Our friends at Kerusso, creators of this incredibly fine-looking Live for Him apparel*, have offered up some T-shirts for this little thing we’re doing.

Beginning later today and continuing through Friday, October 2, we will periodically update our Facebook fan page status with questions about this here blog.

If you answer the question correctly and are the randomly selected winner, you will be the envy of all your friends and the new owner of nice Live for Him T-shirt.

You choose size and color — either the deeply stellar black body enhancer above or one of the vividly bold red variety.

We will announce the winner for each question before we post the next question.

Have fun!

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Let’s find out.

Beginning today and continuing through this Friday (Sept. 25), we will send out tweets about specific children in need of sponsors.

And we’d like you to retweet them for us.

When you do, you’ll be eligible to win your choice of some free Live for Him* apparel:

• T-shirts
• caps
• rings
• wristbands

Every retweet counts as an entry, and winners will be randomly selected.

Once that child is sponsored, we’ll tweet information about another child, and we’ll follow that process for the duration of the week.

UPDATE: 9:05 a.m. – When you click on the child link in a tweet and you don’t see the specific child’s biography, it means that somone is considering the sponsorship. If the sponsorship isn’t finalized within 50 minutes, the child will be visible again.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Hey blog friends, resident Crisis Lady here, checking in and letting you know about a cool new feature on compassion.com that helps you stay informed about what’s going on in your sponsored child’s country.

We now have country-specific RSS feeds!

In other words, you can easily subscribe to information for each country where you sponsor a child, and then every time we publish something new, you will automatically be notified!

For instance …

Let’s say you sponsor a child in Haiti. Like me. You can subscribe to a feed specifically for crisis updates from Haiti.

If you want to receive crisis updates for all our countries, you can subscribe to the main crisis update feed.

And that’s not all! We also have feeds specifically for the Child Survival Program and the Leadership Development Program, as well as our press releases.

Subscribe to a Compassion feed. And happy RSS-ing! Make it a feeding frenzy.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Yesterday, we published a poll asking you how quickly our homepage loads. The poll results told us 20 percent of you feel it loads too slowly.

We made several changes to fix this.

• Reduced the number of posts displayed on our home page, from 10 to eight
• Changed the settings for the “Digg This” button and the “Share This” options.

  If you want to submit a post to Digg or share the post with your friends through e-mail, on Facebook, in del.icio.us, etc., which we hope you do and do a lot, the buttons are available on each blog post page. Just click on the title of the blog post to get there.

• Removed three widgets from the sidebar.

  If you want to use the Global Food Crisis widget or the blog RSS feed widget, you can find them on our widget page. The cool-looking “Where Are You From?” flag-bubble widget now has its own page. You should visit it.

We’ll ask you about this again, in the near future. But for now, we have a new poll asking whether you want us to keep the Twitter widget in our sidebar.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Hi. I’m your Compassion internet communications specialist. I specialize in being especially excited about web stuff.

Do I have fun on occasion? You bet. Is most of it work? Always, and did I mention that saving kids from poverty is my commitment? No? Well, there you go.

Recently I was sent by Compassion to the Forrester’s Consumer Forum which is a think-tank of an organization in the marketing industry.

Forrester speaks precisely about ways companies can target trends and future ideas for getting a product or organization into the eyes of the public through social media.

Some serious marketing research takes place. Seriously.

I was there to learn from the experts about social networking techniques for the internet.

Now I see those wheels turning. Compassion’s trying to be trendy? Compassion looks at the future of the marketing industry? Compassion sees a child as a product?

Well, sort of.

What I discovered in the forum is that huge corporations are dishing out millions if not billions to give their products a pleasing experience that you can relate to.

A pleasing experience with toothpaste? A pleasing experience with credit cards?

How about the experience of sponsoring a child?

I am proud to say that Compassion is doing exactly what it should, from a social media perspective, to help children in poverty.

We are giving the world a true experience of a child sponsorship.

Through churches, through word of mouth, through the internet, through this blog and through our social networks such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter,

Compassion is changing lives.

Yes, the world is changing and we at Compassion are changing with it, and that’s a good move, right? That’s a healthy choice you can agree with, right?

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

We need Compassion sponsors that do not have compassion.com web accounts to do some user acceptance testing for us. Wanna help?

If yes, leave us a comment and we’ll contact you with the details.

Here’s some of the basic 411.

• The testing will take about 30 minutes of your time.
• You must be a sponsor who doesn’t already have a web account set up at compassion.com.
• The testing will take place sometime in October and will be conducted through UserTesting.com.
• You’ll need to install software to record your activity during the testing session, and you’ll need a Windows PC with a fast Internet connection.
• You’ll get paid $10 from UserTesting.com, which is enough to buy a mosquito net for a child in poverty.
• You’ll need a PayPal account to receive your payment.

Still interested? Leave us a comment and we’ll be in touch. Thanks.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

So when you think Compassion International, the first thing you think is “technology” right?

What?!? You don’t?

Me neither. When I think of Compassion, I think of the three wonderful children my wife and I sponsor. I think about the first time I met Ana Maria, our little girl from the Dominican Republic. I think about the thousands of professions of faith Compassion reports each quarter and the amazing leaders emerging from our Leadership Development Program. I think about impact. About lives changed. About the chance we all have to eliminate poverty in my lifetime.

So yeah, I’ll admit it, I don’t think “technology” when I think Compassion. Not at first, even though I work in Information Technology (IT).

And that makes sense. Compassion is about releasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name. The goal of Information Technology is to support that goal, not replace it. Compassion has always expressed a great commitment to using technology in ways that support our mission, and the IT organization has enabled Compassion to fulfill its mission in countless ways.

And while that will continue to be true for many years to come, technology today is about so much more than servers and software and applications built by IT shops. In my opinion, technology in the 21st century is about community. About giving people a global voice. About connecting people across the city and across the globe. About enabling people to experience life lived beyond their borders.

Community. Now that’s right up Compassion’s alley.

And what amazes and inspires me the most about modern technology is how it enables you to do amazing things for Compassion and other causes around the world.

I look at Facebook, where Roderick Pitts, a student from Tupelo, Miss., created a cause page for Compassion. As of today, that cause has nearly 27,000 members and has raised almost $2,700 for Compassion. The cost to Compassion was zero, because Roderick found a way to use technology to fight poverty.

I look at the Uganda Blogging trip, now drawing to a close. Fifteen popular bloggers given an opportunity to see our work firsthand. These 15 individuals were changed by the experience to be sure, but their posts, pictures and videos have resulted in a change for thousands of their readers as well. Many of their readers have sponsored a child. Many now see poverty in a new light. Many will join Compassion to stand up and fight, because these 15 individuals found a way to use technology to fight poverty.

Compassion is by no means alone. Programs like One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Kiva.org and sites like Freerice are not just raising our awareness of global poverty, they are doing something more. They are doing something about global poverty by providing you and me with opportunities to join the fight.

And that’s how I look at my job in Compassion IT: using technology to fight poverty.

It’s a theme I am passionate about and one I hope to visit often as a contributor to this blog. But I need your help. I want us to dialogue together about technology and poverty. I want to hear your ideas and experiences.

Basically, I am asking for feedback, either in the comments of this post, or on your own blogs. How do you see technology being used to fight poverty? What ideas do you have for how Compassion can use technology to fight poverty? How do you use technology in your mission?

It’s a great time to be at Compassion. I’m looking forward to our dialogue.

Brandon Satrom is the Enterprise Applications Architect for Compassion. He works in IT evaluating both new and emerging technologies and helping Compassion IT make the best use of existing technologies.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates