Facebook launches suicide-prevention efforts

People share a large portion of their life on Facebook. In fact, many customers clock in over one hour every day on the social network. People who are a danger to themselves may now be documented by buddies and family to the social network. In partnership with suicide prevention agencies, instant chat help will be provided. People really need this help but do not always know where to get it.

Surge in suicidal shares

The Occupy Wall Street movement began in New York, but has spread across the U.S. thanks, in no small part, to the new digital tools available to the protesters. While Occupy Wall Street (#occupy) has yet to issue a statement on their demands, we can already learn a lesson from how they are using web and mobile technology to organize, collaborate and spread the word.

A woman stops in a BART subway station in San Francisco to send a text from her phone. But she's not telling her friends she'll be late for happy hour. By sending a text to a location-based app, she's trying to save the Earth.

Through this "check-in" on Foursquare, that woman is making a donation to EarthJustice, an environmental law organization. This is one of the many ways that nonprofits are taking advantage of a new generation of applications that utilize physical location information to tie together the online and offline worlds. Location-based apps use GPS or other physical location information to map and keep track of users interacting with the service.

It has been a while since I have posted on the WCDP blog.  This is a way of provding an update and informing about the projects we have been working on. 

We have, for the past 4 years, been providing micro credit loans to women in Uganda.  Currently we have provided nearly $10,000 in loans to almost 100 women over the course of 7 loan cycles.  We have had over 99% of the loans repaid without default. 

"We've just got to keep on keepin' on" I say to my boss as we try to understand why our efforts to engage our fans and followers have flopped again and again. But a question arises in the back of my mind; what am I expecting here? To be overwhelmed with RTs and comments? To be scrambling to keep up with it all? Right now, it's a slow trickle of engagement here and there. But it seems there is a hook we haven't baited properly, no one's biting.

I just went through and made another round of improvements to the Kabissa Connections project on Netsquared to Build Reputation and Trust of Organizations By Revealing Relationships Online. I'm feeling quite good about it and am very excited about the possibilities for Kabissa to serve the African civil society sector in a new way.

For this month's Net2 Think Tank, we asked you to share your tools, tactics, and best practices for promoting your volunteer opportunities online. There are many tools and resources available - so finding the ones that work best for your audience, and finding the ways that you can use them effectively can be a task. Below is a list of networks, tools, and best practices that will help steer you in the right direction.  

Over the years my family and I have worked together to help my Grandmother get wired. She now uses Google Search, reads her news online, sends and receives email, and even uses Facebook to check-in with family and friends. Using the internet isn't a new concept to my Grandmother, though it's not really something she finds very intuitive either. That said, she understands the power of these tools, and relishes the opportunity to learn more.

My Grandmother also has a whole network of friends who are at various stages of computer use/online adoption. Recently, she asked me if I could share any resources for her and her friends to be able to network, learn and socialize on the internet.

Many nonprofits and libraries are using Facebook to interact with their constituencies and reach out to new audiences – but what’s the best way to get your organization started on this hugely popular social networking site?

In this webinar Kami Griffiths will interview social media consultant John Haydon, who will walk through the essential steps to establishing and managing a successful Facebook presence for a nonprofit or library. We will also hear from Gabe O’Neill of Kids Are Heroes, who will share lessons learned from developing their own Facebook page. Get practical how-to information, learn best practices, ask questions, and leave with action items that will help you create an engaging Facebook presence for your organization.

Originally published on the TechSoup Blog.

There's been a lot of discussion over the past week about Causes leaving MySpace and becoming a Facebook-only application. In a sense, the news isn't that surprising (being a for-profit company, Causes must focus on platforms generating the most commercial interest), but it's raised a lot of questions about how closely the nonprofit community aligns itself with commercial tools.

My colleague Amy wrote in a Stanford Social Innovation Review column, "The debate around social media and the Internet in general as a leveling force is still heated from all sides. Yes you can claim that anyone has the power to blog, but that's really only the people who have access to the tools and the time and the empowerment. The access debate aside, the removal of Causes from MySpace where there are active communities of supporters means 'equal opportunity activism' is defined by only certain communities." If nonprofits have the goal of making more resources available to more people, what happens when the tools we're using seem to undermine those goals? Amy points out danah boyd's much-discussed research on the socioeconomic and racial differences between MySpace and Facebook users. Justin Massa goes so far as to call the move redlining: "Causes' justification sounds an awful lot like what financial institutions and the real estate industry used to say about poor and minority neighborhoods."

Marshall at ReadWriteWeb snaps:

Causes co-founder Sean Parker poses sitting with crossed legs in his photo on the company profile page; his mission statement begins with the words "According to the historical Buddha..." It's hard to imagine a beneficent religious figure that would ditch MySpace for Facebook, isn't it? Perhaps "the historical Buddha" would choose to pull up stakes from the 11th most popular website in the world if the people were too shallow and go to the hip social network where the money-raising action is.