Home

How Nonprofits Can Get the Most out of Flickr

How Nonprofits Can Get the Most out of Flickr
Tips for using the online photo-sharing community successfully

By: Beth Kanter
March 5, 2008

Flickr is a popular online photo-sharing community that allows anyone to share and organise their digital photos with friends, family, colleagues, and the rest of the world. While many people use Flickr recreationally, it can also be a powerful tool for organisations, including nonprofits.

There are many ways that Flickr can help nonprofits share photos online and accomplish their goals. For example:

An international organisation sends volunteer doctors to developing countries around the world to perform medical services. The physicians document the impact of their work through photos that they upload to the organisation's private Flickr group. Not only does Flickr help the volunteers exchange photos and information, it also creates an image bank from which the organisation can select photos for its Web site and blog.

An environmental organisation that supports organic farmers had literally thousands of amazing photographs documenting the development of organic farming techniques over the last decade. Before using Flickr, no one had organised or categorized the photos, which were scattered on various hard drives in the office and on volunteers' computers. The organisation uploaded the photos to Flickr and were able to enlist the help of volunteers and members to document the techniques.

A museum was mounting a special collaborative exhibition with institutions located in five cities around the world. As the group prepared the installation, they used Flickr to share photos with one another, allowing them to see what a "textured plaster" wall finish looked like before approving the contracting work; get a visual reference of the exhibition space when selecting picture frames; and see work completed to date. Flickr provided a way for the collaborators to easily upload and share photos publicly and privately.

An executive director wanted to use photos to make her points during a presentation, but disliked clip art and lacked the budget for stock photography. Using Flickr's Creative Commons licensing search feature, she was to find appropriate photos that she could use for free with attribution.

Volunteers and talented photographers for an animal shelter had taken beautiful photos of some the dogs and cats at their facility. The organisation wanted to create special cards featuring the pets that they could use as thank-you notes. Uploading the photos into Flickr, they were able to order cards and other items.

Flickr is a fun, creative, and very useful way to share your organisation's photos and images with other people, whether privately or publicly. It offers an amazing online community, and it is also fairly easy to use. Many nonprofits are discovering that Flickr can be an important part of the organisational communications strategy. Below, we'll show you what Flickr is, and how your nonprofit can best use it to share photos and connect with others.