Social Media Count: No Longer Possible to Ignore It

The rise of social media in the last few years has created exponential growth in web usage. Here's a "real time" app that shows just how dynamic and active the social side of the web is. It helps put the growth of social media in context:



Here are some of the key data points that the ‘Media Count’ is based on:

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
  Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets in April 2009 sent daily (source TechCrunch) ... now 50 million Tweets per day in February 2010 (source: eConsultancy)
• 900,000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 1 Billion videos watched per day, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06; Dec 2009 SMH)
• Second Life 250,000 virtual goods made daily
• Text messages 1,250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 million annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

It's undeniable: social media are here to stay. Every non-profit, regardless of size, needs to think about their presence in this sphere.

The flash app above was designed by Gary Hayes; here's his Personalizemedia blog.

How to ask for a gift ....

Here's a video snippet from the HBO show, Entourage. Matt Damon and Bono are featured as they ask Vince (played by Adrian Grenier) to make a gift to their favorite cause (a children's hunger charity).

Now I wouldn't actually suggest you ask the way Matt Damon does here, but there are some lessons embedded in the video.

Among them:

• Total absence of call reluctance (since he believes in his cause, Matt Damon asks everyone!)


• Asking for involvement in addition to monetary support


• Persistence and the importance of follow-up


• Importance of making your own gift first (because donors, even if they don't ask, will KNOW in their gut whether you've done your part)


• Framing the ask amount in relation to capacity and what other leadership donors have given


• Ask as part of a team, in person (see how much more effective the ask gets when LeBron James joins Matt in the ask)


• How to make it past gate-keepers ("He Jason Bourne-d me!")


• Linking back to the cause when making the ask ("it's for the kids!")

Warning: Some crude language here. Click here to watch.

Marriage Equality: One Year Later

One year ago this weekend, I was married to my partner of 23 years. I'm celebrating this first anniversary, feeling joy, anger, disappointment, and hope.

Joy, because I am married to a wonderful man with so much love to share.

Anger, because of last year's Prop 8 election result, and the California Supreme Court's subsequent upholding of the stripping away of a right from a group, because a slim majority of the public wanted it so.

Disappointment, because while I am still legally married (the Court didn't nullify my marriage), I feel a bit like a freed slave. I have my rights, but my brothers and sisters in my community don't have theirs.

And hope. Hope, because today is Coming Out Day and tomorrow, thousands will march in Washington and elsewhere, for equality ... demanding equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states.

If you want to see what a gay wedding looks like (well, my gay wedding anyway), click on the video links below.


Part 1 is the ceremony.


Part 2 is the reception.

Moving and ordinary at the same time. I've been married one year as of Sunday, October 11. And the world hasn't wobbled off of its axis. The sanctity, validity, and meaning of hetero-marriages in California weren't threatened by my marriage.

Glad to celebrate. Sad that others don't have the same right.

Equal protection, as guaranteed under the 14th Amendment. We will accept no less and will work until it is achieved. We should not have to beg or bargain for the right to work our jobs and go to school free of harassment and discrimination, the right to safety in our daily lives, the right to equitable healthcare, the right to marry, and the right to serve in the military openly.

Cool News for (non-profit) YouTube Users: Annotations and External Links!

I've refrained from doing a lot of posting on social media. For one, even though I'm a long time user of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et.al., other people know more than I, especially about the nuts and bolts. For another, I don't want to do "me too" postings, joining the landslide of commentators and advice givers, immitating and repeating essentially the same old stuff.

But THIS is news. In fact, if you haven't already put up whatever video your organization has on YouTube, then now is the time to explore that. The last possible "excuse" is gone!

Michael Hoffman of See3 Communications explains the new, special YouTube Annotations functionality available only to organizations that are part of YouTube's Nonprofit Program. With this new functionality, you can create "buttons" inside the video player that allow your viewers to connect to an external page---your website, your donation page, a petition, a call to action, anything!

Annotation has been around for awhile, but they always had to link to another YouTube video. This is the FIRST TIME that YouTube has allowed traffic to be directed away from its site. Watch ...



Cool, right? Well, there's maybe ONE excuse remaining:

"I don't know where to start."
Then check out Gear Up for Giving, a series of tutorials, to help nonprofits and their supporters understand how to use key tools and techniques to create awareness, catalyze civic action and cultivate new supporters and donors for their causes. Watch this introductory video to learn more about social media. Then, go to Case Foundation for further information.



Kudos to YouTube and Case Foundation.