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NTEN Member Buzz Round-Up: July 30 2010
(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharing their nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.) Even on vacation, Beth Kanter manages help nonprofits become more tech-savvy! How does she do it? Why, by inviting guests to blog! Some of us here at NTEN are pretty interested in geo-tagging and geo-locating tools and their potential for nonprofit application, so we are thankful for this guest post on Beth's Blog about 10 Ways ...
Things We Like (July 2010)
A monthly roundup of our favorite nonprofit tech resources. Read more posts on our blog. If you haven't seen the "Double Rainbow" spin-offs, you should check them out right now. (You don't know about "Double Rainbow"? We'll just pretend you didn't admit that. Why? Because it reflects poorly on our productivity vis-a-vis yours, smarty pants.) The Kermit mash-up at the bottom of the page is the best. IOHO. You should probably know, however, that human beings have spent 15 years in aggregate watching "Surprised Kitty" -- longer than it took to land a man on the moon. Fortunately, the article ...
Microsoft Office 2010: Our Favorite (New) Features
The latest version of Microsoft Office came out last month and since then we've been fiddling, playing, testing, and tweaking to learn all we can about the 2010 version of the popular office productivity suite. For many organizations, it's the standard-bearer software that lives on nearly every computer and is used daily by millions, so we think it's pretty important to have a good handle on how to answer the seminal question asked by resource-strapped libraries and nonprofits — "Should we bother upgrading?" Now we can't definitively answer that for you, since it depends on a number ...
Does Your Email Campaign Rock? Enter the Paperless Choice Contest!
Flickr photo: kcolwellWe know that you, my fellow NTEN community members, are rock stars. You can write fundraising email copy in your sleep and hand code your e-appeal while making breakfast and watering your plants. You track metrics while you're on the treadmill (without falling off). You are fundraising email campaign ninjas! Like all good ninjas, you don't do it for the glory, you do it because it's right. But we want to shine a spotlight on your selflessness and showcase your amazing work.Enter the Paperless Choice Challenge.If you've been using email, websites, videos, and other ...
The Opportunity: Why Don't People Volunteer?
This post was penned by guest blogger MeiMei Fox, who is a social media consultant, life coach, yoga instructor, and writer. She attended the San Francisco Online Community Report Meetup at TechSoup's offices last night where we featured Ben Rigby and his crowdsourced volunteering organization, The Extraordinaries. You can follow her on Twitter. Here's what she had to say about the event and getting people to volunteer... The Opportunity: Why Don't People Volunteer? They don't have time. Or so we say. Yet we play hundreds of hours of solitaire. We watch 1 billion YouTube videos and spend 270 ...
Can Facebook Questions Bridge the Blue/Red Divide?
On Wednesday, Facebook began rolling out a new feature: Questions. The idea is simple. You ask a question and the Facebook community can answer. Yes, the ENTIRE Facebook community, not just your friends. Of course, we've seen something like this before. But Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web thinks that this is something entirely different: Scale, social software smarts and real identities have the potential to add up to something really magical. Company founder Mark Zuckerberg, wrong as he is about many things like privacy, has said that his goal with Facebook is to build ...
Nonprofit Guide to Going Green Review: Part One
The recently published Nonprofit Guide to Going Green is a robust handbook on greening all aspects of a nonprofit organization's program. It covers everything from greening your office and building to green management, fundraising, information technology, purchasing, travel, organizing events in an environmental way, saving water, saving electricity, recycling, and obtaining green certification. The book has several great checklists and some in-depth case studies that show how both large and small nonprofit organizations have implemented their greening efforts. The book is edited by three ...
Principles of Social Media Strategy Webinar with Beth Kanter: August 11
Beth Kanter (a very familiar name to readers of this blog!) will be hosting a webinar on social media strategy in partnership with The Society of Nonprofit Organizations on August 11 from 1-2:30 p.m. Eastern time.
From SNPO:
Optimizing Your Site for Social Media Visitors
Jeff Patrick, Common Knowledge A whopping 86% of nonprofits say they have a presence on Facebook or another social media site according to the 2010 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report. That’s astounding really, but equally astounding, if a whole lot less obvious: your site visitors are increasingly getting to your site from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites. Why is this important? This socially-sourced crowd spends upwards of 15 minutes per day, every day, on social media sites, 3 to 7 times more than on any other major web ...
The PREP Method of Design: Start with the Right Questions to Appeal to the Right Audience
Christy Van Heugten, Event360, Inc. Two houses stand side-by-side. One has a nice, tidy entry way, the other, a boring, paint-peeling façade. If someone is shopping for a home to invest in, they're more likely to enter the home with the nicer entry first, right? When someone visits your website, the first impression they'll likely get is still your homepage. The homepage of your website is key to engaging your visitors by getting them the information they want and sharing your important message. “What audience am I building for?” is commonly the first question people encounter ...
Creating Website Content: What Do Your Visitors Really Want?
Kivi Leroux Miller, Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com Your website is out there for all to see. You never know who’s going to end up visiting. So how can you create website content that all kinds of potential visitors will find interesting and engaging? We could get into a traditional marketing discussion about target audiences and personas, but let’s go at this challenge in a different way. Let’s think about the stages that your supporters go through as you build rapport with them over time. To keep it simple, let’s group your website visitors into three categories: Strangers: ...
The Mobile Web: Consider the User
Jed Alpert, Mobile Commons Thirty-eight percent of American mobile phone users -- 120 million people -- access the web via their mobile device; fewer than 30 million are iPhones or Android phones. (Mobile Access 2010 Pew Internet and American Life Project). This percentage increases dramatically among the under-served 30% of the population without reliable non-mobile Internet access (Pew). The growth of the mobile web will continue to be very rapid in the coming years -- and will have substantially more reach than iPhone or Android applications. According to a research report by Morgan ...
Evolving Project Management for Evolving Website Technologies
Steve Backman, Database Designs Websites have changed a lot over the past few years. Content management systems (CMS) have transformed standard expectations -- about posting news and updates without web design skills, managing donors and other constituents, opening up sections of your site to your community, tracking results, and more. And open source systems such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone have brought these features within reach of organizations with limited budgets and staffing. Yet, when it comes to organizing the redesign or replacement of an older-style site, ...
Is Web Accessibility a Social Responsibility?
Cindy Leonard, Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University “Web accessibility” means creating websites that can be fully used by people with disabilities. Wikipedia provides a good formal definition: “Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality…When sites are correctly built and maintained, all of these users can be accommodated while not impacting on the usability ...
The Analysis Exchange
Eric Peterson, Web Analytics Demystified The Analysis Exchange is a first-of-its-kind effort to freely provide analytical insights to nonprofits and non-governmental organizations. Founded by three of the most respected web analytics professionals in the world, Analysis Exchange creates value for nonprofits by connecting them directly with experienced web analysts willing to donate their time to help efforts identify opportunities to increase online donations, engagement, interaction, and list distribution. Even better, nonprofits are giving back to the web analytics community because ...
MyFax Adds Print-to-Fax and Offers Free Business Cards
MyFax, which Protus makes available to nonprofits and libraries through TechSoup, lets users send and receive faxes through email and eliminates the expense and paper waste of a fax machine, fax server, and dedicated fax line. With MyFax, your faxing capabilities are always on-line — your phone line is never busy, and your fax is never out of paper. Current subscribers to MyFax as well as newcomers to the service can now access a free new feature, the MyFax Print-to-Fax Assistant, and receive 250 premium business cards for free. MyFax Print-to-Fax Assistant (download directly from MyFax)The ...
Thousands of Small U.S. Nonprofits in Danger of Losing Tax-Exempt Status
UPDATE: A follow-up announcement on July 26 clarified that the IRS is offering a one-time relief extension of the filing deadline until October 15, 2010. In other words, if your organization missed the May 17 deadline, you now have three months to submit the required information and retain your tax-exempt status. UPDATE: IRS Commisioner Doug Shulman announced on May 18 that his agency will offer guidance soon for small nonprofits that missed the May 15 filing deadline. If your organization missed the deadline, you should still file your return as soon as possible. Some wise person or ...
Work from Anywhere with Tools to Stay in Touch
Whether you're getting some sun a thousand miles away from the officeor just want to work from home, there's an ever-growing field of tools available to help you work from just about anywhere. If you have Internet access (which, these days, you can even get via tethering to your mobile phone's wireless service), you can connect to a host of tools to help you stay connected whether you work in a field office, far from the headquarters, or if you just want to work from home on Fridays. All of the products below are available as donated or deeply discounted tools for nonprofits and/or public ...
Tips and Tools for Technology Planning: Webinar Follow-Up
Does your organization have working technology in place, but only one or two people who know how and when to use it effectively? Is there an old technology plan that was supposed to be implemented years ago, but other issues have always managed to push it back? Last Tuesday's TechSoup Talks webinar, Tips and Tools for Technology Planning went over many different strategies to get your organization or library moving towards specific technology and mission-related goals. Our speakers for this webinar have extensive experience in the field of technology planning, and did an excellent job ...
TechSoup's TechFinder and Recycled Hardware Lists Are Retired
After many long years, due to severely declining usage and technical security concerns, we have retired the TechFinder service on TechSoup.org. Additionally, since the Community Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher program has been relocated to Microsoft and they will be maintaining the list of registered refurbishers, we have also retired our Recycled Hardware Lists.
If you are looking for local refurbishers or for consultants, we have provided a list of links that point to other helpful resources.
