Blake's Think Tank

If you listed to the Sunday Buzz with Bill Vickery yesterday you heard a lot of Twitter talk (Thumps Up: @tobifairley). Today, a reader points me to this story in The Christian Science Monitor about the impact Twitter is having on philanthropy.

“Out go the traditional fundraisers, with their extraneous marketing costs and rolls of red tape. In comes a new wave of digital efforts – often engineered by the same young activists that sealed Mr. Obama’s election.

““There’s a huge surge going on here,” says Allison Fine, author of “Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age,” and a senior fellow at Demos, a public policy think-tank in New York. “On one hand, as large numbers of people come to social networks, from Facebook to MySpace, causes will come into the conversation. It’s part of the genetic makeup of Americans to share their passion for causes.””

You sort of want to say No S#@%. The value social media will have on giving and organizing has been demonstrated once over and will only continue to expand. Web savvy non-profits that harness it will have a substantial advantage in the increasingly competitive battle for dollars.

UPDATE: David Kinkade of The Arkansas Project needs to find the funny.

UPDATE II: Twitter VC laughs at claims that Twitter has no business model. You gotta have something to get $35 million in VC money in this economy.