Networked Nonprofits

We've started reading and discussing a new book, The Networked Nonprofit, by Beth Kanter and Allison H. Fine. The book does a great job of taking social media beyond the realm of personal networking and fun as used by Millennials (the generation of our class) to advocate it as an imperative for nonprofit organizations to succeed now and in the future. We'll be applying many of the book's ideas to our work with Safe Harbor, especially for the group that will be developing a social media strategy for the charity.

Political Ads - Communicating for Change?

For the next few weeks, the class will continue to work on our projects for Safe Harbor, but we're shifting focus a bit to talk about political campaigns. Clearly, political campaigns communicate for social change, but they do so in a wide variety of ways. This week we'll be discussing political ads - the good, the bad and the ugly.

We'll review and discuss some of these ads and ideas in class:

The GOP had to pull an ad in West Virginia after it was exposed that the casting call asked for "'hicky, blue collar types," offending their audience. This is another good example of bad spokespeople.

Director Ron Howard doesn't think anyone should use spokespeople. He has an interesting idea to level the playing field for political ads.

What does Ron think of this ad by Christine O'Donnell, which has stirred up plenty of discussion?

NPR has started a program called the Message Machine to fact-check political ads and explain who's funding them.


Politifact.com is a leader in fact-checking politicians, and they're keeping busy checking new campaign ads.

We're In!

I'm proud to announce that our project for the Pepsi Refresh Grant has been officially submitted for the November voting schedule. Pepsi still has to officially approve us, but I don't see any reason why they wouldn't. We're now working on developing emails, Facebook statuses, Tweets and press releases to help spread the word come November 1. We need everyone's votes!

You'll be able to vote for us and follow our progress at www.refresheverything.com/StudentsForSafeHarbor.