Blog Action Day: 10 Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media‏

I'm very proud and happy to participate in this blogosphere-wide event. This post, being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs, is a collaboration between Mashable's Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell's "10 Ways" series.



Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That's one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.

Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you'd like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days -- whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you're passionate about, you're helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.

Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here.

You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you've gathered a social network.

You'll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

3. Follow Charities on Social Networks

In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you're increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.

Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it's a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.

You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:

Oxfam America
(Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)

The Humane Society
(Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)

LIVESTRONG
(Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/livestrongarmy" target="_blank">Flickr)

WWF
(Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)

4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs

Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org (NOTE: Your humble blogger hangs his hat here at Change.org) , Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.

It's important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they're another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you'll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.

5. Find Volunteer Opportunities

Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers (NOTE: Your humble blogger can be found here on Idealist) .

For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.

6. Embed a Widget on Your Site

Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.

Mashable's Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.

7. Organize a Tweetup

You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that's important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.

Be sure to check out Mashable's guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.

8. Express Yourself Using Video

As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.

Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac -- the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.

If you're more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude's Children's Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.

9. Sign or Start a Petition

There aren't many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.

Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.

10. Organize an Online Event

Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized "tweet-a-thon" like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.

In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.

Bonus: Think Outside the Box

Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew's Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew's cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.

Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.

The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.

Special thanks to VPS.net

A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.

Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code "SOSG"to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there's no risk.

About the "10 Ways" Series

The "10 Ways" Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.

This content was originally written by Mashable's Josh Catone.

History Lesson

Happy 4th of July!

As shameful as it may be for me to say this, but...I sometimes watch 'Reality' television shows.

I try to 'clean this up' a bit by watching the more 'classy' shows, like Bravo's Top Chef and Project Runway, etc. But yes, well... there was that season of "America's Best Dance Crew" (which I may talk about at some point), and -- reruns only mind you! -- "America's Next Top Model."

While waiting for the new season Project Runway, I've been watching Bravo's fashion knock off show, "The Fashion Show" with Isaac Mizrahi and Kelly Rowland.

A recent show started an interesting discussion at our house. Contestants were first quizzed on various fashion icons from the past, then asked to create a complete look inspired by a signature piece based on these icons.

Others here in our version of the Big Brother house objected to this. "They're there to be designer, to create something new! Who cares if they know these people from the past!" While I agreed that the challenge was biased toward those who had gone to design school where one formally learns about such things, and also thought that it was wrong to give some contestants in the first challenge multiple choice but not do the same for others -- and, I confess, I'd JUST finished reading Nina Garcia's Little Black Book of Style (...umm....don't ask!:) or else I wouldn't have known some of the answers either -- I understand exactly this challenge was coming from.

As a writer, I think it is very important for artists and creative people to know where their particular genre came from, who the major figures from its past are, and how have they influenced what we see, read, and hear now. It always saddens me to talk to younger writers and ask "Who are your favorite poets" and hear "Oh, I don't read other writers - I don't want to get influenced by them." And I don't think I'm the only one who has run into this response.

ALL of us are influenced by the past. While we think we're being "New" and inventing something never seen before, more often than not we are simply recreating a pale imitation of something or someone who has gone before us. All of us can learn a great deal from past masters, about how they solved problems and achieved their goals, and often looking at the past can be a guide or road map for how to proceed in your own work and career.

Finally, it's always good to know that your field doesn't begin (or end) with you. We are part of a continuum, joining in a procession of creative people who went before us, giving insight and support to those who will follow us.

In the end, The Fashion Show judges had to choose between two people to eliminate: someone who knew the work of the past designer they had been assigned, but got it wrong by using incorrect materials and going her own way; or someone who DIDN'T know the history, and created a garment that, because of that, looked very little like something their designer from the past would have done. They (rightly to my mind) decided to let the person who 'knew' go, keeping the one who 'didn't know.' It is never too late to look back, educate yourself and improve.

Real reason for the Military Gay Ban Revealed:

The sky does NOT fall if you become friends with someone different from you!

In a surprising twist, (Professor Jammie Price) found that the straight men with the most evolved sense of masculinity — the ones who forged the tightest friendships with their gay friends — were from military families or had some military training.

These men were used to being “thrown into different environments where it doesn’t matter whether you’re white or black or Hispanic,” Professor Price said. “You’re going to live in this house and you’re all going to be treated the same and you have to get along.”

It was 40 years ago today...

Around the house somewhere is a photo of me (taken by the Other Half) taken outside the Stonewall Inn during the Stonewall 25 celebrations in New York. That was a great up-all-night-in-the-streets party, and I'm sure this year is no different. One of my strongest memories of that weekend, however is of a moment of unexpected beauty the next day: being outside the bar as a group of young people danced up and down the street carrying an enormous rainbow flag, and looking down to see the sun shining through the fabric and casting a multicolored shadow on the ground.

That beauty and their joy: that's what 'liberation' is all about.

While the Stonewall Riots were not the first pro-gay disturbance, nor really the beginning of the Gay Rights movement (kudos, for example, to the founders of The Mattachine Society and its annual march in Philadelphia on July 4th, Frank Kameny and other in DC, and others in the 1950s, as well as to James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry for their writings in that decade, and to Richard Bruce Nugent for his short story Smoke Lillies and Jade in the 1920s) the Greenwich Village uprising, coming as it did in concert with the civil rights and Black Power movement and the women's movement, truly galvanized 'queers' all over the country. Too often we tend to forget that Gay Rights was part of an entire cultural uprising at the end of the 1960s. And too often, sadly, many in the movement have forgotten that that connection to other liberation movements.
(Thanks to John for an excellent post and the great image above from the New York Public Library's exhibit 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation)

Sadly, however, as much as things have changed, in some places in the country things appear to be still the same. For far too many young people "That's So Gay" is a slur. For all the positive images of gays and lesbians in the media, it still disturbs me how often we remain the 'comic relief' sidekick (but then I have problems with the depictions of African Americans and 'others' coming out of Hollywood also). Astonishingly, black publications covered LGBTQ events in the 1940's but seem to want to avoid them now. And sadly, our political leaders -- the President included -- seem more behind the times than the majority of the people when it comes to the issue of gay rights. A lot of hard work remains to be done.

The first time gay leaders were invited to the White House 32 years ago, they met a mid-level Presidential aide -- on a Saturday. Tomorrow, there will be a Stonewall 40 commemoration with the President -- quite a change, but we need and deserve more. Who knows how far along we will be in 4, or 40 more years.

Rabindranath Tagore: My Song

That person (Michael Jackson), whom I considered (at the risk of ridicule) very pure, still survived -- he was reading the poems of Rabindranath Tagore when we talked the last time, two weeks ago. -- Deepak Chopra


My Song
by Rabindranath Tagore

This song of mine will wind its music around you,
my child, like the fond arms of love.

The song of mine will touch your forehead
like a kiss of blessing.

When you are alone it will sit by your side and
whisper in your ear, when you are in the crowd
it will fence you about with aloofness.

My song will be like a pair of wings to your dreams,
it will transport your heart to the verge of the unknown.

It will be like the faithful star overhead
when dark night is over your road.

My song will sit in the pupils of your eyes,
and will carry your sight into the heart of things.

And when my voice is silenced in death,
my song will speak in your living heart.

Endings

What a day!

As was true for a lot of people, one of my roommates had THE Farah Fawcett poster up on the wall. Of course I watched Charlie's Angels like everybody else, and had a favorite who was NOT Farah, but you couldn't get away from how wonderful and instantly iconic that poster was. Perhaps more impressive about Fawcett was how she made attempts to prove that she was more than just a pin-up, with The Burning Bed and Extremities, moves echoed by Charlize Theron and other actresses, who know in the mad jungle of Hollywood that they have to 'prove' that they have talent.

I also want to say that how wonderful it was that she and Ryan O'Neal were together in a 'non-traditional' relationship for many, many years, and only got married earlier this week.

And then, this evening, the loss of Michael Jackson.

I'm still processing this, but I do want to say that I believe that Michael's music will survive beyond the crazyness of his later years. Watching his videos now (MTV is showing his videos -- an amazing development in and of itself) I'm struck again by his talents as a dancer and showman, by how many references to classic entertainers of the past he incorporated in his work througout his career (Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse, Al Green, Sammy Davis Jr....), and how his work was the Ur-Text for music videos.
Many of us watched Michael grow up before our eyes, then grow strange. He lived so much of his life in the camera's eye: that fact alone had to have had a warping effect on him. I'm also one of those people who thinks that some of the 'blame' for his later apparent discomfort with his body and looks can be placed directly at the feet of his father, Joe.

But more important than all that, we will always have his music, and the images of him performing on stage, perhaps the only place where he ever felt entirely comfortable.

Huffington Post Top Video choices

Roger Ebert on MJ, The Boy Who Never Grew Up

Time Magazine's (Sort of) Celebrating Michael's 50th Birthday by Josh Tyrangiel

Andrew Sullivan, who's penultimate line sums up what a lot of us feel: "I hope he has the peace now he never had in his life."

What Talks & What Walks

Wednesday night, President Obama issued a memorandum extending some rights to Federal workers who are part of a same sex couple

The memorandum allows same-sex partners to be added to the long-term-care insurance program for federal employees. Employees also can use their sick leave to take care of their partners and non-biological, non-adopted children. Partners of Foreign Service employees will be permitted to use medical facilities at posts abroad, allowed medical evacuation from foreign locations, and counted when determining family size for housing allocations.

Like many, I wished the President had gone further, done more -- like adding health benefits -- but, its a start. And considering the pleased reaction of some federal workers to the memo, including the couple pictured above, Candy Holmes (left), a 33-year federal employee and her partner Rev. Darlene Garner, who am I to be a curmudgeon?

In spite of the apparent series of talks and negotiations that lead to yesterday's signing, the event had the feel of a rush job. While Obama's silence on same-sex marriage, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and other issues, and his 'fair' answer to the question of whether they/we have "A Friend in the White House" in him, caused initial grumbling amonst "The Gays", the tone of Justice Department's brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act lead to what can only be called open revolt, and causing some activists to call for a March on Washington this October.

In the interests of full disclosure, I won't be going to the March in large part because I will be in Austin Texas, with (what I hope will be) 200-300 of my close personal friends and fellow readers and writers at the Fire & Ink Writers Festival for LGBTQ People of African Descent. But I'm not entirely sure I would have gone even if I were still close to DC.

Personally I think the way to go now is with more locally focused demonstrations and marches, as well as phone calls and visits to state and local politicians. If there were to be a march on Washington right into marcher's congressional representative's offices demanding action -- now THAT I could get behind. The glory of the 1963 March on Washington makes us forget how many small local actions and very difficult years of sacrifice by average people it took to get there.

I do, however, think think that there have been some telling lessons from this week's events. For example, as part of the furor over the DOJ's support for DOMA, a number of gay money men decided they would not attend an upcoming Democratic Party fundraiser. While considering the idea to be 'a mistake', Rep. Barney Frank, who had previously said that he was not going to push for it this term, flipped and now plans to introduce a revised version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that will include protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Lesson: When the money starts walking, the Politicians start talking. Bravo/a to those closing their wallets for the time being.

Finally -- at the risk of being called a "Kool-aid drinker," a sell out, or worse (see the comments sections of the Salon.com articles linked below) -- I want to say that some of the comments I've seen on the web have approached same tone as the kinds of ugliness I decried after the Holocaust Museum shooting. Phrases like "He's spit in our faces" and those calling the President homophobe and a fraud, truly bother me. Where was all this bile during the eight years of George W Bush?

And, uh, excuse me but: don't we still have troops in Iraq -- and Afghanistan? Isn't the economy still trying to climb out of the root cellar? Is there or is there not a Health Care Plan making it's way through the Congress. And speaking of that, does anyone remember how Bill Clinton's attempt to repeal the ban on Gays in the Military nearly wrecked his young administration and in part his plans for health care, leaving us with the 'compromise' of DADT?

Barack Obama has been president HOW MANY months (not years but MONTHS) now?

I am very much NOT saying we shouldn't make the President live up to his campaign promises. Obama is far from perfect. For example, I think he should stop or suspend sexual-orientation based dismissals from the military until DADT is sorted out, and I am DEEPLY disturbed by his reverses on transparency and lack of interest in following the torture trail wherever it leads. But then I didn't expect him to be (Uh, well...okay.... maybe I did:)

The man is a politician, surrounded by other politicians, many of whom have a vested interest in keeping the gears of power rolling in exactly the same way they have been for the past 40 years, or longer. President Obama, however, appears to be more 'push-able' or 'pull-able' than the previous occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The move made for federal employees this week? *WE* did that. Those of us who expressed our disappointment and then our anger at the DOJ brief caused things to change. It was hard work on the ground in Iowa and other states brought about same-sex marriage, not some mandate from above. The President has power, but not a magic wand. He can and should do more, but he can't go it alone. We, the people, have to point him in the right direction, tell him where to go (respectfully:), and sometimes (often?) go ahead of him and lead him there.

"No permanent alliances, only permanent interests:" Support for those who support you when they're right, principled criticism and attempts to get them to see 'the error of their ways' when they're wrong.

The Debate on Salon.com John Aravosis vs Chris Geidner.