In response to Britt's post about NetSquared's "2007 Best of the Nonprofit Social Web" awards, I humbly submit my own organization, The Nature Conservancy, as an entrant in the Best Use of the Social Web for Raising Awareness by a Nonprofit category.

2007 has been a breakthrough year for The Nature Conservancy's web marketing efforts on the social web, particularly on social news and bookmarking web sites. After about nine months of building up trust and credibility in some of the major social news and bookmarking networks, we finally saw results in a big way this year, including:

• Over 183,000 visitors from Digg, along with 25 appearances on the Digg homepage (!)
• Over 52,000 visitors from Wikipedia
• Over 34,000 visitors from Netscape/Propeller

All of those visitors came to our web site, www.nature.org for major news events, announcements, and conservaiton achievements in the 2007 calendar year. These social news network placements also drew the attention of numerous bloggers and online media outlets, which led to additional web traffic and increased search engine positioning.

Best of all, we achieved this success in social news networks by being good community members: we didn't spam, but rather submitted content from other web sites as well as our own; we were fully accountable in our profiles about who we are and for whom we worked; and we followed terms of use restrictions to the letter.

Additionally, for the Best Use of the Social Web for Advocacy by a Nonprofit category, I'd like to nominate the Humane Society of the United States. Carie Lewis of HSUS has not only garnered lots of nonprofit media attention for her efforts online, but her advocacy campaigns for her organizaiton have been highly successful. From efforts to stop Canada's seal hunting to winning a $50,000 challenge grant from Microsoft, to her non-stop efforts to get her network contacts to take action around the Michael Vick scandal, to the brilliant ways she cross-links her MySpace and Facebook constituents for HSUS to get them further engaged online, I've come to believe that there's nothing Carie can't do. When does she sleep? She's an ace!

Finally, for the Best Social Web Tool for Nonprofits category, I'd like to nominate the Causes application on Facebook by Project Agape. Never before has it been so easy to leverage social connections on a major, widely established network to raise money for a cause and communicate directly with constituents. And with over 219,000 daily active users, Causes has shown wide adoption and acceptance within the nonprofit community, but also within Facebook's general usership -- literally anyone can use Causes to start fundraising for a charity that they care about.

I didn't even start The Nature Conservancy's Cause -- the daughter of one of our staff members beat me to it. But I contacted her in order to become a co-administrator and with just five months work, I've increased the membership by almost 10x, personally recruiting over 100 individual members. If you haven't taken a look at Causes for your non-profit, it's never too late to start!