Crime Reports and Social Media

The company I work at, CQ Press which is a division of Sage Publications, recently released the annual crime report publication. How does your city rank? Check out the rankings at
City Crime Rankings 2008.


After looking at the rankings, I started wondering if social media could be used to report crimes. In my opinion, the social media tools that would be most effective would be blogs, rss feeds, maps, and Twitter.

Here are some examples and articles about the use of maps and Twitter to report crime:

Oakland Crimespotting

Los Angeles Police Department Crime Maps

Police a-Twitter over news alerts

Mountain View Police Join Twitter

Things Nonprofits Should Think About When Using Social Media

Before nonprofits begin using social media, they need to ask the following questions:

• What are your goals for using social media?
  (Example: Is your goal to fundraise, spread the word the organization, or provide information about a campaign?)
• Who are you trying to reach and what social media tools do they use?
• What social media tools do your current subscribers, donors, and volunteers use?
• What are other organizations doing with social media?
• What tools will the organization be using to spread news about the organization? Each time you begin a new campaign or bring awareness about an issue, you need to figure out what tools you will be using.
  

Questions to Ask When Putting Social Media To Action

• Who will be responsible for social media tasks?
  
• Do you have what is needed to complete a task?
  
• What is involved in each form of social media?


• Did you put information in your e-newsletter or website about where the organization can be found on social media sites?
  

Digital Video and YouTube - Do you have the equipment needed to create a video? Who will be making the video? Who will be posting it on YouTube or the organization's website? Will the video be posted on the organization's blog or social networking sites?

Blogging - Will one person or more staff be updating the blog? How often will it be updated? What content will you include?

Social Networking Sites and Groups - Who will be responsible for creating and monitoring the organization's page? How will you decide who to approve as a friend? How often will you post information to the group? How often will you read comments and respond to them?

Blog Outreach - Who will be looking for blogs to see what people are writing about the organization and related issues? Will you connect to these bloggers by writing comments on blog entries? Are you going to keep track of how many blogs mention the organization or write about a campaign?

Social Bookmarking - How many people bookmarked a certain item? What tags were used? Who will be monitoring social bookmarking sites?

Evaluation Questions

• What tools worked and what did not work?
  
• What would you do differently?
  
• Did you raise money and how much did you raise?


• Did you gain new supporters?
  
• Are people viewing videos?
  
• Are people subscribing to the blog's feed or writing comments?
  
• What are people saying about the organization or mission?
  
• What topics are people interested in?

Ways Nonprofits Can Use Flickr

1. Create an account for your organization to post photos

Examples: Humane Society of the United States, Oxfam America

2. Create a group for your organization, issue, or event

Examples: Relay for Life Group, Greenpeace

3. Use tags to share and describe photos

Examples: raceforthecure, earthday

4. Hold photo contests

Example: The Nature Conservancy holds a digital photo contest each year. More information at The Nature Conservancy group.

* This entry was written for the net2thinktank for August about nonprofits and Flickr

NetSquared Mashup Projects

The NetSquared Conference is taking place right now where 21 Mashup Projects are being featured.

I voted a few months ago for ten projects I liked from the Mashup Project Gallery. Four of the ones I voted for were selected to be a featured project!

Listed below are the projects I like the best of the 21 featured projects-

• City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery
• Greener One
• Map This!
• MoveSmart.org
• My Green Map: Sharing your Sustainable Worldview
• OneWorld Connect
  

The Environment and the Internet

I just read an interesting blog entry at comScore Voices titled The Internet Goes Green. It analyzes the number of unique visitors to three environmental related websites (epa.gov, treehugger.com, and freecycle.org) from the past year.

It also shows a few environmental related search terms and the number of times it was searched for in Feb 2007 and Feb 2008. The results showed that 6 of the 7 terms showed an increase. (earth day, recycle, hybrid cars, pollution, ecotourism, and climate change) Global warming was the most searched term but it decreased in the number of searches.


Here is one statement that got my attention in this blog entry -

"So even though we may be less likely to partake in an Earth Day rally today than in the 1970s, it's clear that environmental activism is alive and well – it's just that much of it has moved online."

Five Web 2.0 Things Nonprofits Can Do

Beth has asked "What can you do in ten minutes using Web 2.0 to be a better nonprofit professional?". Her goal is to reach 100 things!

Here are five things I came up with-

1) Fundraise online by using a fundraising widgets (Examples: SixDegrees or ChipIn) or Facebook applications (Example: Causes).

2) Create a fan page on Facebook or page on MySpace for your organization.

3) Write online petitions.

4) Promote your orgnanization's presence on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and other sites by placing badges/links on your website.

5) Make a video and post it on YouTube, then embed it on your organization's website.



Do you have an idea to add to the list? Read Beth's Blog to learn how to submit your idea and to read other ideas.

LOLseals Photo Caption Contest

The Humane Society is having a contest where you put captions on seal photos. The deadline to enter is Friday, March 21. More information at LOLseals Photo Caption Contest.

*The photo above is one of the photos you can choose to write a caption for.

American Cancer Society Videos

The American Cancer Society has started posting videos online. Here are links to two of their videos:

History of the American Cancer Society

Jamaican Cancer Society 2007

Fighting World Hunger with FreeRice.com

The Sacramento Bee has an article about FreeRice.com, a website ending world hunger and promoting world literacy.

FreeRice.com visitors test their vocabulary by selecting synonyms for words from a multiple choice list. When the right answer is selected, 20 grains of rice are donated to the hungry.

These donations are paid by the site's advertisers and the rice is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program.