There was a lot of talk at the AJL09 Convention about social media. As a good example of social media's potential for mitzvah, I want to share with you this post from the Summer of Social Good campaign. -- Heidi Estrin

This post is a collaboration between Mashable's Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell's "10 Ways" series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs. Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That's one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media. Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you'd like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days -- whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you're passionate about, you're helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential. Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here. You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you've gathered a social network. You'll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

3. Follow Charities on Social Networks

In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you're increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it. Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it's a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers. You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:

Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube) The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr) LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr) WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)

4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs

Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money. It's important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they're another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you'll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.

5. Find Volunteer Opportunities

Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers. For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.

6. Embed a Widget on Your Site

Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money. Mashable's Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.

7. Organize a Tweetup

You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that's important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real. Be sure to check out Mashable's guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.

8. Express Yourself Using Video

As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message. Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac -- the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports. If you're more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude's Children's Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.

9. Sign or Start a Petition

There aren't many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years. Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.

10. Organize an Online Event

Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized "tweet-a-thon" like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity. In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.

Bonus: Think Outside the Box

Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew's Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew's cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease. Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy. The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.

Special thanks to VPS.net

A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week. Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code "SOSG"to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there's no risk.

About the "10 Ways" Series

The "10 Ways" Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter. This content was originally written by Mashable's Josh Catone.

As part of this year's AJL Convention, an impromptu roundtable of those affected by recent adverse economic conditions, and those in a position to be of help, was convened on Tuesday morning of the convention. Librarians who had either been downsized, had their jobs redefined or expanded to include additional responsibilities, or who were in a position to assist with resources filled two tables. The purpose of the roundtable was to discuss ways in which our working conditions had been affected by the economic downturn and to use our network of Judaica librarians to assist each other. The meeting was organized by Ann Abrams (Temple Israel, Boston, Mass., and New England AJL Chapter President) and Susan Dubin (AJL President).

Some resources for job-seekers that were mentioned at the meeting include

• Metropolitan New York Library Council, which provides a variety of services to member libraries including resume review and training,
• SLA, the Special Libraries Association, which provides job listings and other resources to special libraries and archives, and also has an employment task force including mentoring, job advisement and coaching, and may serve as a model for a similar program in AJL,
• GetAJob, a service of the American Library Association,
• The Library News, a site specializing in blogs and jobs,
• JewishJobs.com, listing jobs by geographical area,
• Indeed.com, a jobs site,
• @Libjobs, a job-posting aggregator on Twitter,

Not surprisingly, themes discussed focused on negative economic changes. With budgets shrinking and many Jewish organizations having difficulty raising money, librarians must learn to be their own advocates and develop home-grown sources of funds. Grants, book sales and birthday clubs were all mentioned as possible sources of fundraising. The growing trend towards outsourcing of technical services was also discussed. Networking and mentoring are crucial to making important connections; it was suggested that volunteering in an organization in which one would like to work can be valuable on both counts. The lack of respect for libraries and library services was also mentioned as a cause of many problems in the industry, with the example given of jobs lost in the corporate sector. Staying up to date on technology and proving one's relevancy in a changing work enviornment are crucial to maintaining one's position in a difficult period.

As a result of this meeting an online wiki was created to allow AJL members to post discussions, jobs and resources on an ongoing basis. You can find this wiki at AJLJobSeekers.wetpaint.com. It is open to anyone who creates an account on the site. The meeting proved to be a valuable opportunity to share information and form a network of librarians concerned about this issue and it is hoped that discussion will continue online.

Convention photos.

Daniel Stuhlman
Chicago, IL
ddstuhlman at earthlink.net
 
Blog: http://kol-safran.blogspot.com/

  Here's a picture from Monday's lunch at the AJL conference.

Donnie

 
#AJL09

Our "Social Media" speaker, Mark Blevis, hosts a podcast about children's literature called Just One More Book. If you take a look at his website, you'll see that he's posted a message especially for us! It's entitled "A little Book List: For 2009 AJL Convention Wannabes" and it provides links to past podcast episodes of Just One More Book that feature Jewish books. Visit http://www.justonemorebook.com/2009/07/07/a-little-book-list-for-2009-ajl-convention-wannabes/ to learn more.

Also, AJL's own Abigail Yasgur has scored an interview on Just One More Book about her new children's book Max Said "Yes!" (The Woodstock Story). You can hear Abigail at http://www.justonemorebook.com/2009/07/10/max-said-yes-the-woodstock-story/.

Thanks, Heidi!

Sent from my iPhone

Tuesday is always the big day at the AJL Convention for Sydney Taylor Book Award activities. In the morning we have the double session where the members of the award committee discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of what they've been seeing in children's/YA Jewish lit in the past year. We also have the pleasure of hearing from our winning authors - this year we had Richard Michelson and Raul Colon speak in the morning about writing and illustrating As Good As Anybody, and Karen Hesse speak later about the creation of Brooklyn Bridge. Karen was very proud, and rightly so, of the Powerpoint she'd created to show us the incredible amount of documentation she gathers when researching a book - good job, Karen! In the evening we had the Awards Banquet, with wonderful and touching speeches by each gold medalist  from the RAS Awards and the Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award as well as the Sydney Taylor Book Award. In these photos you'll see a long shot and a close-up from the panel discussion in the morning, a shot of me with Karen Hesse (!!!), and the whole Sydney Taylor Book Award committee gathered with our winning authors (the only one missing is Valerie Zenatti, author of A Bottle in the Gaza Sea - her excuse for being absent is that she lives in Paris, France, the lucky ducky).   -- Heidi Estrin

I had the absolute pleasure of listening and watching 3 wonderful presentations on Jews and the Arts.

 

A gift to Biro-Bidjan, Chicago, 1937 by Nathan Harpaz

Oakton Community College got a gift of 14 woodcuts made by Jewish artists in Chicago.  The artists, all part of the depression area WPA project, intended to sell the group of prints to raise money for a Jewish autonomous region in Siberia. Lenin had wanted to give each ethnic group its own territory and he designated the remote area of  BiroBidjan as the place for Jews.

The prints showed many scenes fo the depression,  peddlers with no customers, people working, many had images of smoke stacks belching smoke.  There were also Biblical scenes, home images and agricultural scenes.

 

Look  up: the life and art of Sacha Kolin / Lisa Thaler

Lisa saw one of his paintings at a dealer.  She was captivated by the muted colors and abstract geometric shapes.  Lisa decided to research Sacha’s life.  Well known in her time, she’s fallen into obscurity.  Kolin left about 2000 works of art.  Lisa tried to “read” her body of work.  Sacha moved as a young woman from Vienna to New York.  She found that her search took her places both far and close to home.  She found the name of one of her cousins who had known Sacha.

Judaic treasures of the Jaffe Center for book arts / Daniel Scheide

Books AS art works. “Books” made of scrolls, paper, glass (2 pages that when you close them, they form the letters of the a prayer)   Judith Margolis’ book for the  counting of the Omer – which is designed for you to take out a page a day to put in a frame to contemplate and meditate about.  Some books are “altered” cut, painted on, crumpled etc.

The quilted book compettion done in conjunction with the local quilt guild.  Celebration of the 100^th anniversary of Tel Aviv and illustrations of Shir ha-shirim. It made me want to run home to my sewing machine.