Does anyone have any best practices for using Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc...) to help non-profits in areas like fundraising, volunteering, events or general awareness of what you do?

Dave at Madison & Main advertising (http://www.madisonmain.com/) put together a pretty solid 7-page social media "best practices" document recently. Email me at john [at] floricane [dot] com and I'll be happy to forward it along, or just contact Dave directly.

Madison & Main is hosting its second social media conference/workshop at the end of April. I heard good stuff about the first one last month.

http://madisonmain.blogspot.com/2009/04/richmond-new-media-seminars-429.html

I think one of their principals is talking at a Greater Richmond Chamber event bright-and-early tomorrow morning.

The University of Richmond is hosting a lecture on this very topic. The Annual Quigg Lecturer in Arts Management will speak in the Camp Concert Hall on campus this coming Tuesday, April 7th and 4 pm.
Robert G. Ottenhoff
President and CEO of Guidestar
"The era of assumed virtue is over: How the internet is changing the world of philanthropy."
There is no charge for this. The Hall seats about 700 if my memory is correct.

Another good resource I found on FB.

Social Networking & 1:1 Marketing - Non-Profits/Small Business by INTELMARX

This is a for-profit business but they have smartly collected the latest news articles and opinion pieces on the subject making their Fan Page an excellent place to read about social networking and nonprofit.

We recently created a facebook page at work for our non-profit organization and within a month had over 300+ fans. That's 300 people who probably check their FB accounts daily or every other day (and they certainly aren't checking our website that often) that we can send updates to. Facebook now has a Pages application which is similar to a personal page for an organization, I think its much more effective than creating a Group.

Here is a good article on the topic:

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/nonprofits.html