Goals and Ideas for Nonprofit Blogs

I came across an interesting blog entry and presentation at Community Organizer 2.0 titled Strategic Blogging for Nonprofits.

According to the blog entry, there are three questions that should be asked when working on a blog for an organization.

1. Who is your audience?

2. Why are they coming to your blog?

3. What do you want them to do?

The presentation has some ideas of topics nonprofits can blog about.

Here are some ideas:

• News/Updates
• Campaign Information
• Behind the Scenes
• Call to Action
• Personal Stories
• Achievements
  

Links for May

Here are some interesting websites and blog entries that I wanted to with my readers-

• 9 Reasons Social Media and the Web Can Save Wildlife from National Wildlife Foundation's Blog
• Five Things To Do With Your Nonprofit Blog from Notes for Non-Profits
• Non Profit Website Design: Examples and Best Practices from Smashing Magazine
• Web Design Industry Jargon: Glossary and Resources from Smashing Magazine
• U.S. Government Channel on YouTube
  

Government Resources About Earth Day and the Environment

Here are some resources from the U.S. Government about Earth Day and the environment:

Earth Day - US Government Portal

Earth Day from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) - Earth Day 2009

Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: Earth Day (U.S. Department of Energy)

Remarks at the State Department's "Greening Diplomacy" Earth Day Event

The White House - Press Office - Presidential Proclamation - Earth Day

Earth Day Resources from Library of Congress

Use of Social Media and the Internet on Inauguration Day

Here are some interesting facts on how people used social media and the internet to follow the Inauguration-

• The Presidential Inaugural Committee setup an inauguration channel on YouTube, a twitter account, and a flickr account
• People posted and followed updates on twitter using #inaug09
• A graph on the twitter blog shows the number of twitter updates
• Photos were shared on Flickr using the inauguration tag
• According to the Google Blog, the top keywords used during the day on Google were live inauguration coverage, inauguration day 2009 streaming, listen to inauguration live
• A graph on Google shows that the number of searches dropped from when the presidential oath began and when the Inaugural speech ended

Links for more information-

Inauguration Day: Social Media Goes to Washington

Interactive Inauguration of Obama Is Just the Beginning

Obama's Is First Web 2.0 Inauguration

Live-Blogging the Social Media Inauguration

Official Google Blog: Search findings from the U.S. presidential inauguration

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