This week’s beautiful bytes looks at how the launch of JustTextGiving, Likester and Unity could impact the sector and looks at an innovative use of Groupon for clever crowdsourcing.

The old volume vs value debate is always ongoing and is as pertinent as ever with the arrival, and spread, of social media. But the way people communicate has changed, the tools we have are different, and so the debate has moved on…

Google encroaches on Facebook and Foursquare turf, pressure increases for Apple to allow in-app donations and getting buy-in for development of your online strategy

Swipegood makes donating even easier, Google updates offering to non-profits, check-in to Facebook events and Twitter may be soon to roll out brand pages

  I read this article from Third Sector magazine about Michael Naidu of Mencap, who is also vice-chair of the PFRA, asking that attrition rates from all channels of fundraising be published.  Currently it is only face to face (F2F) fundraising that reports attrition levels (I’m guessing this also includes door to door). I agree [...]

Google had a good idea about a year ago with a Gmail Labs feature called Mail Goggles, which required you to solve math problems in order to respond to email. If you failed to answer the math problems correctly, no email for you. Perhaps community users – especially those of, say, the Red Cross – need a pair of Twitter Goggles. Earlier tonight, someone who updated the Red Cross’ official Twitter account was apparently getting “slizzerd”.

This is a useful graph to add some context if you have not yet tried Facebook advertising for your charity or nonprofit – although most charities I’ve come across have put a toe in the water at least by now, and many have found Facebook ads can work well for them.

Amid the doom and gloom of spending cuts and rising unemployment, I want to focus this week’s beautiful bytes on reasons to be optimistic for the charity sector in 2011:

We’re finally through the 12 days of Christmas and only have 50 shopping weeks until the next one. For now, we can play with all the tasty information we got this Christmas!

Happy New Year everyone – welcome to 2011! I hope you all had a great break full of overindulgence – I think my Christmas dinner has just about settled. Time for some tech news I think!

Cash machines should automatically give customers an option of donating to charity, the coalition proposes tomorrow in a green paper designed to define the elusive “big society” in Britain.

Third Sector reported yesterday on some recently published findings by nfpSynergy (I’ve clipped the article on my Posterous), which prompted me to ponder on these points in particular:

Latest Charity Awareness Monitor also indicates that persistent or obtrusive fundraising puts donors off

The proportion of people who think charities work professionally has increased by more than a sixth over the past three years, according to a survey.

Yesterday, @teridoubtfire stumbled across a charity Twitter account, clearly run by an agency (the people that worked at the agency were the only ones retweeting it), that was busily tweeting celebrities, one after the other, with messages that looked like this:

Earlier this afternoon, as I stood waiting in front of a cashpoint, a young guy in his 20s thrust a blood-covered arm under my nose and asked for a couple of quid. It was a shocking sight on a raw winter’s day and, before I could help it, I had fumbled the money into his hand.

I took part in two social media panels today at the Women’s Resource Centre’s Facing Our Future Conference at the Cass Business School, alongside Fiona McLaren from Amnesty UK and @BeckyPants, founder of whomadeyourpants – a cooperative in Southampton, ‘empowering marginalised women and making utterly splendid pants’.

If you’re a Facebook user – which, if you’re reading this, in all likelihood you are! – then you probably noticed lots of you friends changing their profile picture to a cartoon character over the weekend and wondered what it was all about.