Nonprofits and Photosharing: A Cost-Effective Way to Spread Your Message Online

At the Michigan Nonprofit Association, we are constantly looking for resources and tips to share with our 1100+ members. Lately, we have begun delving into learning more about social media and how we can further facilitate resource sharing and information sharing with our members. One great tool that every nonprofit should know about is photosharing. Online photosharing services allow users to upload photographs, store them, organize them, tag them, share them, discuss them, and explore others’ photographs, too. The possibilities are endless and best of all, photosharing services are generally free!

If you are brand new to the idea of photosharing, you may want to watch this great video done by Common Craft, titled “Online Photo Sharing in Plain English.”

So, how can nonprofits use photosharing to spread their messages? As a starting place, Flickr is a popular, incredibly user-friendly place to host photographs. For example, if your nonprofit has taken photographs of a recent event or of volunteers helping with a project, you may want to share these photographs with donors, potential donors, volunteers, partner organizations, staff, and people in the community. Flickr allows you to upload photos of your choice and gives you the control over who can see them.

An especially great feature about Flickr is that it gives users the opportunities to create group photo pools about shared interests, connect with other users, and engage in discussion about whatever they choose. Here is an excellent post by Beth Kanter, a nonprofit & social media guru, that explains how nonprofits can get a free Flickr account and begin using the plethora of features Flickr offers. The post explains how to set up an account, upload photos, organize, and share with others.

Additionally, Beth has written a wonderful primer on nonprofits and Flickr that is full of examples of nonprofits using Flickr and how you can use it, too. This primer is an excellent resource for experienced photosharers, in addition to nonprofits just beginning to think about whether photosharing is right for them.

Wild Apricot’s Nonprofit Technology Blog also has an excellent post to inspire creativity in nonprofits that use Flickr. Some suggestions of ways nonprofits can utilize photosharing to reach new audiences can be found here. The post includes examples of nonprofit organizations who have used Flickr in the following ways:

- running a photo contest
- telling a story
- promoting an event
- launching a campaign
- engaging volunteers

If your nonprofit is already on the photosharing boat, you’ve read more at the Flickr FAQ, started a free account, and are considering the benefits of upgrading to a Flickr Pro account, you are in luck! TechSoup, a fantastic place for learning about nonprofits and technology, has partnered with Flickr to offer 10,000 Pro accounts at an extremely discounted rate!

These Pro accounts are available to nonprofits in bundles of two ($6.00) or five ($15.00) and last for one year. If, at the end of the one year period, the account is not renewed, it will revert to being a free account. So many nonprofits have been taking advantage of this resource and TechSoup started a Flickr group for nonprofits to share the impact technology has had on their organizations and communities.

And finally, two inspiring and widely different examples of nonprofits using Flickr include:

- The Learning Community, a school in Rhode Island that built a playground for students in a former parking lot. Their Flickr photostream illustrates, step by step, how they went from demolishing their parking lot to finishing the tiles on their playground floor.

- cmartin82, who had this to say:

One on the main reasons we created a Flickr account was to put information out there for the local media to access when they want to feature us in a story. Thus far they’ve had to contact us for pictures, and since we haven’t had many good pictures on hand anyway, we’ve missed out on some potentially great coverage.

As you can see, there are a lot of potential benefits for nonprofits to share photos online and plenty of reading on the internet to help nonprofits get started. This post begins to cover the various resources available for nonprofits, but we would also like to get your take on this subject. Do you share photos of your nonprofit’s work online? If so, have you had success in doing so? Do you have any favorite examples to share with us?

One of my personal favorite examples of nonprofit photosharing may be the Humane Society’s LOLSeals Photo Caption Contest. The Humane Society provided several adorable photographs of baby seals and asked participants to add funny captions. After users submitted their entries, the photos automatically loaded to the Humane Society’s Flickr photostream.

After all, who doesn’t love looking at photos like this one, submitted to the LOLSeals Contest by Cassie in Silver Spring, MD?

Submitted by Megan Engle

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