10 Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media

This post is a collaboration between Mashable’s Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell’s “10 Ways” series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs.

Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.
Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.
Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here.
You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.

You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

3. Follow Charities on Social Networks

In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.
Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.

You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:

Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)

The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)

LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)

WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)

4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs

Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.

It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.

5. Find Volunteer Opportunities

Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.

For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.

6. Embed a Widget on Your Site

Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.

7. Organize a Tweetup

You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.

Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.

8. Express Yourself Using Video

As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.

Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.

If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.

9. Sign or Start a Petition

There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.
Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.

10. Organize an Online Event

Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.
In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.

Bonus: Think Outside the Box

Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.

Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.

The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.

Special thanks to VPS.net

A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.
Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code “SOSG”to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there’s no risk.

About the “10 Ways” Series

The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.

This content was originally written by Mashable’s Josh Catone.

10 Ridiculous Wastes of Packaging Materials and How to Stop It

Over-packaging seems to be the norm in our excessive society but too much packaging causes problems for the consumer, as well as the planet.  It’s frustrating to tear through huge boxes filled with endless packaging foam to finally unwrap the tiny iPod you’ve been waiting on – getting rid of all that waste is an entirely new battle, not to mention all the unnecessary space required during shipping for too much packaging.  We’ve gathered some of the most ridiculous examples of over-packaging and included a few ways you can help diminish the excess.

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11 Pieces of Great Growing Green ‘Furniture’

Got a green thumb and a hankering to get into the furniture-making biz? Take the hassle out of finding green furniture for your home by growing your own.

Building furniture from the ground up

Imagine living green bus benches and playgrounds filling our cities. It’s a bit idyllic, but within the realm of possibility with Plantware’s innovative designs. Ultra practical yet totally biodegradable, Plantware’s award-winning designs could be the way of the future. The living KinderFroest in particular has tremendous benefits: grown from Ficus trees, it’s self-healing, requires only sunlight and rain to produce, is earthquake safe, and produces a ton of oxygen over its long life. What better place for your children to spend their time?

Melding whimsical imagination with growing green furniture design, artists Peter and Becky work with wild plum and black cheery trees to shape them into both living and harvested furniture. The process can take up to 10 years, and you can even join Becky and Peter to collaborate in the making of your own pieces!

In another take on the tree-to-chair concept, a 60 year old Mr. Wu has successfully grown his own chair. While perhaps not the most attractive chairs we’ve seen, these sitters are certainly sustainable. Formed by bending pliable, still-growing elm trees into his desired shape, Mr. Wu prunes and fusses over his chairs (six currently in production) for up to five years each, after which they are “harvested.” This chair “designer” lives in Shenyang City, Liaoning province, China where he extols the virtues of growing furniture.

Made from natural wood and infused with growing mushrooms’ spawn, these are a true demonstration of biodegradable furniture. Designed by Shinwei Rhoda Yen, this stool will slowly break down as the wood is consumed by the mushrooms.

Nestle your toes in real, live moss after your next shower with one of these growing bath mats. Designed by Nguyen La Chanh, they’re made from plastazote (an imputrescible foam) stuffed with ball moss, island moss, and forest moss. You provide irrigation as you drip on it coming out of the shower.

Perhaps a little less comfy that the preceding options, the Venus Chair is grown not from living green plants, but rather out of natural crystals in a water bath. It’s up for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2009.

Grassy ass outdoor furniture

The Lawnchair by Fung+Blatt Architects take earthy to a whole new level. Made from renewable steel and rubber, and “upholstered” with a layer of sod, this lounger allows you the feeling of a lazy afternoon in the grass without the discomfort of a less ergonomic random patch of ground. And in case you were worried about keeping it green, it comes equipped with a moisture distribution system.

Like something out of a Seuss book, these couches, chairs, and benches help you create a truly green space, even in a concrete jungle. Peddy furniture by Mindscape can be grown by just about anyone and requires only the occasional clipping to keep them neat and trim.

Adding a green touch to old pieces

The wacky embellishment of these furniture pieces by Bob Gromofsky Designs gives a whole new meaning to bringing the outdoors in. We especially enjoy the grassy treatment given to the lamp, although aren’t quite sure what that’ll do to the diffusing quality of the shade.

Your personal care routine has never been this green! The garden powder room displayed at a past New England Flower Show demonstrated how to turn the common vanity desk and chair into a growing work of art.

And from the realm of the historical memorablia (we couldn’t resist!) comes the CH- CH- CH- CHIEF Special Edition Chia Obama for the mantle of every American home. Emblazened with Obama’s “Yes We Can!” your growing “happy” or “determined” Obama head will add to your green decorating scheme

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Green Politicians: 10 eco-friendly additions to Washington

Change is coming to Washington. Greed is out, and Green is in!

Here are 10 of our favorite fresh new faces:

Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy

Here’s a nice change, blasting the Energy Department out of its fossilized, fossil-fuel state and into the 21st Century. Instead of an oil company exec, Obama has appointed a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a track record in working toward energy efficiency. As Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chu gained a national reputation as a speaker; among other things, he liked to point out that companies who claimed they couldn’t possibly cut back energy use suddenly manifested miracles of efficiency when they stopped paying lobbyists and hired engineers instead.

Lisa Jackson, Director, Environmental Protection Agency

After years of neglect, bending over backward to industry demands, and interference in basic science by political hacks, Jackson will be a breath of fresh air at the EPA. As head of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection Jackson has been implementing that state’s climate plan, which aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. If New Jersey can do it, there’s hope for the U.S. “I can think of few people more qualified and ready to lead the EPA during these challenging times,” notes Senator Tom Carper (D-DE)

Carol Browner, “Global Warming Czar”

The longest-serving EPA Director in history (all of Clinton’s eight years) and a “well-known environmental wonk”, Browner brings her geeky science background to the White House, where she will head a new council to coordinate White House energy, climate and environment policies. She’s been lauded by everyone from the Audubon Society to the Center for American Progress; the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in contrast, finds her “excessively partisan”, which must come as a shock after the easy-going, non-partisan environmental policies of the Bush years.

John Holdren,  Science Advisor

Can you imagine a world in which the President’s science advisor publishes articles with titles like: “The Future of Climate Change Policy: The U.S.’s Last Chance to Lead”? Science was not exactly respected during the Bush years; it was more swept under the rug, then beaten with the broom. Holdren, a physicist-turned-environmental-policy-expert, is better than “change we can believe in” – he’s “change we can demonstrate with empirical proof”.  Oh – the subtitle for that article, which appeared in the October Scientific American? “McCain or Obama can end shameful U.S. foot-dragging and rally the world against climate change.”

Nancy Sutley, Chair, White House Council on Environmental Quality

As Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles, Sutley has been working on that sprawling city’s climate change initiatives; prior to that she worked at the EPA, the California EPA, and served as energy advisor to California Governor Gray Davis. She’s also a woman of color, born in  South America, and an open lesbian. Says Warner Chabot, CEO of the California League of Conservation Voters: “Nancy Sutley rocks!… one of the most ethical, effective environmental policy leaders in government.”

Jeff Merkley, Oregon Senator

What a nice concept – a Senator who, instead of being a former business exec, is a former executive director of Portland Habitat for Humanity. As Speaker of the Oregon House, he racked up such an impressive record that the Oregon League of Conservation Voters named him “Caretaker of the Year”. He’s bringing in a plan to fight climate change by, among other things, having U.S. cities adopt some of the initiatives he pushed through in Oregon, such as investing in renewable energy and conservation.  Merkley took out incumbent Senator Gordon Smith, whose League of Conservation Voters score of 37 percent was much improved by an election-year conversion that might not have lasted had he been re-elected. Ironically, Smith was the black-as-dirty-coal sheep of the generally very green Udall family – cousins Mark (D-CO) and Tom (D-NM) are newly-minted senators themselves, with Mark a former director of Colorado Outward Bound.

Paul Tonko, New York Congressman

A familiar face in Upstate New York, Tonko brings a solid progressive vote to this solidly Democratic district (a nice change after years of hawkishness under Sam Stratton and moderateness under Michael McNulty). Tonko is an engineer, spent years in the NY State Legislature, and then was head of the New York Energy Development Authority.

Phil Shiliro, Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs

You probably haven’t heard of him, and probably don’t even know his job exists – there are no YouTube videos, or even a pic of him on the White House website [update - they've finally got one up!]. But he’s the guy that schmoozes with the Congress, making sure that Democratic lawmakers (and maybe even a Republican or two, you never know) are on board so that legislation gets passed. Effective liaison was one of the big failures of the Clinton White House, and Obama is already making smarter choices – Shiliro is a former chief of staff to Henry Waxman (more on him in a moment) with nearly 30 years of Capital Hill experience. An environmental lawyer, he joined Waxman’s staff in 1982 to work on the Clean Air Act.

Henry Waxman, California Congressman

Not exactly a new face, but probably the most significant change in Congress this year. Henry Waxman booted John Dingell (D-GM) from the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he had been single-handedly holding up, slowing down and sabotaging any legislation that Detroit automakers didn’t like. Waxman, in contrast, has been the go-to guy on just about all things green: He wrote the Safe Climate Act (which may now be able to pass); he also wrote the Global Warming Statement of Principals and got 152 House members to sign on. He’s also been a key defender of the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. (Likely key player in helping Waxman oust Dingell: Phil Shiliro)

Jerry McNerney, California Congressman

Not a new face again, but a pleasant surprise – a green face we didn’t expect would stick around. McNerney is a wind power executive (!) and two years ago he knocked off one of the most anti-green Congressman, the scandal-plagued Richard Pombo. McNerney walked cautiously during his first term, thinking he would only be able to hang on in this solidly Republican district as a blue-dog moderate Democrat. But he won re-election over a rock-ribbed conservative, and it looks like he’s here to stay.

First Eco-President – Inauguration 2009 Anything but Green

The 2009 presidential inauguration is a historical event that promises an unprecedented turn out – not only is Barack Obama the first African-American to take charge of the White House, he also aspires to be the greenest president in American history…but just how green with this eco-Presidential inauguration be?

We’ll probably never know the exact number attending Obama’s inauguration.  The largest recorded turnout was Lyndon B. Johnson’s inauguration in 1963 with 1.2 million in attendance, but the Park Service stopped official head counts in 1995.  Most officials are estimating a similar turnout for January 20, 2009 – but there have been rumors of as many as 4 to 5 million showing up for the event.
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