Monday, October 01, 2007

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants: How Does Your Nonprofit Have Fun and Do Good?

I am hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants this week. As the host, I asked bloggers to post about, How Does Your Nonprofit Have Fun and Do Good?

Bloggers were invited to post about:
1. Your favorite fun, creative nonprofit campaign (i.e. fundraising, advocacy).
2. How you make nonprofit work fun for you, your colleagues and constituents.
3. Your own take on the theme.
**Extra points if you include an amusing photo, cartoon or video with your post.

LOLnptech: Comic Relief for the Nonprofit Technology Community said I could pick my favorite one of their posts for the Carnival so I picked the image above from They Want Me to Build Them a Facebook Widget.

Rob Cottingham contributed an original cartoon, Go Fish, on the Social Signal blog about how hard it is to take time to have fun when you work for a nonprofit (pictured left)

Idealist.org has fun with their staff by producing “Ideavision”:
"We’ll close our email boxes and set aside our to-do lists for a moment and don our lip-synching rock star hats. We choose a song (Bohemian Rhapsody was a recent favorite) and 'produce' a music video. As you can probably imagine, we've learned a lot about one another's hidden talents in the process!"
School gardening program, Urban Sprouts, has fun by collaborating with Meet the Greens, a website about two middle school kids who are green (literally and environmentally), and with Trash Mash-Up an organization that works with students to make costumes and other fun things out of trash.

George Irish of Shake the Pillars posts about Amnesty International's "Get in Bed with Darfur" -Putting the Fun Into Human Rights Campaigning.

To promote Amnesty International's CD Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur, which features musicians' recordings of their versions of John Lennon classics, Amnesty decided to build an outreach effort around the Bed-in for Peace that John Lennon and Yoko Ono carried out in the summer of 1969. They replaced tabling at concerts and festivals with a big tie-dyed bed. Be sure to read his post for more campaign details and check out the over 1,000 photos of people who have joined their Virtual Bed-In.

Isabella Mori of Alphablogs.net suggests 10 Reasons Why Arts Organizations Should Have Blogs including to be, "a virtual gallery, museum, concert hall or book store."

Ken Goldstein of The Nonprofit Consultant Blog is excited that YouTube Ups the Ante for Nonprofits with the launch of the YouTube Nonprofit Program:
"Online video has become a vital communications tool. With today's technology it doesn't take much to get started telling your story in moving images. YouTube makes it easy to post and host your video on their site using their servers and then easily embed it into your web site with no additional server load.

So, what are you waiting for?"
Thanks to everyone who submitted posts and images to this episode of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants.

You can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.

Next week's carnival will be hosted by Michelle Murrain of Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology. The topic is: We all make mistakes in our work with clients. What mistakes have you learned the most from? How do you deal with making mistakes?






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