Christina Johns

Here are three ways the qualities of millennials, often seen as negative, can be leveraged for nonprofit success.

Here are some lessons that you can incorporate to avoid making social-media mistakes that many others have made.

To Mama With Love is a collaborative online art project that honors moms across the globe and raises funds to invest in remarkable women who are transforming our world.

Nonprofits and schools alike should set social-media guidelines and encourage social-media use.

Here are two of the tools that I have found to be the best time-savers in my social media day-to-day listening, communication and analysis of online activity.

How does Generation Y choose to give, and in what ways? One example of a Generation Y stereotype-busting, charitably conscious individual is Carlo Garcia, an actor and producing director for Chicago’s Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co.

A social-media enthusiast breathes, sleeps and eats social media, and also tends to have a niche within social media. The trick is finding the perfect enthusiast for the job. Here are a few tips on finding your perfect match.

This past week my computer died. To most people this would be an inconvenience, however, to someone who makes her living using online tools and a consistent Internet connection it was a slightly different story. I was nearing hysteria by day four of using a loaner computer that would probably be more useful as a coaster than for accessing the Web.

There are several different ways a crisis can be defined. In social media, a public relations crisis is particularly frightening. As best we try to avoid these types of issues, sometimes problems occur that are beyond our control. For companies and organizations that work hard to maintain a presence online, coming under attack from the opposition can start a firestorm that leaves more than your Facebook page in ruins.

After the tragedy in Haiti, the word “mobile” seemed to take on a life of its own. Like most bright, shiny things, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the success we saw with text-to-donate campaigns for Haiti relief. While bringing the use of mobile devices into the nonprofit world is most certainly a positive step, it still must hold up to the standard critiques given to any new method of communication that an organization decides to test when reaching out to their constituents. Here are a few things to mull over as you add SMS to your nonprofit vocabulary.

It was a typically Sunday morning for me in Chicago. I had my Starbucks, my free Wi-Fi and my Google bookmarks to keep me busy for the next hour until I was fully caffeinated and ready to face the world. I came across a great article that I was really excited to share with my fellow social networking enthusiasts — but then a very troublesome thing happened. When I went to utilize the “share” feature of this article, I was redirected with an error message. After a bit of scoffing at the thought of actually having to copy and paste the URL into my Twitter account, I began to think about how many other organizations are utilizing sharing tools and other social media widgets and tools without troubleshooting their functionally.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve signed up for numerous organizations’ e-newsletters seeking innovators and strategic thinkers who look at an e-newsletter as more than a condensed version of their home pages. 

Nonprofits can tap the power of their rock stars — biggest fans and most active advocates — to spread the word via social media.

So you have your Facebook page and your YouTube channel, and you’re even on Twitter. Now what? How do you get more people to visit your pages and, more importantly, how do you get those who have visited to keep coming back?  Keeping your pages fresh with photos, videos, articles and links is a key factor in creating and sustaining online traffic.

As a 24-year-old who once was grounded for excessive use of MySpace and only intermittent use of my textbooks, I never imagined that someday Facebook would be listed as one of my job responsibilities. However odd it seems, I am indeed responsible for putting in face time on Facebook to expand my organization’s participation in the world of social media.