Care2's nonprofit online marketing blog, frogloop, recently released a dual post on social networking worthy of a read from even the most staunch social networking gurus. Both the ROI Calculator and The Long, Long Tail of Facebook Causes articles will help you determine whether marketing on social networking makes sense for you.

The first one, an ROI Calculator, will help you calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator.

Just enter the starting assumptions like cost per hour of staff/volunteers, social network "friends" recruited per week, and the average response rate for outreach or advocacy mailings, and the tool calculates results automatically. This is a fantastic way to help you determine whether or not developing a presence on social networking sites is worth your hard earned dollars and precious time.

Sometimes sharing stuff is better than being forever embarrassed of one’s own creative urges, regardless how critical we might be of ourselves.

Perhaps partially as a result of our explorations in the many social networking tools which have been shown to us at Net Tuesday and at N2Y2, I went nuts and joined 10 social networks on NING, while thinking about the identity of the one that I might create.

Youth Venture, sister program of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public (www.ashoka.org), is one of three finalists in the MySpace Impact Awards. Youth Venture is building a global movement of young social changemakers by inspiring and investing in young people around the world to launch and lead their own social ventures. Youth Venture is using it's innovative new website, www.genv.net, to connect young people across the globe in a movement of youth-led social change. Youth who have already launched Ventures can create their own profiles of their teams and can read about and connect to other teams.

We loved meeting everyone during the NetSquared frenzy- it was so great to learn about your projects.

So we definitely wanted to make this one of the first places we went to when we started signing up causes. Right now, we're building a base of nonprofits before we launch.

But I won't talk your ear off here- check out our tour and, most importantly, give us a shout out to tell us what you think (or go ahead and sign up).

http://www.cauzoo.com/cauzoo-nonprofit-info1.php .

The join page is at the end.

Good luck to the conference goers and everyone else!

~Phil, Cauzoo

I must admit, when Daniel Ben-Horin asked me to be an advocate I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into. Having the chance to participate in this event, however, is pretty exciting.

I've started with two projects: one that's using MySpace to connect non-profits and help them network and use MySpace successfully, and one that hopes to use Creative Commons licenses and an open market to change the way music, writing and art is distributed and valued.

I've commented on each of the projects:

Joshua Levy at the Personal Democracy Forum has a post today about the use of MySpace for political campaigns and by advocacy organizations. He interviews Scott Goodstein, who has worked on the Save the Internet, Save1800Suicide and Military Free Zone campaigns, and me (I work for the Genocide Intervention Network).

Pete Cashmore writes a popular blog about new Web 2.0 services at Mashable.com. He's a consultant for organizations looking to leverage the new social web paradigm. Pete frequently covers web services that he says are designed to "feed the MySpace beast".

Along with Second Life (subject of an upcoming interview) MySpace is a topic that many nonprofit organizations are giving some amount of thought to engaging with. The MySpace profile page for the film An Inconvenient Truth has been added to the friends list of almost 70,000 MySpace users. That profile page uses multimedia extensively and if your organization seeks to get into MySpace, you may want to consider moving beyond a simple default page as well.

Other organizations participating in MySpace include Green Peace USA, Philadelphia's Clean Air Council, the World Wildlife Federation and many, many more.  When MySpace users  add one of these groups as a friend, they are notified whenever new items, events or writings are added to the organization's page.

The Olympia, Washington based Free Child Project engages in a large number of activities to support youth led social change.  Their mission reads: The Freechild Project seeks to advocate, inform, and celebrate social change led by and with young people around the world, particularly those who have been historically denied the right to participate.

Adam Fletcher is the founder and director of Free Child.  We talked last week about the group's work.

Free Child produces presentations, trainings and publications around the US and internationally that highlight youth-led social change efforts.  The group emphasizes doing work with youth, as opposed to the normal models of doing work for youth.  Free Child seeks to give young people the tools they need to more effectively make signifigant social change wherever they are.

Their projects include service-learning, topic-specific workshops and activist group incubation.  The group does consulting with local and national non profit groups in strategic planning, capacity building and product development all with youth empowerment at the center  of their priorities.  They also perform networking services through conferences and online communications.  You can read more about the group's work on the Free Child Activities page.  The FreeChild resources page is a huge directory of youth led social change resources.