A huge thank you to Jill Foster, Geoff Livingston, Dan Morrison, and May Yu. Through Citizen Effect’s #CitizenGulf campaign, they came to explore the Gulf Coast, meet with nonprofits and find out how they could best help the efforts going on here for recovery and to encourage citizen philanthropy (a favorite topic of mine you all know).

Since I’m smack in the middle of co-producing tomorrow night’s Gulf Benefit Concerts (85 and counting in 11 countries), I couldn’t be with them during the day as they went to St. Bernard Community Center, to visit Catholic Charities and other wonderful groups, but we did get together for dinner last night at Cochon to talk about giving, New Orleans, my experiences here (and frankly travel stories I hadn’t told in awhile including tales from my Burma trip last summer).

To be around such incredible minds, giving souls and dedicated citizen philanthropists was engaging and inspiring. And then it was even better because they were able to help promote tomorrow’s events through the iReport above and also through an exciting blog post tomorrow (publication TBD) and their own social networks.

They kept saying, “Thank you so much for taking time away from the benefit shows to have dinner with us, we know you have so much to do!”

But really, it’s a thank you to them. For coming here and learning. For being open to the experience and being emotionally drained and exhausted, for wanting to keep giving and find more ways for their communities (online and off) to be engaged down here. It was the least I could to do give them my 110% (the very best Sloane I could be) because the emails, the follow up, the Gulf Coast stuff – that was there waiting for me when I got home to my place in the French Quarter last night.

Offline comes before online always. Remember that.

If you like what I’m rapping about in the video above, I hope you’ll attend a benefit concert in YOUR area tomorrow night (or get some friends together for an awareness party if your city doesn’t have an event) AND MAKE A DONATION to support our efforts. After all, 100% of donations are going to Gulf Restoration Network and it all then goes directly to the communities in need. No loopholes. No delay.

Tomorrow isn’t just the day of the benefits, and it’s not the end of this effort by any means. It’s only the beginning.

Yours,
Sloane

What to help and GET INVOLVED? Read more or skip to the get involved part!

Along with Nic Adler, owner of The Roxy on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, CA; Megan Jacobs of The Roxy, Casey Phillips, talent buyer for venues including Tipitina’s in New Orleans and Viper Room & The Mint in Los Angeles, and a terrific support team, we have over 25 venues on board nationally to support this effort with 100% of proceeds going DIRECTLY to the Gulf Restoration Network (@healthygulf on Twitter) and their community-based effort called Gulf Future.

Daryl Hannah, Dave Faustino, Ed Begley Jr., Rebelution, Nicky Avalon and venues like The Roxy, Viper Room, Spaceland, The Echo, The Mint, Fais Do Do, The Comedy Store, Tipitina’s, Press Room and more are involved have enlisted their efforts to help! Volunteers in each city and music industry heavy-hitters are jumping in. Now it’s YOUR TURN!

Is it ambitious to gather music venues around the country to donate ticket sales on July 1st and create an online giving platform that encourages donations to the relief efforts? You betcha. But the people, wildlife and wetlands affected need our support and we’ve combined efforts and networks to make this successful and meaningful for those in the Gulf Coast.

Revenues from ticket sales will be donated to help the fishermen and their families along the Gulf Coast cope with this disaster and aid wildlife and wetlands restoration for the Gulf Coast. Over 25 venues have been confirmed and more are being added every day. Artists performing include national as well as local acts across the US.

“We know through music and the generosity of people that we can help make a difference in the Gulf Coast.” Adler says. “We hope this inspires others to make a donation, attend an event and get involved.”

The wetlands and wildlife are in desperate need of our attention now and we can’t wait for BP to take care of those in need. Many of our fellow Americans will have no livelihood, are preparing to leave their homes and are now lining up for food handouts. With hurricane season on the horizon, there is reason for great concern and it’s crucial the affected communities be prepared for the worst.

What YOU can do!
1) Make a donation! We’re using a WhatGives donation widget where 100% of donations go to Gulf Restoration Network. GRN is distributing the funds directly to community groups after July 1st. You can also put this donation widget on YOUR site!

2) Attend one of the 25+ shows around the country on July 1st! The venue lineup is almost complete. The website and Meetup Everywhere widget are being updated daily. Or go DIRECTLY to the venue’s website and buy tickets. Invite your friends. Have them buy tickets. 100% of proceeds from the door are being donated. Venues from LA to Kansas City and Portsmouth to Aspen are participating. Don’t see a venue in your city? Plan an event of your own on Meetup Everywhere or make a straight donation!

3) Follow @gulfbenefit on Twitter and friend us on Facebook. Put our Twibbon on your Facebook and Twitter profile!

Stay involved! Post the following message:

#RockTheSpill with @GulfBenefit on July 1st at a venue near you! http://bit.ly/gulfbenefit #oilspill #gulf #bp

4) Blog about it! Email your friends! Tell your press and PR contacts that this is an awesome story to cover. You can use copy from our online press release or from this blog post. Every little bit helps.

5) Join the Google Group! We’re creating conversation about what people can do to help – yes for these concerts but beyond this as well. Join TODAY and enter our conversation about more ways to help.

There is a lot of work to be done between now and July 1st. I’m tireless and fearless when it comes to lending a hand and helping others. Are you? Questions, comments, feedback – I welcome them all!

Email me at sloane@thecausemopolitan.com or contact me via Twitter through @sloane.

To a better tomorrow than we have today,
Sloane

I was recently invited to speak at the Association of Fund Raising Professionals (AFP) Fund Raising Day NYC. It’s their largest single-day conference dedicated to the development and fund raising professionals and a huge honor. I was invited into the Internet and Technology track and presented on emerging technologies and tools that nonprofits could use to help fundraising online.

Full details:

Emerging Channels, Emerging Prospects: Building Community Using the Next Generation of Web Marketing and Social Networking Tools.

Questions like “Why aren’t you on Twitter? What’s your Facebook or YouTube strategy? How do we monetize our investments in social media?” are increasingly common. It’s not enough to just have a presence. Organizations need to have clear direction for maximizing their social media resources. Two experts in this emerging field will provide real world case studies for devising effective social media strategies and integrating these channels into your sustainable marketing efforts and what this all means for your budget and staffing.
You’ll Learn:

* To look at social media as part of your overall donor cultivation strategy.
* Strategy tips and case study examples for fundraising campaigns that have been a success, those that haven’t and the why & why nots.
* Tech tools, APIs and tools from the insider’s toolbox to use at your organization, no matter the size or bandwidth.

A huge thank you to Steve Jacobson from JCA who invited me to present and to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, who featured me in a story based on my Cause It’s My Birthday campaign to raise money for malaria nets through an online fund raising campaign and offline series of parties. It was that campaign that I used for the first case study in my presentation, which you can see above from SlideShare.

I was thrilled to be joined by Christopher Maddocks, Director of Information Management and Technology, Children’s Hospital Boston as we split our presentations across different tools included listening and monitoring tools, social media and social network management, and ways to engage with donors.

I come from a traditional fund raising background and felt so at home at the conference all day. The keynote speaker during lunch was Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone and he was irreverent in his story telling and jokes that ONLY a fund raiser would get. We all laughed together and it was amazing to me to think it that room of 1,000 that we ALL look to the giving and philanthropy of others to push social action in nonprofits forward.

I was reminded of the ambient intimacy I feel with fund raisers. Though I’m not in their midst daily, I do always have my fund raising hat on and I think about PEOPLE and COMMUNITY all the time.

The biggest takeaways (technology examples and case studies were included with each)…

• Fish where the fish are – use social networks to engage donors
• Quantify giving – where does that $25 donation go?
• Be transparent in where donations go and what you take for overhead
• Customizing campaigns matters – spending the extra time targeting donors pays off
• Use free technology tools to analyze your efforts. Every act online is measurable
• You can never say thank you enough when acknowledging donors

So get out there and happy fund raising!

You can read more about the nomination on our Tumblr for NOLAlicious.

As many of you know, NOLAlicious is my baby. It’s my passionate side project. It’s one of my favorite things about 2010 and a creation I am deeply proud of. It’s a collaboration effort with two friends that is a daily learning experience and opportunity to share all the things we love about New Orleans with the rest of the world. To think of how far we’ve come in six months is incredible!

To those who don’t know…NOLAlicious is a free weekly email newsletter created with collaborators (and fellow new-to-New Orleans residents) Taylor Davidson and Carl Nelson. We give you five things to do, eat and see around town every week, through the eye of the tourist and the soul of native. We also give you job and travel tips and some pretty awesome photography each week too (if I may say so myself). It’s a little bit for everyone and for the native New Orleanians, recent transplants, expats living around the country, to those who have visited once and got bitten by the bug, NOLAlicious is your way to take a little bite out of New Orleans every week and explore, just like us.

Win or lose, we’ll keep sending the newsletter every Tuesday, but man, I really hope we win because I KNOW it would mean so much to everyone involved and we promise to keep growing and listening to YOU and giving you the best content we can find and deliver each week. Plus, we have new features launching soon that are amazing, so what do you say, can we have your vote?

Here’s what you can do:

1) VOTE
2) Post to your Facebook wall or Twitter this message:

I just voted for @NOLAlicious to win @The_Gambit ’s web awards for best e-newsletter. Your turn! http://bit.ly/GambitWebAwards

3) TELL YOUR FRIENDS!

Thanks everyone, and keep sending in tips for what we can do to make NOLAlicious better and ideas for what to feature. I love reading our emails from the community!

The week between Jazz Fest weekends is known to be the stomping grounds for fests of all kinds and this year was no exception. Fests rule the day when the weather is nice but not too sticky here in New Orleans! I was asked to give a talk at a newcomer to the Fest scene” Launch Fest: A fun conference for serious entrepreneurs. In the social entrepreneurship talk on Tuesday I gave a talk called: The Art of Storytelling. I talked about how storytelling is the new elevator pitch and showed examples of compelling stories on the market as well as gave tips, tricks and resources for everyone to discover and cultivate their own story around what they do, why they do it and who they are.

Reference websites from my slides:

• Kiva
• Vittana
• Microsoft BizSpark
• Microsoft Give Camp
• Microsoft DigiGirlz
• Charity Challenge Weekend
• Donate Life PA
• Step Up To Speak Up
• Donate Life Pennsylvania Facebook
• Walt Disney World Public Affairs
• Disney’s Friends for Change
• Citizen Effect
• Do Something
• Volunteer Spot
• KaBoom
• Story Navigation
• More Than Myth
• Answer With Action

You can see more of my slides from past talks on slideshare and also see my new consulting website, Answer With Action for a full list of services. I love connecting with communities and talking about how to put your best foot forward with stories that matter and are aligned with your overall business goals. Thanks to everyone at LaunchFest, it was a blast!

Log in and participate in the conversation at 7pm!

Joining me in the chat tonight are:
Adelma Stanford, Social Media Marketing Strategist, Promethean USA: @prometheanUSA
Karen Bantuveris, CEO, VolunteerSpot: @volunteerspot
Kevin Prentiss, Founder, Red Rover: @kprentiss

What to get involved in a future chat about this subject? Let me know!

Suggested topic question I’m going to cover:

• Changes in education over the past 5-10 years
• How technology is being used in the classroom
• Different tools that enhance education including: Xbox, Promethean (interactive whiteboards), iPad
• Social Media in the classroom – how it’s used. What is appropriate and what is not.
• The virtual classroom – What does it look like?
• Where do they see education going in the next 5 or 10 years

What are your questions? Join the chat tonight and contribute to the conversation!

Help spread the word! Here are two sample tweets:

• Join the discussion on The 21st Century Classroom Thurs night (4.29) at 7pm EST bit.ly/21stcc #edtech #21stcc
• @Sloane @PrometheanUSA @volunteerspot @kprentiss will be talking about the future of #edtech on 4.29 7pm EST http://bit.ly/21stcc #21stcc

Follow along using the hashtag’s #edtech and #21stcc

I’ve been active with nonprofits all my life and spent the last 10 years working in development and fundraising. I’ve worked in education and supported nonprofits focused on education. I believe that education is a true economic driver and can help raise people up from poverty and open doors previously closed. Combining technology and education and making is accessible to all is a true game-changer!

Hope to see you tonight in the chat!

Please welcome me in introducing Answer With Action to the world! Contact me about getting started on your big ideas at sloane (at) answerwithaction.com.

What is Answer With Action?
ANSWER WITH ACTION is about taking big ideas and making them happen. Answer With Action is about inspiring you to take your small business, company or nonprofit to the next level. Answer With Action is about combining online tools with offline engagement and creating a robust conversation about you, your brand, your services, your products, and your events.

Answer With Action is a New Orleans-based integrated marketing, digital media and public relations consultancy. Create campaigns and events that have an immediate impact on your business and learn how building relationships online using new strategies and tools can transform the way you communicate with customers, vendors and donors. Answer With Action creates opportunities for you to learn, adopt and implement new media into your existing business. Answer With Action will help you build cause marketing campaigns to broaden your audience and create more depth and sincere story-telling into your current strategy. We provide short and long-term engagements with clients including website reviews, training sessions, webinars, and speaking opportunities to help your business go to the next level by understanding how your content is consumed and make it accessible to your target audience.

Take a look, below are a sample of the services I’m offering:

Strategic Planning
Answer With Action helps you to strategize, think big and then execute on your ideas to create effective campaigns and more cohesive relationships within your business, company or nonprofit. From campaigns to reinventing how you operate in the online space, let us be your partner-in-crime to take your wish list and put it into ACTION!

Relationship Building
It helps when you have a connector guiding you in the right direction, teaching you how to be a better communicator and reaching into their networks to open doors and ignite conversations for you. Services include community engagement, blogger, media relations and influencer outreach and targeting online and offline individuals and groups to help you grow your brand.

Event Planning
Years of experience in planning corporate events and nonprofits galas (plus volunteer events and salons) taught us the importance of attention to detail, strong relationships with vendors and remaining calm in the face of adversity. Let us create the experience, you keep the memory!

Social Media Branding
Listening, monitoring, engaging in conversation. It all seems like so much to handle! Don’t get lost in the social media vortex. We’ll tell you what to look for (we can build out those tools for you), how to respond, and most importantly how to quantify it all so that your CFO will be on board and go “Yes, I get it!”

Philanthropy Matchmaking
You should feel empowered by what you can do, not guilty for what you can’t. Cause, the art of giving back, doesn’t have to be something on your “one day” list any longer. We’ll work with you to identify target nonprofits to partner with and then help build relationships that matter. From volunteering to board placement, cause marketing campaigns to major gifts, we can help make your gift of giving matter.

Website & Technology Review
You think you know what works and what doesn’t about your website, but you’re not sure. You want a blog but don’t know where to start. You know you should be more fascinated by analytics but you don’t know what to look for. You need help! Let us review your business, company, personal or nonprofit website and give you specifics on what you can do to improve your site, gain traffic and feel confident to tell people where they can find you online.

Keynote & Speaking Engagements
Let’s get your tribe excited and motivated! For a list of speaking topics, check out the next section Speaking.

Spokesperson/Evangelist
From conferences to private events, we can evangelize your product or services and walk away with meaningful contacts who are excited to hear more about your company.

FYI it’s the incredible Jeremy Yuricek at electrocinema that put together my new site, thank you to the incredible Taylor Davidson for connecting us!

This is the first of three posts reviewing the first quarter.

Life goes by fast and I’ve found if you don’t stop and smell the roses, well, it passes fast and it’s hard to look back and remember things. Remark on them. Tell those you care about how much those moments COUNT for something.

A friend of mine told me of an exercise where she takes the printout of her calendar and at the end of each month writes on the back what she is most proud of, who she is happy she connect with or who impacted her the most that month and then looks forward to the next month.

I’ve been wanting to do that for every month of 2010, which of course didn’t happen. It was a whirlwind and instead of fighting the wind, I succumbed to it. I was wrapped up and twisted into post-Davos, Superbowl, local election, Mardi Gras mayhem, trips to Los Angeles and SXSW and wouldn’t you know, a truly terrific cold and cough that once I recovered from, I was staring down the face of mountains of work. The work I love! It just leaves little time to post, to write, to share.

No matter. I can go back and recount what happened a few weeks ago, a few months ago. I’m no less busy now, but sometimes you just have to force yourself to MAKE time. This is me making time.

So looking back on the first three months of this year, I’ve decided to break the posts into three parts:

1) Site (and life) updates.
2) Top posts of 2010.
3) Acknowledgments (and influences).

Lagniappe: Next steps and looking forward to the rest of the year. Maybe even a Master Task List for old times sake!

Secret: I have a huge task list of updates I want to make to my blog and it’s hard to get to them all. I am planning a major overhaul at some point this year, but in the meantime, I just want to make small changes each month. That seems more doable anyway. Here’s what I did in January (and some with the help of my good friends an SEO whiz and easily swayed).

* About Page was rewritten. It now includes a fun bio in 140 characters, a short bio that can be used for speaking and then a longer bio or really first-person story I wrote about why I am the way I am, or why I think I am the way I am. Or maybe just my perception of what things have happened to me that make me the way that I am. You get the point!

Writing about yourself, I think, is the hardest thing. It seems so hard to get the wording right, to remember things just so. It was a great challenge to sum up ME in 140, you should try it (if you do, send it to me)!

* Contact Page: Added a photo and changed the text on the page. I always strive to keep the contact page as simple as possible but inviting. I love hearing from people, and the form just streamlines everything and gives it to me with clear information.

* Added “Work With Me” section. This entire section (and forthcoming consulting site) have been in the works all of 2010. I thought I’d have to put up a page or a site in order to get work and clients and wouldn’t you know, I’ve been so incredibly blessed and crazy busy without them. As I’ve been able to stick my head above water and breathe, I do now have this page up. I also have some bandwidth, so if you’re interested in learning more and working with me, well then let me know!

* Kiva Fellowship section reorganized, parts rewritten, all content optimized for search and to find. I know the Kiva content was in a lot of places on my blog and I wanted it to be clear and easy for both future potential fellows and also Kiva-enthusiasts to be able to see. Anyone who has EVER reworked pages of content knows this is a tedious process, it’s moving things ever so slightly, but making a big difference hopefully in the long run. I hope that is what this reorganization did. The new sections are now separated into:

• Kiva Fellowship Overview
• What Is Kiva?
• What Is A Kiva Journal?
• Fundraising for a Kiva Fellowship
• Kiva Fellowship Donors

* Media section completely redone. This section is far from complete! It’s always changing and I’m not quite sure exactly how I want the page to look or be laid out. But again, it was important to start somewhere! The rest can wait. So for now the sections are:

• Media
• Press (Which is in need of updated even now. It’s endless I tell you)!
• Speaking & Inquiries
• Schedule 2010
• Schedule 2009 (for posterity).

* Sidebar Navigation has lots of goodies!

• First are the six boxes at the top that show where to find me on other social networks. I had wanted to do this for sometime, connecting every together and I’m really excited about it.
• New Twitter Integration with the box that says “Join The Conversation.” It’s just a much better widget and cleaner looking. Clean is good on a blog. Cluttered is way too yuck.
• The box that shows Recent, Popular, Comments and Tag Cloud. I saw this on a few other sites and wanted it on mine. It wasn’t an easy get, and I graciously had a friend help with the coding. But now all of those main calls to action are right there on the homepage and above the fold. Score!

* Additions to posts and the overall content. Last updates! First the RELATED POSTS at the bottom of posts can now be automated. People don’t know this, but I’ve been handpicking the “related posts” for months, mostly because I knew which ones I wanted to include, but there is a great widget out there that helps do this, it took some reworking, but I’m really happy with it. Next, my comments are all through DISQUS now and I love them. Their platform, customer service, the way comments come through. All of it! Last is the “share” bar on the bottom. It allows people to share content across networks simply and with the touch of a button.

* Last thing! All posts now get automatically feeded into my Facebook profile as a note. It allows Facebook people to see every post. I had been putting only some of them in manually. This step to auto takes one thing off my plate.

There you have it! So it might look like everything is the same, but really there have been small-to-medium size changes every month. The list is long and there are more to come, but hey, sharing these was at least a start.

Most of all, I hope everyone reading this knows that I make these changes as much for you as for me. I love this blog, I love this little corner of the Internet that is mine and I thank you for reading. And if you got to the end of this post, well you’re a ROCKSTAR!

This excitement towards learning is inside all of us. And thanks to the Internet, it’s free (or close) and available when and how you want it. I’ve listed first the resources from The New York Times this weekend (aggregated together from a few articles) and then a list of my personal favorites. If you have one you’d like to share, please leave a note in the comments!

What They’re Watching (Top YouTube classes online):

• Moral Reasoning 22: Justice Harvard
• Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy University of California, Berkeley
• Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents University of California, Berkeley
• Physics 1: Classical Mechanics M.I.T.
• Introduction to Basic Electronics Indian Institutes of Technology
• SIMS 141: Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business University of California, Berkeley
• Computer Science 106A: Programming Methodology Stanford
• Mathematics 18.03: Differential Equations M.I.T.
• Modern Theoretical Physics: Einstein Stanford Continuing Studies
• Math 18.06: Linear Algebra M.I.T.

More Resources on Learning Something for Nothing:

• Academic Earth
• Connexions
• OpenCourseWare Consortium
• Open Culture
• ITunes U
• YouTube.com/edu

A few of my personal favorites:

• PopTech
• Ted Talks
• Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership Series, Stanford
• Social Good from The Chronicle of Philanthropy
• Philosopher Notes
• Mixergy
• Edufire
• PSFK
• Trend Central by The Intelligence Group

What are your favorite places, podcasts, educational resources online?

My weekly newsletter about New Orleans, NOLAlicious, is running a contest that ends tonight and I wanted to share the details.

Here’s what’s up. We’re stepping it up! We’re going big. To do that, we are looking first for a spanking new logo. After that we’ll be revamping our website and starting to include select advertisers into the site, as they make sense to our content. We’ve been fielding requests, and we wanted to get our ducks in a row first, and plus grow our base, before taking this turn.

So what’s up with the contest? Honestly, Carl, Taylor and I all have design experience to varying levels, but we wanted to make this collaborative and inclusive. After all, all three of us have struggled and continue to grow into our own careers but aren’t that far away from the tooth and nail of getting your name out there. So we thought a logo contest, for an up and coming artists or a small firm would be great exposure. Or an introduction to us to possibly reward the website redesign.

I posted before about website work and the post was successful in awarding the website redesign to two design firms.

For today’s logo contest, reminder it ends tonight. Here’s the deal:

* Send all submissions in .jpeg or .png format to editor@nolalicious.com. Submissions close Monday at 5pm CST. It’s an open platform and we’re looking for a creative and fresh take on what you see when you think “NOLAlicious.”

* We’ll showcase many of the entries on NOLAlicious and allow YOU to vote for your favorite. The three of us at NOLAlicious each have one vote, and you, the readers, hold the fourth vote.

* The winner will have their logo featured on the new NOLAlicious website and newsletter, showcasing their work to the greater NOLAlicious community.

* Standard terms & conditions apply. By entering a design, you agree that NOLAlicious will own all right, title, and interest in the design.

Any questions let me know!

Related Posts:
Three Exciting Announcements
My First Mardi Gras
Thank You For Your Donation