The following is an excerpt from Mobile for Good: A How-To Fundraising Guide for Nonprofits. In 2013 the number of nonprofits that hired part-time or full-time new media managers increased fourfold. As nonprofits have gotten better at implementing multichannel communications and fundraising campaigns and improving their tracking and reporting systems, many nonprofits have come to the conclusion that creating a paid...

Google+ Pages have a vast tool set and Google’s quest to integrate Google+ into their most popular products, such as Search, Gmail, YouTube, Local, and Wallet, is paying off as active monthly users continue to grow. That said, Google+ is low on the priority lists of most nonprofits. Many nonprofits are curious, but lack the resources necessary to create...

Last year Google+ began enabling page admins to reserve custom URLs for their Google+ Pages, but the service was offered to a relatively small number of verified pages of well-known brands and celebrities. However, last week Google+ began rolling out the ability to reserve a custom URL, such as google.com/+nonprofitorgs, to all page admins provided that your page has been active...

Google’s strategy of making Google+ the thread that links all Google Products together is working. Google+ can now lay claim to 359 million active monthly users and the title of being the world’s second largest social network. If your nonprofit uses Gmail, Search, YouTube, Maps, etc., then you can’t avoid having a presence on Google+. Currently in Beta, YouTube just...

And yet another reason why your nonprofit can not ignore Google+… the Google Knowledge Graph which now prominently features information about nonprofit organizations on the right-hand side of Google Search results. Data is pulled from multiple sources including Wikipedia, GuideStar and of course Google+ Pages.  As a result, nonprofits must ensure that their Wikipedia Page and GuideStar Profile are current and...

Most nonprofits approach social media with the strategy of increasing awareness for their cause by posting and sharing content on their profiles and then when time permits, engaging their fans and followers as they respond to the content posted and shared by the nonprofits. That’s what social media marketing is and the premise upon which all social media strategies...

My Return on Investment (ROI) from using Pinterest to promote Nonprofit Organizations is somewhere between minimal and better-than-expected, but using the site on a regular basis has fundamentally changed how I think about social media and the people who use it. In the same way that Twitter forced me to rethink online messaging in 2008 and onward, Pinterest has...

UPDATED 2/26/12: Please note that the best practices listed below are a work in progress and are updated regularly. To be alerted of when new best practices are posted, please subscribe to the Nonprofit Tech 2.0 e-Newsletter. Also, since the Google+ Pages launched after the release of Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits, please consider this...

As a follow-up to Google+ Best Practices for Nonprofits and 22 Must-Circle Nonprofit Bloggers and Resources on Google+, below are 22 nonprofits that are regularly using Google+ effectively to engage and inspire the Google+ community. As traffic continues to grow,  new tools and functionality are added almost daily. Google+ is definitely a work in progress. Most nonprofits are still...

I joined Google+ a few months ago as an individual, but it hasn’t been until the recent launch of Google+ Pages that I began investing time in the exploring the Google+ community and tool set. Google+ is a bit more complicated than Facebook or Twitter, but already a significant source of traffic to this blog, and like most communities...

A “Google+ icons” search in Google Images reveals numerous free Google+ icons available for download, however most are embedded in images files. Many of you have to tools to extract and crop the icons for your website, blog, and e-newsletter, but for those of you that don’t, simply right-click on the Google+ icon in the right-hand column of this blog...