One of my projects over the last few months was to write and get approval for social media staff guidelines for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). I’m sharing them because I hope that they will be useful to other organizations who are working on similar documents.
One of the most persistent and hardest to dispel myths in social media is that of the “quick win”. Since Facebook, Twitter etc. are easy to use from a technical point of view and since there are always stories of people getting an insane amount of attention through these channels, many people assume that there is no work involved. Scott Stratten has recently posted an excellent, short video (1:52 min) explaining why you can’t expect to open a social media account[...]
The Swedish International Development Agency has launched “The World Log” a new catalogue for web content related to aid and development content. It lists blogs, videos and photos by geography and topic – and it looks really pretty! Great chance for high level exposure The site is still a bit buggy (sometimes the user interface switches to Swedish so you have “Läs mer” instead of “Read more”) but if you have anything to do with aid or development, then you should definitely[...]
Last week I gave a presentation at the IFRC’s communications managers meeting about social media in general and how we should use it. Below you find the largest part of that presentation. I removed the bits that were focusing very much on internal processes and steps that need to be taken in-house in order to make social media work. (Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers and staff can download the complete presentation from FedNet, the IFRC’s extranet.) I hope you like it.[...]
One of the things I love about my job is that I constantly find out about incredibly useful or smart things that people have come up with. Right now I’m in awe of the the new Emergency Items Catalogue (www.ifrc.org/emergency-items) that was just released by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Metric? Imperial? Who cares? Imagine you show up at a disaster and you’ve brought a few pumps[...]
I just discovered that, the day after I posted “We are not funny – why nonprofits suck at being viral”, Mashable’s Josh Catone published “Top 10 YouTube Videos for Social Good”. This is a great list and I really recommend that you watch all of them for inspiration. While I don’t want to duplicate what he has already done, here are my top three – and my two cents for each of them: Because we are all connected I think this[...]
Rebecca Leaman has created a list of “100 Online Tools for Non-Profits”. What I like most about it: she doesn’t focus on the cool and trendy but on the workhorses that help to run any organization.
TED is a non-profit organization that invites interesting people to talk about interesting things. But what really makes their site stand out is how well they understand video presentation online.
