One such organization is Mission Possible. Homelessness is a big problem in our city. I live near the DTES, and I drive through Main and Hastings almost every day. Mission Possible helps to get people off the street by helping those challenged by homelessness and poverty achieve a renewed sense of dignity and purpose through meaningful work. They have two main businesses, maintenance and recycling, but they have also just recently opened an art gallery as well.
As with many charities, Mission Possible relies upon the goodwill of others to keep going. They actively solicit for donations. However, a growing trend these days is to use social media to fund raise. They have partnered with Broadband TV, and launched a video contest. Youth are encouraged to create 3-minute videos on why they should care about poverty and homelessness. After May 25, when the winning video is posted, all ad revenues will go directly to Mission Possible, so simply by watching a video, you can help to raise funds for the organization.
In addition, Mission Possible is planning a Smart Phone Raiser. On May 25, there will be a tweetup of sorts at The Academic. Young folks are urged to use their phones to talk, text and tweet at their friends, and will compete to see who can raise the most awareness and funds for Mission Possible.
I love that Mission Possible has come up with creative alternatives to raising funds, rather than simply soliciting donations. Are you a part of a non-profit or charity organization? Have you come up with creative ways of raising awareness or funds through social media? I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.
I just finished teaching the module on Blogging this past week to my BCIT classes. I love introducing people to WordPress. It pretty much is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Part of why I love WP so much is that it gives people the ability to customize their website/blog, and the possibilities are basically unlimited.
When blogging, it’s really important to remember to make sure you make your posts scannable. If you land on a page, and there’s just reams and reams of text with no break, you’ll quickly click off somewhere else. But if you land on a page that has chunks of text, bold statements, images or video, it helps to break up the page and is much more pleasing to the eye. It is my policy to include a graphic on every single blog post I write–whether a photo, graphic, or video.
Sometimes it’s hard to find appropriate images, though and you don’t want to grab just anything from google. You might be infringing on copyright.
Check out Compfight. It’s a search engine tool that searches through Flickr and finds images that are licensed under the Creative Commons. You can use it as-is, or you can install the WP Plugin, and search for and insert images right from your WordPress kitchen sink. You have the choice of three different sizes, and the plugin even creates the licensing blurb for you.
I‘ve been writing a monthly e-newsletter for three years, now. It took me a while to find my niche for the e-newsletter, but I’m fully into it now: every month, I share a “Social Media How-to.”
I started thinking recently, that it would be nice to have an archive of all these newsletters on my website. First off, it is a great source of information, and could be mined for information. Secondly, someone who might be hesitating about signing up for my e-newsletter could get a sense of what I write about, and get a clearer picture of whether or not they think it might be useful to them.
I use MailChimp, because it’s an insanely good deal. You can use MailChimp for free until your newsletter list reaches 2,000. There’s no other e-newsletter software out there that can offer you such a good deal. If you’re thinking about starting an e-newsletter of your own, here’s some basic information on them.
The screencast video that follows shows you how to do this, and you can check out the final results here.
