Courtesy of Capital Area Food Bank of Texas "Hunger is Unacceptable" Campaign

Ed Nicholson

I've previously mentioned two online spaces that do a marvelous job of giving residents in their communities an accurate and compelling image of the face of hunger:  Food for Thought and Invisible--the frontlines of hunger in Colorado.

This week, I was made aware of the online community-building being done by the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas in Austin.  Extraordinary work.  Lisa Goddard, advocacy and online marketing manager, is the architect of the food bank's online outreach, which supplements a very well-designed website with a wide variety of social media tools, the center of which is the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas Weblog .  

The blog, up since June, was originally launched provide an account of food bank CEO and President David Davenport's experiences with the Food Stamp Challenge.  It does a superb job of just that, with compelling insight from David, brought to life with helpful links and embedded YouTube and Google video. But Lisa has now taken it much further. 

David's blogging generated the phrase around which the food bank's latest effort was built,  an incredibly-creative Flickr-focused campaign called "Hunger is Unacceptable."  People are encouraged to upload their photos containing the message "Hunger is Unacceptable" to a Flickr group, where the photos are aggregated online.  It gets visitors actively engaged, allows them to make a personal statement about hunger, and provides a reason to re-visit the site.    You'll need to visit the site to see how they've made participation easy.

In addition to their blog and Flickr account, the food bank is using all of the most popular social media tools to build community, including a Facebook group and a LinkedIn organizational profile

In the ultimate social media activity, the food bank is working with the extremely active social media community in Austin, including Social Media Club Austin     and 501 Tech Club  on a HAM-up (Tweetup), mobilizing the well-connected community to a food drive via Twitter. Thanks to the outreach of  David Neff,  director of web and interactive strategy for the American Cancer Society, and highly connected and kinetic Ausitinite, Tyson Foods will be supporting this event in a unique way. 

Stay tuned here next week for more details early next week.  You  have a potential role in this. These guys in Austin have it going on,   having recently organized a highly successful blood drive Tweetup.

We'll be using this space to talk more about hunger in Austin, and specifically about the good work of the food bank.

Until then, go see what Capital Area Food Bank of Texas is doing.  It's definitely the most effective use of social media community building I've seen among hunger relief organizations. 

If you're aware of other online hunger relief efforts, let me know and we'll do our best to create awareness of them.