The annual SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX—which brings together tech geeks, social media peeps, and other online folk—wrapped-up yesterday after five intense and inspirational days. I attended a bunch of sessions focused on how nonprofits, in particular, can take advantage of technology to meet their mission—here’s a short-list of ten things that really stuck.

1. Tell stories about your constituents that speak to the heart and inspire action.

How are lives being changed because of our services to support, feed, advocate for, teach, and clothe? How are individuals impacted by the work we do? How is the fabric of the community positively changing because we’re here? When supporters donate time, money, or services, they don’t do so to support us, really—they do it for the causes that benefit from the work we do. Inspire them to action by telling stories about how causes are affected because of your organization, not just about what your mission is.

2. Ensure cross-channel brand and message consistency.

Message and brand consistency isn’t just about your website, print materials, and email newsletter anymore. Now there’s your Facebook Page, Twitter profile, white-label social networking community, transactional emails, click-to-chat, and a host of other channels you use to get the word out about your organization. What’s your strategy for not only ensuring that people are experiencing your brand consistently across all these channels, but for making sure that your tone, language, message and is both consistent AND appropriate for the medium? Not an easy task, but it’s a critical branding activity.

3. Get your message across in as few words as possible.

We all have LOTS to say about how important our mission is, the details about our program and service delivery, and the impact we’re having. But, if you’ve taken a look at your website analytics lately, you know you have mere seconds to engage your audience before the continuous partial attention kicks in and they’re off to another page or site. I know this tends to take some internal wrangling, so try let your analytics speak for themselves when making a case to stakeholders: There’s simply no time to say everything we think is important, and we need to embrace it. Cut, cut, cut…and then cut some more until you’re left with only your core messages. My favorite messaging-related buzzword now is “simplexity”: The art of communicating complex ideas in succinct ways, because nothing’s important if everything’s important.

4. Make sure your website behaves like an approachable and likable person.

I had an “a-ha!” moment when I heard this because it totally captures what it is we need to do with our websites: They need to be friendly, engaging, and likable—which is pretty much the opposite of what most of our websites are (stuffy, wordy, and malfunctioning). Consider how qualities about likable people (casual, modest, interesting, helpful) can be emulated by your website when it comes to content, design, forms, error messages, and the like.

5. Support other nonprofits involved in your cause.

I think we all know that it’s not really about the work of individual organizations, but the aggregate impact we all have on the causes we care about. It’s helpful to be reminded of that from time to time, though, because it can be challenging in practice. We need to do what we can to support each other.

6. Segment your constituents and develop a targeted communications strategy.

Related to email marketing strategy, something I’m totally focused on this year is doing a much better job of segmenting our database of supporters in order to create hyper-targeted messages. Do you know their gender? Age? The causes they care about? What industry they work in? How often they’d like to hear from you? How about their donation history? How many links they’ve clicked on in the past few emails? If you know all this stuff, are you actually taking advantage of it? It’s not about the number of emails you send anymore, but how well you’ve engaged your audience.

7. Create and maintain an editorial calendar.

And speaking of segmentation and cross-channel message consistency, it’s totally important to have an editorial calendar so you’re not left wondering what you’re going to write about today on your Facebook Page. When will your emails go out? How do they relate to holidays that are relevant for your organization? What milestones can you share and when will they occur? The better you’re able to anticipate opportunities, the more likely you are to engage your constituents in timely and relevant ways—so get going on that calendar!

8. Empower your super-advocates.

Some supporters are more active than others. And then there are your best advocates, the supporters that are so excited about the work you do and do so much for the causes your organization benefits that you just want to love them and hug them and squeeze them and call them George. Well, are you doing anything for them? Do you recognize them in some way? Better yet, are you empowering them to engage even more supporters? Make sure this is integrated into your outreach strategy.

9. Experiment frequently and iterate rapidly.

Yeah, I know this is much easier said than done. But, a big takeaway for me was the need to experiment with new ways of communicating your core messages, new website functionality, different ways of capturing data, and creative methods to engage your peeps. We absolutely can’t be afraid to test new ideas! Make sure you have ways of analyzing the before and after, and embrace the fact that some ideas will fail. We’re sure to be surprised and enlightened by what we learn when we lighten-up and experiment.

10. Create content that people will talk about and share.

When creating new content—whether it’s in an email newsletter, on your website, or on your Facebook Page—consider it from the perspective of whether or not it’s shareable. Are you creating something that encourages your supporters to share with friends and family? Are you providing the right tools to make sharing easy for people? It’s not just about our marketing messages anymore—word of mouth marketing from our network of friends, family, and people whom we look to when making purchase decisions is more important than ever.

And what did YOU learn? Share!

[NOTE: This post is being featured along with twenty other awesome ones about nonprofit technology on NTEN's blog. Check it out!]

Facebook is kind of a big deal.

With two billion pieces of content shared every day on Facebook, influentials confirming that Facebook has been the largest gainer of online usage over the past three years, and recent deals with Microsoft and Google to bring public status updates to search results, getting your nonprofit organization to appear in Facebook’s news stream needs to be a marketing priority for the new year.

There’s a pretty good chance your website or blog already has a “Share on Facebook” icon or button that offers your visitors a dead-simple way to share your site with their peeps on Facebook, so that’s a great start. With a little technical savvy, you may have even figured out how you can control some of the content that appears in what’s shared to Facebook, such as the thumbnail image and the link description.

If you delight in keeping-up with tech news, you may have also heard that Facebook recently relaunched its “Share” button to include customizable text and a handy little count bubble that shows how many times a link has been shared, which is pretty nifty.

Facebook's new "Share" button with count bubble

As great as all this sharing is, though, what if you could have even more control over the content that’s shared, increase your brand’s visibility, add a call-to-action, and get started on creating a deeper level of engagement? You can do all that with Facebook Connect. [UPDATE: Facebook Connect is being phased-out and replaced by Facebook Platform.]

If you’ve ever logged into another website using your Facebook account, that’s an example of Facebook Connect in action: it’s a secure way for you to authorize other websites to access your identity and connections on Facebook without needing to hand over your login information to yet another third party. With your consent, Facebook Connect also allows websites to access a user’s news stream to publish content—and that’s where things get exciting.

If you have a website where visitors complete actions—like to donate, enroll, volunteer, become a member, RSVP, request information, sponsor, etc.—make sure you provide them with the opportunity to tell people what they just did. On the page that thanks people for their donation, for example, encourage them to tell their friends on Facebook that they just did something great to support your organization. Similarly, make sure that they can easily share their enthusiasm after they’ve just signed-up for your program. You can do this by adding a button to these pages that leverages Facebook Connect to share a chunk of pre-defined content.

Implementing Facebook Connect can be a bit tricky, so I’ll take you through five steps to get it done. With a bit of geeky self-reliance and motivation, you can totally do this yourself without the assistance of a Web developer.

So, here we go!

1. Run the Facebook Connect Wizard.

This process creates the Facebook “application” that your website needs to communicate with Facebook. Enter your site info, upload the xd_receiver.htm file to your root directory, and test the connection.

Facebook Connect Wizard Step 1

2. Add a spiffy icon to your application.

Yay! Your application is now “Connect-enabled” and ready for a lot of awesome.

Your site is now Connect-enabled!

But, take advantage of a branding opportunity here by adding an icon that becomes part of your published content.

Facebook Developer Dashboard

Go to your Developer Dashboard, click on “Edit Settings,” and then the “Change your Icon” under “Basic Settings” to upload your 16 px × 16 px icon (which is the same size as a favicon except it needs to be a GIF, JPG, or PNG).

Edit Application

3. Create the content you want published to the news stream

Now, it’s time to visit Publishing to Facebook and create your first chunk of shared content.

Stream publish content form

See how I’ve added the “Subscribe” link so Facebook users can subscribe directly to Nonprofit Geekery right from the news stream? Once you’ve entered your info, click the “Preview dialog” button to see exciting things.

Preview of published content

If you’d like, click “Publish” to send it to your profile and news stream.

How it looks in the news stream

See how it all comes together? With Facebook Connect, you control the link, the title of the link being shared, the description, the image, the icon, the name of your organization, and the call-to-action! Admittedly, my example is pretty lame since I’m just sharing the homepage with a generic description about the site, but there’s lots of opportunity here to customize the content based on the action your website visitor has just taken.

4. Insert the code that makes it all work.

Once you’re done being wow-ed with your work so far, it’s time to grab the code and put it on your site.

First, copy and paste the first chunk of code you see on that same Publishing to Facebook page and place it in your HTML just after the <body> tag on the page.

The code your website needs to communicate with Facebook

Next, copy the code that renders all that lovely content you just created and paste it where you want the button to appear.

Code to publish the shared content

5. Make it look pretty.

Since that “Preview Dialog” button looks like it got beaten with an ugly stick, let’s dress it up in two steps. First, add these styles to your site’s CSS file.

/*FACEBOOK CONNECT BUTTON*/
input.fb-publish {
 background: #617aac url('http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/zAB5S/hash/4273uaqa.gif') no-repeat 5px;
 border-bottom: 2px solid #33332f; /*Separate border styles give a simple 3D effect*/
 border-left: 1px solid #33332f;
 border-right: 2px solid #33332f;
 border-top: 1px solid #33332f;
 color: #fff;
 margin: 10px;
 padding: 5px 5px 5px 25px;}

input.fb-publish:hover { /*Adds neat-o hover effect to the button*/
 border-bottom: 1px solid #33332f; /*Separate border styles give a simple 3D effect*/
 border-left: 2px solid #33332f;
 border-right: 1px solid #33332f;
 border-top: 2px solid #33332f;}

Then, add the “.fb-publish” class defined above to your button…

Add the "fb-publish" class to your button's HTML

…and edit the “Preview Dialog” text.

Change the "Preview Dialog" text to something less awful

Save the files back to your site, refresh, and behold the transformation!

Your pretty new button!

To see a working demo in action, check out my sandbox. [UPDATE: I've removed the link to my sandbox since Facebook Connect is being phased-out and replaced by Facebook Platform.]

I would really love to hear all the creative ideas other nonprofit geeks have for putting this to use. Have you implemented Facebook Connect on your nonprofit’s website? What are your suggestions for how this can be used to get into the stream?

Did you know you can link directly to a specific time in a YouTube video? If you use online video as a way to get your nonprofit’s message out, make sure you’re taking advantage of YouTube’s deep linking capabilities. It’s super-easy, and you can do it right now.

Let’s say you have a five-minute video about volunteering abroad in Brazil on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3mVea-XWPk

That one video, though, covers a whole bunch of different topics related to volunteering in Brazil, like what kind of volunteer work is available starting at 1:45, interesting cultural activities you’ll enjoy starting at 2:53, ideas for what you can do in your free time starting at 3:45, and other distinct video segments—each of which represents an opportunity to provide targeted, relevant content for your constituents. To create a deep link directly to the video segment about cultural activities, for example, just use the following syntax:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3mVea-XWPk#t=2m53s

That’s it! When the video loads, it will start at the 2:53 mark. Deep linking to particular video segments like this is particularly awesome if you have pages of content on your website that also relate to those segments, like a page about cultural activities that spans multiple countries in which you can volunteer, for example, because then you can take advantage of linking to that segment on cultural activities in Brazil and create a great experience for your constituents.

Now, you should start thinking in terms of video segments instead of whole videos, too. Here’s how to get there:

1. Do a video segment audit. Review each of your videos for opportunities to slice-and-dice it into distinct segments.
2. Keep track of the segments by noting the time they start, and give each a descriptive title. I’d recommend a spreadsheet for organizing this (and what self-respecting geek doesn’t delight in a good spreadsheet?). The more videos and segments you have, the more you’ll need to be strategic about how to keep all that juicy content organized in such a way that makes linking opportunities easily identifiable.
3. Find linking opportunities. Now that you’re thinking about video segments and enjoying the afterglow of uncovering content you never knew you had, start linking! Your constituents will thank you for it.

A WIN for targeted content. How are you taking advantage of deep linking to YouTube videos?

Do you get emails from Google Alerts whenever your org is mentioned on the Web? Great!

Now I’ll show you how to take your brand monitoring strategy up a notch.

Google Alerts by email is one of the Web’s original keyword monitoring tools. However, the content that Google Alerts monitors for your keyword search isn’t comprehensive, search terms and Alerts accounts can be hard to manage internally when multiple people are involved, and we get too much email as it is!

Fortunately, RSS feeds offer a much more efficient way of making sure we’re in the know when someone’s talking about us or our organization on the Web. (If you need a primer on RSS feeds, check out “the Oprah way” of explaining how RSS works.)

To get started with making the transition to monitoring with RSS feeds, you first need a feed reader. There are a bunch of options to choose from if you don’t already have a favorite. Carie Lewis at the Humane Society, for example, uses iGoogle for brand monitoring, and Amy Sample Ward uses Netvibes to keep track of keywords that are relevant to her. I use Google Reader, so that’s what I’ll talk about here. Google Reader offers a centralized, Web-based approach to organizing your RSS feeds, sharing feed content with others, and learning about your feed-reading trends with built-in analytics. It’s pretty nifty! And, you can share a single reader account between multiple people since it’s totally Web-based.

Whether you’re monitoring the Web for mentions of your brands, executives, peer organizations, or other chatter that’s important to you, it’s critical that your monitoring is comprehensive—which I mentioned is one of the pitfalls of relying solely on Google Alerts. To be comprehensive, the content you monitor must be inclusive of mainstream news media, blogs and blog comments, Twitter, video- and photo-sharing sites, discussion forums, wikis, and more—none of which is comprehensively monitored by a single service, so you’ll need to construct a dashboard consisting of not one, but multiple feeds that dynamically search for the stuff you’re looking for.

So, which search services should you get your feeds from? Above is a screenshot from Google Reader of the feeds we monitor at Cross-Cultural Solutions for the keyword phrase, “cross-cultural solutions,” which are inclusive of a wide range of content indexed by the following services:

• BackType: A “real-time, conversational search engine.”
• Bloglines: Blog and news search.
• BlogPulse: Blog search.
• BoardReader: Forum and discussion board search.
• Feedky: Video search.
• Google Blog Search: You guessed it.
• Google News: Right again!
• Google Video: Yup, videos. Including YouTube.
• Icerocket: Blog search.
• Social Mention: “Like Google Alerts, but for social media.”
• Technorati: And another blog search.

To get your own RSS feeds of search terms, just click on the RSS feed icon (like this: ) in your browser’s address bar after doing your search on any of these services and subscribe to it in Google Reader. If you’d like, you can also grab a “comprehensive” RSS feed version of your currently-emailed Google Alerts instead of turning them off altogether—but, keep in mind that, despite the fact that Google Alerts are individually available for Google News, Blogs, Web search, Video and Groups, the “comprehensive” alert only includes News, Web search, and Blogs.

You can access your "comprehensive" Google Alert by RSS

Once you have your feed list squared-away, it’s time to have a look through all that lovely, relevant content that’s neatly organized in one place. You’re bound to find duplicates here and there between the services, of course, but each feed will likely pick up content that another hasn’t. Feel free to experiment with a bunch of other services, too! What you actually do with this content now is the subject of another blog post or three :)

BlogPulse's feed items containing the keyword phrase, "cross-cultural solutions"

Have I left any services out?

What better time to launch a blog for geeks than during Global Geek Week?

Taglined “an entire week dedicated all that is geek & giving back,” Global Geek Week is sponsored by the Society for Geek Advancement (also on Twitter @geekadvancement) and Mashable’s Summer of Social Good with a focus on attracting donations to major nonprofits like Oxfam America and The Humane Society.

There’s also a contest going on, with the winner getting two roundtrip tickets to anywhere Virgin America flies. Just submit a geek-inspired video up to two-minutes long and post to YouTube’s globalgeekweek group to be judged by tech luminaries such as Guy Kawasaki and Shira Lazar. Over 50 videos have been submitted already, and they’re pretty darn geeky.

Follow the latest in geek-week tweets with the #geeksforgood hashtag.

UPDATE (Aug 10): Mashable’s got a run-down of the top ten geekiest videos submitted.

I like nonprofits. I like technology. And I totally geek out when it comes to technology that’s accessible to tech-strapped nonprofits.

Fortunately, there’s lots of awesomeness in this space to satisfy me. People like Beth Kanter, Amy Sample-Ward, and the rest of the good folks at Socialbrite and NTEN—and the whole community of nptechies who tweet, retweet, blog, and share stuff—feed my need to be informed and inspired about technology in a nonprofit context on a daily basis.

What I’d like to do here is complement all that goodness with a blog featuring short, focused posts on actionable things you can do right now to promote your cause, engage your people, and advance your organization’s mission using free and inexpensive online tools. I’ll write-up some advice and share best practices in:

• brand monitoring,
• social media strategy,
• website content strategy,
  
• staff engagement,
• and other fresh bits of nptech goodness.
  

You’ll find step-by-steps, case studies, info on fun and useful new techie things I’m experimenting with, and the occasional lolcat. I’ll try not to say things like “leverage” and “robust” and “even your grandmother’s on [insert social network here],” but I can’t pinky-swear. And I totally dig screenshots, so expect to see lots of those, too. With arrows. And neon highlighting.

And so begins the Nonprofit Geekery. If you’d like, subscribe to the Geekery’s (humble) feed, join the site using Google Friend Connect, leave some feedback, and learn about me.

While you’re doing that, I’ll work on writing some geeky stuff I hope you’ll enjoy.