Speaker profile: Beth Kanter

Friday 2:30 - 3:15: Using Social Media for Good Causes

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Her expertise is how to use new web tools (blogging, tagging, wikis, photo sharing, video blogging, screencasting, social networking sites, and virtual worlds, etc) to support nonprofit. She has worked on projects that include: training, curriculum development, research, and evaluation. She is an experienced coach to "digital immigrants" in the personal mastery of these tools. She is a professional blogger and writes about the use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector for social change.

She has given numerous workshops for nonprofits around the world on how to integrate social media into communications strategies as well as how to workshops on specific techniques. She is in much demand as a workshop leader and a top rated speaker. She was the keynote speaker for the Cambodian Bloggers Conference in Phnom Penh, The Connecting Up Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Minnesota Council on Nonprofits, Making Media Conference in Chicago and others. She has presented about nonprofits and social media at some of the leading social media industry conferences including O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns, Gnomedex, SWSX, Blogher, and Podcamp.

She is curating NTEN’s "We Are Media: Nonprofit Social Media Starter Kit," an online community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world. She is facilitating the community to work in a networked way to help identify the best existing resources, people, and case studies that will give nonprofit organizations the knowledge and resources they need effectively use social media.

She is a professional blogger and writes about the use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector for social change. She was recently named one of the top fifty most influential female bloggers (#29 on the list) and the only blogger who focuses on the nonprofit sector and on a top ten list of female thought leaders in social media. In addition to her highly rated, award winning blog, Beth’s Blog, she is a Contributing Editor for nonprofits and social change for BlogHer and a contributor to NetSquared. Her articles have appeared many online nonprofit publications including TechSoup, Nonprofit Times, and others. She contributed a chapter to the NTEN’s forthcoming nonprofit technology book, to be published by Wiley, on Technology and ROI and she contributed a "thought leader" essay on social media adoption issues to the recently published book "Mobilizing Generation 2.0."

She is an expert in the use of web 2.0 for fundraising, having raised over $200,000 for Cambodian orphans using her blog and other Web 2.0 tools. She was the first place winner of the Yahoo Network for Good Contest in 2007 (covered by the Wall Street Journal) and came in first place for global causes in America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by Case Foundation and Parade Magazine. Her case studies about using social media to raise money for charities are documented here.

In 2007, she received the "Most Valuable Person in the Field" award from NTEN. In 2008, she voted by her peers as the person the community is most likely to turn to for advice. She has been interviewed numerous times by mainstream media outlets and popular blogs, video blogs, and podcasts. You can learn more about Beth’s work by reading her Beth (http://beth.typepad.com) or poking around her wiki portfolio.

If want to know something more about Beth, email her.

(from bethkanter.wikispaces.com/Bio)
Photo by Steve Goodman

Twitter: twitter.com/kanter