The last two days have seen an interesting “flash cause” develop from the nonprofit community regarding Apple, the iconic computer and gadget maker. Here’s the background from Gizmodo: “In August, PayPal added a donation feature that allowed users to make charitable contributions from within the services’s iPhone app. In late October, Apple made them pull [...]

You have to admire the ideals of Chris Hughes, the young co-founder of Facebook and one of the key strategists behind President Obama’s successful 2008 campaign online. Hughes is the founder of Jumo, a new online community that aims to connect people with causes and nonprofit organizations. “The more connected that individual is to an [...]

We all know about “too big to fail” and its repercussions for the economy. But what about “too important to fade away?” To me, that’s the story of Idealist, the pioneering online community for the social sector- and its current fight to survive. A week ago, Idealist founder Ami Dar sent a warning note to [...]

When you’re relatively transparent in your online social enterprise model, you can expect dissent to show up on the doorstep every time. And to me, public challenges to peer-to-peer funding models come with the territory. In the last couple of weeks, two of my favorite platforms – one huge, the other quite small – came [...]

My panel yesterday at the Skoll World Forum, courtesy of MakeGood. Lifting a pint in an Oxford pub that celebrated its 500th birthday two years ago with several Skoll World Forum attendees may have provided the exclamation point on a notion that developed during my panel on peer-to-peer philanthropy and microfinance platforms earlier in the [...]

Last month around the inauguration of President Obama – and the day of the service centered on the celebration of Dr. King’s life  -  there was a ton of focus on creating a lasting online movement for citizen-powered change. As the economic crisis deepens and the new Administration deals with that challenge on a day-to-day [...]

ChristmasFuture.org didn’t make my list in CauseWired and I’m sorry about that because I love the message of this year-old site that aims to change the nature of Yuletide giving. Here’s how this Canadian nonprofit describes it: ChristmasFuture is about change—fundamental, meaningful, planet-shifting change. We’re helping bring together everyone to eradicate poverty by leveraging the [...]

Online social activism platforms are, generally speaking, lean operations. The more than 40 platforms we’ve identified here at CauseWired (and supplemented by Christine Egger over at Social Actions) do not boast deep balance sheets laden with venture capital, or vast marketing operations designed to build their brands rapidly. As hard times nip at the world’s [...]

Note: The online social activism sector is growing all the time, and sharing information and ideas is crucial to continuing that growth – and the very impact on society. We’re happy to carry the excellent Social Actions Round-up of links and resources here at CauseWired, created by the prolific and plugged-in Joe Solomon. Enjoy it [...]

Way back in the dark ages, before there was a Google, some of the bright digerati both inside and outside of media companies had saying the loved to drop into presentations or spout at conferences. “Content,” they’d say with confidence, “is king.” Many of those who used that phrase in the early days of the [...]

Congrats to the Social Actions team on the launch of their new widget, which recommends ways to take action on behalf of causes related to the content of any web page. Tailor-made for blogs (and I’m going to experiment with it myself), the widget is powered by the new Social Actions open API – so [...]

JD Lasica has been one of the true guides in the evolution of Internet-based communities and networks for well more than a decade. His 2005 book Darknet was a seminal piece of reporting about the personal media revolution, and certainly an inspiration for some of what I’m trying to accomplish with CauseWired. And I’ve been [...]

Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of The Point, a for-profit online social activism platform, has written a brief manifesto for his company, he posted on Make Something Happen, the company’s blog. It’s quite good if stratospheric, and I particularly liked the first part: People want a way to make a difference, but feel powerless to [...]

I found a remarkably honest post from the founder of The Point, Andrew Mason, over at GigaOm. The Point helps people start and run campaigns and is one of many growing platforms in the busy online social activism sector. Andrew’s post is a great one for any social entrepreneur to key in on, but I [...]

The founders of Social Markets say it is “building the foundation for a true social capital marketplace.” Now that’s one tall order, yet the creation of the year-old nonprofit is aimed at fulfilling a need on the lips of social entrepreneurs, grantmakers, and philanthropists big and small for years. Founded by Allan Benamer (author of [...]