Using a blog and social media to help a non-profit, in this case the Kentucky Coaltion to Abolish the Death Penalty

Recently I overhauled the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s (KCADP) online presence. This describes our approach and how I can help you or your organization make better use of the Internet.

Early on, KCADP’s staff and I determined that there were three objectives for its online presence (all of which should apply to similar non-profits):

• increase its membership
• keep its existing supporters engaged
• convert its opponents or disinterested people into supporters

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Behold the renovated (again) ZachEverson.com–feedback appreciated!

As overhauling this blog seemed less daunting than unpacking all of my possessions after my recent move to Louisville, I spent the past couple of days renovating the website. I

• upgraded the blogging platform to WordPress 2.6.5–it has a slew of new features, so many in fact that I only needed to install two plugins
• installed the ShareThis plugin–it appears after each post and allows visitors to easily, um, share the post via social networking and bookmarking sites, blogs, or e-mail (previously I needed three separate plugins to handle these feunctions)
• added the fantastic free Typebased theme from Woo Themes
• corrected a coding problem that caused a lot of punctuation to appear as code (which is certainly not acceptable on a blog that covers grammar and punctuation)

Feedback—good or bad—on the update is appreciated. Thanks!

Is Facebook heading for a Black Tuesday-like crash?

When Joseph Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s father, overheard shoeshine boys discussing their stock porfolios, he sold many of his holdings, figuring the market was overextended. Shortly thereafter, the market crashed on 1929′s Black Tuesday. (Disclaimer: this story might be an urban legend.)

Might Facebook be heading for a similar catastrophe? My father just signed up for an account.

While my father is no shoeshine boy (he’s a physicist), Facebook’s appeal has been to the younger folk. Might the influx of, um, people of an advanced age cause the site to lose its cool? (I’ve noticed that some of my friends’ parents also have been popping up on Facebook.)

Of course, there is an opposite interpretation: Facebook’s reach has become so vast that no other social networking site stands a chance of usurping its dominance.

I’m not sure which theory I subscribe to. But in the meantime, I need to scrub my Facebook profile and make it Dad-safe.

Connect with me on these social networking sites

You can connect with me at these social networking sites:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
  
• Twitter

Ping.fm solves the (admittedly self-inflicted) problem of updating your status on multiple social networking sites

With so many social networking and microblogging sites, updating your status on all of them can be a pain. In many people’s cases—including mine—it leads to either neglect or cutting and pasting.

Ping.fm solves the problem though. From Wikipedia:

Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously.

Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social mediums individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

From Ping.fm I simultaneously post to Twitter and update my status on Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Ping.fm supports more than 30 social networking sites, including the behemoths that I just mentioned, new sites, and even dying networks (remember Friendster?).

I bookmarked Ping.fm and added it to the home screen of my iPhone for easy access when I’m away from my computer.