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: OneWorld!

Project Details:

• Name of Organization: OneWorld
• URL: www.oneworld.net
• Location: Washington, DC

Project description:

OneWorld Connect - This is meant to enhance the way OneWorld gathers and distributes organization by facilitating a meta-data exchange to make said exchange much more seamless. They aim to bring the data that's living on the community level to their editors so that they can know about it. At the same time, they hope to address user submissions by answering the questions: "How do we get beyond form on the site? How do we look at creating submissions? How could people contribute and interact with it?" Finally, they've addressed visualization by investigating a mashup of content data and geocoding content beyond country-based organization. The intention was to mash this huge repository of data onto maps in hopes of enabling people to see the work that's happening on the ground.  

Social media tool or tactic used:

Widgets (for contact management and data processing), geocoding, mapping, fundamental infrastructure is the web infrastructure.

How was it used?:  

Largely unimplemented - User widget on hold.

Outcome:

Largely unimplemented.  

Lessons Learned:

Financial situation:

• Things are always harder than they first seem (learn it a number of times)
• Would have been better to identify well-wishers / break down project into doable little chunks. Level of excitement at the conference - wasn't for us.
• Would have been smarter to bring one project rather than an over-arching, comprehensive system project (so as to make it more digestible to those judging)

• 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.