Social Actions Roundup3 - New Financing, New Launches, and New Campaigns!

Each week, Social Actions community members post links and news about online social activism to the Social Actions Round Up group. The following round-up is a summary of the links that surfaced in the last 7 days.

Acquisitions:

Network for Good acquires ePhilanthropy Foundation: http://tinyurl.com/6dy3cn

Mal Warwick Associates Announces Acquisition of Donordigital - http://is.gd/1iwE

New Financing:

WeTheCitizens receives a whole lot of financing ($1.5 million) - http://is.gd/1ip2

Endeavor, a nonprofit organization in NYC that finds and supports individual entrepreneurs in emerging markets has received a $10 million infusion from the Omidyar Network. Hat-tip - Lucy Bernholz - http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2008/08/syndication.html

New Platforms and Platform Updates:

Razoo (re)launches alpha site - with new giving guides - http://www.alpha.razoo.com Re-launch of Razoo's Facebook app is promised for September - http://is.gd/1iuX

Everyclick opens search engine to all UK charities - http://is.gd/1ivb

Betterthworld is set to launch for Fall 2008. (Imagine raising money for your cause, simply by surfing the Internet...) (Hat-tip - Tom Watson - http://causewired.com/2008/08/04/links-for-2008-08-03-deliciouscom/

Bettertheworld also includes an interesting "Resources for Charities" page (features Kiva, Idealist, Facebook Causes): -- http://glimpse.bettertheworld.com/resources-for-charities

TogetherChange.com is also slotted for Launch Fall 2008. (Hat-tip - Beth Kanter - http://netsquared.org/blog/kanter/nptech-roundup-grasshoppers-and-a...)

Knight News launches Knight News Challenge Garage - http://garage.newschallenge.org/ -- "the place to tinker with your great idea for the News Challenge before you apply" for their grants, which total upwards of 5 million each year (Hat-tip - DigiDave - http://is.gd/1izk)

http://www.discoverscholars.org/ applies the citizen philanthropy model to college scholarships. (Launched May '08)

Sector News:

MGive lights up the mobile giving scene! Joanna Fritz of About.com covers Alicia Keys use of the tool to raise $40,000 from more than 8,000 people during her recent concert tour. - http://is.gd/1iz7

"Another extremely cool tool offered by mGive as a part of this product is a widget that you can embed in a website, blog or online social network which will initiate the text message to your phone. You can see that in action at the Keep a Child Alive site." -- Michael Stein, Raising money from text message donations

How to Avoid the Curse of Vision Overload - A great post by Andrew Mason, Founder of ThePoint on GigaOM -- http://is.gd/YCY "In our case, we spent nine months developing extra features to accommodate our grand vision instead of focusing on what our users would really need..."

Direct-giving Web sites rely on fees to help cover costs - http://is.gd/1ipl Write-up on the fees charged by social action platforms, quoting Peter Deitz/Social Actions, Tom Williams/GiveMeaning, Charles Best/DonorsChoose, Keith Taylor/Modest Needs, and others.

David Karp of FirstGiving writes about their "Summer social media fundraising promotions" (includes tagging, Digg, Twitter, and Facebook)

Andrew Mason of ThePoint publishes a manifesto - http://is.gd/1iws

New/Noteworthy Campaigns:

Lois of FirstGiving highlights how one FirstGiving used YouTube to raise funds for Children's Hunger Fund and the WWF - http://is.gd/1itN

The Filmmakers of TheDelegates use an upcoming deadline and a huge national event (The Democratic Convention) + Chipin to fundraise for their film -- http://is.gd/1ivW

Sean Tavis, Runing for State Representative in Kansas uses a web comic + PayPal to raise small contributions from 3,000 donors! - http://is.gd/UPJ

Social Actions Updates:

Kare Anderson of MovingFromMetoWe blogged about Social Actions & Interviews Peter Deitz (podcast) - http://is.gd/1ipq

SocialActions' Joe Solomon launched Twitter.com/OnlineGiving - A mashup of blogs and news in the digital fund raising field.

Social Actions Labs launched the DonorsChoose.org WordPress Plugin! http://is.gd/1cen