Our organization has been in an unusual position since Hurricane Ike slammed us a week and some change ago. Houston is just now reverting to normalcy... though a complete recovery is months away, if at all possible. The Blood Center shut down its operations for four days in response to Ike and began collecting again last Tuesday, calling for the public to give blood and replenish the supply.

To promote a new gorilla habitat, the London Zoo came up with a virtual gorilla. You download it to your desktop, then make sure all its needs are taken care of: food, water, etc. In time, the baby gorilla will grow into a mighty silverback. (I’m waiting for a virtual Jane Goodall to show up and park herself in the corner of my monitor, taking notes on my gorilla.)

Basically, this is a retread of the Tamagotchi phenomenon. It’s a cool toy that hooks kids in, educates them a little, and clutters up mom’s computer.

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:

As I've been (mentally) exploring the many ways for my NPO to effectively use social media tools, I've also been paying close attention to what others are doing. A great example of a non-profit on Flickr came up just the other day, when Houston's Opera in the Heights extended an invitation for local amateur photographers to a photo shoot for its upcoming production of Madama Butterfly.

A remote funding developer. They work from home, they take up less support costs and they don’t involve supervisory time - what’s not to love? I worked as a remote funding researcher recently, and while I’m not willing to flat out say it doesn’t work (comments welcome from people doing just fine at this job) I am willing to tell you what to watch out for.

We can empower others to do more through technology.

The net2thinktank question about non-profits on Flickr is what brought me here... but now that I'm all registered and logged on, I'm drawing a blank. The truth is, non-profits are doing lots of great things with Twitter, some of which are truly impressive.

My NPO has only begun to scratch the surface of social media. We have a Flickr account. We have a few pics up, some different versions of our logo. One on the main reasons we created a Flickr account was to put information out there for the local media to access when they want to feature us in a story. Thus far they've had to contact us for pictures, and since we haven't had many good pictures on hand anyway, we've missed out on some potentially great coverage.

The future of the media today truly is online. The amount of people switching to the internet for their daily habits such as reading the news, watching the news, shopping, research... everything can be found online, and can be used to our advantage. It shouldn't be any different for humanitarian-based initiatives. Non-profit organizations can use the internet and the power of voice and visual aid to their advantage online. That's where a website like www.goodtube.org can come in handy. It is completely non-profit, completely free to use, and is a channel for non-profits to use and share their videos with others.

The NetSquared, Cisco and the other sponsors put on a great event. Here are some of the folks I worked with at the registration table in the morning.

Jayson Fagar & Colleen Nagle, NetSquared staffers, at the registration table.

Just finished volunteering. In time to hear the opening speaker. Now we get to hear a 2 minute blurb from each of the featured non profits. The first one was about "micro" volunteering. Definitely want to check that one out.