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Social capital: doing well by doing good.

Article Excerpt
In my role within the nonprofit fundraising profession, I use tools to gather, analyze, and organize information for more efficient attainment of fundraising success. My work also involves conversations with other nonprofit professionals using technology for other purposes, such as community organizing and sharing information. As an early adopter of technology tools, I realized that there was a lot I didn't know about how technology is applied within other nonprofit organizations. So I decided to investigate further what my colleagues are doing.

What I found was an incredible community of people using social media to communicate with each other, promote their organizations' missions, raise money and awareness, and meet and learn from each other. The field of nonprofit technology is growing and changing fast. This article will only show you the tip of the iceberg. The creative possibilities for these organizations are endless and, even as I write this, I'm sure new innovations are under development.

Many social networking websites have applications that promote visibility for nonprofit organizations; some have recently gained prominence. According to Techcrunch.com, the Causes applications, which promote and raise money for nonprofits on MySpace and Facebook, registered 12 million users supporting more than 80,000 nonprofits worldwide, with more than $2.5 million raised for nearly 20,000 charities.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) [http://www.nature.org] has successfully raised more than $33,000 through the (Lil) Green Patch application on Facebook, according to Jonathan Colman, associate director of digital marketing. This application involves a...

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