Simon Cantlon is on a mission to document the power and allure of the American open road. And he’s using Ning as the community hub for the project. He’s producing an interactive documentary film and book called The Motels of Route 66. The project will explore the stories of the motel owners, the architecture, the travelers and the road itself, which runs between Los Angeles and Chicago.

For funding and publicity, he’s built a Ning community centered around the project and ties it closely together with his Kickstarter project, a funding platform for creative projects. By June 9, he’s looking for $30,000 in backing for the project. The funding will cover the month-long journey down Route 66 with a full four-man film crew (director, cameraman, photographer, lighting & sound), vehicle rental, equipment, gas, food, lodging and supplies.

It’s an ambitious goal, for sure, and we’re excited to follow Simon and his crew on their documentary-road trip across one of America’s most historic thoroughfares.

“We’ll be out on the road meeting travelers, the people who live in the towns, mom and pop businesses and the owners of the motels along the way, all the way down Route 66. We’ll be bringing them into the story, and letting them be a part of it. As the story unfolds step by step, it will be documented on our Ning community,” said Cantlon. “That’s awesome.”

You can back his project on his Kickstarter page and follow the endeavor through his Ning community, The Motels of Route 66.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. More than ever, breast cancer patients, survivors, friends and family members, and organizations are sharing stories, raising awareness, and gathering support through online channels.

We heard about The Pink Daisy Project, a non-profit online community and all-volunteer Ning Network started by breast cancer survivor Debbie Cantwell. The organization is dedicated to helping young women with breast cancer cope with the hardships of their treatment by providing them care and comfort, and a hopeful online place to share their stories of survival. Debbie was also featured as a CNN Hero in July for her work with the community.

Debbie started The Pink Daisy Project on her own, as a way to thank all the people who helped her during her treatment and to pay it forward. Through the Ning community, women undergoing cancer treatment lean on the bravery from others around the world, forging lasting friendships, sharing their stories of treatment and survival, and receiving positive support from the greater community.

The national organization also provides financial help and relief to women during treatment – from sending groceries for a month or having someone come clean their house, seemingly little contributions make a positive difference while undergoing cancer treatment.

Debbie has built and managed The Pink Daisy Project while juggling a full-time job, and busy life with her husband and 2 children. “It’s been very easy for me, without any technical experience, to maintain the community, keep it running, and make changes,” Debbie highlighted. “The website we had previously was really static. It wasn’t dynamic and it wasn’t engaging; there was no interaction. So, people would look at it, and then they’d leave. Using Ning gave me the capability of having the interaction we wanted to see on The Pink Daisy Project.”

You can donate to the Pink Daisy Project through their Ning community. How is your Ning community making a positive impact in people’s lives? We’d love to hear about it.

Everyday, we speak to hundreds of Ning Creators across the globe. We really enjoy hearing from customers, and learning about the ways they are leveraging the Ning Platform to create wonderful communities and businesses using our product. We recently spoke with John Mitchell, an entrepreneur with 11 niche communities on Ning. One of his communities is Garden-Share, a social network of 29,000 passionate gardeners from around the world, and we wanted to hear first-hand from John about his success with Garden-Share.

Tell us about yourself.
I live in Houston, Texas with my wife and 3 children. I operate 11 niche Ning social networks under my company, Share-Media, Inc. and I am a Content Editor of Garden-Share. I have a history working in IT software before starting my Share-Media venture.

Why did you create these communities?
Back in 2009, I saw the limited features and customization of Facebook Groups. Users were mostly sharing with people they already knew. There was a void for creating organized groups covering subjects large enough to be powered by dynamic data. I was looking for a place where new and interesting data could be shared, attracting people to join and contribute. I envisioned this place to be both an online and open periodical.

Why did you pick Ning to power your communities?
I thought, if I could build a hub with something centered on a specific interest, I could turn this into a business. I hired a small web development company, and they tried building on an open-source platform. But, they were unable to deliver a tool I could easily use. I was struggling to find a solution that would work, and was sold on Ning after another organization I was part of started using Ning to power their community. Ning was the solution I had been looking for in a scalable hosted platform.

What has been the most rewarding thing to blossom out of Garden-Share?
The shear amount of information I’ve been able to aggregate in such a short period of time – it’s something I’m really proud of. There’s 29,000 members, 150,000+ photos, and we continue to grow. The positive feedback from members gives me a strong sense that I’ve built a digital online brand with many loyal followers.

You now have 29,000 gardeners on Garden-Share. That’s an amazing number! How have you scaled with this growth?
A lot of hard work and moderating. Along the way, I have had people help me as content managers. You have to engage people when they join the community, welcome them—this personalizes the community for our members. We also listen—it’s important to get a pulse of what’s going on, so you have a gauge for customer satisfaction.

We encourage people to contribute content, and this can turn into an opportunity to become an administrator. It’s also a way for them to forge a deeper connection with more members, and now I have evangelists out there beating a drum for me, letting me know what’s going on in the community.

What’s the driving force to get your members contributing and visiting again?
When members post content, we feature it. We respond directly, letting them know we saw what they have posted and that we like it. Members love receiving instant recognition; they’re engaged.

We also continually ask for more content. We’re truly trying to set up a place where people can maintain their entire gardening experience for the rest of their life. People can share their photos and experiences with friends on the network, and also with other friends around the world, instantly.

If there’s 1 feature you couldn’t live without for your community, what is it?
Photos – this feature is at the very core of the Garden-Share brand. It’s about sharing garden photos with likeminded, passionate gardeners. Photographs are the most effective way at gauging peoples’ interactions. If they like the photo, they’ll usually engage with the photo by commenting, sharing it with others, or uploading something in the same vein.

You’ve built a business out of your communities. What’s next and how will Ning help get you there?
To continue to attract and aggregate more amounts of garden information and data. We’re encouraging people to come join us at Garden-Share; Ning provides the most dynamic information-sharing tool available for what we’re trying to do. It’s a different way of engaging on a social network.

As a Network Creator, the Ning Platform provides me with a place to have vertical-specific communities with far-reaching and excited audiences—it’s about the content. This is the reason driving people to come back. In the process, you get to know the people. It’s about members’ content, and their willingness and excitement to share it with others, making it unique, special and authentic.

I’ve attended many conferences, with major themes focusing on the music-tech community. Over the last 6 years, during the growth of social media and the expansion of community-building tools, I’ve observed recurring and like-minded questions asked by panelists from every background. Similar core issues arise amongst community creators and leaders. As niche intimate communities grow to bountiful online spaces where humans transcend physical boundaries and interact globally in meaningful ways, creators are asking:

What happens to the offline component? How does a community grow? What kind of space am I building? What’s it all for, anyway?!

Mom 2.0 Summit
I recently attended Mom 2.0 Summit in New Orleans. Marketers, Moms and Mums covered high-level concepts; the keynote from Abigail Disney and Lois Vossen united the audience as a powerful community, empowered by tools to “heal the world where you are.” As digital storytellers, the “mommy blogging” community is a powerful contingency and their energy is positively different; I knew I was in a room full of powerful and driven women, community creators, leaders and builders. They know what tools to use, and draw in amazing sponsors like Whirlpool. Not only did I want the washer/dryer on display at Mom 2.0 Summit, I knew I wasn’t going to end up simply teaching these women how to craft an “@ reply” on Twitter.

The Four Questions
Among a list of amazing speakers, Laney Whitcanack and I ran a workshop, Building Community or Building Business: A Blueprint for Creating Space.

In the music space, we often discuss the union between offline communities at live music events with online music communities. Many artists are trying new things to bring content online, but the live music online/offline space has yet to be conquered. Many of the moms I met in New Orleans expressed similar disconnections within their own communities. Together, Laney and I helped community leaders discover answers to this by going through a few exercises while shying away from mentioning any specific tools. We asked four questions of community leaders:

What is the purpose of your community?
What kind of space do you want it to be and what do you want from it?
Secret Sauce: What are you doing to help participants disclose, share, and follow information?
What is the structure of the community?

In a fast hour, we drew Venn diagrams, learned about a community of teachers sharing information online, and a community focusing on bountiful friendships between Muslim and Jewish Americans. We tried to focus mostly on answering the questions without relying on the preference of one social tool over another, but it was impossible to ignore the benefits of Ning and the benefits a community creator enjoys by choosing Ning’s platform. A creator might want to build a “living room” with a forum, or a “community recreation center” using Ning groups. Because they adapt so easily to growth, Ning’s products enable the “secret sauce” necessary to help participants disclose, share and follow information. Ultimately the creator must make regular decisions about the environment and is empowered to grow large spaces filled with people from around the world for distinct purposes. For our workshop, we reviewed what tools are best and for what purpose, and purposely focused on growth, space, and creative communication, all of which are fully enabled by Ning. It felt great to be there, knowing that these conversations were not future tripping – we were talking about what community leaders and creators can do right now. It dawned on me during the workshop that Ning speaks the language of a worldwide web; within the right space, any community can transcend spoken word.

Offline
The gap between online and offline communities can be tough to bridge. In music, the common activity is obvious; music fans go to shows offline. But moms have many common interests, ranging from teaching to aerospace engineering. While the communities grow en mass online, at the conference there was a strong desire to unite offline, too. One way to bridge this gap is to find leaders in a community who want to take on specific regions and organize activities to drive engagement, such as posting great content from activities for the rest of the community to experience. With Ning groups and calendars, this strategy is easy to execute. In the end, the number one question that must be revisited every 12-18 months: What is the purpose of my community?

Show Mom The Money
One unanticipated and recurring question raised: How do you monetize? The growth and popularity of “mommy blogging” communities built from the heart is incredible. And the thirst for these communities is ever-present. This leads to a conundrum—time needed to manage and money to support these mom epicenters. And that’s where choosing the right tool does play a role in community building decisions; this is where Ning shines. Having full control over if and where advertisements appear in online communities, or ways to incorporate guerilla advertising in an authentic way becomes incredibly powerful and attractive to advertisers and people trying to reach community members. Additionally, people are willing to pay a premium for valuable and useful content they can digitally access. Going back to the bridge between online and offline, branded merchandise and fundraising add true value to any social destination by making the online community more tangible, real. Giving a real value to your community makes it, well, priceless.

Corey Denis is VP of Digital Marketing at TAG Strategic, a digital entertainment consulting firm. She has been pioneering digital music marketing since 1999. She also founded Not Shocking, working with clients like SoundExchange, Michael Tilson Thomas, IRIS Distribution, Inu and Todd Fancey.

It’s always exciting to hear first-hand of our customers’ success both on and off the Ning Platform. We think about social websites on Ning as the hub for social branding and identity. This naturally lends itself to having a presence, or spokes, if you will, around the web and real world.

BlackTree TV positions itself as the world’s largest urban entertainment network by producing and posting high quality videos distributed across the web. They cover everything from red carpet interviews, celebrity one-on-ones, and frontline social commentary from artists and politicians alike. They decided to use Ning to have a website layering in community, monetization flexibility and a branded experience encompassing BlackTree TV’s entertainment focus.

Between BlackTree TV and their accompanying YouTube channel with 400+ million views, their success is nothing short of awesome! In a recent tweet by Tony Idem, BlackTree TV’s Community Manager, we learned about their new partnership with an in-store content provider. In short, the deal paves the way for BlackTree TV to bring the same great content from BlackTree TV to Walmart, Albertsons, Costco and 10,000 retail locations nationwide! They’re making moves to produce aisles near you – keep an eye out for BlackTree TV. Congrats to the BlackTree TV team!

Bay Area residents who drive down Hwy 101 are used to seeing Box.net’s cheeky billboards. They challenge Sharepoint users to try Box.net’s Cloud Content Management system — and see if they don’t like using it better. One additional benefit of Box.net over Sharepoint? You can install Box.net on your Ning Network, thanks to their Ning App. Platform Manager Jeremy Glassenberg chatted with us about the company, their Ning App and what’s coming up.

Can you give a little company background on Box.net?
Box.net was founded in 2005 on a simple, powerful idea: it should be easy for people to access, collaborate, and share all their content, wherever they are. We’ve since grown into the leading Cloud Content Management solution for 4 million users and companies ranging from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies.

Who is a typical Box.net customer?
To be honest, there is no ‘typical’ Box.net customer. We’re a horizontal solution that serves individuals, small businesses and large enterprises that need a simple way to share and collaborate on files with people, both inside and outside of their company. In larger organizations, we’re typically adopted by marketing departments first, as they tend to have the most content to share.

How did you decide to create a Box.net Ning App? Had you created OpenSocial applications before?
We have in fact created OpenSocial gadgets before, including one for Ning [member pages]. The new Ning Apps, however, were especially exciting for us by providing a means of deeply and seamlessly connecting a Ning Network to a Box Business deployment. Both Ning Networks and Box Business provide consoles for administrators to manage users and product permissions. So, when a Ning Network Creator adds the Box Ning App, they automatically have full control over their Ning Network’s Cloud Content Management system, even though it’s powered by Box.net.

Did you develop your app with a specific type of Ning Network in mind? (i.e. professional one, education related, etc)
Yes. While our standard profile application is available to anyone, we’re especially proud of our Ning App’s ability to work with professional and business networks.

Why would a Ning Network want to install the Box.net Ning App? What type of functionality does it add?
Box.net provides advanced content management capabilities to a Ning Network, empowering organizations to easily manage, access and share any type or size file directly within the Ning environment. Ning Network Creators can easily make marketing assets, videos, and branding artwork available to their Network members. Even better, users can easily collaborate on projects with their Ning Network connections in a secure online workspace, keeping their content and workflow centralized on Box.

Do you have any plans to add new features or functionality to your Ning App?
We’re always looking for ways to enhance our applications, and are currently corresponding with the Ning team to learn more about the next set of updates we can use.

Stay tuned — tomorrow, we’ll have a second Box.net post on the Ning Blog that you won’t want to miss.

Instant messaging is easy on a Ning Network, thanks to the Chat feature. Displayed as either a persistant chat bar on the bottom of the page, or as a feature on the Main Page, Chat is an easy way to let your members conenct with each other in real time. But what if you want something a little more… visual?

Enter TokBox, a Ning App that allows members to easily video chat with one another. VP of Marketing and Business Development Micky O’Brien walked us through some of the TokBox need-to-know info.

What’s the background of TokBox? Can you describe what the product does?
The TokBox team believes in the power of face-to-face communication as a way to build teams, build communities and build relationships. So we wanted to create a really simple way for people to video chat with a group of their friends, customers or colleagues.  You can video chat with up to 20 people at once, or with Broadcast Video Chat you can add an audience of up to 200 people. Because TokBox is web-based, all anyone needs to join is an internet connection and webcam, no need to download or configure anything or have any special equipment.

Since we launched in October 2007 we have seen thousands of groups of people get together to discuss the things that matter most to them, whether that is a book club, a prayer group, a support group or simply a group of friends that share a passion for the movies.

How did you decide to start developing on Ning?
As we increased our understanding of who was using TokBox and what for, we realized that Ning, as a network of groups and communities, was the perfect place to offer TokBox’s group video chat functionality. We already had a video chat API in place and so making the changes that we needed to create the OpenSocial App was easy.

Is there a specific type of Ning Network you had in mind when you built the TokBox Ning App?
Video chat really is applicable to anyone who wants to communicate face-to-face, meaning most Ning Networks. That said, since it has launched, we have seen some Ning Networks find it more relevant than others, particularly those who want to build a deeper rapport and relationship between their members or have a more visual message.

Can you provide an example of a Ning Network that is are using the TokBox Ning App?
My Shimmer is a Ning Network for women to share their beauty secrets. They have lots of tips and tricks to share that are reliant on a more visual form of communication.

What’s next for TokBox? Where do you see it going from here?
We’ve recently launched a number of features on tokbox.com that we think would be really useful for Ning Networks.  Moderation and Scheduling enables the chat organizer to schedule the chat in advance, control who comes in to the video chat as well as the media shared. Broadcast video chat enables the organizer to have up to 12 people in a video chat and then add an audience of 200 people. The audience can participate by submitting video questions, text message or even being moved on-screen to participate directly in the video chat. We would like to launch all these features in to the OpenSocial App in the coming weeks. Following that, we will continue to listen to Network Creators to hear what features they would like to add next.

Compton, Calif. isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of an politically engaged community that’s active online. Not now, anyway. M.L. Harrington is trying to change that though. He’s the Network Creator of Hub City Livin’, a Ning Network launched in August 2009, specifically for Compton residents. Want to learn more about what running a Ning Network in Compton is all about? Read on.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Compton born and raised. Always been bright, book-wise. I ran the streets for a while, got in trouble here and there. Took up a vocational trade. Anything like printing, arts, music related… I’m a workaholic. I have a nine-month-old son. I’ve always been community oriented. I like what’s right, like to stand up for what’s right.

How did you go about starting Hub City Living? Did you have any goals in mind when you launched it?
I was promoting myself for hip hop music and was joining a ton of social networks…. I grew up listening to NWA. I saw that music was a way to bring social change and awareness. With hip hop becoming more commercial and harder to break into, it made sense to move these goals online. I still have the passion to want to facilitate social change, and it was easy to transfer that into a social network.

Initial goals when I started were to highlight positivity coming out of Compton. People [in Compton] complain that the media only highlights negativity. I think a lot of the negativity is embedded… we started viewing the discussions happening as being positive [in and of themselves]. There’s a culture in Compton where people are separate. They aren’t used to being engaged.

What’s been the reaction to Hub City Livin’ in Compton?
A majority of people I meet, they love the site. I never paid attention to politics until I started the site. [A community pillar recently told me] that I probably have the most revolutionary thing he’s seen in 50 years. It was just amazing to hear that coming from him. I invited council members, but they haven’t joined yet, though many city employees have. It’s been fascinating.

What’s been surprising for you about Hub City Livin’?
The level of interaction and the way people have gravitated to the site. It hadn’t really hit me until some people told me I’m in uncharted waters. People had never done anything like this. I have the one place in Compton that has the most different organizations in one place. They want to collaborate. They want to come together. That’s been the most surprising thing.

Have you partnered with any other organizations in the area?
No formal partnerships. Early on I had a partnership with [a fire department]. That was the most official partnership [to date]. The first official partnership would be with the Community Redevelopment Organization for Compton. They want to make downtown Compton more like downtown Pasadena, with more foot traffic.

How do you get the word out about your Ning Network?
Any way I can! Word of mouth has been really good. All of the professionals know about it. I do print up fliers and pass them out. It’s been word of mouth mostly.

What are the biggest challenges Hub City Livin’ faces?
To get more people engaged and [involved in] the discussion. The digital divide in Compton is so great. Not a lot of people have regular Internet access.

Do you have any particular goals for the future?
To have the city on [Hub City Livin'] in an official capacity. All the way down, through each department. That’s my big goal, to bring connections to residents and transparency to government. Number two goal is to get more sponsors. To get more sponsors will help get it more of an official stamp.

Providing cancer survivors with opportunities for wellness and healing through the practice of yoga is the goal of YogaBear, a nonprofit Ning Network started by Network Creator and YogaBear Founder Halle Tecco. Tecco isn’t an easy woman to track down; she’s busy running the organization, working on an MBA at Harvard Business School and contributing to publication like the Huffington Post. Luckily, we were able to grab a few minutes of her time to chat about how YogaBear was started, why they chose to use Ning and what other nonprofits can do to build out a web presence.

Where did you get the idea to start YogaBear?
In college I interned at Columbia Hospital, where I was working on a music therapy project. This is when I became interested in ‘alternative’ therapies like music, art, language and yoga. My boss, a PhD in neurophysiology and neuropsychology, knew I loved yoga and shared with me one of the early western studies of yoga for cancer. I thought this was a great opportunity to get more involved in the cancer community, and a few years later I decided to turn the idea into action.

Is there a typical member of YogaBear?
Our online members include yoga instructors, cancer patients and survivors, volunteers, and fans. Ages range from 18-71, with the average age being 42. Members are from all over the world, although the majority are from the US (because this is where our offline programs are).

How do you attract new members to join. Do you do any offline marketing?
We were lucky enough to receive a grant from Google, which allows us free ads. However, most of our marketing is from word-of-mouth, articles in the press and our volunteers who work with local communities.

How did you choose to build out YogaBear’s online presence on Ning?
Before we used Ning, my boyfriend was our “CTO” and we used Google App Engine. The organization was just starting to pick up, so we were always needing to make changes and updates to the website. The job got too big for him, so I began looking for ways to manage the website myself. I explored many options, and the other volunteers and I decided we liked the social-networking functionality of Ning.We found that it was an easy and seamless way to build and manage our online presence.

How does your Ning Network interact with other social media channels YogaBear uses?
We use our Ning Network as the hub, and augment this with our Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook pages. For instance, when we post a new blog post on our Ning site, we announce this on Twitter. And when we make new videos on YouTube, they automatically show up on our website because we’ve embedded our YouTube channel centrally.

What advice would you give for people looking to create a Ning Network for a cause or nonprofit organization?
First, take the time to learn basic HTML.  Second, it’s tempting to add all the bells and whistles to the site, but this can actually be a burden for users. Figure out which features are core to your existence and focus on those. If a feature isn’t working out, don’t be afraid to cut it completely. For instance, we learned that more members were likely to RSVP to events on Facebook than our Ning network. So we cut this feature out, and left more room for [other features], like the forum and blog.

Recently named a finalist in the Ning Appathon competition, the NutshellMail Ning App allows your members to receive newsletters highlighting recent activity on your Ning Network. We recently chatted with Mark Schmulen, CEO and co-founder of NutshellMail, about the origin of the company, developing on the Ning Platform and their plans to launch a fully-integrated email newsletter service designed specifically for Ning creators. For more information on Ning Apps, please visit the Developer network.

What is NutshellMail in, well, a nutshell?
NutshellMail is a free Ning App that helps Network Creators increase user engagement and site visits through automated email newsletters. “If you build it, they will come” is a big myth. It’s not enough to just create a Ning Network; to increase readership and engagement, you need to keep your members up to date on all the great content on your site. Email is still one of the best ways to keep members informed and to make sure they continue to visit your Ning Network. NutshellMail enables you to add an email newsletter feature to your Ning Network, and it simplifies the process through automation. NutshellMail automatically consolidates new activity from your network into a single email digest that is sent on a recurring schedule defined by each member who opts-in.

What inspired you to start it?
I have been a member of several Ning networks since 2007, but I found it difficult to keep track of everything going on across my networks. I am also on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn, which only compounded the problem. Our team developed NutshellMail because we all needed a simple way to manage our social networks. I used to rely on email alerts to know when to log into my networks, but my inbox was getting cluttered with too many emails from my social networks. The concept was pretty simple. We thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could receive all of our social networking alerts in a single email digest?

How did you decide to start developing on Ning? What other platforms do you develop on?
We initially developed NutshellMail for Facebook and Twitter, but our users have been asking us to support Ning since we first launched. We didn’t need much convincing. With more than 2 million networks, Ning is one of the hottest and fastest growing platforms. When Ning announced the 2009 Ning Appathon, we submitted our application and were named a finalist.

Our integration with other platforms is one of the key factors for our success. Ning members who subscribe to their network’s newsletter can also add their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts so that they can manage their entire online social lives through their email inbox.

Did you develop it with a specific type of user in mind? Or more for a general audience?
We developed NutshellMail for busy social networkers who don’t have time to hang out online all day but need a simple way to stay connected to their online social lives. However, we also developed our Ning App to help Network Creators increase member engagement and site visits. It’s a win-win for everyone. Ning members love how they can keep track of their social networks through a single email, and the Ning Networks benefit from increased member activity.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?
We plan to release a more robust version of the NutshellMail Ning App. The new version is designed based on the great feedback we have received from Network Creators. The new application will give Ning creators more control and features, enabling them to send email newsletter campaigns to all of their members on an automated schedule. It will include list management, editing tools and analytics so that you can customize your campaigns and measure their effectiveness. We are trying to make the creation of email newsletters as simple and painless as possible. All you have to do is schedule your campaigns, NutshellMail will automatically populate your email newsletters with content from your network and then send it out to your members.
If you are a Ning creator and would like to learn more about our new service, you can submit your email address to our beta. We are giving our initial customers free access to the service.