Hi Net2, You have probably heard of Facebook's new Causes application and LinkedIn's digital bumper sticker program.   If you haven't, please check out this blog entry I just wrote up:

Facebook, LinkedIn Transforming the Practice of Person-to-Person Fundraising  

Here's an excerpt:  

With the launch of Causes on Facebook and ‘digital bumper stickers' on LinkedIn, non-profits can now benefit from the rocket success of the two social networking web sites.

Causes is a Facebook ‘application' designed by Project Agape that adds the ability for friends on Facebook to raise money for any registered non-profit. LinkedIn's digital bumper stickers are the equivalent of ‘donate now' buttons for non-profits that a LinkedIn user can add to his or her profile page.

Colleagues on LinkedIn and friends on Facebook can use either system to affirm their connections with one another through a contribution to a contact's featured non-profit.

Facebook and LinkedIn have spent the last several years building web sites that mirror real world friendships and professional contacts. The resulting communities combine the always-on quality of the internet with the high trust-factor of actual friendship.

I can't imagine a more ideal setting for experimenting with person-to-person fundraising. Person-to-person fundraising—also known as group fundraising—consists of individuals creating online campaigns on behalf of non-profit organizations, and then emailing friends, colleagues, family about the initiative and the intended outcome.

Facebook and LinkedIn remove an important step in conventional person-to-person fundraising: the email solicitation. Until now, the essential component of any group fundraising campaign was the email that an organizer had to send to his or her personal network in order to let people know about the giving opportunity.