Live Podcast: Featured Guest Beth Kanter, Author of Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media (http://beth.typepad.com), one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including “Psychology of Facebook Applications,” edited by BJ Fogg, Stanford University and “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN – both published in 2009. An authority speaker and trainer, she has trained nonprofits in social media techniques literally around the world. In 2009, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” In March, 2009, she will serve as the 2009 Visiting Scholar for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation.

She has given numerous workshops for nonprofits around the world on how to integrate social media into communications strategies, as well as how-to workshops on specific techniques. She is in much demand as a workshop leader and a top rated speaker. She was the keynote speaker for the Cambodian Bloggers Conference in Phnom Penh, The Connecting Up Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Minnesota Council on Nonprofits, Making Media Conference in Chicago and others. She has presented about nonprofits and social media at some of the leading social media industry conferences, including O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns, Gnomedex, SWSX, BlogHer, and Podcamp.

She is curating NTEN’s “We Are Media: Nonprofit Social Media Starter Kit,” an online community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world. She is facilitating the community to work in a networked way to help identify the best existing resources, people, and case studies that will give nonprofit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to effectively use social media.

She is a professional blogger and writes about the use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector for social change. She was recently named one of the top fifty most influential female bloggers (#29 on the list and the only one focused on the nonprofit sector) and appears on a top ten list of female thought leaders in social media. In addition to her highly rated, award winning blog, Beth’s Blog, she is a Contributing Editor for nonprofits and social change for BlogHer and a contributor to NetSquared. Her articles have appeared in many online nonprofit publications including TechSoup, Nonprofit Times, and others. She contributed a chapter on Technology and ROI to the NTEN’s forthcoming nonprofit technology book, to be published by Wiley, and she contributed a “thought leader” essay on social media adoption issues to the recently published book “Mobilizing Generation 2.0.”

She is an expert in the use of web 2.0 for fundraising, having raised over $200,000 for Cambodian orphans using her blog and other Web 2.0 tools. She was the first place winner of the Yahoo Network for Good Contest in 2007 (covered by the Wall Street Journal) and came in first place for global causes in America’s Giving Challenge, sponsored by Case Foundation and Parade Magazine. Her case studies about using social media to raise money for charities are documented here.

In 2007, she received the “Most Valuable Person in the Field” award from NTEN. In 2008, she was voted by her peers as the person the community is most likely to turn to for advice. She has been interviewed numerous times by mainstream media outlets and popular blogs, video blogs, and podcasts. You can learn more about Beth’s work by reading her blog (http://beth.typepad.com) or poking around her wiki portfolio.