If everything goes according to plan, 2011 will see me expanding my “community” here on the Front Range – it’s where I like to work – and hopefully planning some movement-level stuff with their help. :)

This blog post is part of #REVERB10, an annual event and online initiative to reflect on your year and manifest what’s next. The end of the year is an opportunity to reflect on what’s happened, and to send out reverberations for the year ahead. With Reverb 10, we’ll do both.

Mark and I kicking it in Kibera with some friends

There is no end to blog posts from experts declaring the need to “separate noise from signal” and “engage your community” while getting out there in social web promotion. As nonprofits, we understand this. No joke. We get it.

I spent 13 months with The 1010 Project in Denver, coordinating fundraising and our social web life. In July of 2009, I left The 1010 Project for a job with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation. I now do a bit of consulting for The 1010 Project along with the former Director of Communication Mark Mann (now heading up Denvelopers), who handled all the coding and web design and SEO stuff. Since leaving, and with the benefit of distance (physical and otherwise), I have realized what we were really aiming for and accomplishing with our forays into the social web. Three milestones (we’ll use that word for now) have enabled me to take a look back and understand how we made things happen.

1. The 1010 Project came in 1st (disclaimer: it was an alphabetical list! :)) on Lon Cohen‘s list of “26 Charities on Twitter“, which attracted a lot of attention (and followers) on Mashable in April. We were in very, very good company on that list.

2. Follow Fridays have been good to the organization this year. We are regularly grouped into #FF tweets with other luminaries like charity:water, Save the Children, and the National Wildlife Federation.

3. Yasamin Beitollahi, a marketing strategist and Huffington Post blogger, included The 1010 Project in her “Tis the Season for Charitable Giving: 7 Extraordinary Nonprofits on Twitter“. Some of the other luminaries? LIVESTRONG, Habitat for Humanity, and Susan G. Komen For the Cure.

Compared to these other nonprofits, The 1010 Project lags behind in almost every conceivable dimension. Since our founding in 2003, we’ve spent (in total) less than many of these organizations spend in one month. We have (as of December 2009) just shy of 2000 followers on Twitter. How have we managed to play with the big dogs?

We’ve been genuine. We’ve been honest. The quote that begins this post is not so much something that we learned from other bloggers as it is something that came naturally to us, as a community-benefit organization. We simply translated what we would do face-to-face to what we would do digitally. We had conversations (a staple of successful “How to Tweet” posts), we told friends about other like-minded orgs, and we never for a minute harangued about ROI (return on investment) or anything like that.

As a humanitarian organization, we did what we knew was right. We connected with people, albeit through tweets. And those tweets have landed us friends/followers, digital evangelists, and some money. We played with the big dogs because we knew that digital tools are equalizers, and that having a human behind a URL can make a world of difference. By viewing the web as an extension of real life, we made those relationships work.