Social Media & Nonprofits

They can be very congruent, as this article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy notes.

An excerpt.

“As the world has discovered through the grass-roots revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia —driven in part by messages on Twitter and Facebook—online social media can be powerful tools for spurring social change. And increasingly, both fledgling nonprofits and long-established charities are taking up those tools in issue advocacy.

“The trick, say nonprofit advocacy experts, is to pair virtual campaigns with flesh-and-blood action. “I don’t think broad change is likely to happen exclusively online,” says Chris Sarette, director of business operations at Invisible Children, a charity started in 2004 by young filmmakers to raise awareness about the plight of young people in war-torn East Africa.

“The charity has used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and its own video-rich Web site to organize hundreds of student rallies across America to oppose the use of child soldiers in northern Uganda. In 2009 the San Diego group’s protest outside Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, in Chicago, covered on Twitter by protestors, became one of the top-10 Twitter topics of that day and resulted in a very visible guest spot for Invisible Children on Ms. Winfrey’s talk show.

“Last May, when President Obama signed a bill that is expected to reduce child soldiering, leaders of Invisible Children were invited to the White House for the signing.

“An astounding 97 percent of nonprofits are using social media, far surpassing even the business world,” says Nora Ganim Barnes, co-author of a study released last year by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research.

“The embrace of such embryonic media (Facebook started in 2004, Twitter in 2006) has led to an era of creative experimentation, says Jamie Henn, communications director for the environmental activist group 350.org, in Oakland, Calif.

“And, he says, such experiments are seeing results. Last fall, through digital organizing on its Web and Facebook sites, his group mobilized people in all but three countries around the world to work on climate change in their own communities. In 7,347 places, people planted trees, installed solar panels and wind turbines, weatherized buildings, and planted urban gardens.

“Social media provides a place where people can share the work they are doing in the real world and gain a sense of momentum and community by seeing similar stories from around the planet,” Mr. Henn says. “It meant a lot for a group of friends in Las Cruces, N.M., after putting up a solar panel on a homeless shelter, to see a story about a group from Johannesburg, South Africa, doing the same thing. People get drawn into the Web site and see these amazing things others are doing, and they figure they can go out and do them as well.”

“Using social media to spur activism is such a new approach that many groups are still learning what works and what doesn’t.”