Ten years ago I was helping leading charities in the UK, including Christian Aid, YMCA, Woodland Trust, Epilepsy Action and Breast Cancer Care, to develop online communities. Since then the game has changed. It’s no longer about creating communities so much as finding your community in the social Web.

As with large businesses, the focus for charities and non-profits is shifting towards social media monitoring and engagement. The success of Twestival (“Twitter” + “Festival”) for the charity Water, shows how non-profits can use social media to successfully promote events and raise funds. But this is just the crude beginnings of something far more significant for the charity sector.

Search marketing (e.g. Google Adwords) now enables any organisation to attract “prospects”, i.e. people who have already self-selected themselves by the words they have used in their search. In social media – blogs, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, forums, YouTube etc. – people are engaging in conversations that are equally, if not more, revealing about their intentions, interests, desires and dislikes. In short: there is a lot more information out there that can lead charities to new supporters and activists than is currently being used. Just as big businesses are wising up to this opportunity, so too should charities.

US-based blogger Beth Kanter recently wrote a fascinating article about how, between 2007 and 2009, the American Red Cross has actively engaged in social media monitoring, with extremely positive results.

After hurricane Katrina, during which the Red Cross received a degree of criticism for their handling of the crisis, they hired a social media expert called Wendy Harman. Wendy set up a range of social media monitoring tools that would enable the organisation to track what people were saying about the organisation online. There are thousands of solutions on the market, ranging from free (e.g. Google Alerts) to paid (e.g. Visible Technology). She just picked the ones she felt would work best.

Her stated goals for the project were to:

• Listen to public opinion
• Correct misinformation
• Track conversation trends (in part to pre-empt crises)
• Identify influencers
• Build relationships

Over the course of two years Wendy made a great effort to shift the attitude of the organisation towards social media from one of suspicion and mistrust  (staff were not allowed to use social networks from work), to one where this new medium was embraced. In 2008 the American Red Cross lifted their ban on staff using social media and allowed them to actively engage online. It now has several thousand more highly committed online advocates.

In terms of direct results, the charity managed to recruit an army of supporters on Facebook (and now Twitter) who helped them to get $50k grant in 2007 and, more significantly, a $750k grant earlier this year. But the biggest benefit, according to Wendy Harman, is the change of culture within the organisation. This has been so successful that they have needed to set in place limits on when staff engage in conversations online – for example, they now only respond to blog posts where the blogger has achieved a certain Technorati ranking. This enables them to focus on the most influential posts and people.

I believe this case study shows the start of a significant change in the way non-profits engage online. Just today I read about a report that suggests many teenage suicides could be avoided through social media monitoring. By tracking conversations and seeing the signs early, we could actually save lives! How powerful is that? Obviously it’s ironic that it takes a global network to hear the voices of distressed children who may be living next door – but it’s also a huge opportunity. Leading charities should be at the forefront of this innovation and I look forward to living in a better world because of it.

Monitoring Social Media 09 a conference dedicated to social media monitoring, is taking place in London on 17th November.

Update: Apparently in the US 75% of charities monitor the internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their institution. Great blog post about it here.