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Raising awareness is vital to the survival of most nonprofit organizations. Your organization is
probably doing important and valuable work but if no one knows you or your work exists then
you are missing out on the opportunity to meet, engage, and motivate others to take action on
your behalf.
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Unfortunately, because nonprofits have very limited resources, they can face huge challenges
when deciding how to get their message out into the public. These organizations must continually
keep answering the important question of how they can reach the biggest number of people
in the cheapest way possible. Many should consider MySpace, one of the most popular web 2.0
social networks on the internet today. |
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MySpace is designed to help likeminded people and organizations meet and share things about
themselves, social networks like MySpace are showing promise as low cost, high impact marketing
channels because they are highly visited and demographically targeted. For example, a lot of
nonprofits are beginning to set up personal profiles on social networking sites like MySpace to
keep acquaintances current on the latest behaviors. These acquaintances then encourage more
friends to connect to the crowd and so on, eventually allowing the nonprofit to get in touch
with people well outside its unusual circle. |
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To investigate the challenges and payback of social networks, representatives from three nonprofit
organizations who are at this time using MySpace to raise consciousness for their causes have
contributed their knowledge for this article. Chris Burley is the Director of Online Campaigns
for Defenders of Wildlife, which is committed to the fortification of native wild animals and
plants in their natural surroundings. Tim Fullerton is eAdvocacy Coordinator for Oxfam America,
an organization working to end global poverty. And Carie Lewis is Internet Marketing Manager
for The Humane Society of the United States, which works to protect animals in the United States
and abroad. |
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How are they using MySpace? |
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Chris Burley: "We [at Defenders of Wildlife] repurpose alerts into blog posts, issue alerts as bulletins
to our MySpace friends, and have just started adding together events to the calendar module.
We also have code and directions to permit our friends to post a campaign banner ad on their
MySpace pages." |
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Tim Fullerton: [At Oxfam America] "we are using our MySpace page to raise awareness about
our work to end poverty and injustice around the world and to engage a larger audience and
inform them about our issues. We also partnered with MySpace on the Rock for Darfur campaign,
to raise awareness about our work in Darfur, Sudan." |
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Carie Lewis: "[The Humane Society has] a pretty large network of friends on MySpace, which has
been assembled mostly through word of mouth. We post content that speaks to, and is relevant
to, our friends' interests, and don't just repost press releases. It takes a lot of time, but it gets our
friends engaged and interested in making a difference.
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When we post comments on other people's pages and videos, we include a link to our Web site
and to our profile, encouraging others who see the content to be our friends. Our blog is updated
almost daily and anything that we want people to take action on or know about right away is bulletined. | |
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Since MySpace is the number one site for video, we've recently put all of our videos on the site and
feature the most recent or 'hottest' one on our main profile page. We provide code on our page so
that others can easily repost the videos to their profiles. " |
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