Your Social Actions on my.socialactions.com

Earlier this month, Social Actions blog member and Ning CEO Gina Bianchini made an offer to Social Actions that we couldn't refuse. She presented Social Actions with pro-bono access to her design team to help us enhance the Social Actions blog. Since then, we've been cooking up some exciting improvements.

Gina's offer came at the same time that Britt Bravo and I were talking about how to make the Social Actions blog a more active and member-centered community. Below is a quick rundown of what we're planning. I'd love your feedback on these ideas, which we plan to launch in early 2009.

1. The address blog.socialactions.com will change to my.socialactions.com

The Social Actions blog will be moved to a stand-alone Wordpress blog, and will be used to convey Social Actions news and roundups.

2. Our nearly 400 members will be invited to add "featured actions' instead of 'blog posts.'

This functionality will help Social Actions members share with each other the actions that they are taking as private individuals and social benefit professionals. We'll encourage members to conclude their 'featured actions' with instructions on how readers can participate in the action. We expect that a portion of the 'featured actions' will be drawn from Social Actions dataset of 40,000+ actions.

3. The forum will host weekly discussions.

Drawing on the success of the SocialEdge weekly discussion model, we'll make a concerted effort to host active discussions on what actions people are taking to change the world. We'll also encourage members to post their own discussion topics in the forum.

4. The revised layout and content will draw more attention to the Social Actions member profiles

The Social Actions Ning network has nearly 400 of the most active individuals using technology to make a difference. We'll be using our revamped Ning network to draw more attention to all of your efforts. Along the way, we hope to facilitate meaningful and lasting connections among members.

5. Members will be able to upload pictures

Ning gives each network member a special email address they can use to post pictures on their profile. For online actions, this may seem a little strange but not impossible (think screenshots). For offline actions, this feature will permit seamless uploading from mobile phones to My Social Actions of the actions people are participating in.

6. Sponsorships and affiliate offers

Social Actions needs to generate revenue in order to sustain the operation. One solution that we've come up with recently is to run non-intrusive sponsorships and affiliate offers in the right sidebar of our Ning network. We hope the sponsorships and affiliate offers will complement the content on my.socialactions.com. And of course, we'll continue to accept monthly and one-off donations.

These six changes make up the bulk of the enhancements we plan to roll out in early January. Please leave a comment below and let us know what you think. All the best, Peter