This is an amazing free software tool that could be adapated for all kinds of community telephone campaigns. It was designed for the Red Cross blood donor program and based on the Ribbit voice platform.

Save a Life creates contact-on-demand access to an entire social networking community. With Save a Life, a community member with an urgent need to reach the entire membership or a segment of the community by phone can eliminate the need to look up phone numbers. Mashing up Ribbit, Yahoo Maps, and Google Calendar, Save a Life can be used for such applications as an emergency donation campaign or an emergency dispatch service.

Ribbit Developer Platform – Blog – Ribbit Announces Killer App Challenge Winners!.

Article by Jakob Nielsen on how nonprofits could encourage more online giving –

Non-profits would collect much more from their websites if only they’d clearly state what they are about and how they use donations. Our new usability studies revealed considerable frustration as potential donors visited sites and tried to discern various organizations’ missions and goals — which are key factors in their decisions about whether to give money.

In 2008, non-profits got about 10% of their donations online, according to a survey by Target Analytics. Given the high growth rate for Internet donations, we estimate that they’ll constitute the majority of donations by 2020. If non-profit organizations get their sites into shape, that is.

Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

Recent survey of potential donors using social media concluded:

Of all the forms of social media used by 30-49-year-olds, only social networks and blogs received greater than 40 percent rankings for “trust.” Specifically, 66 percent trust social networks and 50 trust blogs. In the over 50 bracket, 62 percent trust social networks and 42 percent trust blogs.

Perhaps one of the most interesting points that arose from this data was that both social media savvy groups prefer group social media, with the exception of blogs. Whether for personal use or trust in third party sites, blogs represent the second most viable source of information next to social networks (among both the digital rich and the traditional brackets). After blogs, message boards, forums, wikis and review sites were all deemed more credible than videos or podcasts (the terrain of traditional “personal” social media).

Social Media for Social Causes Study: The Results.

Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.

MIT to make all faculty publications open access – Ars Technica.

You can now add drawing objects like flowcharts, arrows, callouts, banners and even freehand scribbles to your documents in Google Docs using the new “Insert Drawing” command available from the menu bar.

Create Flowcharts & Diagrams in Google Docs.