You've heard of poetry slams, events where poets compete to perform the best delivery of orignal poerty, but have you heard of pitch slams? Innovate!100 is a new competition challenging start-ups to create the best pitch and compete for money, prizes, publicity, and the opportunity to be introduced to world-class partners and investors.

Green Mountain Coffee and Ashoka's Changemakers are organizing the Revelation to Action Competition to find the most innovative ideas to inspire community action. From now until April 21, 2010 you can enter your idea for motivating local citizens to strengthen communities across New England and New York. The best innovations will be awarded prizes totaling USD $50,000, and other prizes are available as well.

In recent days, Causes has left MySpace and IdeaBlob has shutdown. To some, these events were unimportant. In reaction to the Causes announcement, Economist bureau chief Matthew Bishop tweeted “Who knew it was on MySpace?” to which New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom tweeted back “No kidding.”  But to many people active in online social action communities, these events had deeper meaning.

Visit the Tactical Philanthropy blog to read today's guest post from Amy Sample Ward, NetSquared’s Global Community Development Manager.

The Mobile Citizen Program launched earlier this week, and it provides some great funding opportunities for organizations working in mobile technology throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). 

The program focuses on finding citizen-centric strategies to provide mobile services for low-income areas, both urban and rural.  They express interest in creating models for implementation of mobile technology which have growth potential.  The program also seeks to support research into the social and economic impact of mobile technology on local communities. 

Are you a social entrepreneur or the leader of a social venture, or do you know someone with a social venture that could benefit from capacity building, in-depth consultation on their business plan and mentoring by Santa Clara University faculty and Silicon Valley start-up veterans?

The Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™) is a capacity building program for leaders of social benefit enterprises run by Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology and Society.

Enter now for a chance to attend.

If the more you communicate, the more impact you can have, the more you potentially can create more support for your cause, get donors, etc, should funders look at nonprofits who are communicating more in a more favorable light?

And should every facebook event post, every myspace friend, be counted towards that communication quota?

Or are nonprofits in new media investing program money in something that has yet to show a serious $$ per person return? 

Are funders even looking at communication as something worth supporting?

What is your experience?

My blog is located at:

http://theraiser.blogspot.com/

i would love to figure out how to use all these new technologies to make our work easier and more effective, bu who pays for implementing all these fabulous tools and technologies? Even with open source software, low capacity and grassroots nonprofit organizations like mine still have to identify a staff person or key volunteer to implement, manage and support the technolgy. How do I identify that person? how do i motivate current staff and volunteers to add one more responsibility, one more task to an already overscheduled, overfull agenda? Where do i find qualified volunteers who are both motivated and committed to such a large task? how do I manage and supervise them?I think that many of these tools are merely tools for technoogy's sake - without any real vison about who will actually use them.The real digital divide is between organizations - those of us who deveote all our energy to our programs just don't have the resources to implement new technologies.