3 Innovative Ways Non-Profits Are Leveraging Blogs

The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes a full platform of marketing software, including lead generation tools.

If you're a non-profit, you're using every imaginable network to get your message out. Amidst all the fancy new social tools with silly names, it's possible to lose sight of the traditional blog as an effective channel.

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Most non-profit websites have some blog components -- posting updates, news, photos, videos, etc. -- to keep their fans informed. We dug a little deeper and found some unique ways that non-profits are sharing content.

1. Blog Action Day

Blog Action Day takes the adage "two heads are better than one" and applies it to digital updates. Blog Action Day is an annual event in October for which major blogs and everyday bloggers come together to write about and spread awareness about important issues. Mashable has participated in Blog Action Day, even writing up a story on last year's theme, Water.

The event has attracted major companies and blogs including Oxfam, the Guardian and Tumblr.

2. charity: water

Following the water theme, charity: water has put its blog front and center with the launch of Dollars to Projects, an initiative to match up every donated dollar with a real world action. Charity: water wanted to fight the feeling that donations just fed into a vat of pooled money. Instead, Dollars to Projects accounts for every donated dollar by providing donors with photos, video and text updates detailing how their money is being used.

“Water is provable -- you can know that you solved the problem and saved people’s lives,” said founder and CEO Scott Harrison during Mashable's Social Good Summit. Harrison said that charity: water receives 73% of its donations online.

3. Reports and Interactive Maps

Some non-profits like Invisible Children and HarassMap are turning their blogs and websites into social tools. Invisible Children, a non-profit seeking to end violent conflict in Uganda, created an LRA Crisis Tracker to plot out where violent attacks are taking place in Uganda, but also to provide a constant stream of news and updates about the violence in the area. It's a bit of a hybrid between an interactive map and a blog, but one that helps Invisible Children achieve its mission.

HarassMap is a similar idea from a group of Egyptian women sick of the harassment and abuse of women in Egypt. The map, like the Crisis Tracker, show where attacks take place along with sections for submitting reports and finding help.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Fikra

The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes a full platform of marketing software, including lead generation tools.

This story originally published on Mashable here.