Well, it’s Blog Action Day once again. I’m struggling with this year’s topic, climate change, because I simply don’t have strong feelings about it. (I also feel this is kind of a repeat of 2007’s topic, and I didn’t have much to say then either.) Yes, the climate is changing. Is it caused by man? Even if it is, can we do anything about it? Would our resources be better spent fighting it or figuring out ways to deal with its effects? I dunno.
So instead of weighing in on the political aspects of climate change, I’m going to share some resources on the scientific aspects. For example, NASA has an excellent list of resources. And for all those concerned about global warming, check out the other side of the coin: mini ice ages. And lastly, perhaps we can learn from our past through environmentally-themed historic markers (or, perhaps more fittingly, markers about natural disasters). Hey, I’m a Markeroon – that’s what I do.
So yeah. Maybe next year the folks at BAD will pick a different topic, one about which I actually have something to say.
Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.
Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.
1. Write a Blog Post
Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.
You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.
2. Share Stories with Friends
Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.
You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.
3. Follow Charities on Social Networks
In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.
Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.
You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:
Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.
It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.
5. Find Volunteer Opportunities
Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.
For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.
6. Embed a Widget on Your Site
Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.
Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.
7. Organize a Tweetup
You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.
As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.
Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.
If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.
9. Sign or Start a Petition
There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.
Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.
10. Organize an Online Event
Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.
In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.
Bonus: Think Outside the Box
Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.
Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.
The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.
Special thanks to VPS.net
A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.
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About the “10 Ways” Series
The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.
Here in the US, Blog Action Day is technically tomorrow, but the posts are already rolling in (and I suspect I’ll be busy enough tomorrow that I’ll forget to post), so I suppose I’ll go ahead and weigh in.
This year’s topic is poverty. I have no solutions. So many people are focused on government-sponsored solutions to poverty, as if throwing money at people will make the problem go away. The simple truth is that the extreme poverty of so-called third world countries is mostly caused by corrupt governments. It’s not that the rest of the world isn’t helping, it’s that the politicians are intercepting everything rather than letting it get distributed. I don’t know how to solve that, except to get rid of the corrupt governments. How to do that is another question. As we’ve proven in multiple wars, installing democracy by force doesn’t work so well.
In the United States, in cases where laziness or misplaced priorities aren’t to blame (which happens more than most would like to admit in this land of victims), often the problem is inadequate education. This is not the fault of the individual, but rather where they live. Unless you can afford private school, the quality of your education is a total crapshoot. In short, the public education system is failing us. Throwing money at it isn’t the answer; it needs to be restructured. Administrators and teachers need more accountability: there is such thing as a bad teacher and they need to be fired. Likewise, good teachers need to be rewarded, rather than simply earning the same amount as everybody else in the union. Children need to be challenged and inspired: most kids find school boring, tedious, and largely irrelevant. When it’s difficult they simply give up, having zero interest in progressing. They need to know why they are learning as much as what and how.
This is a fixable problem. You can start by educating yourself. Pick up a book – even a Dummies guide – on some subject that has always baffled you. Read up on chemistry, or Chinese history, or economic theory. Then talk to someone else about it. Become a tutor, if you feel so inclined. But whatever you do, never stop learning, and never stop teaching.
Mark your calendars, kids, Blog Action Day 2008 takes place on October 15th. This year’s theme is poverty. The idea is that on the day in question, you post in your blog about the specified theme. That’s it. It’s about getting people to think, not just to open their wallets (which is usually what these mass blogging activities usually amount to). I have no idea if I’ll be participating. It’s on a Wednesday, so it really depends on whether or not I remember to do it.
Today is Blog Action Day. The basic idea is for everyone to blog about a single issue. This year that issue is the environment. I’m too tired to think up original content tonight, so I’m going to recommend some environmentally-themed books:
* Zodiac by Neal Stephenson: A fast-paced novel where eco-terrorists are (more or less) the heroes.
* Saving the World in Your Spare Time by Laura Klotz: A friendly little book full of tips not only on helping the environment, but on making the world a better place in general.
* Barbapapa’s New House by Annette Tison: The Barbapapa family, sick of all the pollution, leave the people and get a new house. One of my favorite books as a child.