With the launch of the iPhone tomorrow, being heralded by Apple aficionados as the greatest thing since, well, the last thing Apple came out with, devotees are lining up to buy the device designed to replace your phone, music player, toaster over, PDA, PSP, portable video player, Tamagotchi, and perhaps car (teleportation rumored to be available on the $600 version only). At this point, you, the non-profit web professional, might be thinking, “What will my site look like on an iPhone?” Sure, the NY Times looks great in those ads they’re running (personally, I liked the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ones better, but that’s just me), but you’ve got to assume that they picked nytimes.com for a reason. What about your site?

For Mac users, there’s a tool that gives you at least some perspective. It’s called iPhoney, and it’s only available for Mac OS X, but it’s designed to actually just be a miniature version of the Safari viewer. The app is designed by Marketcircle, and it’s free – if you’re on a Mac, go pick it up. It won’t be an exact interpretation, due to the different rules for CSS, Java, Flash and Javascript that iPhones follow, but at the very least, it should help you realize what the lower resolution does to your site.

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When I last posted about Facebook Causes, just under 200,000 people had signed up for the Causes app. Just three weeks later, over 1.1 million people have Causes on their Facebook – and it’s still growing (to give you some context, there are about 24 million Facebook users today). Some individual causes have been showing similar logarithmic growth – Save Darfur is up to almost 220,000 members and $17,000 raised, The ONE Campaign is at almost 40,000 members and $4,500, and Support Breast Cancer Research, a cause that wasn’t even on the radar three weeks ago, is at nearly 400,000 members and $10,000 donated. So there’s clearly potential for groups to build a network and raise money, at very little cost of funds. But what’s next?

Well, for one thing, Project Agape founder Joe Green has hinted that new features are coming later this month or in early July. What’s going to be included in these new features? They’re not saying yet (there are some hints at interviews he’s done for Personal Democracy Forum and MyDD – read the tea leaves however you’d like), but I thought I’d write up my own personal wish list here:
 
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(Note: many of the links in this post go to pages that require a facebook login to view. If you don’t have one, you should get one here)

With the announcement of their new open platform, Facebook has turned the social networking world on its head. Instead of banning third-party widgets, they’ve opened the doors to innovation. We’ve already seen new modules for sharing movie favorites, supporting your favorite presidential candidate and playing music (mercifully, iLike has no autoplay-on-load option).

And more relevantly for non-profits, we’re seeing applications like Project Agape’s Facebook Causes that let you build a community and raise money using one of the 800 lb gorillas of social networking. Facebook boasts over 24 million members as of this writing, a disproportionately high number of them in college or college educated – prime future small donor material. Facebook Causes lets you build your own cause by choosing an organization to support, writing a short brief on why they deserve your support, and picking a category.

Next comes the tricky part – promoting your cause to your network. Some of the most popular causes, like the ONE campaign and Save Darfur, have grown exponentially, with 9,203 and 44,506 members respectively. Others, like Net Neutrality is Bogus and Simplify our Citations (number one position: “Bibliographies are hard”) have garnered only 13 and 18 members so far respectively. There are 150 causes tagged as public advocacy (one of nine categories), ranging from presidential candidates to political issues both mainstream and obscure, so you can get an idea of the volume of causes to support in total.

So how do you make your organization stand out from the masses of causes, yearning to raise funds? Start by mobilizing the assets you already have. Post a page on your web site, encouraging users to add your cause to their profile. Send out an email to your house file. Create an official profile for your organization so you can start collecting friends of your own. And when you create your cause in Facebook, make sure you pick the right one for the donations to go to! The list of available causes is pulled from Guidestar, so most large C3’s will be on there, and Project Agape has hinted that political campaigns could be coming soon.

One hitch with the Facebook Causes is that you’ll get donors’ money, but not their contact information. Facebook is known for being very careful with users’ privacy (as a matter of fact, it’s the prime directive in their FAQ), so don’t expect this to change much, which means that if you want to solicit your Facebook donors, you’ll need to do it on Facebook. On the other hand, for political campaigns, there will need to be reporting for FEC filings, so we’ll hopefully see some middle ground that lets users click an opt-in that says “Please let <organization that I must think is cool or I wouldn’t be giving them my money so I certainly would love to get the occasional email from them> contact me.” Let’s hope for this in the future.

In the meantime, start thinking about ways to integrate Facebook into your portfolio of online outreach. We’re bound to see more of this sort of thing with the new platform, and a vibrant Facebook community could be a valuable asset to reach new donors.

In an interesting post, Web Designer Mike Cherim wonders what damage we can do to the accessibility of Web sites by overdoing it with accessibility features. I’ve been thinking about this myself and find that I agree with Mike when he says that some accessibility features are either so misunderstood, poorly implemented, or unknown that they are probably best steered clear of (Access keys) or used in moderation.

In related news, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 is open for comment. You have until June 29 to submit your comments on the working draft and make your voice heard. There is also a summary of changes since the last draft avialable for you to review.