The following story is courtesy of MSNBC:

On June 24, the nonprofit New York Philharmonic ended its annual concert in Manhattan’s Central Park in a highly untraditional way: it asked concert-goers camped out on the lawn to take a quick moment to text-message their preference for the final musical number as conductor Bramwell Tovey waited on stage. Would it be Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebees? Or an orchestral version of JIMI HENDRIX’ Purple Haze? Hendrix proved the more popular choice - 74 percent of those texting chose Hendrix - so the orchestra wasted no time launching into a spirited version of Hendrix’s 1960s-era counter-cultural anthem.

The vote, however, did more than cap a concert. For many people in attendance that night, it signaled a new era of social engagement for the tradition-bound orchestra and underscored what other institutions in today’s cash-pinched charity sector are just beginning to figure out: “crowdsourcing” - using the Web and online social media to invite mass collaboration - is critical to 21st century advocacy. The rise of social media - from mobile phones to online social networks to digital video-sharing - is forcing many charities to expand and accelerate their use of new Web capabilities to drum up much-needed new converts, dollars and ideas. “We need to engage people we have never really reached before,” says Vince Ford, the Philharmonic’s director of new media. “We need to reinvent the way we build support.”

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