Nonprofits, non-governemental organizations (NGOs), schools, community programs by governments and various other mission-based organizations and institutions benefit hugely from sharing photos that illustrate their work. Sharing the photos online give people a powerful visual about the organization's work. It's also seen by many staff, both paid and volunteer, as a recognition of their service.

Photos can be of employees and volunteers in action, or clients or event participants benefiting from the organization's services: a volunteer teaching a client something, an actor performing in front of children, a smiling event participant, and on and on.

But I'm astounded at how many organization use only Facebook or their web sites to share photos. What a huge missed opportunity to reach more people about your organization's work!

Believe it or not, not everyone is on Facebook. That means if someone wants to see those photos of your beach cleanup or your performance last weekend or those cute animals you saved recently, and you have posted those photos to Facebook, they probably won't be able to see them - at least not easily. In addition, photos on Facebook are hidden from search engines, meaning they can't be found by people who may be looking for such. They also cannot easily be shared by anyone who finds them and thinks, wow, I want all my friends to see this!

In short, Facebook is a walled garden. Just like America Online used to be (and look what happened to AOL eventually!)

By contrast, if you put your photos on Flickr:

• They can be seen by anyone (you can change the settings so that only approved people can see them - but that would be missing the point as far as outreach!)
• They can be described and tagged in such a way that they will show up on Google, Bing, or various other search engines (this isn't true of Facebook)
• They are easily linked to from any social networking platform: not only can users on Facebook share them, Twitter users, Google+ users, or users of whatever the next big thing in social networking is can share them as well.
• They still allow people to share and comment on those photos, just like you can do with photos on Facebook (and you can delete any comment you feel is inappropriate).

That isn't to say your organization shouldn't share some photos on Facebook or your web site - you should! But if you put all the photos you want to share on Flickr:

• You create a cloud-based, searchable database of your organization's photos you and anyone can access anytime.
• You can link photos from Flickr onto your web site, saving yourself disk space and making it especially easy to change photos on a web page.
• You can share as many photos as you like, in a database that is super easy to search.

There are alternatives to Flickr that will also let you more easily share photos: Picasa (soon to become "Google Photos") is one. Here are four more.