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Identifying Nonprofit Leaders Using Social Media

There's always a need for fresh leadership and big thinking in the nonprofit sector, and finding those leaders can be a herculean task. A friend and I were thinking about new approaches to finding untapped leadership online and thought it would be interesting to develop a reputation-based search engine that could help recruiters look at how users interact across different social media websites.


By Flickr user neXres Right now it's already possible to sort through user behavior across social media sites using available tools and combining user profiles with technologies like Google's Social Graph and the microformats rel-me and hCard. Using these together, we can begin to identify passionate individuals with the skills and ideas that will benefit the nonprofit community. (Note: This is entirely hypothetical and definitely raises privacy issues. The views here are my own, and this topic is mainly just for discussion.)

So how would this work? I could begin using the reputation-based search engine to find out who is submitting Habitat for Humanity stories to Digg, or who the passionate editors of the Greenpeace article on Wikipedia are. A few more questions I might think about include:

• Who submits the most stories per given category?


• Who comments or votes the most per category?


• What are the keywords for stories that a certain user has voted for or commented on?

Say, for example, that I want to find the "top" users on different social media sites using keywords like "nonprofit," "solar power," or "Red Cross." Which users would the search engine return? Here are some hypothetical examples:

• On Twitter, JohnDoeX returned with the most tweets related to the keyword "nonprofit."


• On Digg, Ghostman returned with the most submitted links related to the topic "solar power."


• On Delicious, PaulRT returned with the most saved bookmarks related to the keywords "nonprofit" and "solar power" and also "volunteer" and "Brooklyn."


• On Wikipedia, Starman88 made the most accepted changes on Wikipedia related to the "Red Cross."

Maybe PaulRT seems like the type of person my organization is interested in recruiting and I want to find a little bit more about this user. I want to use the reputation-based search engine to see how PaulRT measures up on a variety of different social media networks. What sort of data will be returned? How do the results compare to what I'm looking for? I'd be able to answer these questions across a number of different networks:

• What types of stories has PaulRT submitted on average?


• What types of stories has PaulRT favorited on average?


• What types of stories has PaulRT voted for or against?


• Which topics does PaulRT vote up or favorite most often?


• What are the keywords from PaulRT's comments?

When I look at the overall picture of PautRT, it looks like he's very passionate and proactive in the alternative energy community. He's able to articulate his thoughts fluidly and his ideas are very interesting. And it looks like he's very adept at using social media tools to promote his cause. PaulRT might be exactly the sort of person my organization is looking for.

With more people using the web each year than the year before, we're able to find new leaders and big thinkers much more easily than in years past. This approach for finding new leadership is just one idea and it definitely raises privacy concerns, but it's a start in locating the leadership the nonprofit community will need to continue the work we feel is so important.

What do you think?


This post is by Scott S., our resident expert on social media.