The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is in full-swing. Come on into the tent and peep at the best posts of the week related to social marketing and nonprofits.

Craig Lefebvre of On Social Marketing and Social Change addresses the recent New York Times article ripping social marketing efforts selling bed nets for malaria control. He does a thorough job of explaining the many problems with the objections, and even follows up with a summary of the responses to the article. My favorite Senator, Tom Coburn, shows again what an advocate of public health he is with the line in the NYT article, "We knew social marketing doesn't work."

Britt Bravo of Have Fun * Do Good offers four steps to start using the social web for social change: consume, join, participate and create. She has great lists of examples and resources for each step.

Beth Kanter of Beth's Blog demonstrates yet again how effective social media can be for personal fundraising, raising $1,000 in 24 hours to send a young Cambodian woman to college and (as of this writing) at least half more of that to sponsor a young man as well. There's still time for you to donate!

Paul Jones of Cause-Related Marketing makes the interesting observation that the pink ribbon for breast cancer awareness has become the equivalent of an open-source charity icon. This is a double-edged sword, as not only can breast cancer-related nonprofits use the symbol, but so can for-profit entities (who may not be as protective of its charitable meaning).

Sandy Beckwith of Build Buzz gives her take on how Ellen DeGeneres' dog adoption story should have played out differently, from a marketing point of view. (And her follow-up on what animal rescue organizations should do to take advantage of this publicity opportunity.)

Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention makes the case for making search engine optimization part of your marketing strategy. It's really not that scary.

Katya Andresen of Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog lays out ten steps to finding and winning a corporate partner for your outreach efforts. As an added bonus, Joe Waters of Selfish Giving offers his own riffs on Katya's points.

And for the host post, I'll share the beginning of my case study about using a Facebook Group for building a grassroots advocacy campaign for suicide prevention-related legislation. We're up to 82 members, and if you're on Facebook, I hope you'll join us.

Next week the Carnival will be at Donor Power Blog. If you would like to participate, go to BlogCarnival.com to submit your post using the form there or send an email to npc.carnival AT yahoo DOT com with your name, your blog’s name and the URL of the post (not your blog homepage). The deadline is Friday, 8:00 p.m. ET.


Technorati Tags: carnival, nonprofit, consultants, marketing