Baptcare was recently awarded a Google Grant, free publicity that has doubled our website traffic. Using that Grant we’ve created adverts to promote our nonprofit organisation’s vacancies and seen a big rise in the number of job applications we’ve received. Maybe you could do the same for your website’s job ads. Like most charities, we’ve published vacancies on our website and in print. Visitors would see an ad that we’d placed in the jobs section of the local newspaper and then visit the we

Writing a blog to provide information for people isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. You can do a lot of different things to provide value to your readers. Ramkarthik at Blogging Tips has a nice post that lists 3 ways you can brand yourself as a blogger. 1. Problem Solver Problem solver is the one who writes solutions for problems that people are facing. Problem solvers have the advantage of getting more subscribers easily to their blog. 2. Advice Blogger Advice bloggers are those who give

I’ve been pretty enamored of Ubiquity since installing it a month and a half ago. Tonight, I decided to play around with writing a command. So, in just a few months and with (oh, trust me when I say this) virtually no skills whatsoever, I wrote my first Ubiquity commands: Social Actions Ubiquity Command. You’ll see the full disclaimer there (and the things that I’d like to figure out how to add). But it was interesting to me to see how genuinely easy it was to do this. Any feedback i

Here's my contribution to this month's Net2ThinkTank question posed by Amy Sample Ward, "What are the key questions nonprofit orgs should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning?" 1. What are the goals you are trying to achieve this year? 2. Which social media tools could possibly help you achieve those goals? 3. If you don't know the answer to #2, ask yourself, where can I get

A busy Friday it has been -- server installed, webinar completed, Intern taught mail merge -- and now we're looking forward to next Tuesday when we will co-host a Teleseminar with Women Who Tech and Susan Mernit on Owning Your Own Power.  This talk with Susan Mernit, who's created content, developed products and run businesses and non-profit endeavors -- in a wide variety of settings, from companies as large as AOL to her own small startup -- draws on her 15+ years of experience working in

See3 | Guide to Online Video: "Today the web fully supports video. And that requires a new paradigm for how you think about video, how you document your work, and how you reach out to your constituents.This 7-part introduction is designed to get you thinking about online video, and to get you started on the path toward becoming a more web-centric organization."

We Are Media Toolbox: Commenting Submitted by Holly on Thu, 10/09/2008 - 8:54am. commenting NPTech social media wearemedia web2.0 We're going to close out this week's round of We Are Media Toolbox fun with commenting. Have you ever commented on a blog, a picture, or a video? In many online communities, comments are more than just, well, comments -- they're part of a conversation. Comments, and then comments on the comments, often create some of the best discussion on the web. Chris Brogan

One tough thing about raising funds is getting people to open your message. You're in the inbox next to dozens, even hundreds, of other messages, many of them brazen spam. And all you have to get opened is a few words. No color, no images, no typography -- just pure text. And very little of that. (If you've played your cards right, your name in the "from" line also helps.) Here are some good principles for subject lines from Constant Contact: How to Get More Opens and Clicks. 1. Opposites A

Hugh McLeod has a must-read Q&A with Seth Godin, on Godin's new book, "Tribes." Here's a taste: The world has always been organized into tribes, groups of people who want to (need to) connect with each other, with a leader and with a movement. The products, services and ideas that are gaining currency faster than ever are ones that are built on a tribe. Barack Obama has one, John McCain tried to co-opt one. Arianna Huffington has built the most popular blog in the world around one. Harle

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Matthew Saunders has posted a useful introductory article outlining the media available to share your organisation’s stories along with tips on how to get started.  Head over to his blog and read the full article Story Telling, Web 2.0, and Non-profits. Visit Laura's Notebook to read more articles or to leave a comment.

A HUGE Thank You goes to our all NTC sponsors and exhibitors to date!  We are super-geeked about the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference (and not just because we're geeks). We're putting many of your ideas into action this year and we already have a crew of super folks on our side to make the NTC the best place to connect, learn, and change around the technology issues relevant to you. Check out this amazing list of sponsors! (Don't worry, you aren't too late, learn more and sponsor the NTC

I own the domains www.GivingTools.com and www.GivingTools.org. I don’t have any plans to use them. I’m not interested in selling them, but if you would like the domains AND you have an interesting project that you would use them for, let me know and I’ll consider giving them to you. I apologize for the low volume of posting recently. I’m concentrating on the financial markets right now.

DrupalNGo Last weekend, my company’s Paris office helped run “Drupal’N'Go” , a BarCamp/WineCamp style Drupal barn-raising.  The idea was to select a worthy nonprofit organization, and build an entire webiste for them. How did it turn out?  DrupalFrance community member jlndrr posted this feedback (in English, French version here ). Technorati Tags: drupalngo , af83 , drupal       

We Are Media Toolbox: Social Bookmarking Submitted by Holly on Wed, 10/08/2008 - 8:26am. NPTech NTEN social media wearemedia web2.0 Another day, another We Are Media Toolbox challenge! Today's topic is social bookmarking. When I first heard that phrase, it conjured up images of women reading their favorite passages from Nicholas Sparks novels aloud to one another while drinking white wine. How wrong was I? Social bookmarking is now part of my everyday online experience. I use Delicious

Flickr Photo: paurianMuseums get a bad rap as purveyors of the past.  I'd guess most of us, when we think about museums at all, think about dusty old things.  But the very best museums tie all that old stuff to the world we live in today, and the future we're creating. It's a lot like our roles as non-museum nonprofits: we sift through all the information and data out there to find what matters for our communities -- and make it relevant.   Part of that is the selection process, choosing

How safe is your Donor Data? Had just sent off a piece to our marketing department on data security when I received my invitation from the Institute of Fundraising Technology Group to attend their session on this very topic (Sign up here)- so seems this is an issue on a few people's minds. I had started my piece by describing a cartoon I saw in a national paper recently, which showed one commuter saying to another ‘I never buy the Times anymore – there’s always those secret papers to read on t

Over here Jon Bounds has reminded us of our collective Birmingham blogger wish to mark Blog Action day next week in some shared way.  When Tom Watson asked us about this a while back there was plenty of enthusiastic muttering. The theme for blog action day 2008 is poverty, considered in it’s widest sense. So rather than simply blog, we’re arranging to do something more practical:  run a social media surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham.  Many of these deal directly with p

If You Listen, a T-Shirt Will Come Submitted by Holly on Tue, 10/07/2008 - 7:19am. NPTech NTEN wearemedia Congratulations to Ashley Messick! Yesterday, we kicked off our month-long We Are Media Festival of Tools with a conversation about how to monitor the conversation. Many of you added your favorite tools for eavesdropping on the interwebs to learn more about what people are saying about your organization and your issues. We're also hoping to learn why you use those tools, and how you u

This is pretty cool: the Donation Dashboard, a site created by the Berkeley Center for New Media. It's meant to help you decide where you should direct your charitable giving. It works like this: You are offered a series of descriptions of nonprofit organizations. You rate them on a sliding scale of your interest. Then it returns a pie chart of how you should divide up your charitable giving. The logic is, "If you like organization X, you might also like organization Y." In my case, I got a