A couple weeks back I introduced the new nonprofit social startup Causecast.org. I have since learned of two great websites that put Causecast back in the ‘contender’ category – because they have been around a lot longer and both enjoy a substantial amount of members.
In fact, SocialVibe.com and Ammado.com share many of the same ’causes’ . Both websites provide visitors with a wide selection of nonprofits to follow. SocialVibe wins my vote as the most efficient, usable, and well-designed website. The website allows you to ‘join’ as many causes as you wish – once you join a cause you can contribute to the nonprofit’s SocialVibe community by submitting donations, uploading multimedia (photos, videos), writing in a cause-specific forum, and finally, you can share the nonprofit’s SocialVibe page on other social networks (MySpace, Facebook, etc.). The ‘One Laptop Per Child’ cause has a well-utilized page on SocialVibe.
The Ammado.com platform offers just about everything SocialVibe does but not in Web 2.0 form. So the website doesn’t compare to Causecast or SocialVibe in many aspects – it does not have a donation function nor does it provide the ability to share a cause throughout the social-networking sphere; nevertheless, even modern websites fail to adress a primary principle of Web 2.0: ‘Harnessing Collective Intelligence.’
The Social Networking space is certainly saturated with general sites like Facebook and MySpace but it’s good to see this ’cause-centric’ flavor of social networking websites pop up. I only reviewed three of them because they attracted my immediate attention – but there are many useful and effective social networking sites that fall into this category (Max Gladwell has reviewed several of them)…here’s a brief listing:
Don’t forget the websites that allow you to build your own custom social network. There are hosted solutions like Ning, and completely ‘white label’ solutions like Crowd Factory.
Thank you for the mention! -Amy Causecast Community Manager
Nice article thank you for sharing!