A guest post from Debra Askanase of Community Organizer 2.0

There are so many great organizations listed on the JGooders donation platform! Some you may know personally, and others seem appealing from their description. Though each nonprofit has been vetted and interviewed by JGooders, you may want more information before donating. It’s easy to research nonprofits you are interested in supporting using social media.

One of the best things about social media is its transparency. It’s hard to “get away” with untruths nowadays because everything an organization writes, uploads, and talks about online is available for scrutiny. Researching an organization using social media means looking at both the organization’s “official” social media presences, and what other people are posting online about the organization. The great part for you, as a donor, is that you can use all of this information to inform your decisions.

Where does one start researching? Look up the name of the nonprofit at http://namechk.com/. This site checks most social media sites for user name availability. If a nonprofit has registered its name with any social media site, then this search will tell you where to find their official online presences. One important exception: nonprofits often register their names on social sites that they don’t actively use – either to reserve the name or to use at a later date. Here is a screen shot of the site after I searched for the user name profile “Shatil,” a relatively prominent Israeli nonprofit organization.

Check out the sites on which Shatil has a registered username

Find the nonprofit’s officially registered social media profiles and spend some time on them. Do you like what the organization has to say and how the organization says it?  How engaging, or un-engaging, is the nonprofit online? Does it respond to comments? Ask questions? Is it transparent about its challenges? What does this tell you about the organization?

Next, listen to the conversations the nonprofit is not controlling.  I recommend limiting your search efforts to Twitter, Google blog search, Facebook, and of course…looking at what Google has indexed about a particular organization.

Twitter is wonderful because you can search Twitter conversations both in real-time and historically. I prefer the search engine Twazzup http://twazzup.com when searching Twitter because it gives great information about who is tweeting the most about the organization. Plus, you can save each search.

If you don’t want to register for Twazzup, you can easily use the default Twitter search engine without registering. Here is a screen shot of what people are saying about Hebrew University on Twitter using the default Twitter search http://search.twitter.com/.

Hebrew University Twitter Search Results

It is relatively easy to judge from the Twitter search whether or not people are speaking positively about the nonprofit that you want to support. You can also find people who are tweeting about it and send them your questions.

I also recommend a Facebook search in order to find the “unofficial” Facebook groups – groups started by either fans or critics of a nonprofit. Young Judaea has almost a hundred different Facebook Groups – many of them alumni groups. That says a lot about an organization if so many alumni want to reconnect over time.  There may also be Facebook Groups formed just to oppose the efforts of an organization. It is up to you do decide what information may or may not influence your decision to donate.

If you want to dig deeper, type use Google Blog search.  http://blogsearch.google.com/. A search under Google Blogs for “El HaLev,” a women’s self-defense and empowerment organization in Jerusalem, revealed this:  It’s a great way to gain an insight into the way that others are thinking about an organization.

El Halev - Search Google Blogs to see what people say about them

Lastly, if you are thinking about donating to a nonprofit organization in the US, don’t forget to look for it on Charity Navigator!  Charity Navigator http://www.charitynavigator.org/ is an independent evaluator of the financial health largest 5,400 US charities.

The social media conversation is unstoppable, and social media conversation is generally uncontrollable. This means that there is a lot of information out there that can and should inform your decision to donate to a charity. How do you research organizations?

Debra Askanase

Debra Askanase has 20 years of experience working in nonprofit organizations, from Community Organizer to Executive Director. She is the founder and lead consultant at Community Organizer 2.0, a social media strategy firm that works with non-profit organizations and businesses to develop social media strategies, activities and campaigns. She blogs about the intersection of social media, nonprofits, and technology at communityorganizer20.com.

Tags: El HaLev, Hebrew University, nonprofit research, philanthropy, Shatil, social media, social networking, Web 2.0

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