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Aug 14, 02:57 pm: Get your social actions noticed
Peter Deitz over at Foik (soon to be renamed Social Actions) asks us to tag any group fundraising pleas with sa-topten. You can further promote the effort by plugging a widget into your site to republish some of those efforts (you can see what it looks like below).
I’ll certainly help spread the word. I think anything that can help get the word out and bring more visibility to nonprofit efforts is a good thing. Okay maybe not anything. But this thing is worth the old college try.
There are, though, some tweaks that might make it more likely to succeed:
- tell us what a group fundraising effort is. I hate to be dense and maybe I’m just speeding through the feedreader too quickly but I’m not sure what makes something qualify. How do I know what to plug in there?
- give us an easier tag. Probably too late for that one but I just can’t remember sa-topten. I keep having to make sure that I’ve got it right. And that’s even with, you know, getting that the tag is “social action top ten.”
- make it even easier. Peter made it dead easy to promote the resulting links. Make it even easier. Give me a little link for my browser that automatically adds the tag when I do my social bookmarking magic. Something that works like the del.icio.us buttons but already populates the tag field.
I’m quarterbacking here before the game’s even started but I’m taking my little focus group of one public.
So, you all, prove me wrong. Use the tag like wild fire and tell me why it works.
tagged: nptech, net2, fundraising, tagging, group, community
Peter Deitz
Hi Marnie, Here are some quick replies to your questions…
First off, yes, the widget you see here is extremely primitive. The launch version of Social Actions will include a widget wizard for creating custom streams of group fundraising campaigns. People will be able to republish lists of campaigns that correspond to a keyword, an issue, a location, to name a few criteria. In other words, folks won’t be limited to the official top ten list of the latest social actions.
The tag sa-topten is probably not going to change. The reason for this is that other tags will accompany it, ie, sa-poverty, sa-africa, sa-katrina, sa-climatechange (you name, and we’ll have a tag for it). The prefix ‘sa-’ will indicate that the destination link is an actionable page, and not just a news story, editorial, or backgrounder.
Which brings me to the definition of social action. A social action (of which group fundraising campaigns are one type) is anything happening on the web that people can take part in through donation, signatures, offline meetings, etc… I realize this definition is extremely broad.
To start, the web site will feature social actions in the form of group fundraising campaigns, definied as giving pages or widgets that solicit funds for a specific non-profit program or project. Group fundraising campaigns are typically initatied by individuals.
I’m excited to have the conversation about Social Actions begin before the launch. Stay tuned… I think you’ll be pleased by the outcome web site. I welcome questions/suggestions from anyone and everyone. All the best, Peter