After a few months of silence, I am back to launch an exciting new project that I hope will be of great interest to all of those nonprofits out there that are grappling the possibilities of new technologies, and perhaps struggling to seperate the digital wheat from the digital chaff. The 'Digital Makeover' project also aims to rope in social web experts, who are up for putting their considerable enthusiasm and know-how to good use in a practical context.

Vancouver had its first Net Tuesday in February and its second in March. Its third and latest event happened this past Tuesday and was a great success! Presenters included Jason Mogus of Communicopia.com, Scott Nelson of FearlessCity, and Keith Grennan of Sprout. Our host for the evening was Sarah Pullman.

My colleague, Jeff Patrick, is presenting a free webinar hosted by Kintera on a topic near and dear to all of our hearts: Web 2.0 & social networking for nonprofit fundraising. This two-part series, Next Level Online Communities, offers a 101 version next week, and a more advanced 201 version in April.

Next Level Online Communities 101:Foundations for Community
Wednesday, February 13 at 1:00 pm PT/ 4:00 pm ET
(and the same thing offered again)
Thursday, February 14 at 10:00 am PT/ 1:00 pm ET
Register here

There are numerous services on the web that will help you start your own online petition – often for free. Unfortunately, many of these services are not as effective as they could be. Here are 5 areas in which they could be improved to better serve nonprofits and social change campaigns.

I have been playing around with Twitter tonight, trying to see how well this can integrate with Drupal. There is alot of buzz starting to brew about how Twitter can be used as a tool for advocacy, political campaigning, and possibly even fundraising. I was personally looking for an easy way to do some micro-blogging from the road. To be completely honest, I am not a huge blogger (as you can see from the frequency of my posts), because it requires me to take time out of my busy days to sit down and formulate coherent thoughts into posts like this one (ugh).

RSS to me is going to be the next email. Alot of people make the argument that "RSS hasn't caught on as much...", but I don't completely buy it. Over 65% of consumer marketing sites use RSS feeds today...that is a huge chunk of the web! Now, what I personally feel is happening...well, marketers are not sure what to do with it.

RSS is a great way to deliver content to your constituents wherever they are through aggregators. I personally subscribe to over 30 sites to keep up with the lastest political and nonprofit technology, as well as general tech and business news. Google Reader is just as great a companion to me as my inbox; I categorize incoming news, email it to friends and archive it for research purposes.

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:

(originally posted at: http://emargolies.blogspot.com
Older and Wiser Than Yesterday

Last week I attended a very cool conference about social change and the social web. It focused on 21 nonprofit organizations who made their case for funding their particular web 2.0 strategies. At the end, we voted for three who received substantial cash grants while the remaining 18 got enough $ to make the conference well worth their time and effort. My job was to walk around and do short interviews (now called videoblogs) with attendees for Netsquared,the sponsoring organization. If one could transform the idealism there into alternative energies, we could have provided all the electricity for San Jose for at least six months. There are those who talk about the amazing reach and interconnectivity of the internet in quasi-religious terms, as the harbinger of democracy,

In this videoblog,Peggy Duvette and Melinda Kramer see a much more effective, progressive movement when the wide array of organizations can work on the web like the spokes of a giant, multicolored umbrella.

In this videoblog, Jennifer Corriero and Kirsten Jordan display their infectious enthusiasm for the way youth are using the Web to effect change and cite a powerful example regarding AIDS.