We have seen it and heard about it time and again, but the Obama campaign is capitalizing on social media use and setting some great examples for nonprofits and other social change campaigns looking to try something new.  Without any candidate endorsement, we can look at the success the Obama camp has had and try it out in our own work!

Newest in the playbook: iPhone app

On the official Barak Obama website ,supporters can now download and use the Obama iPhone application.  As the site explains, the features include:

This month's Net Tuesday San Francisco will focus on how to creating a successful web campaign for your nonprofit. Our speakers will be David Taylor, the Founder and Director of Radical Designs, and Jon Warnow, an organizer and technology coordinator whose most recent project was Step It Up. Jon received a Brower Youth Award in 2007. Check out the YouTube video (above) about his work with Step It Up.

Net Tuesday San Francisco will be held at the TechSoup/CompuMentor offices (525 Brannan Street Ste. 300) on March 11th from 6-8 PM. RSVP on Upcoming, Meetup or Facebook.

Speaker Bios:

Yesterday at the MediaPost Online Media, Marketing, and Advertising Video conference analysts declared that the starting point for campaign design must be research and testing. This is because the window has grown shorter in getting attention, developing commitment, and converting on your call-to-action. Themes, storylines, and next steps have to be quick, easy, urgent, and readily acceptable. So sort out the highest value concepts and propositions in a closed survey before you jump, so that you can proceed with confidence.

Before committing resources to particular milestones & objectives for a fundraising campaign that employs groups, events, and applications on Facebook, OpenSocial, and other platforms, test (AB testing) the relative appeal of various assets (themes, messages, actors, stories, text, images, video, wikis, audio, speakers) and tools for your campaign on a representative sample of your target audience/engaged membership.

Some set of elements fit together and perform as a whole better than others. Find out which combinations create the best results.

Once testing is complete, estimate:

I found something interesting in my garage earlier this week.  A tatty old piece of card?

Before the computer... or at least before they became part of our lives... I give you, The Telephone Tree.

I won't cross post the whole thing, but you can read the full story on nfp 2.0:

My Social Network, circa 1987

Does anyone else remember networking this way? It's so much easier now (I think).