With 2012 around the corner, political campaigns and lobbying are set to explode, and mobile will play a critical part unlike what has ever been seen before! There is an increasing need for nonprofits to turn their supporters into passionate activists and make citizens’ voices heard in government as important causes depend on it; mobile technology will serve as an important conduit for this.

Join us on September 29 at 2pm EST for our next webinar: ‘Creating Loyal & Engaged Advocates via Mobile Apps.’ In this Webinar we will showcase an advocacy group, Susie’s Law Movement, and the launch of their Smartphone app, ‘Susie’s Law First Responders’

We will highlight:

Given the constantly escalating number of Smartphone users in the country, Susie’s Law Supporters realized they needed to expand their brand to where their supporters were, and increase engagement and interaction with the animal lovers of North Carolina, to stay true to their mission.

This recap was originally posted on the TechSoup Canada blog.

By: Claire Buré, TechSoup Canada Volunteer 

If we compare the two phrases, “Hear John's story on our website” or “go to the website and check out our stats”, which of the two is more likely to encourage you to go to the organization's website? The first one, right? The most compelling stories are those that appeal to emotion: those that are told from the heart, rather than a fact sheet.

Today, as people around the world celebrate the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day, The Belinda Stronach Foundation and 30 supporting businesses and organizations have announced the Second Annual G(irls)20 Summit 2011.  On October 18-20, a girl from each of the G20 countries, and the African Union, will come together to “debate, discuss and design innovative solutions for the economic challenges of our time.” The participants are all 18-20 year old young women and will be trained in business, media and public policy so that they can grow innovative solutions in their own communities.

Nonprofit Vote has recently created a toolkit help you improve your organization's voter engagement activities. It's designed to help you get started in planning and carrying out simple, effective, and nonpartisan voter engagement  - and all of the content is free and available online. 

I recently wrote about the British documentary “Us Now” and what I thought about its content. In my latest blog entry I'm talking about what can be learned from the web site and why it provides an excellent lesson in how to make advocacy films that extend beyond the screening room: http://sm4good.com/2009/11/24/open-source-documentary-advocate

I like well made advocacy videos - and the one that British Red Cross released today definitely falls into this category. It features Konnie Huq, a well know and very sexy tv-presenter (well known in the UK). The question is: "Would you still want to kiss her, if she was HIV positive?"

The reason this video was made is a survey that British Red Cross commissioned of 16-25-year-olds in the UK. The result:

Even though 85 per cent know you cannot catch HIV from a kiss, 69 per cent of respondents said they wouldn't kiss someone with HIV.

Or as British Red Cross puts it: "There is safety. And then there is stigma."

Today, over 800 student activists converged on Capitol Hill for the largest lobby day to prevent genocide in history. 

We were recently contacted by the Tactical Technology Collective, which describes itself as:

... An international NGO that provide human rights  advocates with guides, tools, training and consultancy to help them develop the skills and tactics they need to increase the impact of their campaigning.

They were hoping that NetSquared (that's us) would let you (that's you) know that they've got some guides and toolkits available online, and that these guides and toolkits might be of some interest to you.

Check it:

I've written up a summary about how we are using Facebook combined with news to support online organizing to stop climate change. This is based on our work with Hot Dish, the climate change news publication with the action team contest I posted about earlier. There are a bunch of examples and screenshots to help describe and explain the various capabilities available with this type of approach. We also just added a live chat feature on our news story pages that is worth checking out.

http://blog.newscloud.com/2009/03/applying-hot-dish-technology-to-online-organizing-.html