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.

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.

This is a lightly revised note that I shared with 157 fellow Net Tuesday Organizers this past Friday evening, concerning Causes' recent announcement to 'abandon 184,674 users' on MySpace. Here's a quick way for you to share it on Twitter & Facebook.

Dear friends,

I hope this note finds you well on a lovely evening. Or morning. Or afternoon. We're a truly global bunch - so this note could find you at just about any time of day or night. Which offers somewhat of an introduction to something I want to share with you.

So much of the work we do is around connecting people across boundaries, from different countries & time-zones (from Douala to Tokyo to Vancouver) to different ethnicities, classes, and cultures within our own communities. While we don't have a stated mission, it may be fair to say we use the web to strengthen the fabric of our social ties with the intent of weaving together a better world. We use and push for tools that break down barriers, help diverse voices get heard, and bring more of us together for the beautiful array of changes we all seek.

Sadly, Something recently happened in the world of web tools for social change that seems to go against this -- of what we aspire for and work towards with a democratic web.

In somewhere around 100 different ways on this blog, I've tried to stress the importance of showing over telling. Very recently I was happy to speak with Bryan Tighe of Collective Lens, a beautiful and comprehensive web-based photozine that helps small nonprofits and causes show their stories and impact in powerful and touching ways. The site does a wonderful job of realizing and putting to work the impact of the visual, especially with regard to telling the story of an initiative, a people, and/or a country, and shows a lot of potential for helping organizations find support by sharing their impact visually.

Google has apparently applied for a series of patents that will enable it to a put a value on how connected you are, within your social network. Akin to the "pagerank" system used by the search giant for valuing the popularity of websites, "friendrank" would help identify individuals who are particularly influential within circles of friends.

A chat with Susan Gordon, Non-Profit Coordinator for Causes. She tells us a thing or two about how Causes works, how a medical student used Causes to create a 3.3 million+ strong campaign to fight cancer, and how to get your fumigator to join your Cause.

I will give you some actual nuts and bolts, but let me first say this: all good online fundraisers have two basic directions they work in - in and out. ‘In’ is a webpage, where people visit you. ‘Out’ is as in reaching out, through emails, smsing, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook etc etc etc. You are aiming for flow between the two directions. Because - just like all really successful fundraising - this is not so much about asking a bunch of people for money. Actually, it’s about a personal exchange - exactly what the internet was made for. Hold that thought, here come the nuts and bolts…

(to read the rest of this post, click here!)

Engaging the youth!

What does it take? Whether you're on the board, on staff, or a volunteer, this is on every nonprofit's mind. And if you're looking around yourself at all, you're attempting to plan ahead. Developing support for your nonprofit means communicating. A lot.

What about making people laugh?
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=529102816568&ref=nf

Care2's nonprofit online marketing blog, frogloop, recently released a dual post on social networking worthy of a read from even the most staunch social networking gurus. Both the ROI Calculator and The Long, Long Tail of Facebook Causes articles will help you determine whether marketing on social networking makes sense for you.

The first one, an ROI Calculator, will help you calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator.

Just enter the starting assumptions like cost per hour of staff/volunteers, social network "friends" recruited per week, and the average response rate for outreach or advocacy mailings, and the tool calculates results automatically. This is a fantastic way to help you determine whether or not developing a presence on social networking sites is worth your hard earned dollars and precious time.

Sometimes sharing stuff is better than being forever embarrassed of one’s own creative urges, regardless how critical we might be of ourselves.

Perhaps partially as a result of our explorations in the many social networking tools which have been shown to us at Net Tuesday and at N2Y2, I went nuts and joined 10 social networks on NING, while thinking about the identity of the one that I might create.