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The Web Is Dead? What Does that Mean (to Nonprofits)?
Wired has a fascinating series of articles up about the future of the Web. Everybody interested in the actual "technology" part of nonprofit technology -- as differentiated from what technology can help your organization accomplish -- should probably give it a read (and not just because Tim O'Reilly compares Steve Jobs to either Gollum or Frodo; I can't tell which).For everybody else, here are some highlights:The web browser may be in decline. The proportion of Internet traffic served through web browsers reached a peak of more than 50% in 2000, but has since declined to less ...
GreenTech Book Review: Green IT for Sustainable Business Practice
In our quest to shine a light on what's going on in green IT for nonprofits, libraries, and really anyone running or working in a small to medium sized office, we'd be remiss to not call some attention to a new book by UK-based author, Mark O'Neill called Green IT for Sustainable Business Practice. The Amazon blurb on this describes it as "a sensible, clear-sighted guide to emerging standards, rules, business processes and best practices in a complex and ever-changing sector." Essentially this small 158-page book is the latest in a somewhat small genre of books on the subject of green IT. It ...
Running Free: Seattle Free School at Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp
One thing I always enjoy about Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp is getting to know very small organizations. A lot of people stopped by our booth and told us about the challenges their one-or-two-person nonprofits are facing. It's an important perspective, and a big part of TechSoup's user base. Working with a tiny staff and budget brings a litany of challenges, but it brings some amazing opportunities too. The low-budget ethos is encapsulated no better than in the Seattle Free School. SFS doesn't accept donations and doesn't apply for grants. Volunteers teach free classes in rooms donated by ...
Top Ten Technology and Social Media Resources for Nonprofits
This post originally appeared on TechSoup's global partner, Connecting Up Australia's website and was written by Shai Coggins.
Everyday, we find great resources on the different uses of technology and social media in the nonprofit sector. We bookmark them, note them, share them, tweet or retweet them, and sometimes, we even blog about them. So, in this post, we thought we'll round up some of the most interesting resources that we think you might also find useful for you and your organization.
Crowdsourcing Events: The Citizen Gulf Project
Remember Live Aid? At the time, the most impressive thing about the concert was not how much money was raised, or how many musicians were involved, but how global it was. Concerts took place mainly in the UK and the US, but also in Australia, Japan, France, and a half a dozen other places around the world. If only for the sheer scale, it was epic, in the truest sense of the word.*Scale like that required a massive amount of centralized work, work to bring the periphery (France) into the larger whole. It was highliy orchestrated, from the content to the signage to Phil Collins' travel. How ...
Free Webinar August 25: Three Ways to Know if You're Ready for Planned Giving
On August 25, 2010 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, our donor partner Mission Research (which donates its fundraising and donor management software GiftWorks to eligible nonprofits and libraries through TechSoup) will host a free webinar on planned giving with Scott Lyons.
From GiftWorks:
NTEN Member Buzz Round-Up: August 16
Flickr Photo: Caro Wallis(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.) I didn't get a round-up posted last week, so I have an extra long one this week! Let's get started: Thanks, Nancy Scwhartz, for taking the recent Russian spy saga and turning it into a nonprofit marketing lesson. This article from Microsoft tries to tackle the IT "overhead" challenge nonprofits ...
A/B Testing Is O/K
Which is better, "Join us" or "Sign up for updates"? "Gift" or "Donation"? Large photo and short fundraising blurb, or vice versa? We've talked a few times on this blog about the importance of testing how constituents respond to your website, but we've never really talked about how to run a test. If you think that testing a new web design or call to action requires an experienced web programmer, then you might be pleasantly surprised. A/B testing is a term for testing two different versions of any piece of collateral: a website, an email newsletter, direct mail, an advertisement — anything ...
Steven Slater & JetBlue Make a Great Case for Open Leadership
Flickr: mi..chaelIf you've engaged any news source this week, you've probably heard about Steven Slater. Slater is the (previously employed) JetBlue flight attendant who, upon allegedly being assaulted by a passenger, effectively quit his job with a tirade of expletives over the PA system before grabbing a beer and making a grand exit out the emergency chute (luggage in hand) at JFK airport. Slater was promptly arrested and the media blitz began. For many organizations and individuals, this would have been a disastrous situation. In the age of Charlene Li's Open Leadership, however, it ...
How to Get Longer Life Out of Your Laptop Battery
By following these tips, you should get more hours out of each charge of your laptop battery and save electricity to boot:
- Close unused applications or software programs. The information to run the programs is stored in memory, which requires energy to keep active. If you're not using it, close it!
- Turn down the brightness of your monitor. (This may also help preserve your eyesight!)
- Set your power settings to sleep your monitor and hard drives at a more aggressive interval.
Net Neutrality Update: The Google/Verizon Proposal
When last we tuned in to the soap opera that IS the net neutrality debate, the fate of our Internet had been left in the hands of FCC Chairman Genachowski, who had architected a process he hoped would lead to some action. Things weren't moving quickly, but they were moving, and down a definable path. (Thanks to the nearly 500 NTEN community members who signed the nonprofit petition!) On August 4, the New York Times broke the bombshell that Verizon and Google were meeting about net neutrality to broker their own proposal. Then, on August 9, Google and Verizon took a left turn, and ...
Blog Migration!
Happy 2009! I thought I’d let you know that NPower Seattle is merging our blogs into a single account, which you can find here: http://community.npowerseattle.org/npowering/
You can expect to see all of my postings about Salesforce, Plone, Websites, Databases and more -as well as viewing great tips from Jon Frank (our Training Manager) and Dave Forrester (our Manager of Strategy and Planning).
So - update your bookmarks/rss feeds and other notifications, and I’ll see you on over at our new blog!
Patrick
The New & Improved NPower blog!
OK most of you know I started this blog at the beginning of 2008 to help you all with software related issues. Cool tips & tricks when using various programs. And Patrick Shaw, NPower’s manager of web & database projects, has had his blog to help with questions around web design & databases. So now what? Well these 2 blogs cover 1/2 of the services that NPower has been providing to nonprofits for the last 10 years. With a new year, it seemed like a good time to get our other 2 managers involved. We can’t have all of the blogging fun. So we’ve combined all of our ...
Image Resolution & InDesign
Now for the longest time I’ve told students in our InDesign classes that the way to tell if your photo is high quality is to open in up in Photoshop. Now InDesign CS4 will tell you the resolution of your graphic in the newly updated Links panel. This is one of those moments where I’m reminded that I don’t know everything. And when it comes to the Adobe products, that’s doubly so. Turns out that InDesign can & will tell you the resolution of your graphics in the older version. It just so happens that the Info panel, a panel that I stopped using when I switched ...
Making Snowflakes with InDesign
Since it’s been snowing so much here in Seattle, which is unusual for us; it seem appropriate that the folks over at InDesign Secrets have posted this handy tutorial on how to create snowflakes with InDesign. Or other really cool fractal designs.
Check it out, I’ve already creating several. Besure to ready the comments too, there are some great tips there. And you can do something similar using Illustrator, I posted about that a while back.
Creating Image Text with inDesign
For those of you who’ve taken NPower’s InDesign Intermediate, you may remember this handy trick. How you can use an image and make it appear inside your “text”. So that the characters are made up of the picture. It’s a cool trick and can make your document really stand out. The folks over at InDesign Secrets have a great posting about this. They do a great job explaining how it works, how to do it, and why the obvious method doesn’t work. That being, using the None or Paper choices in the Swatches panel. But this brings up an entirely different ...
Deleting Guides from Your InDesign Document
I know that lots of use work with Graphic Designers. We can’t all be design experts. Or you may have inherited InDesign documents from a previous staff member, etc. And lets just say that the way the did things doesn’t quite mess with your style. One of those migh, just might, be the use of guides. I’ve opened up some documents where the author had gone whole hog with the guides. I mean they were everywhere! I could hardly see the content on the page through the forest of guides. Now if this has ever happened to you, let me share a little trick that the folks over at ...
Working with a Designer pt.2
Well this week seems to be my week for follow-up posts. Recently I commented on working with a graphic designer and who owns what. Well today I came across a post that dealt with the same issue but from a web site perspective. It apply to print too and the author makes some fantastic points.
You can check it out at http://blog.pixelita.com/23/who-owns-your-web-site/
Hidden Characters in InDesign, pt. 2
A while back I posted a link to Adobe’s website that listed hidden characters that InDesign can show you for spaces, tabs, etc. Well the folks over at InDesign Secrets went one step further (and better). They created a great PDF of these characters. What makes it better is it’s LARGE, so you can actually see the characters easily. And it shows them in context.
Check it out!
Staff Reductions in the Business and Nonprofit Communities
I’ve been thinking a lot about the layoffs happening all over the world, brought about by a combination of the economic crisis and the ensuing environment of fear. I don’t have a great list, but a quick web search tells me that: Bank of America announced plans to cut up to 35,000 WaMu: Most! Dell: 8.800 Citigroup: 50,000 The list goes on and on. But nowhere am I seeing the rest of the story. For instance – what services are being cut to accommodate these layoffs? If there aren’t any service cuts, then I’m left with the impression: These agencies were obese – fat with people ...
