Great idea, Clever Boy !!!

Okay, okay, I'll work on this pitch--after supper. Darn it I'm such a procrastinator. I want to make a pitch based on a gift like beads and the school fees. I just love the connections LiA makes and think others will too. So I've got to find a succinct way of doing that.

Here's my copy. Anyone please improve on it. Be sure to tell me if it's not okay to post.

Also I love looking at the Ned and LiA photos. It would be great to have one photo with a CC license. Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 seems pretty safe. I enjoy the Flickr streams so much I would be happy for others to discover them. So if there's a photo that could be given a CC 3.0 license that would be icing on the cake.

I recommend Life in Africa (LiA) for a present for that special someone.

LiA makes a great gift because it's not just a gift, it's a experience. There are many ways to connect: shop for community-made gift that make a difference, invest in the LiA community through a Kiva loan, or my favorite, give to help provide school fees for 200 orphans in LiA households. It's not just a gift, it's an experience.

http://lifeinafrica.com/

Ah, I notice The Emancipation Network was Johnny on the spot about this.

John this is so great of you - thanks!

What do I have to do to give a picture a cc license? Send me a link to one in the LiA photostreams you like and I can do that if I know what to do.

John Powers said: (cj added a few words here and there)

I recommend Life in Africa (LiA) for a present for that special someone.

LiA makes a great gift because it's not just a gift, it's an experience. There are many ways to connect with Life in Africa's war-affected communities in Uganda: shop for community-made gifts that make a difference, invest in the LiA community through a Kiva loan, help Ugandans plan projects online, or my favorite, give to help provide school fees for 200 orphans in LiA households. More than just a gift, LiA is an experience that makes Africa feel closer

http://LifeInAfrica.com/

The photos are entirely optional. Flickr makes it easy to do license a batch of photos with a CC license, but that also makes it confusing if all you want to do is give one or two photos a CC license. That's not hard to do, just finding instructions to see to be. What you do:

Open a photo you want to add a new license to. On the right at the bottom of the list of Additional Information is link with a little green box which will say something like This photo is public with the link (edit) click on that.

Under the photo on the new page will be a link Add license to your photo. Click on that, choose the type of license you want and click Save.

The Gulu Mamas picture already has a link attached to it back to the School Fees at the LiA Web site. That's something good for the picture to have. A picture of the Jungle Beads would also be nice.

Don't worry about this too much Christina. I don't know how you manage to do all the Web stuff in the first place!

I notice that some of the great pictures from Uganda at <Ned>.com's Flickr photostream have 300+ views. That just goes to show that Flickr can be a useful way to drive traffic to the LiA site.

I love the new copy!!!

thanks John - ok I did the license thing on this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lif einafrica/1355977961/

and this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lif einafrica/504983684/

let me know if there are others you have an eye on. It wasn't hard to do once I knew where to click!

Hey John, has anyone told you lately how great you are? Well I'm telling you now.

Wish I could help more right now but I don't have constant internet access right now since I moved last weekend and am camping out at my sisters house until I leave for Uganda on Tuesday.

Evvy Bryning said:

Hey John, has anyone told you lately how great you are? Well I'm telling you now.

Evvy, I told him the same thing the other day so hopefully he is starting to really get the message!!! G. xxx

I posted to Beth's Blog. I really love the pitch Christina made so crisp. I know of no other organization which has embraced the human connections made possible by the Web as LiA.

It's not easy being a guy. Well, surely from a woman's perspective it must seem easier being a guy than being a woman. I guess what I'm referring to is that sometimes it's not so easy to discover I think like a guy and realizing that's not always so pretty.

Blogher is pretty cool because it gets to this not so pretty aspect of us guys. I'm not very clever about computer stuff. It was a real help to discover women geeks online because I finally found people who'd give me info I wanted about tech stuff without belittling me.

On the About page at the LiA Web site are pictures of Christina, Grace and Evvy. I kept looking at the pictures trying to think of some way to say how different and special LiA is. Obviously LiA is special because of three unique and special people. I think it does matter you're women, but how to say that? I thought it safer to close the window than to stick my foot in mouth.

It takes a village as they say. We all have something important to share, girls and boys, woman and men. So now my mental soundtrack is playing Maurice Chevalier "Thank Heaven for Little Girls." See what I mean about it being hard as a guy? Ah, but there's an essential difference;-)

Thank you very much Evvy and Gayle for your kindness.

Here is the post at Beth's Blog and here it is at BlogHer. The "Gulu Mamas" photo is the first one, so it's above the fold at BlogHer. It's a great list of organizations, and I'm just so pleased that Beth was keen to do the story by putting the call out on her blog. She could have easily listed her top ten organizations. But she gets how the Web is a participatory medium. I'm very happy The Emancipation Network took her up on it too. For all the challenges of lack of IT departments, resources and what have you, non-profits find ways to make their online presence work.

John, thanks for the tip on this. I submitted The G.R.O. Foundation and it also made it in to the Holiday Guide post, #7.

Congratulations also to LiA and TEN!!!

Meron, thanks for piping up, I'm sorry that I didn't connect you and The G.R.O. Foundation earlier. I still haven't quite wrapped my head around an abundance model where we're all at the table and bring something to it. But I'm convinced that there's great value in approaching the world in this way.

It's been interesting to participate in other social networks since Omidyar.net shuttered its doors. I keep seeing Onetters. So for example I get a note at Facebook from Christina advocating for Kaboom in Atlanta:-) It's not just preaching to the choir, it's a process of helping more and more of us sing together joyously.

Wonderfully put John!

Thanks for posting all this, I was so busy when I first saw it I had no time to thank you and could only just react. l It turns out to have been nice, but ineffective. looking at our Google analytic data we got a grand total of 6 people linking from blog her and 4 from beths site. I dont post that to be negative, just to share what I am learning about using blogs as a marketing tool.

We were fortunate this year to have a variety of blog types talk link to us even though we had no real campaign to create the links. I am certainly happy to have the links at it improves our google rankings, but so far keyword search and direct links from related topic trusted partner sites have been the best for us.

>>keyword search<<

John, do you mean paid or organic? (or both?)

paid - we are too low on organic to get that high a percentage

john its amazing know that and i would love to get to that too,but i need help since am not perfect with the computor knowledge,you can help us with the links to. Thanks for your help too.

>>paid - we are too low on organic to get that high a percentage<<

I think Ned has pretty good Google Juice. We show us as #4 for a search on Ned, and #20 for a search on XO computer. Once we get the trafficking/slavery thread moderator up and going, I suspect those keywords will rise quite a bit in organic search as well.