Are you working on a project that aims to use technology, Internet applications and social media to fight corruption, protect human rights, or fight intolerance? Enter the One World Social Media Competition, share what you achieved and inspire others! The submission deadline is December 15, 2011.

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.

Social change strategy firm Communicopia has published a Non-Profit Digital Teams Benchmark Report that surveyed 67 nonprofits on their social media habits to find “how non-profit leaders manage digital and online initiatives in their organizations.” The Stanford Innovation Review presents a three-part series of lessons from the study on how digital teams - staff in organizations that deal with their online or web presence - work.

Handling social media for your organization can sometimes feel like a component of work that is difficult to control and too time-consuming to do well. New trends and tools are constantly popping up, as are comments and conversations that require responses.

One of the things that excites me about being part of the NetSquared community, and particularly about NetSquared Local, is that it engenders spaces where digital innovation actualizes the potential of the social web to address critical social problems offline. In the process, it is also deepening and strengthening - rather than weakening or diluting - the relationships and connections the social web affords us.

Twitter announced on August 13th that they will be integrating an analytics tool into the popular micro-blogging site. Organizations doing outreach on Twitter now have much more information about how those efforts are paying off.

The recent UK riots took place between 6 and 10 August 2011 in cities and towns across England, including several boroughs of London. The riots were supposedly provoked by the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by Metropolitan Police two days before the riots began. Although I’d say that the main characteristics of the riots, like any spontaneous and grass root movements,  were those of chaos and randomness, the rioters were somehow organized as the riots spread all over the English cities. The blame for enabling rioters to gather and communicate in real time   has been put on social media.

It is clear that the rise of social media provides many unique opportunities for nonprofit organizations to fundraise, engage supporters and reach target audiences. What has been much harder to discern is determining whether those social media efforts create positive, measurable results.

Participating in social media takes time and resources, things which lean-running nonprofits usually lack. How can these organizations measure whether social media is an effective use of scarce resources, a waste of time or something in between? 

Empowering the Charitable Sector with Interactive Technologies II

15th September, LBi London

Please join us for the 2011 Nonprofit Marketing Conference in DC, July 11-13.
The line-up is amazing, the presenters an incredible mix of nonprofit marketing experts.

Here are a few of the tech-related highlights: