While Facebook can be a great way of helping charities engage with their supporters, one of the accusations typically thrown at it (and rightly so) is that it’s a walled garden and not very open with its data. You can include lots of information, like your personal details, photos and videos, but it’s usually very hard to get data back out.

One thing that Facebook has introduced to help open up its data is its Open Stream API. This is a way of pulling all the information out of a Facebook news feed or wall and manipulating or displaying it somewhere else in any way you want. You’ll need a good Facebook developer and a decent amount of time to build anything from that, but there is a slightly easier way of connecting your website with Facebook (if not back the other way).  It’s called, cunningly, Facebook Connect.

The basic premise is that, when on a website, a user can login to Facebook and share their activities  on that site with their Facebook network. So you might be leaving a comment on a blog, and by connecting with Facebook you can share that comment with your network – so they can read it and follow the link to that blog if they are interested. What’s more, the privacy settings set up in Facebook are used in Connect, so people will only share what they’ve previously allowed Facebook to share.

On a deeper level, that could be allowing people to login to a site using their Facebook details instead of creating a new account. But let’s not get too complicated to start with.

The reason I think this is important to charities is that it’s the first time you can get someone’s personal details out of Facebook and use them somewhere else. Thanks to Ross, I found a list of Facebook Connect implementations on the social media blog Mashable which will give you some great examples.

One implementation I thought was particularly good was Frenzied Waters, which uses  your details from Facebook to make a quite unsettling video of what would happen if you were attacked by a shark (to promote the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week). Try it out, by clicking on the 'my story' floating jar and see how it makes you feel. Scary, huh.

Also great was the Prototype Experience, a campaign to promote a computer game that pulls in your details from Facebook (photos, name, etc.) to create a hugely personal experience. In my case, the experience was more than a little surreal, as it pulled in photos from a fancy dress party I’d shared on Facebook, but hopefully you get the general idea.

But it’s this personalisation that’s the point I want to make. We all know from DM experience that the more personal a campaign, the better the response rate. And for many people, data doesn’t get much more personal than what they share with their friends on Facebook…

Imagine how you could use that data in a campaign. How could you use someone’s personal photos and make it relevant to your charity’s goals or a story for a new campaign?  Or, once someone is donating to you online, could you ask them to connect with Facebook so you could create a personalised thank-you video, including their name and address, showing how their donation has helped?

There is great scope for using this feature to create a rich, interactive experience and greater personalisation. The beauty is that you don’t have to ask people to enter any details, they just log in to Facebook, and you use things they’ve already shared.

The one charity I have seen using Facebook Connect so far is Amnesty UK, who use it on Protect the Human. Read their explanation to see how it’s being used, and for the more technically minded among you, here are the developer notes which explain the whole thing in more detail.