Beth Kanter, author of Beth’s blog dedicated to how non profits can use social media is also 2009 Scholar in Residence at the Packard Foundation, and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.”

She recently published a great article in Mashable where she outlines four ways in which non-profits are being transformed by social media.

a) First is the ability to create deeper, more meaningful relationships and engagement with their constituencies.
With the rise of social media, the role of the non profits rapidly evolving from initiating and controlling charitable initiatives to letting stakeholders control them, and they can focus on nurturing initiatives in the field.

b) Charitable Giving is more and more becoming self-organized, by people with a social conscience leveraging social media. Stakeholders are feeling more and more empowered to self-organize and take charitable action on their own. Applications like Facebook’s “Causes Birthday” encourage people to leverage their birthdays to raise money for a cause. And Stephen Colbert’s “DonorsChoose” recently launched a similar feature called “Birthday Give Back.” Social media allows non profits to reach a lot more people than before, in a more effective and less costly manner. We are witnessing the dawn of a social-media enabled groundswell in social responsibility.

c) Social media help people within and across charitable organizations collaborate rapidly and inexpensively. Whether it is communication between volunteers, or between the organizations and other funding or granting organizations, or whether it is sharing ideas for charitable programs, the ability of charitable organizations to operate and join forces effectively is being dramatically increased. Beth Kanter goes on to describe how WeAreMedia, a wiki project has allowed more than 100 technology professionals to pool knowledge and resources to develop training materials to help no profits lean how to use social media effectively. The initial content, says Beth Kanter, was facilitated through discussions on blogs, Twitter reviews and Facebook reviews. The presentations were then remixed and delivered as trainings to non profits at conferences and workshops across the US.

d) The reengineering functionality inherent to social media (flattening organizations, enhancing decision-making speed..) fosters change within the non profit organizations to a significant extent, and with a speed which would not have been possible otherwise. For Danielle Brigidia, with the National Wildlife Federation: “We have started to focus on cross-promoting our ideas and programs thanks to social media tools like Yammer.”

As social media fluency grows among people in non profits, and as more supportive applications get developed, we can expect to see a growing transformation in how non-profits operate and in the results which they are able to generate.