Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 28, 2008

On my recent visit to Hong Kong, I was able to see the amount of excitement and interest in social entrepreneurism. One had to assume there's a lot going on in China, too, but it's hard to connect with. I just received an update from KK Tse entitled The Most Inspiring Story from the Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship, talking about 1KG More, a social enterprise that implemented Voluntourism: combining backpacking with delivering books and other gifts for rural Chinese children.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 21, 2008

A while ago, I joined a bunch of groups at groups.drupal.org , thinking I’d pick up some interesting ideas, and meet some folks who were doing cool stuff with Drupal. One of the groups I joined (along with “Drupal for Good&# and “Drupalchix&# ) was the PostgreSQL group. Yesterday, in my RSS feed, this post showed up. It was the suggestion to remove PostgreSQL support from the Drupal core.

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Judi Sohn

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

I had never been to a large, high-priced business conference like Dreamforce before, much less spoken at one. Oh, the details! From the sturdy high-quality conference bag, to the folks standing outside the Moscone Center dressed in white carrying cloud balloons, to the video walls and careful lighting…and the Foo Fighters! No expense was spared, and lots of open bars.

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NetWits

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Like the Sasquatch legends of lore, truly powerful uses of APIs and other connectivity technologies are more talked about than actually seen.

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Speaker: Andrew Olsen, CFRE - EVP, Fundraising Solutions at DickersonBakker | Kat Landa, CFRE, CSD - SVP, Talent Solutions at DickersonBakker

Across the nonprofit sector, organizations invest heavily in donor retention efforts, yet the struggle of cultivating lasting relationships remains. While attracting new donors is crucial, the lack of repeat donors poses significant financial risks. Through a comprehensive analysis of industry data, experts argue that there is a direct correlation between donor burnout, donor retention, and the talent retention crisis.

Donor

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 30, 2008

Last August, I saw the impact of Twitter's velocity first-hand with a fundraising experiment. I was able to raise $2,500 in 90 minutes at Gnomedex. I wondered whether or not those results would be replicable ? Right before Thanksgiving , the TweetsGiving effort and Avi Kaplan helped Epic Change raise over $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania.

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Wild Apricot

NOVEMBER 28, 2008

Checking for and fixing broken links on your organization's website can be tedious and time-consuming, but it's a vital task for anyone who manages a website. You can save time and effort by preventing a lot of those broken links, however. The key is to be a bit strategic when you're choosing which page you'll link to, and double-checking that your link is correctly formed before you ever hit the "Publish" button.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

I don’t usually title my tech blog entries with quite that sort of title, but that’s how I feel after spending 3 days with one of the most fabulous groups of people I have had the honor of spending time with in recent memory. I was at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit , which was an event full of great sessions, meeting neat people of all sorts, and having lots of geeky fun.

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Judi Sohn

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

When I’m home, I sync my iPhone with my iMac, and life is good. But when I’m traveling, I only have my MacBook Pro with me. I use Spanning Sync to keep iCal and Address Book on the laptop in sync with iCal and Address Book on the Mac (and in sync with Google Calendar and Gmail). I use DropBox to make sure I have important files with me (and to hold my 1Password keychain file s o my login passwords are automatically synced ).

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See3

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

We’ve talked about the power of the Girl Effect video , which uses only typography and classical piano to make its point. It’s a very compelling piece, and has received a lot of attention exactly for its freshness and innovation. Well, Starbucks released a new ad during Saturday Night Live this past weekend that’s shockingly similar.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

When I was a kid, Lucy the Elephant , was in a state of disrepair. A community group worked hard to get her placed on the historic register and raise money to restore her to her mid-century glory. How? Bake sales organized by my third grade teacher, Josephine Harron or was known as "Cupcake." I baked a lot of cupcakes with my mom for those bake sales.

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Speaker: Tim Sarrantonio

The average nonprofit uses five or more different software platforms to create their donor’s journey, making the experience clunky and disjointed. If you want to design a magical online giving experience for donors, making their journey as seamless as possible is key. In this webinar with expert Tim Sarrantonio, you’ll learn the fundamental steps to create an immersive and personalized online giving experience for your donors.

Donor

Wild Apricot

NOVEMBER 27, 2008

Our blog provides technology-related ideas and advice for small non-profits - professional and business associations, clubs, charitable organizations, churches, activist groups and communities. Many subscribers are also Wild Apricot software clients, so we do occasional blog posts about our software updates. Wild Apricot smart software simplifies life for people in associations and non-profits.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 20, 2008

Our Bookshare.org team is delighted that we've just added I Am Potential, by Patrick Henry Hughes to the Bookshare.org collection. Patrick's story is getting a lot of deserved attention nationally as a significantly disabled college student who hasn't let disabilities stop him from pursuing his dreams. What is even cooler is that Perseus Books, Patrick's publisher, reached out to us during the production process to make sure that the book was available to people with print disabilities.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2008

Getting involved in a social network, whether it be something like Facebook or Myspace, or a content-connected social network like flickr or delicious (I’m starting to get used to writing that without the dots,) is pretty easy. But there are SO many, and they all have their pros and cons. What I have learned, though, is that a social network is only as good as something that you have absolutely no control over: how many of your real friends and colleagues use it.

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Judi Sohn

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

I’m here at Terminal C at the Philadelphia Airport, waiting for my flight to San Francisco. The airport normally has nice bright displays showing all the departing/arriving flights. Not today. Folks are usually quick to point out a random BSOD on displays as an example of Windows FAIL, so it’s only fair to show that it happens to the best of ‘em.

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Advertiser: Digital Ocean

Effectively managing cloud technology is getting more complex. From cybersecurity concerns, vendor lock-in, cost increases, or lack of transparency on costs, it can quickly get out of control. Knowing what you can control and finding a platform that’s built with nonprofits in mind is key.

Nonprofit

NTEN

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Over the past year -- or, I guess, 2 years, really -- we've seen the power of people-to-people, word-of-mouth, long-tail, whatever-you-want-to-call-it fundraising with the success of the Obama campaign's online efforts. They broke all sorts of fundraising records, and did most of it with donations under $100. What really excites me about the result is the lesson it can teach advocacy and nonprofit organizations across the country.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 12, 2008

Using Social Networks for Social Change: Facebook, MySpace and More View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fundraising advocacy ) I was lucky enough to meet Ivan Boothe at the first (or maybe second) Netsquared Conference back in 2005 and have been following his work for years. Ivan Boothe helped start the Genocide Intervention Network in 2004, and was responsible for communications, web development and social networking strategy.

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Wild Apricot

NOVEMBER 23, 2008

First-time nonprofit managers can often use a bit of guidance from more experienced colleagues, as well as the answers to specific questions. The problem is, there just aren't enough mentors to go around, and perhaps this is especially so in the nonprofit sector where resources are stretched to the limit. What's the solution? Well, Third Sector New England believes it's found a partial solution at any rate.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

I went to Dubai for the first ever Summit on the Global Agenda. The Summit pulled together experts on roughly seventy different topics to discuss the current and future state of major issue areas: areas as varied as water, mining, nanotechnology, governance, economic development, economic meltdown (kidding) and so on. Obviously, there was a lot of buzz about the financial meltdown, especially in a place like Dubai that has built itself up as a major international business center (Dubai as an emi

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Advertiser: Syncrony

Looking for cost reductions for your nonprofit? Why not consider modernizing with a digital board management system that's designed to work with remote meetings, with immediate cost reductions if you still distribute paper packets to members? Get going in less than an hour on a fully hosted cloud solution built on the latest technology that runs on any device - from desktops to tablets and smartphones - without any installation.

Nonprofit

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 15, 2008

I was perusing the program for a local “green&# event, when I noticed a full page advertisement for Firefox, saying that it’s software was “ 100% organic.&# I kind of chuckled. I thought, what does that really mean? For Firefox, it means, “open source, community-powered.&# And I realized that they had an interesting point. In my mind, it harks back to the arguments that Yochai Benkler made in his book “ The Wealth of Networks ,&# that a ecosystem full of open source

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Forum One

NOVEMBER 21, 2008

Earlier this week I (Michaela Hackner) was in Austin, TX attending the Convio 2008 Summit , a national conference focused on the use of the Convio's constituent relations management tool. Attendees primarily consisted of nonprofit organizations seeking to grow their donor base while also continuing to engage their existing audience. In normal economic times, this is not an easy task.

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NTEN

NOVEMBER 20, 2008

Peter Deitz, Social Actions. With the global financial crisis at its peak and a recession looming, many nonprofit managers are probably asking themselves, "How will my nonprofit raise money next year?" I suspect fewer fundraisers are asking themselves, "How will my nonprofit raise the money it needs four years from now?" The second question is the more important of the two, and the more difficult to answer.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Source: Facebook vs LinkedIn Traffic. The illustration above shows the overlap between people who use LinkedIn and Facebook. What initially caught my eye was the demographic (age analysis) of LinkedIn VS Facebook users. We know that professional relationships are moving from the Rolodex to the social networks. LinkedIn is designed for specifically for business professional networking, while Facebook is a bit more casual.

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Advertiser: DonorDock

Are your donors your biggest fans, or are you lacking donor loyalty? The truth is, your donors have expectations of what their relationship with your organization should look like. This ebook will help you learn how to live up to those expectations!

Donor

Wild Apricot

NOVEMBER 20, 2008

Choosing software for your organization is a lot like choosing where to set up your office. Basically, there are two choices: you can buy your own office building, or you can rent space in someone else's building. And it's the same with your organization's software. But which is the better choice for you - self-installed software or a hosted package?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 15, 2008

My current business trip started by heading for Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I had been invited to attend the Global Agenda Council meeting organized by the World Economic Forum. It was easier to say yes than usual: I'd never been to Dubai or the region, and the government of Dubai and Emirates airline offered to fly me there business class! I was stunned when I found out in New York that the plane I was boarding was the new Airbus A380, the massive, double-decker airliner.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

I’m going to go out on a really thin limb here, and feel free to saw it off in the comments. :-). If you haven’t been to change.gov yet, you need to go. Now. I’ll be here when you come back. There is little question that Obama was Presidential Candidate 2.0. And it’s becoming increasigly clear that he’ll be President 2.0.

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Forum One

NOVEMBER 24, 2008

The “ Green Enterprise Unconference ” we’re hosting on December 3rd is looking extremely timely and interesting. It’s timely because integrating environmental factors into decision-making is likely to become a key issue in 2009 for businesses and governments. Timely – according to The Wall Street Journal’s “CEO Council”, recommending today that the new Administration pursue a variety of alterative energy technologies, and “mandate” improvements in energy efficiency – strong calls by corporate CE

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Advertisement

Organizations like yours are increasingly realizing that technology adoption is only as good as the technology you choose. Statistics from a 2014 NTEN study show that seriously investing resources in training for your staff corresponds to higher adoption and ultimately technology effectiveness. In this report, we’ll give you a high-level overview of how to get your organization in shape for technology adoption and best practices for facilitating this critical process.

Nonprofit

NTEN

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

I'm an Executive Director now, so I have a new-found (and acute) understanding of just how complex that role is. . At a small organization like NTEN, a leader has to be ready to do just about everything, from fundraising to janitorial services. I'd been at NTEN for five years before I took the ED job, so I was lucky enough to know what I was doing -- mostly.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 21, 2008

Laura Fitton (aka @pistachio ) the Twitter for Dummies site where folks are contributing ideas and tips to help write the book. In addition, 10% of the proceeds will benefit a charity to be nominated by the community. I nominated the Sharing Foundation for the following reasons: In July/August 2007, I launched my third fundraising campaign to support the Cambodian Bloggers Summit and the Sharing Foundation.

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Wild Apricot

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

If you're running any kind of organization, a suite of office software is essential — at the very least, you need a fairly good word-processing program, a spreadsheet application, and some sort of presentation software. Feature-rich Microsoft Office has made that particular market its own for at least the past decade, but now a few strong alternative software suites are fast gaining ground.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

We've just started up a new publication, The Bookshare Bulletin. It's amazing to me how much our team has gotten done over the last year! There are easily a dozen articles in this first issue about our new website, international work and many more. I'm quite excited about a new initiative which is the last article in the newsletter. We've now made it easy to report quality issues with Bookshare books, and we have a new wiki-style webpage where all of the reports are posted and updated as the iss

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Association executives—and hopefully their boards—know that they are facing perilous times. Driven by the pace of cultural and technological change, they are experiencing major disruptions in the traditional business models that used to guide organizational growth strategies.orgSource offers a straightforward approach to navigating these changes and readying your organization for growth.

Associations