation, and action alerts tailored to users' home districts.

Social media tool or tactic used:

Anti-Genocide Action Tracker primarily catalogs open legislative records, so there has been very little social networking used in the creation of this site (the tool, though, is a data aggregation widget).

How was it used?

The Anti-Genocide Action Tracker very rarely uses social media--the [rare/specific] nature of the data they are collecting for it essentially means they are creating most content ourselves based upon our scoring methodology.

Outcome:

The Anti-Genocide Action Tracker is currently in the process of building out their site--they have scaled back slightly in the scope by focusing on legislators'
records rather than providing location-specific information to users, though they claim this function may be added to a later iteration.

Lessons learned:

• When dealing with a site this ambitious with minimal staff, it is best to set priorities early
• When you need a large amount of data entry done from a publicly accessible database, it's a good bet someone has already written an API for it.
• Never rely on wireframes or sitemaps to give you the full scope of the size of the project.

For more information:

• See the full list of N2Y3 Featured Projects here.    
• Read all of the N2Y3 Case Studies as they are published.

The work to create this case study series was funded by a grant from the Packard Foundation.