The Jenzabar Foundation Social Media Leadership Award

Recognizing People Who Effectively Harness the Power of Social Media to Support Philanthropic Endeavors

In light of the ever-active community of social media users, The Jenzabar Foundation is welcoming ideas from both individuals who are associated with a specific non-profit organization, as well as those who are not, but would like to put their expertise to good use by offering their take on how a social media outreach campaign can benefit a particular charity.

The Jenzabar Foundation is offering a $3,000 grant to one U.S.-based non-profit organization based on a blogger’s demonstration on how they are either effectively utilizing, or propose to utilize, social media to raise awareness and/or funds for their cause.

Please email The Jenzabar Foundation at blog@thejenzabarfoundation.org with detailed information about your campaign or proposed campaign (logos for the non-profit are encouraged). Please attribute the program to a specific non-profit organization and let us know if you are currently affiliated with the organization or not.

Examples: individuals/organizations could leverage an interactive website, complete with videos and blogs that offer information and calls-to-actions to current and potential members. Or, individuals can submit their ideas as to how an organization can identify new members (and donations) through sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Once the proposal is received, The Jenzabar Foundation will post worthy submissions on this blog. People then have a chance to vote for their favorite submissions by commenting on the corresponding blog posts. The submissions/blog posts with the most comments at the end of the submission period will be chosen as finalists.

In the spirit of social media, all submitters are encouraged to promote the blog post to their friends and followers to persuade them to comment and increase their chances of receiving the grant!

The Jenzabar Foundation will consider submissions from each and every individual who submits a post, and there is no limit, or floor, on the length of the blog post. Each proposal must include specific mention of the non-profit organization that is intended to receive the grant.

The Jenzabar Foundation Social Media Leadership Award submissions will remain open for comments (votes) on this blog until April 30, 2009. At that time, submissions and comments will no longer be accepted.The Jenzabar Foundation will award the winner on May 28, 2009.

Please note certain additional terms and conditions may apply.

Each new post will appear below. You can also view other posts in the “nominees” tab on the right.

Habitat for Hamtramck: Rebuilding Homes to Foster Positive Redevelopment

Ian Perrotta

Director

Habitat for Hamtramck

www.habitatforhamtramck.org

Ian Perrotta of Habitat for Hamtramck explains how his grassroots organization, armed with the goal of rehabilitating houses in the Hamtramck area of Detroit for families that support the positive redevelopment of the area, is focused solely on promoting their cause the internet’s “main roads.”

Hello. My name is Ian Perrotta and I am the director of a new non-profit organization. Habitat for Hamtramck is a grassroots organization with the goal of rehabilitating houses in the Hamtramck area of Detroit and giving them to families that can help further the positive redevelopment of the area.

This is actually the first week the website has been fully operational and able to accept donations, so currently my brother and I are involved in a media blitz involving all of the new web giants. I recently came to the realization when posting fliers for my lost cat that getting attention to help find her would be a lot like hyping something up on the internet. Only, instead of placing fliers on telephone posts next to stop signs on main roads where people can see them, on the internet you can apply the same logic and place fliers on all of the internet “main roads.”

For Habitat for Hamtramck, we went straight to the highways by writing an I-Report on  CNN.com, creating Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Digg, and Flickr accounts, and posting on popular sites such as PerezHilton and TMZ, and now we’re on the side streets trolling for groups that look like they would have people who would help spread the word virally. By successfully integrating social media applications into our organization we have generously increased the awareness of our non-profit. Ultimately, our goal is to enrich the lives and and community of Hamtramck and after reading about The Jenzabar Foundation’s Social Media Award, we feel that this is exactly the kind of morale booster that our organization needs in order to give back.

Center for SCREEN-TIME Awareness

Robert Kesten
Executive Director
Center for SCREEN-TIME Awareness
www.screentime.org

Robert is the executive director of Center for SCREEN-TIME Awareness, a small international nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, DC.  His organization is a leading nonprofit group that places an exclusive focus on the impact of electronic/screened media on health, education, family and the workplace.

Below, Robert outlines the social media campaigns that the Center is currently working on:

Campaign ONE:

In these very difficult economic times we, like many for and not for
profits are doing all we can to keep our doors open.  Many of those who
have supported us in the past are unable to contribute any longer, so we
have to find new sources of income and we have to become more astute in
the way we sell our educational materials.

We are using Twitter, Facebook, blogs and places like LinkedIn and Ecademy
to encourage people to visit our website and purchase our Organizer’s Kit
so that they can fully participate in our annual TURNOFF WEEK event,
coming up this April.

TURNOFF WEEK is a time (now in its 15th year) when people around the world turnoff their recreational use of screens for 7 days and live in the
present, in real time and space.  There are immediate medical and
educational benefits to this and our hope remains that people will become
more selective in how they use electronic media once they return to using
their myriad screens.

Our effort currently includes a constant flow of information on all these
various platforms, leading them to other platforms as well.  We plan to
put something up on Youtube as well in order to continue encouraging others to virally pass along the information.

To date, having started this plan last week, we have seen a spike on our
website and orders are picking up.  We are not yet at the level we need to
be at to achieve our goal, but there is a noticeable difference.  We are
exploring other sites, other tools and apps, as we go along, but as novices
in this field we are learning as we go.

We aim to master social media before TURNOFF WEEK begins (April 20-26) and use that knowledge to move forward with our message of building stronger families and communities.

Campaign TWO:

By using many of the same tools as above, we are launching a campaign to
challenge NBC Universal.  This large media company is using TURNOFF WEEK as a time to launch their Green TV week.  As we encourage people to
turnoff the recreational screen, and directly impact the environment, NBC
is encouraging people to watch an additional 150 hours of television,
increasing their carbon footprint.  NBC kicks off their GREEN TV
programming with the Miss USA pageant, hardly a paragon of environmental programming.

We are starting with a Twitter pitch, asking for retweets, and later this
week will form a Facebook community around this.  We will use our website,
with its increased traffic, to make people aware of NBC’s duplicity and we
hope to use NBC’s own media websites for our comments as a way to help
people focus on their real and only goal, to make money at the expense of
the environment.

I hope in the future we will be able to be more specific in how we will
use these wonderful new technological tools to get the word out, but as we
are learning, we can only express to you our goals, objectives and a basic
concept of how we hope to get there.

As a reminder, if you would like to support this initiative and it’s use of social media, please vote by leaving a comment under this post. At the end of the submission period, the campaigns with the most comments/votes will be  chosen as finalists.