Brent MacKinnon's List: 5 top tools

"Using video to disseminate knowledge, create awareness, stimulate action and promote prevention is a powerful way to tell your non profit story. As you you may have noticed in many of my blog posts, I like to use video to tell stories about causes."

"The Cynefin model is a sense making framework. It can be used to understand complex situations in which your organization is struggling. It is different than a categorization model where you plop data from your situation into a two by two matrix and sort out your decision based on how the matrix categorizes your data."

"I am involved with a small project for a wonderful organization called the Krasman Centre. I put together a couple of picture slide shows using different social media tools. Our Executive Director Tanya Shute will use the slideshows as illustrations of the consumer survivor philosophy and the way in which consumers are valued within our organization. As always, your comments are welcome."

"I created this map as part of my community development work with a School Board committee. We wanted to look at what groups were participating within the York Region School Board system.

I know the details of this map are not relevant to many readers but as I reflected on on these clusters I started to think of questions that could help our committee make sense of what’s going on."

One of the main reasons we updated our book Groundswell in a new paperback edition was to provide some advice on corporate uses of Twitter. Two things we said in the original Groundswell (2008) were (1) pick a corporate objective before implementing a social technology strategy and (2) keep an eye on this Twitter thing, it's going to be big.

Trusting the curators was a strategy I employed to begin to figure out what to read, what I needed to read, and what others whom I trusted thought was important to read. We cannot read it all. We cannot begin to imagine trying to read it all. We must trust to the curators.
Trusting others to curate content has become my primary means for gathering relevant information about social media and particularly nonprofit technology.