Bloggers on Online Phenomena and Nonprofits: An Overview

Several recent blog posts have examined various benefits to nonprofits of newer online phenomena.

Graduate student Alyssa Walden writes about the sector’s increasing use of social-networking sites to attract donors and volunteers:

MySpace and Facebook are making it easier for non-profits to set up accounts, with both adding Impacts and Causes[, respectively,] for non-profits to use. These social networking sites allow the organizations to connect with a large audience that ranges in age.

Brett Meyer of the Nonprofit Technology Network discusses how nonprofits can quickly (and cheaply) leverage search engine optimization to drive online readers to their websites:

By integrating best practices into the standard operating procedures for your various teams, you can achieve significant SEO benefits without investing large amounts time.

And consultant Katherine Watier explains how YouTube’s Web analytics tool can help drive viewers to the videos your organization has posted online:

I think it’s important to know how any marketing initiative is performing, so if you haven’t already, I would encourage you to log into YouTube Insight to see how many people are looking at your YouTube videos.

The danger is that as soon as you master one online tactic, something newer has replaced it, but people are using the tools cited by these bloggers in such rising numbers that it seems a no-brainer to determine whether they might help your organization. There are plenty of websites and consultants and white papers and books that could set you up, but the posts above aren’t a bad place to start. | 501(c)