Care2's Digital Engagement Blog

The World Hunger Relief Project is actively engaging in a social fundraising giving day on World Food Day this October 16 to get 10,000 people to raise $200,000. World Food Day's philanthropic goal encourages people to participate in small acts like a social share or a $10 or $25 donation. These small acts do make a big difference. The World Food Program is the beneficiary, and the effort is sponsored by Yum! Brands. To give you an idea of how that plays out here:

Yesterday in Washington, DC, Dell and the American Red Cross announced the launch of the Digital Operations Center, a social media emergency management response center. The digital monitoring facility was donated by Dell, and is based off their critically acclaimed Social Media Listening and Command Center.

Last week, I had the privilege to serve as General Manager of Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington, an online fundraising event that raised $2 million for 1200 local nonprofits from almost 18,000 donors. It was a fantastic giving day, and it showed that even a super busy city like Washington, DC can come together for a day of collective nonprofit action.

Data from Comscore Nonprofit marketers should evaluate Twitter once again. The network suffered a bad year in 2010 which saw it lose a lot of ground, and become relegated to a second tier network behind Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn in user visits.

One of the more exciting developments in the cause space is the rise of middleware platforms to enhance nonprofits fundraising capabilities on mainstream social networks. Middleware solutions leverage people’s inherent networks in Facebook and Twitter and add new functionality to them usually for grassroots organizing. There are several notable ones in the space, including Causes and Jumo. The Edward Norton backed Crowdrise is starting to separate from the pack as the early market leader.

The CitizenGulf project was just unfolded last week. A national event on August 25 with would-be meet-ups throughout the country designed to create awareness for the Citizen Effect project, seeks to raise funds and awareness for fishing families. The effort also fits the nonprofit's citizen empowering philanthropy philosophy, which is identifying actionable problems and solutions amongst major problems, such as this one -- the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill. How does one go from an oil spill to a national meet-up event? What strategies and tools will be deployed? Here's an inside look on how we scaled from a nonexistent program to a national effort in just three months.