I cannot think of another organization that better exemplifies the concept of "followership" than Epic Change. They listen, include, incorporate, and respect followers. This year's Epic Thanks is a result of good followership. This Thanksgiving season, as in years past, Epic Change is raising money to support the Shepherds School in Arusha, Tanzania.

Share The newest form of social media fundraising has arrived, and as far as I can tell, it may be one of the first instances I’ve seen of a purely Google+-based fundraiser. This fundraiser was created just hours ago, and it immediately grabbed my attention. Carter Gibson, an American University senior, announced this afternoon through [...]

Share In early July, I read a blog post about the Northeast Animal Shelter’s successful Groupon G-Team deal, so I was intrigued when I came across a Jolkona tweet later that month promoting its current Groupon deal. Jolkona ran a Groupon deal as an experiment to try to raise money for a specific campaign using [...]

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."

It's looking to me a lot like Facebook may jump into the online donation space. The newly-created Facebook Payments and structuring of Facebook Deals speak of a company ready to move into online donations. Here's why.

In light of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, free agent communities have risen once again, this time to raise funds for disaster relief in Japan. In this blog post, I feature three blogger communities raising money for Japan. Once again, this begs the question of best practices and whether or not nonprofits are working with free agent communities to establish relationships.

Though it may seem impossible to create a personal relationship with a family of bears, the North American Bear Center has enabled that beautifully through Facebook. All told, Lily the Bear's fans have helped to raise $159,597 from 23,502 fans just this year. In terms of social network fundraising, that's huge. The real question is why. In this blog post, we'll examine what the NABC has done so well that could be replicable by others.

Tweetsgiving 2010 is all about Epic Thanks. It includes some great features: gratitude cards, online evangelists, and community organizing. It's also one of the great online fundraising campaigns of 2010.

Epic Change just launched a fundraiser entitled To Mama With Love, and it embodies everything social network fundraising should be: a conversation rather than an ask for money, linkages to a greater movement, and utilizing the power of social network.

Many foundations and philanthropies are using social media to talk to their stakeholders. If you are a nonprofit seeking foundation funding, make connecting with foundations using social media part of your overall development plan - and your engagement strategy.