Get the picture

Whilst discussing publicity and promotion with one of my new local groups who are just setting up earlier this week, they mentioned that they were thinking of using Flickr to put up the photos onto the internet they’ll take at an event planned for the summer. They thought it would be good to begin to create a bank of photo’s for their upcoming organisation to be able to use in their own future publicity as they have no office base as yet; as well as being a place where supporters and participants from their event could show others what they did on the day. The interested volunteer used Flickr at home for their own family photo’s to keep friends and family who lived far away up to date with their own adventures.

I was quite excited by this and said to them that it was great that they were exploring the use of social media for their organisation.
This led to another conversation that the group hadn’t seen their planned usage of Flickr as using ’social media’. In fact, they hadn’t understood what this ’social media’ label was that so many of us use, nor what it meant. We then continued our conversation further and came up with lots of possibilities for using a variety of modern media methods in the future to help them spread the message of the work they aim to do.

I offered to compile a list of some of my favourite sites and articles on the subject of online photo’s for nonprofits and thought others may find these links useful too.

This week, Commoncraft released another of their fabulous quick fun video’s in ‘plain English’, perfect timing for my list, as this one is all about online Photosharing.
Soha El-Borno of the Wild Apricot Blog gives some inspiring ideas in her article - Five Ways Nonprofits Can Use Flickr to Reach New Audiences. Ideas include launching a photo contest, telling your story and engaging your volunteers.
Tim Davies has produced a quick guide to Flickr as part of a series of mini guides to social media which can be downloaded.
Beth Kanter has an excellent resource list on her blog for nonprofits and Flickr.
Do also see Beth’s article and screencast on How Use Creative Commons Licensing and Flickr To Find Powerful Visuals for Your Presentations.

I’d love to hear if you have used flickr in innovative ways, please leave a comment below!