• About Amuta 2.0

  Take your non-profit to the next level by making the internet work for you! Using blogs and social media tools, you can help your message reach farther than ever before. Learn more.

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• See us on twitter!

  We're now on twitter. Check us out at www.twitter.com/amuta2point0, where we'll be publishing links to useful resources related to non-profits and social media.

• Recent Posts

  • Your Non-Profit: Remember The Romance
  • Microblogging with twitter for your non-profit
  • Wandering Jews
  • Socially Responsible Investments: Creative Capitalism and the Jewish World
  • CharityHappenings.org: the meetup site for the non-profit community

• Resources

  • Blogs to read
  • Fundraising
  • Israeli non-profit sites and blogs
  • Non-profit widgets
  • Social Media 101

You may have heard of twitter, the site where people post up to 140 characters about “what they’re doing.” Well actually, if they post about what they’re doing, like “Going to the supermarket” or “Brushing my teeth,” they won’t do to well on twitter. In any case, twitter is one of the hottest social networks right now, and it is generally agreed that it is a great tool for networking and marketing your business.

But how about promoting your non-profit or cause with twitter? Like many things in this age of social media, what works for businesses often works well for non-profits too, and the same is the case for twitter.

How twitter works

Every twitter user sets up a profile, where they get their own URL like www.twitter.com/username. Their profile displays their username, which can actually be different than what appears in their URL, a short blurb with up to 160 characters about who they are, and a display of how many people they’re following, and how many people follow them.

Here’s my personal/business profile on twitter:

As you can see, the main part of the screen displays my username and profile picture, and my latest “tweet” (update) is prominently displayed. Under there are all my previous tweets displayed chronologically. In the right-hand bar is my real name, location, bio, web site, number of followers and following. You can click on the word “followers” or “following” to see who exactly is following me, or who I am following.

You may also notice that my profile page has a unique design, with different colors than the standard twitter page, and my company’s logo displayed on the left. You can create a personalized home page design, which is recommended. It’s not too difficult, and just takes a bit of playing around with, but it’s a good way to expand your branding over to twitter.

When I view my home page, I don’t just see my tweets, but the tweets of everyone I’m following, displayed chronologically, like so:

Here are three quick tips for getting started with twitter:

1. Provide useful information in your tweets: Never follow the twitter guide of What are you doing? Instead, post links to useful information in your field of interest, or that you think your follows will enjoy. Also, do not over-promote your cause. People will learn about your cause indirectly by following you and seeing you as an expert in your area.
2. How to reply to other twitterers (also known as tweeple): When replying to someone on twitter, use the @ symbol before their username, i.e. @username. They will be able to see that in their @Replies section, which is available in the right-hand bar of their home page. It is important to have conversations with other twitter users to strengthen your network and meet others.
3. Think carefully about your bio: Make sure you have a bio in your profile so people can see who you are. Trust plays an important role in the world of social media, so you must give people real, credible information so that they can see you are a real person.

There are many twitter and third-party tools that you can use to enhance your twitter experience. Brian Solis has a great overview at Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals where he has published an amazing looong list of tools you can use to build up your twitter community.

Here are some links to other articles that discuss using twitter for non-profits and social change:

Twitter and NonProfits from Me Like the Interweb – this post discussses how you and your supporters can use twitter, and gives examples of non-profit success with twitter.

Twitter for Nonprofits from The Fundraising Coach – gives reasons why you should consider using twitter, with links to useful resources on the subject

5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good from Stepcase Lifehack – great tips for how to use twitter to get some good stuff going

How Some Non-Profits Use Twitter from Betsy’s Blog – links to some prominent organizations and how they’re using twitter. Good to see same case studies like this.

Twitter and Non-Profits from Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology – this post discusses why twitter ain’t for everybody

Twitter’s not for every business or organization, but it’s worth getting to know it so that you can assess whether it will help your non-profit, and if so, how.

amuta 2.0 on twitter!

In honor of this post, amuta 2.0 is now on twitter! Yes, there’s not much there right now. Ok, there’s nothing there, but come follow us, we’ll follow you, and we hope to provide some useful links there to good resources about non-profits and social media. Here’s the link to our profile: http://twitter.com/amuta2point0

Happy twittering (or tweeting, as we say in twitter-world)!

CharityHappenings.org is an events directory that calls itself “The Official Master Calendar of Non-Profit Events, Galas, and Benefits.” A hefty title to bestow upon oneself, it does seem to live up to the name, if displaying lots of pictures of women in evening gowns is any indication.

[Personal rant: why do people have this need to be part of lush, ridiculously expensive, fashionable parties in order to feel good about donating to causes they supposedly care about? If they really cared, they'd forego the parties and donate all the money from the fashionable food, venue and attire as well. These galas should really be called "Let's party for the poor." End of rant.]

The site says that it offers the non-profit professional community, the philanthropic public and the media with a free, comprehensive and up-to-date calendar of charitable events. On the other end, the site offers event organizers and users a portal to display party pictures enabling charities to publicize the success of past events. And finally, the site offers an extensive directory of venues and suppliers.

You can post your event’s details and photos for free. A listing on the Supplier/Venue directory costs between $100-$225 per year, and ads run from $7500-$20,000 per year.

So break out your party dress, shell out a few thousand bucks on your favorite “look at my generosity” gala event, and maybe your pic will end up on CharityHappenings.org.

Richard Macmanus, founder and editor of Read/Write Web, one of the most successful Web 2.0 business/tech blog/websites, has launched a new series of reviews and articles, titled, Religion and Web Technology.

He is going to write about churches and other religious organizations that use Web 2.0 media well. His first piece is about an Oklahoma church with the website LifeChurch.tv. It’s an interesting read and offers a lot of ideas that can be put to use by amutot – religious or not.
As part of that review, I wrote to him regarding things we are doing here at Shalom Hartman Institute, and which are summarized below. Let this stand as fulfillment of my promise to the Amuta 2.0 folks to recapitulate some of the points in my talk at the conference earlier this month.

Our website includes regular Op-Ed length essays by our leaders and scholars on topics of interest to the Jewish/Israeli worlds. We include “talkbacks” (reader comments) on our articles, some of which draw large responses.

We also stream lectures from our scholars and leaders both onsite and offsite. I have used Blip.tv for full-length videos, YouTube for short ones (we were named 2nd most-viewed Israeli non-profit on YouTube), and Jewish video sites Yideoz.com and JewTube.com for additional distribution (although both sites have their technical issues).

To upgrade the quality of our videos, which had been single-camera-plopped-in-front-of-a-seated-lecturer boring, we hired a professional cameraman this summer who intercut and edited the videos, as well as added intros and credits at the end. We have had interest in these from a Jewish cable TV network in the U.S., as well as have placed these on an online Jewish Internet TV network.

We have done video-enabled distance learning to rabbis, teachers and community leaders in North America for 5+ years via dedicated, non-Internet lines. We are transitioning this fall to online video via Ustream.tv and/or Mogulus.com. Some of our courses are for small groups, so we will keep those streams private for a while before making the recorded videos public.

I started an offsite blog for our site – http://hartmaninstitute.wordpress.com – to allow us to use Hebrew, to enhance search, and to give a less formal view of our activities.

I am working – with some frustrating lack of success – to launch an iTunes podcast audio and video versions – although I suspect the problem is more my lack of understanding than anything else (help appreciated!).

We have purchased URL’s that correspond with the names of some of our leading individuals – donnielhartman.com, and rabbihartman.com (not surprisingly, davidhartman.com was taken), and are building individual sites for them.

We also are working on enhancing the Wikipedia entries others have created.

We are developing a Facebook strategy, as well. I use my FB page (Alan Abbey – please ask to friend) to promote our content and videos, and have created a FB group for a group of North American rabbis studying with us. I regularly place our material on related Jewish/Israeli FB groups, as well as promote through Twitter.

We are weaker than I would like in social networking, however. Our existing audience is older than the standard online audience, and we are slowly making headway.

All this is not to say we are doing the best job in the Jewish world. There are some better funded, and larger organizations with intensive Web operations. We are probably, however, one of the better organized “mainstream” Jewish organizations online (i.e., not Ultra-Orthodox, not “messianic” Jewish, and not “New Age-y”).

I would love it, of course if our Amuta 2.0 users were to look at our ops and review, comment and critique. I could use some advice!

[Update: Read/Write web featured the Hartman Institute as part of its Religion and Web Technology series ]

This post was written by A lan D. Abbey, Internet Director at the Shalom Hartman Institute – http://hartman.org.il/

It’s been over a week since we held the launch event for amuta 2.0 in the form of a breakfast in Jerusalem featuring Jeff Pulver and a panel of representatives from non-profits speaking about social media.

Thanks to everyone who schlepped to the event from all over the country and the world. We had people from the Golan, the north, the Negev, and the Tel Aviv area, and of course Jeff who was in Israel from New York. A big thank you also goes to our sponsor, The Jerusalem College of Technology and their representative Dr. Avi Kay who introduced the event, whose generous sponsorship helped make it all happen.

Here’s an overview with links and info from the event:

They blogged and wrote about it:

• Thanks for a GREAT Week in Israel (Jeff Pulver on facebook)
• Amuta 2.0 hosts a Jeff Pulver Brunch (Debi’z blog)
• New group hooks up NGOs with social media marketing (Haaretz)
• Amuta 2.0 Launch Event with Jeff Pulver (Jewlicious)
• רשמים מכנס Amuta 2.0 + יום הבלוגים (smo.co.il)

Photos

We posted photos from the event on the Launch Page . Jeff also uploaded photos to facebook.

Packets

We’re really sorry there weren’t enough packets for everyone. We’ve uploaded some of the packet material to the website so that you can download it. Click here to view the contents of the packet.

Write on the amuta 2.0 blog

Our blog is there for you: not only for reading, but also for you to share your wisdom and experiences with others. We’d love to publish your thoughts and ideas on marketing, managing and growing your non-profit, and every blogger gets to publish a bio at the end of their article with a link back to their site. It’s a great way to help others, AND promote your organization. To submit an article, please send it as a Word document to info@amuta20.com.

More amuta 2.0 goodness!

We’re already got a few great tentative events lined up for the next half a year:

Wednesday October 29th
How-to Hands-on Workshops
Haifa

Sunday, December 7th
Business and Non-profits: Models for Working Together
Tel Aviv

Sunday, January 4th
Peoplehood: Connecting the Jewish People
Location to be announced

Stay updated

To stay updated on future amuta 2.0 events, please sign up for the newsletter by entering your email address in the sidebar of the website.

Thanks again to everyone who came and made the event a success, and we hope to see you soon!

So we’re getting closer to the launch breakfast, and we’re excited. We’re especially excited that Jeff Pulver will be there leading us in his world-famous social networking. With the creation of his social networking system, Jeff has managed to bring the world of online social media and networking to the offline, three dimensional world where people actually meet and talk to each other.

The great thing about Jeff’s system is that it gives people the opportunity to benefit from the advantages that each type of networking offers. When networking online, we can quickly get an overview of a person’s interests and personality by looking at their profile, blog posts, tag cloud on their blog, friends, etc. However, no matter how much we communicate online, we can never entirely recreate the experience of talking to a person in real life and verbally communicating.

How does this social networking work?

Below is a video in which Jeff explains how his social networking works, but here’s a quick overview:

You get a little plastic bag.

The bag has stuff in it.

It has a pen, two labels, a label sheet, and mini post-it notes.

Now, here’s what you do:

1. You write your name and personal tagline on one label.
2. You write your personal tag cloud on the second label. A tag cloud is “a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color.” (Wikipedia on Tag Clouds). What this means for you is that if you love fishing and do it a lot, you write “fishing” in large text. If you don’t love the color red, you write that in smaller text (or whatever). Etc.
3. You use the label sheet for real-time tagging of other people. This means that while you’re talking to someone, write something down about that person on a label and stick it on ‘em. For example, you may find out that they are a blogger, photographer, Dad, or just plain amazing. Write it on a label, and stick it.
4. All that’s left are the post-it notes. These are for placing on everyone’s “walls.” I actually don’t quite get this part, since things that are written on people’s walls are things that make sense to actually say with your mouth. But anyways, that’s what it’s for.

The goal? As Jeff says, it’s to break down all the other walls around you. Nice.

Here’s the video. We’ll be testing you:

The world of hi-tech entrepreneurs and innovators in Israel is thriving: between networking events galore, and a high level of social media savvy, many of these people are reaping the benefits of their knowledge in the form of new leads, recruitment, and even investments.

The Israeli non-profit world, on the other hand, has fallen dramatically behind. Many organizations are still using the same methods to promote their causes and increase donations that they were using 20 years ago. This means that they are missing out on the opportunity to diversify their marketing on the web, and reach a population that is steadily losing touch with the Jewish world: the under-30s.

The under-30s are the next generation of decision makers, and it is important that they feel engaged with your world of non-profits if you are to remain sustainable. Yet, they are not going to pay attention to your direct mail pieces written in lofty language. In order to reach them, you must reach them on their terms: in their language, and on their turf.

Advantages of using social media for your non-profit

First of all, what is social media? Social media refers to the new tools and technologies being used on the web that allow people to create online relationships with others. The most prominent example of this is facebook: on facebook, users can “friend” other users, and in this way create their own personal network of people they have selected. These personal networks enable members to see each other’s online activity, like the addition of new photos or videos, new blog posts, new recommended links, and more.

The world of social media has its own culture as well. When communicating online, people expect companies and organizations to be authentic and transparent.

Here are just some of the advantages of participating in the social web for your non-profit:

• Diversify your web presence: people are spending more and more time on social networks every day. This means that they are spending less time on your website. In order to increase your chances of engaging with them, it is important to create good social profiles in the right places, so that people can get to know your organization without actually having visited your site.
• Increase search engine rankings: people are also spending more time searching for information. By creating social profiles in other places on the web, you are creating good incoming links to your site, which can affect your search engine rankings for the better.
• Create passionate “customers” for your non-profit: by talking to people in their language and on an equal level, you can generate increased interest in your non-profit, and even passion. In turn, they may start to spread the word as well.
• Increase donations: Barack Obama raised way more than Hillary Clinton online. He wasn’t afraid to go after many small donors, rather than a few big donors, and his bet paid off. The right social media strategy will drive people to your site, and to your donation form, even for small amounts.

How can I find out more?

If your interest is piqued, you may want to find out more about this subject. One way is to attend our first event on August 31 in Jerusalem, where we will be discussing the use of social media in the non-profit world. Another way is to look at the sidebar of this site, where it says Resources. That section will be constantly updated with new material on the subject, so make sure to check back. And of course, you can snoop around the web yourself to see if you can find anything.

Happy Social Media-ing!