NetSquared recently received a $600,000 grant over three years from the Surdna Foundation, a long-time supporter of TechSoup. While at NTEN's 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference in March, I sat down with Vince Stehle, the Program Officer for the Nonprofit Sector Initiative at the Surdna Foundation. We talked about philanthropy, nonprofit technology trends, and Surdna's support of NetSquared.

During the past few months I've been researching the role of mobile phones as an emerging tool for participation in civil society.  The result is a series of Strategy Guides published by MobileActive that are designed to equip organizations around the world with the know-how to deploy effective mobile campaigns for a variety of types of activism and advocacy. The first Guide in this series (published today) focuses on using mobile phones in electoral and voter registration campaigns. Other Guides will focus on advocacy, fundraising, and mobile organizing.  This first Guide looks at uses of mobile phones in electoral monitoring (case studies in Thailand, the Philippines, and Montenegro), voter registration (U.S.-based Rock the Vote, MobileVoter, and Voto Latino), and candidate and political party support (case studies in Spain and U.S.).  The Guides are a joint project of MobileActive, Green Media Toolshed, and NTEN, and are made possible with support from the Surdna Foundation, a leader in supporting civic engagement and the use of technology in nonprofit organizations.  My personal thanks to everyone who spent time helping me with research and fact finding. You can grab MobileActive Strategy Guide #1 at http://www.mobileactive.org/guides/.