I had the pleasure of presenting a workshop entitled "Data Driven Leadership" at the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network/AGM annual conference last week, along with colleagues Marc Baizman and Steve Backman. The question we addressed in the workshop was: what online data does a leader want in order to make informed decisions around programming, advocacy, fundraising, and advocacy? Marc, Steve, and I have expertise in analyzing Google Analytics, understanding customer segmentation and databases, and identifying social media metrics, respectively. Each of us thought about how the data from our respective area of expertise could address this question, and demonstrated how to find those answers during the session. We also created a DIY worksheet for the session entitled, "Make Your Data Work for You: A DIY Worksheet." It offers sample questions to get you started thinking in the areas of marketing, programs and services, development, and volunteers and advocacy.

There are plenty of fundraising solutions that leverage social media, relying on fundraisers to tweet, share, and post their fundraising pages to their social networks. There are also fundraising solutions that fully rely on and live within a social platform, such as a Facebook fundraising application or a fundraising widget you place on your blog. Then there is the newest evolution: fundraising that innately utilizes the social media platform. I think THIS is social media fundraising, and it has just arrived. In the slide presentation, I review these three categories of social media fundraising and my thoughts about how social media fundraising has finally "arrived."

Without engagement, social media ultimately fails. However, you can design your social media activities to create online engagement, which is the focus on my presentation. The conference presentation covered five core concepts about how to design real online engagement for the highest return on engagement: numbers do not equal return on engagement, you can design social media activities for real engagement, how to leverage relationship ties organizationally to convert fans to superfans (and increase ROE), aligning SMART goals with engagement design, and three approaches to measuring ROE: community commitment, fan trust, and SMART goal achievement.

There are five ways to best utilize Linkedin professionally: be goal-oriented, optimize both your personal and company profiles, utilize groups, and use Linkedin Answers. This blog post includes a slide deck with explanations about how to best use Linkedin.

How can an organization be personal enough to create online friendships and meaningful relationships with individuals? Ultimately, the organization must become a personal organization. This blog post considers why and how organizations can become personal, and move people to action by doing so.

Measuring engagement is critical. If we don't know how engaged people are in our social spaces, we won't have a clue if our campaigns to move them to act will work. I think there are three kinds of measurements: status, engagement, and activism measurements.

What is a social website? This blog post includes the slide presentation presented at the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference. The blog post and presentation reviews the goals of social media integration, technical categories of integration, examples from nonprofit websites, and additional resources.

Facebook plugins (including the Like button) and social sharing tools amplify your content on the web and on Facebook. This post includes a slide presentation that comprehensively explains the different Facebook plugins, understanding the Open Graph, Facebook NFO (EdgeRank), the ROI of a Facebook Like as a case study, the ROI of social sharing as a case study, and primary social sharing tools.

The single most frequent question that I get from nonprofit organizations who want to use Twitter is "how do I get started?" My response is to follow The Twitter Rule: Less Broadcasting, More Conversation. The embedded slide deck includes strategies for using Twitter to create social capital and conversations.

Highlights and best practices of several youth entrepreneurship organizations using social media to promote youth entrepreneurship, source new borrowers from their loan fund, and support and find mentor businesses. This is part of a presentation offered at the Youth Business International Global Forum 2011 in Mexico City, Mexico.