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: Your Mapper!

Project Details:

• Name of Organization: Your Mapper
• URL: www.yourmapper.com
• Location: Louisville, KY

Project description:

The goal of Your Mapper is to create a platform to enable local data collection on a national scale. Your Mapper empowers local citizens to work with their city governments to make their public data truly available to the public. We provide intuitive toolsets, documentation, and a social community to enable anyone to load, maintain, and share large amounts of government data, turning it into interactive maps.    

Social media tool or tactic used:

Blog, Twitter, Facebook, on site tools (ratings, comments, flagging, sharing, saving, friends), iPhone App, mobile device view

How was it used?:  

The social media tools are used to create a community around the site, encourage communication between users and data collectors, and facilitate the sharing of any knowledge discovered.   Each type of tool used is tailored for specific integration with the site.  

Outcome:

Your Mapper is working on the finishing touches of this new site, and plan to launch first quarter 2009, so they don't know if all of our goals will be achieved or not.   One way they hope to measure success is by new site traffic and the information that people choose to store in their accounts.  

• 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.