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Review TechSoup on GreatNonprofits
A while back, I wrote about GreatNonprofits.org, also known lovingly by me as the nonprofit Yelp. Well, TechSoup has a listing there and we'd love it if y'all would get yourselves over there and write us a review or three! C'mon, give us some sugar.
If you do, TechSoup.org will appear in their "fall giving guide" which sounds cool even though I don't really know what it is. Don't you want us to be a part of it too? Get ye to GreatNonprofits and share your love (or like) for TechSoup!
Printing Booklets with InDesign
So in the last InDesign class here at NPower I had a student ask about printing options. She had a publication that she printed on 11×17 paper and then folder in half to make a booklet. She created it with the page setup as 11×17 but wanted to know if there wasn’t a way to get InDesign to print the last page & the first page together. It’s actually more complicated than that, if you set up your document this way. My answer, don’t worry about it. There’s an easier way. And it turns out my answer helped another student who was also creating a similiar ...
Vote, Vote, Vote
nonprofit voterWe don't have to tell you how important it is to vote this Fall, but we keep hearing about great resources for nonprofits working to get out the vote in their communities. We want to make sure you have them at your fingertips. The Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network is a national nonpartisan effort providing resources to America’s nonprofits to help their communities participate and vote. You'll find a wealth of resources designed specifically for nonprofits to encourage voter participation safely and effectively on a nonpartisan basis. Nonprofits can ...
Worth a Thousand Words: Photos, Photos, Photos!
Over at Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog, she's touched on an oft-repeated and even more often ignored topic of how to use pictures to tell your organization's stories. She's highlighted 4 tips that all nonprofits should heed to get the most out of using images online (and to protect themselves from a copyright infringement lawsuit!) Beth Kanter, guru of all great nonprofit social media topics, penned an article for TechSoup a while back about how nonprofits can get the most out of using Flickr. It's worth a read if you're wanting to beef up your use of images — both owned by your ...
SXSW Interactive Panels
South by Southwest Interactive, the new media sibling of the SXSW film and music festivals, is currently in the process of choosing panels and talks for the 2009 festival. SXSW's Panel Picker lets people vote for the panels they think would justify the trip to Austin. Beth Kanter and Social Actions have both posted lists of their favorite proposals from the social sector.
Online Used IT Equipment Buy-back Websites
As is often stated, reusing discarded goods of any type is the highest and best form of recycling them. This is especially true for electronics. Reuse is the highest form of recycling in that it retains the intended function and materials of electronic equipment with very little wasted, while end-of-life electronics recycling recovers just a portion of the metals, plastics, and glass that go into the manufacture of electronic devices. Shredding and smelting computers, for instance, loses 10% to 30% of the materials and energy in any given item.
2009 NTC Brainstorm: Be Careful What You Wish For
09NTCToday, we hosted a call for anyone who wanted to talk about what they want to happen at the 2009 NTC. It was a really fun call for me: I learned a few new things, was reminded to stop being so lazy, and had a few good chili pepper-related laughs. I'm posting a summary of the call so that, if you were not able to join us, you can still toss in your two cents. I've also called out the areas where we're going to need some help from the NTEN community. Because we really want to hear from you, we'll randomly pick three people from those who offer their ...
TechSoup Online Event: Get in the Groove with Google Grants
For those of you who may have missed the webinar on maximizing your Google ad grants from earlier today, you can still get in the Google groove by participating in the ongoing discussion over in the TechSoup Community forums. Share your expertise on Google ad campaigns you've run, get all your questions answered, and chat it up with the experts. Check it out now.
Rate Your Donor Management Software
It's NTEN survey time again! Your input helped make our reports on Content Management Systems and Constituent Relationship Management software successful, and now we need your help evaluating the vendors of Donor Management Software. > Rate your Donor Management Software today! Tell us what you love -- and what frustrates, irks, and just generally annoys you -- and we'll compile the results into a handy report, then give it to everybody who fills out the survey, for free Donor Management Software generally refers to a system that helps you manage relationships with ...
How to Measure Success with Your Blog
Beth Kanter consistently blows me away. As you know, since you’re reading this blog, that it’s relatively new for me. I started about the beginning of the year. It certainly has been a learning experience and overall great. One of the Goals I have for this year is for this blog to be successful. As we were reviewing our goals I realized I have no idea what this means! Is it number of readers? Number of posts? What??? Well Beth has a great post all about measuring success and what should it mean. She used a few benchmarks that she got from Avinash Kaushik and measured this year ...
Organizing Meetings
I guess I’m a little spoiled here at NPower. When I want to meet with my colleagues I use Outlook to check their calendars and schedule a meeting. Simple enough. Well it’s easy to forget that not everyone works at the same place or has an account on our Exchange server (for Outlook). What happens when, for example, I’m trying to set up a good meeting time with my fellow board members for the nonprofit I’m on the board of? Usually it’s a string of emails bouncing potential dates & times. You’d think, me being tech savvy, that I would have realized that ...
Rate Your Donor Database
NTEN is conducting another in its series of vendor satisfaction surveys. This time they want your input on donor management systems. Their pitch:
Tell us what you love -- and what frustrates, irks, and just generally annoys you -- and we'll compile the results into a handy report, then give it to everybody who fills out the survey, for free
Nonprofit Web Sites and Transparency
Today at his oft-stimulating blog, Seth Godin considers how technology can be used either to shield you from your constituents or to make you closer to them. He offers some ideas on how new technologies can help personalize interactions rather than depersonalize them. Many of Seth's ideas are tailored perfectly to nonprofits. He suggests private video-sharing for reporting to parents on students' progress, or using inexpensive virtual assistants to transcribe from-the-field reports. Ideas like these are great because they're examples of technology enabling a new level of personal interaction ...
Plone’s Best Feature
Helping you quickly enter and edit great content! That’s it. Don’t get me wrong - Plone is HUGELY featured, and it integrates very nicely. But I think it is the printing press of the decade, if you get what I mean. When Martin Luther nailed his treatise on the church door in Wittenberg - it wasn’t the content of his note that was radical -it was that he was able to use the printing press to evangelize (no pun intended) his message: The printing press is discovered and put into action in 1450. … Luther would have just been one more reformer in a small area if it had not ...
Spam
And no, I’m not talking about the kind that comes in a can and you can eat. Spam is the bane of our e-communications. And Spammers are getting more and more clever in their attempts to verify that your email address is valid, so they can sell it of course. Recently I’ve been receiving the following “types” of emails: It LOOKS like I’ve signed up to get news alerts from CNN, a reputable source. But as in many things on the internet, looks can be deceiving. I most certainly did not sign up for news alerts from CNN (or MSNBC, the other spam that I’ve been ...
Free TechSoup Google Ads Webinar and Online Event: August 14th
Mark your calendars for TechSoup's free online event and webinar on Thursday, August 14. Making the Most of Your Google Grants donation of In-Kind Advertising Did you know that Google gives grants in the form of in-kind advertising? Have you heard of Google Grants but don't know how to get one? Then don't miss TechSoup's free event where you will learn about Google Grants and how your nonprofit can receive up to $10,000 to use towards a donation of Google AdWords, Google's in-kind advertising program. Take part in the live webinar, Thursday, August 14 from 11:00 A.M.-12:00 P.M. PDT. ...
eNewsletters and formatting in Dreamweaver
A couple of times in NPower’s eNewsletters for Nonprofits training I’ve had students want to embed an anchor in their stories. An anchor is a link to another section on the same page. The best, and most common use, is for a list of contents in your enewsletter. This helps guide your readers to stories that are “below the fold”, which means they’d have to scroll down to get to it. And most readers won’t unless you make it super easy for them. Ideally you wouldn’t do this in Dreamweaver. If you’ve ever taken this class at NPower, you know I ...
Free Software Tool Cuts PC Energy Use
If you’re looking for a very easy way to cut your computer energy use and save money, Verdiem Software and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative have released a free energy-saving software application called Edison. The simple to use software tool works with Windows XP and Windows Vista machines and you dictate which hours you use your computer most, choose the level of energy savings you want to achieve (using a sliding scale), and then it calculates your estimated savings based on the setting you choose. You can find and download the 28 megabyte application at their Web site. read ...
Let's Get Tactical, Tactical
In our quest to use social media to build a social media curriculum for the sector, our WeAreMedia project has already involved more than 65 people. You've been contributing articles, photos, videos, and mindshare toward a common cause. Over the last few weeks, our focus has been on social media strategy, or the bigger picture concepts an organization should tackle before worrying about the tools themselves. We have covered how to know if social media is a good fit for your organization, strategy mapping, meeting resistance, storytelling, engagement skills, and ROI.(If you ...
Latest Spam Alert: CNN's Custom News Alerts
CNN is not reporting that their CNN Custom News Alert is being spoofed by spammers — with sometimes outrageous story headlines — but they are. Just this morning, I had a variety of spammy emails using CNN's My Custom Alert banners and some sounded legitimate ("Officials work to ID remains from helicopter crash") and others definitely didn't ("Naked celebs will make your day"). Spywareremove has a detailed blog post about how the spam works to trick the user to downloading malware. The post also includes a simple but effective way to filter them as spam using ...
