Imagine having the ability to translate virtual reality into actual reality.

Roeland Ramakers of EEN, the Dutch affiliate of the ONE Campaign, found a way by launching the world's first real-life virtual protest. His creative and unusual campaign merged online activism with offline action, and combines the power of the web with live demonstration. The result shows a possible future direction of a new kind of protest for the new generation. By creating avatars to represent online protesters, Ramaker has twice used a unique approach to get tangible results.

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A recent survey by  Harris Interactive and Virilion unearthed some surprising results about donor preferences for receiving information.

A majority of donors, 51%, were, "not at all interested" following organizations that they care about through blogs, social networks, and RSS. In fact, only 6% of donors reported using social media to track organizations.

Presenting nonprofits with somewhat of a paradox is the fact that 52% of respondents think its important that nonprofits use social media to connect with supporters.

When asked what types of information they would prefer to receive through social media, "Donation/Information Requests" ranked last, preferred by only 22% of donors. The top three choices were News and Announcements, Success Stories, and Volunteer Opportunities.

The survey, taken during late December of 2007 and early January of 2008, included 2,275 adults who reported donating, volunteering, or advocating on behalf of a nonprofit in the 12 months prior to taking the survey.

Though these results are somewhat inconclusive, the survey highlights the importance of knowing what your donors want and keeping in touch with their preferences.

Click here to read the full results and details. 

Thanks to The Chronicle of Philanthropy for their article that brought our attention to the survey!

The Facebook Causes Giving Challenge recently crowned its champions of social network fundraising -- Love Without Boundaries Foundation, a more-than-deserving nonprofit specializing in medical care, education, foster care, and nutrition for orphaned children in China.  Their Causes page garnered over $94,000 from 6,268 members in 50 days.  

How did they do it?  Get ready to throw out the book on promoting Facebook Causes.  From teaching supporters how to create Facebook accounts to ol' fashioned door-to-door fundraising, Amy Eldridge from LWB, an admitted Facebook newbie, says it's as much the offline as the online work that gets the job done.

If you're on an RSS reader, click here to read how they did it. 

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Need more proof of the organizing power of social networks? Look no further than the USA Today article covering a massive worldwide protest organized via a Facebook event that gathered close to 100,000 people in 165 cities around the world--all in less than a month's time.

Protesters united to take a stand against the continued brutalities carried out by Columbia's largest rebel group. Known as the FARC, the group is responsible for hundreds of kidnappings and continues to hold several high profile hostages.

The thousands who gathered wanted to send a clear message to the FARC to stop kidnapping and release the hostages they're holding. Though turnout was the strongest in Bogotá (where estimates range from 500,000 to 2 million people), the international scale demonstrates both widespread awareness of the issue and solidarity with the Columbian people.

This is a perfect illustration of the organizational power that Facebook and other social networks have. With over 64 million active users and 250,000 more joining daily, Facebook in particular can be an excellent network to use to plan and coordinate events, gather support for a campaign, increase publicity for your organization, or collect donations (though the jury is still out on this one).

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The always excellent Beth Kanter tipped us on this interesting post from the Compete.com blog  that demonstrates the overlap that exists between users of social networking sites.

How is this valuable?  Well,  theoretically, if you believe MySpace is a place for donors, your presence there also reaches 64% of Facebook users, 65% of Bebo, and 69% of Hi5.   As you can no doubt gather, you might not need to invest valuable time and resources into all four, because a lot of the audience is redundant.

So, which one social network should you consider for your next campaign?  Beth points us to a great post on Read/Write Web about some demographics information on the users of the different networks.

Choose wisely and, as always, make sure it's worth it.

Thanks to everyone who sponsored, presented, attended, and called in to today's brown bag session.  A special thanks goes out to today's speakers: Suzanne Rainey and Andrew Cohen from Forum One Communications and Hillary Zwerdling with M&R Strategic Services.  You can check out a wrap up of their presentations by clicking here.

 Also, we'd like to give a shout out to the wonderful people at OneWorld.net and Interaction who also sponsored today's event.

 If you couldn't make it or call in, click through for some of the great takeaways.

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Post co-authored by James O'Malley and Justin Perkins.

With estimates up to 200 million members globally and 12% of all internet traffic, MySpace certainly earns the title of the "top dog" of social networks. Despite the more recent shift of attention to Facebook in the past 6 months by the nonprofit community, there are still remnants of a goldrush by nonprofits over the last year to build a presence on the uber-popular site. But was there ever any gold? And is there any left?  And what is the optimum combination of videos, pictures, text, friends, and other widgets? And is it even worth it?

Á la our Causes analysis awhile ago, we examined 150 nonprofit profiles on MySpace to see which functions people were using, how those features were working, and how much money their profiles were raising.

Whether you've stacked your profile with all the cool widgets, videos, and badges or you're still trying to figure out who "Tom" is, read on to learn what others are doing and how you can maximize your MySpace, or see if you even want to spend your time there.

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