Last night, my friend Stephanie Rudat shared this link. It’s a memorial website to Nate Henn, an American who died on Sunday in a terrorist attack in Uganda whilst working directly with children to alleviate the terror that is “children soldiers.”

Nate spent a year and a half working with Invisible Children, a completely voluntary role, where he became somewhat of a big brother to these children who desperately need some good role models. On Sunday, an explosion ripped through a rugby field where people were watching the World Cup Final. Unfortunately, both Nate and some of the children he was working with died. You can read the full story here.

When Stephanie shared this with me, I gave $100 dollars to their cause immediately. It’s not a lot, but more than I normally give to things online. I figured that if Nate could give his life, then I could give $100.

I know there are 101 causes that we can give to, but none has touched me immediately like this, hence I am sharing it here.

Let’s not let “social media for social good” just be a mantra. Let’s do it.

If you can’t see the video above, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

I got an email last week from Sally Douglas from Agenda21Digital.com asking me to say something about Christian Aid Week which runs all this week to raise awareness and finances for some core social justice issues around the world.

Why am I posting it? First of all, I believe in it.

Secondly, it’s not hard to imagine they targeted UK bloggers based on keywords like “Christian” and “Pastor” – but the fact that they did that, that not only an agency did it, but a charity like Christian Aid also went with it, deserves some respect.

I also love the way Sally went about doing it. She gave me very clear points, posted three bit.ly links (so as to not cram my screen), and then kindly asked me to post a link to them. It was easy for me to write this post - all the research was done for me. The tools were complete.

The campaign is actually pretty cool. You can do things like “donate your Facebook status” (on this page here), which is a very low participatory way to help spread the message that is also new and not just the regular retweet button or host of share buttons that no one ever uses.

The site reminds me a little of the Child’s i Foundation and their Get Involved Page, where you can give “time”, “love” or “money” – another exceptional way to allow a low participatory buy in, and also appreciate that for some people, their time is more beneficial than the amount of money they can give. (That last point takes me right back to our discussions on People vs Parts.)

Having spoken to Lucy Buck who runs the foundation, she says that this people-to-people approach has been very successful, in both increasing participation, reducing waste (particularly with time), and in turn, has reduced costs.

What can we learn here?

There are a few lessons here for charities using Social Media, and for community in general:

• Find advocates who are stake holders. The people that give most to charities are the ones that have benefited by them.
• Create complete tools to help people share. Don’t make people have to work to share you. (Watch this video for more.)
• Have multiple levels of participation, with the lowest being just a click.
• Value more than money – and make it clear you do. Because to make anything work, you need more than money – you need people.

I know today might be too late for you to get massively involved with Christian Aid Week, but what you can do at least is donate your status. I’ll be doing it.

Last week Matt Young presented the Have A Heart Appeal as one of our Endeavours at Like Minds.

The aim is simple: to raise £1,000 for the Starlight Children’s Foundation, whose aim is to basically grant the wishes of terminally ill children.

I’m not asking you to have a heart because I know you have one. I’m just asking you to do two things:

1. Give to the appeal if you haven’t already.
2. Pull your contacts to see how we can not only smash through £1,000, but use our connections to help make some wishes come true. Put what you can do in the comments below.

So, to give to Have A Heart, click here.

I know we can do a lot of good for the local community with this – and do things that really matter.

If you can’t see the video click here. You can watch the video on YouTube here.

I was taking a break on Dartmoor this week when I started seing lots of collection boxes for Devon Air Ambulance Trust (DAAT) in practically every shop, hotel or restaurant that I went to. The woman at this shop told me that everyone in the town (Chagford in this instance) had at the very least a family member who had been directly helped by DAAT.

So I flipped out my camera and started rolling. It was a moment of synchronicity – let me tell you why:

We had Heléna Holt on the first panel at Like Minds last week, who is the CEO of Devon Air Ambulance Trust, and I know the campaigning that she and many others do through Social Media to not only get funds but to also increase awareness. Having Heléna on the panel was another local person who we had in the diverse mix of people speaking. I hear people talk about ‘local’ in Social Media, but few do it.

The local goodness doesn’t stop there. In fact this whole thing is a local affair – because it’s our local partners Optix Solutions who developed Devon Air Ambulance’s website and Social Media campaign. In fact having ‘local partners’ is something that just isn’t really being done by conferences that have a global voice. Anyway, moving on…

Heléna sat on the panel that Jonathan Akwue from Digital Public had keynoted on minutes before – the very keynote where Jon boldly said that “Social Media saves lives.” The Guardian were there and concured with Jon, and thus ran the first of two articles on Like Minds, titled ‘Like Minds: Social Media can save lives‘. You can see the interview with Jon and how they reduced teenage pregnancies using Social Media here and then the keynote here.

And there’s one more thing: before Like Minds, not too many people knew about Jon – something he blogged about quite openly here. But his opening keynote has been praised over and over. We knew that he had something to give, even if he didn’t shout about it.

There are plenty of examples of local charities doing good with Social Media. But more often than not they are behind the scenes rather than jumping to get attention. Take our like minded endeavours for example – I never knew any of them were functioning at such a level.

Let me hear from you – what local charities do you know of using Social Media to do good that we should be promoting?