What we know as an organization-led realm is in an interesting state of flux.

This is a subject I have a professional interest in, and hope to dissect in great detail over the course of the Millennials Changing America Tour. I'll be blogging some of my findings here, and much of the concentration of my NetSquared coverage of the tour will focus on this shift.  

We spend much of our time trying to connect the nonprofit (and the nonprofit minded) with the technologies necessary for the advancement of institutional altruism. However, we spend relatively little time looking at how the technologies necessary for advancement are changing the landscape of the nonprofit realm.

Our organization has been in an unusual position since Hurricane Ike slammed us a week and some change ago. Houston is just now reverting to normalcy... though a complete recovery is months away, if at all possible. The Blood Center shut down its operations for four days in response to Ike and began collecting again last Tuesday, calling for the public to give blood and replenish the supply.

I recently wrote about Tu Diabetes' use of Twitter and the strategies the online community has employed to find and engage with new people.  Today, I want to take a look at another social media tool Tu Diabetes is using successfully: YouTube.

We very recently took a look at what is and is not getting read on the NetSquared blogs and figured that the information we came upon will be as useful to your content development strategy as it will be to ours.

Here are a few things that jumped right out at us (the bold is straight from the report, followed immediately by my commentary):

As I've been (mentally) exploring the many ways for my NPO to effectively use social media tools, I've also been paying close attention to what others are doing. A great example of a non-profit on Flickr came up just the other day, when Houston's Opera in the Heights extended an invitation for local amateur photographers to a photo shoot for its upcoming production of Madama Butterfly.

We would like to believe that since we're web-savvy enough to be interested in finding out how to bring success to our organization via augmenting our web-presence, paying attention to our email formatting is so 1997. I thought so too until I received the following email:

ALEX I WOULD LIKE TO TALK WITH YO ABOUT THE MILLENNIALS PROJECT DOES ANY TIME THURSDAY WORK??

Now for the quiz:

This email was from:

Engaging the youth!

What does it take? Whether you're on the board, on staff, or a volunteer, this is on every nonprofit's mind. And if you're looking around yourself at all, you're attempting to plan ahead. Developing support for your nonprofit means communicating. A lot.

What about making people laugh?
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=529102816568&ref=nf

The net2thinktank question about non-profits on Flickr is what brought me here... but now that I'm all registered and logged on, I'm drawing a blank. The truth is, non-profits are doing lots of great things with Twitter, some of which are truly impressive.

My NPO has only begun to scratch the surface of social media. We have a Flickr account. We have a few pics up, some different versions of our logo. One on the main reasons we created a Flickr account was to put information out there for the local media to access when they want to feature us in a story. Thus far they've had to contact us for pictures, and since we haven't had many good pictures on hand anyway, we've missed out on some potentially great coverage.

At OpenGreenMap.org, our newest mapmaking resource is an interactive platform and social networking website. The Open Green Map has mashed-up Flickr's API code, allowing to us to showcase images of green living sites, natural and cultural resources submitted by Mapmakers and the website's users around the world.

I'm looking for people interested in working with HRC Houston www.hrc.org turn the Texas House GLBT/Progressive friendly this upcoming election cycle.  We only need five seats to accomplish our mission!

 We have launched an aggressive effort, teaming up with The Sierra Club www.sierraclub.org, Stonewall Democrats www.stonewalldemocrats.org, the ACLU www.aclu.org and others to fight for fair-minded and equal rights for every American.