Future:Media:Change

In a world of far too many social media tools and not enough resources, FourSquareFoursquare the popular geo location social network/game/craze has tested their own fund raising component to the service.  Is this something that nonprofits need to keep on their radar?  Do you need to hire a foursquare intern now?

FourSquare for Charity

In DecemberDecember Boys reviews FourSquare ran a test campaign that donated 4 cents to CampInteractive, an organization that aims to inspire inner-city youth through technology each time someone check-in to a location in New York City.

While this will just be an experiment in NYC at first, FourSquare hints that this is something the company is thinking about doing with its leaderboard going forward. And this extends upon the idea of using the game element of Foursquare for good. Last month, the service teamed up with BART, the public transportation system in the San Francisco Bay Area, to encourage people to check in more at BART stations to earn rewards such as free rides and a special badge. -TechCrunch

If you want to sign up your nonprofit on Foursquare, this is a handy little guide on how to do it.  But many nonprofits might want to hold off for a bit.

The 300 million pound elephant in the room.

FourSquare is already becoming the darling of the media with journalists calling it the 2010 Twitter.  Before we move all of our twitter eggs into the FourSquare basked let’s not forget about Facebook.  The social networking giant isn’t sitting still while geo-location websites become more popular.

There is already a Yahoo! app that allows you to share your location on Facebook and when Facebook rolls out their own geolocation service it will likely make a significant impact.

Of course we have no idea who is going to win the geolocation service game, but in a crowded social networking field unless your community is highly active on FourSquare I would advise nonprofits to keep their resources on the social networking you are already working on.