Making Your Social Media Strategy a Reality: Reflections, Challenges and Next Steps

The symposium wraps up with reflections from Mitch Hurst and Milt Sharp. Participants will be challenged to think about how they can get started with their organization's social media strategy. Plus three lucky participants will win Flip Video Camcorders!

Community Engagement 2.0

Check out this quick highlight from the Community Engagement 2.0 session. Noelle Haille of IMPACT Silver Spring captures some of the dialogue with Charles Lenchner, Director of Online Organizing for the Working Families Party in New York. The afternoon session highlights the work of Noelle along with Monica Garreton Chavez from Logan Square Neighborhood Association and Reemberto Rodriguez from the Silver Spring Regional Center.

Online Communications

Demetrio Maguigad, New Media Manager for the Community Media Workshop helps participants understand how nonprofits are using online communication tools to advance their mission and build their organization.

Overseeing Your Organization's Social Media Strategy

Angela Siefer, Founder and Chancellor of Shiny Door helps Exewcutive Directors and organizational decision makers examine the basic tenets of establishing a social media strategy for their nonprofit organization. The afternoon portion of the session will feature a discussion with Kim Brumber - NeighborWorks Rochester, Justin Massa - Movesmart.org, and Bill Traynor - Lawrence CommunityWorks.

Introduction to Social Media Strategy

Demetrio Maguiguad and Lovette Ajayi of the Community Media Workshop introduce participants to social media strategy through an interactive session modeled after the ever popular social media game

New Media, New World: What's It All About?

Follow the opening session of the NeighborWorks Symposium Social Media and Web 2.0: Engaging Community and Achieving Mission. Mitch Hurst, VP of Interactive Solutions with the Scofield Company will set the stage for the symposium via a live chat with Gavin Clabaugh, VP of Information Services with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

Making Life Simpler with RSS

For many of us, checking our favorite online news sources has become as much a staple of our morning routine as that strong cup of coffee. Although many of our frequently visited sites are easily accessible from our past browsing history or stored in our internet browser Favorites, RSS feeds, short for Real Simple Syndication, eliminate the need for us to navigate to multiple sites in order to get our fix.

The key to managing your RSS feeds is setting yourself up with a good reader. Google Reader is a great tool (and a personal favorite) to easily keep up with all your favorite blogs, but there are also a number of other subscription services available. These services pull the latest news and updates from all your favorite sites directly into one page, making information easy to manage. Once again, the folks at CommonCraft have another great video that sums it up in less than four minutes and provides a step-by-step how to set up your RSS feeds.

Although a little dated, this piece from Tech Soup gives ten solid reasons why the non-profit world should be using RSS feeds. The No. 1 reason on TechSoup’s Top Ten is top for a reason: RSS makes the web easier to read – saving all of us time. And of course, if your organization has a blog, having an RSS feed available to your readers, is critical if you want to get your site noticed and build some buzz on the Web.

You can get started by setting up an RSS feed of NeighborWorks news.