Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants – a weekly blog carnival comprising posts on a particular nonprofit theme. It’s the first time I’ve hosted the Carnival here on Giving in a digital world, and my theme for the week was ‘Engaging with supporters through online social networks’. In accordance with the ‘seven posts only’ rule – here are the top seven posts…

With Facebook still the hottest online social network in terms of discussion about new advertising approaches, here’s Wild Apricot’s Ten innovative ways nonprofits can use Facebook.

The rise of Facebook over the last year has tended to obscure the fact that MySpace, with some 200 million members, remains the world’s biggest online social network. In the light of this, the folks at Frogloop have conducted an interesting analysis of how 150 nonprofits are using MySpace and what others can learn from this when considering their own MySpace presence.

Taking a different tack, Kivi Leroux Miller’s post ‘Forget MySpace and Facebook and try sites for Boomers?’ is a great reminder to think first about just who you’re looking to engage with and only then then to consider which social networks might be right to help you achieve this – rather than simply following the MySpace and Facebook crowds.

Here in the UK, discussion about such Boomer sites has been fueled recently by the launch of SAGA Zone. However, as reported on NMK’s blog, UK-based charity Help the Aged has criticised the site for segregating older users.

Alternately, how about building your own social network site? In her post social networks, walled gardens, and decision trees, Elizabeth Dunn discusses the pros and cons of an organisation-specific social network vs a ‘big box’ site.

And finally, with the launch of Google’s OpenSocial perhaps it’s going to get a whole lot easier to develop online engagement programmes through a range of different social networks (or perhaps not?).

At Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology, Michelle Murrain gives a very handy intro to what Open Social means and what it might mean for nonprofits.

While John Bell encourages nonprofits to take advantage of OpenSocial to engage with supporters through the development of multi-platform widgets in his post on Nonprofit widgets in the age of OpenSocial.

That’s all for this week, but you can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, whoever is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.

I had an especially busy time last week with a couple of big presentations to give at the same time as I was due to be attending the Resource Alliance’s International Fundraising Congress over in Holland.

Unfortunately, while the presentations went fine, this meant that I didn’t get to see many sessions at the Congress – which is a pity because it’s a unique opportunity to hear from fundraisers from all around the world. However, I did get to talk to some folks from Ammado about their new social network – which is currently in Beta phase.

The Resource Alliance had partnered with Ammado at the Congress, with invitations for all 900+ delegates from some 50 different countries to join the beta test membership, so I joined-up and visited their exhibition stand to learn a bit more about it.

From the publicity materials I had thought that the site was purely intended as a social network for fundraisers – providing an environment within which fundraisers around the world can share ideas, pose questions, and generally feel more connected. All in all, rather like a year-round online version of the International Fundraising Congress. What surprised me was that the Ammado team actually envisage it as also being a general social network for people interested in supporting charities.

I must admit that I’m not convinced that this is going to work for them on a mass market scale – at least not in those countries where online social networking is already becoming established (which is pretty well all developed markets).

The real hard core of a charity’s active supporters might be convinced to join-up – and I can see it perhaps being a good place to communicate with and equip keen volunteers. However, for general supporters there needs to be a very good reason for them to register and maintain a profile on this site as well as on any other social networks they’re already members of – whether that’s MySpace, Facebook, the newly launched over-50s Saga Zone, or whatever.

If people are already active within their own personal networks on sites like these, then that’s where fundraisers should be engaging with them – if they want to benefit from the peer-to-peer fundraising potential on offer. Perhaps Ammado is hoping to ride the growing wave of interest in social networking and catch late adopters who haven’t yet chosen a social network site – but in that case they’ll be up against some very high profile generic site competition.

Only time will tell whether they can achieve their vision of creating an online “community of people who care”. Meantime, however well it develops as a Web 2.0 charity portal, it’s certainly well worth fundraisers taking a look at Ammado as a potential resource for networking and sharing of best practice – which is a very worthy aim for the site in itself.

Rumours are bouncing around the web that social network site MySpace is preparing to launch its 3rd party developer platform at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco next week.

Creatively called ‘MySpace Platform’, it is expected to comprise a set of APIs and a new markup language that will allow any developer to produce advanced applications with the ability to access member information (profile data, friend list, activity history, etc.) – rather than just sit on the surface of the site as a plethora of MySpace profile pimping options currently do.

This launch has been expected ever since Facebook opened itself up to 3rd party applications in the same way back in May – in a move that has contributed significantly to that site’s astonishing growth since then.

For online fundraisers, MySpace Platform will offer opportunities to engage with the MySpace member audience in a far more sophisticated way than ever before. So, look out for the launch of new MySpace fundraising apps similar to the range of Facebook apps that have appeared over recent months.