Sparking charity: Columbia J-school dean uses social media to shine light on nonprofits

Sree Sreenivasan, the dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School who regularly blogs about social media, is using his Twitter account as a platform for bringing attention to nonprofit charities.

"Sending money, of course, remains the single most important way to support nonprofits," Sreenivasan wrote Sunday in a blog post for technology website CNET. "But social-media users have learned that you can also have an impact by paying with something else: attention — your own attention and your friends' attention. … As I approached my 6,000th tweet, I decided to use the occasion to bring some attention to a few nonprofits and to learn more about how every day users support their charities. … People would nominate their favorite charities and I'd tweet about five that caught my eye."

Sreenivasan's CNET blog post included a preliminary list of 35 nominated charities that ran the gamut from Alex's Lemonade Stand ("fighting cancer one cup at a time") to School on Wheels ("provides tutoring and educational advocacy for homeless children in Indianapolis").

Last year in the article "Social media's impact on charitable fundraising: Does it work?" USA Today's Christie Garton wrote, "Charities that have taken a holistic or integrated approach to fundraising — combining multiple social media tools with the more traditional approach of email or mailed requests — saw their fundraising increase as much as 40 percent compared to peers that didn't use these social tools."