5 Useful Posts Around the Web This Week

5 Great Posts from around the Web

Here are some items we found around the web, and we thought would be of interest to nonprofit organizations, and the people running them.

I’ve tried to list a good variety of topics, if there are topics you would like covered just let us know!  These are just a few of the many people I follow.  I encourage everyone that is not using a reader and following bloggers they like to start doing so today.  There is so much great information out there.

From Mass Nonprofit: Nonprofits continue to Outpace Businesses in Use of Social Media According to a recent study by UMass Dartmouth, top organizations have found a new and exciting way to engage employees, volunteers and donors. According to them over 97% of charitable organizations are using some form of social media, including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, video blogging, wikis, and Twitter. Links to the study can be found in the article.

From Chronicle of Philanthropy: Charity Watchdog Releases List of Reasons Groups Fail to Meet Standards Compliance and worrying about compliance is a complex issue that all nonprofits struggle with:

“Insufficient transparency, inadequate board activity, and the lack of assessment of charity effectiveness account for the most failures in compliance,” the alliance said in a statement.

The Wise Giving Alliance said that evaluation of the charities that provided it with requested information in the past two years found that 56 percent of charities met all 20 standards while groups in the remaining 44 percent did not meet one or more of the standards.

From Envisioning the Future International: 4 Ways to Grow Your Non-Profit: Most groups and organizations want to grow, and here are some things to consider when looking for growth: promote, partnership, diversifying funding sources, and a growth strategy.

From NTen: Optimizing Your Site for Social Media, Jeff Patrick of Common Knowledge, explains that your site is getting found from Twitter, Facebook, and many other social media sites, are you prepared, do you know where your visitors are coming from? Jeff talks about analytics, and things to consider when optimizing your site to be “social”.

Ideaware released a new ebook: The Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide created in partnership with the New Organizing Institute, the Decision Guide shows a step-by-step process to assist you in deciding what social media channels make sense for your organization including a workbook and guide. With examples of nonprofits that have seen value in using Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Photo Sharing Sites, Video Sharing Sites

Join us for our next Networking for Non-Profit Event tonight!