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.

Maintenance activities keep a company's presence alive. They don't increase presence, increase engagement, or even develop the community. What they do is buy you time. It's called feeding the dog.

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.

The Campus Kitchens project just pulled off its first fundraiser, a competitive fundraising riff on college basketball's March Madness, and the key to winning was...Facebook. This post explores how Campus Kitchens harnessed Facebook Pages and social sharing to Facebook to bring in donations.

What prevents ideas from happening? What can you and your organization do to shepherd ideas into action? This blog post summarizes some of the best ideas presented by Scott Belsky of Behance.com in his SXSW Interactive 2011 session.

NTEN: Change, a new quarterly journal for nonprofit leaders and staff, launched on March 18 by NTEN. NTEN: Change offers quarterly in-depth articles, news, and insights for the nonprofit leader about all facets of nonprofit technology. This blog post includes an interview with NTEN staff about why they launched the journal, what readers can expect, and who should read it.

Whew, it's been a heck of a month for the nonprofity tech folks in the world: SXSW Interactive, followed by the Nonprofit Technology Conference. I attended both conferences, and paid a lot of attention to trends, commonalities, and differences that I saw between the two conferences. In this blog post, I list three commonalities and two major differences.

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.

Online community members with a lot of social influence within a community may be preventing full community participation. While groups welcome so-called "social media rock stars," these influencers can also weaken a group. The job of the community manager is to nurture full participation and ensure that the social media rock stars don't adversely affect community participation.

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.