My good friend Beth Kanter has been a sponsor of Leng Sopharath for some time now. She has been helping raise money to send her to college. This year, using Twitter, she managed to raise the tuition in record time and more. Now Beth's target is to raise enough money that TWO kids can go to college. This is a life changing opportunity for a kid in Cambodia. I have donated a little and encourage you to do the same. Beth is using Chipin to raise the money. If you want to help, point your browser to Beth's Blog, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Chipin badge.

Beth asked what my take on non-profit use of Flickr might be.

My focus is currently arts non-profits, so my response will be coloured a little.

Flickr's groups and tags make it a powerful tool for non-profits--actually any group that wants to engage in viral marketing. The potential ephemeral/throw away nature of flickr groups is such that it can feed an event. That doesn't mean to say that all flickr groups have limited life, but it does mean you can purposefully set up a situation in which the posting life is limited. You might set up an event around a group.

For example, lets say your organization has promoted a concert with several different acts. You could set up a flickr group, apply a few good tags to that group and offer everyone who walks through the door a slip of paper with that information and encourage posting to that group. Very quickly you could have a significant archive of the event--with deeper roots than if you had hired a professional photographer.

Similarly one could set up a virtual event whereby you ask a dozen people to take similar pictures across the country and post them to Flickr. Using a Flickr widget, that content could be embedded in your Website dynamically. This could be used for nation wide fund raising.

Either of these things can be done manually, but Flickr makes them nearly painless to aggregate and disseminate.