We very recently took a look at what is and is not getting read on the NetSquared blogs and figured that the information we came upon will be as useful to your content development strategy as it will be to ours.

Here are a few things that jumped right out at us (the bold is straight from the report, followed immediately by my commentary):

I was going to write about all the excellent non-profit blogs out there that there are to be read, but Beth’s Blog already made a fantastic entry to get you started on this (granted it focuses exclusively on Gen X/Y/Millennial blogs - but we’re Gen X/Y and it’s just to get you started).

A confession is that I don’t actually read a whole lot of non-profit oriented blogs and sites, mostly because it’s hard to find ones that don’t oversimplify their advice to the point of it being useless. Consider a recent example I came across on the subject of online fundraising:

Staying on top of the best times to email newsletters is imperative in the world of nonprofit 2.0. Also important is knowing which Twitter apps work best for you, as is keeping up with the countless other dos and don'ts of Internet etiquette. Getting overwhelmed by this ever-changing set of rules and compilations of best practices, however, is counterproductive when it makes one forgetful of the importance of maintaining human contact.

I left Australia on Sunday afternoon and arrived in the Bay Area on Sunday morning. I'm here in Silicon Valley for Netsquared Conference and last night the conference got underway... Read more: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/05/im-video-bloggi.html

My friend and colleague, Beth Kanter, asked me for advice about how A/B multivariate testing applies to the design and execution of calls-to-action in the non-profit sector, with a particular eye toward how we leverage the social graph. What follows is my response to her question, from which I would hope that others will draw some benefit.

Malcolm Gladwell reveals the key to success in a presentation that he made to the TED conference in 2004 entitled “Learning from Spaghetti Sauce”.

Stephanie Strom published an article in the New York Times today about the loss of private data in the NPO world due to an assualt on the Convio site: Hackers Cracked Charities’ Addresses and Passwords. The article describes the scale and scope of the losses. Both Beth Kanter and Allan Benamer contributed to the text of this article.

At my blog, studio 501c, I asked readers to point me toward examples of nonprofits that have engaged young people in blogging. I also asked for examples of safety guidelines the nonprofits used as a result. I started this research, on behalf of a friend who works for a youth-engaging nonprofit, by emailing Britt Bravo, Beth Kanter, and Marshall Kirkpatrick, all of whom I want to be like when I grow up (and all of whom I finally met face-to-face at Blogher in Chicago this past summer). I'm grateful to them for getting the ball rolling.