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Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media

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2010 Nonprofit Software Development Summit Dates Announced

By Matt on August 19, 2010

Have you heard of Aspiration‘s Nonprofit Software Development Summit? It is THE place to connect with other people just like you who care about software and technology in the nonprofit sector. Let me emphasize that. Connect. With PEOPLE. This is not the place to sit down in a room and listen to a keynoter talk at you. No. We believe that the greatest resource and benefit that you can get from a conference like the Dev. Summit is the people who are around you. Users, abusers, developers, reverse-engineers and people who just want to know how to Drupal a Ruby’s rails with a CRM.

Our sessions are designed as discussions around a theme. There are no keynoters, just facilitators. This is a place to learn new things, meet cool (sometimes bizarre) people, get involved in great conversation and ultimately connect with what has become an incredible Aspiration family. I HIGHLY encourage you to at least sniff around the website if you are at all interested in connecting with others concerned with software and tech for the nonprofit and social justice sector.

The dates have been announced for this year (November 15-17) and we want to hear from you about what sessions you’d like to see! Let us know by leaving a comment on this post, Aspiration’s Facebook wall, tweeting at us or emailing info@aspirationtech.org.

To give you a better idea about what it’s like, check out the photos below:

Look!  Here.  On the Floor! Sidewalk Tech
It's this Big Wired Collaboration
Dev Summit Scary Face

It’s such a blast. Don’t miss out. More info about registration will be up soon! :D



Dashboarding Guide from Netvibes

By Matt on August 12, 2010

Our favorite dashboarding tool Netvibes has put together a Dashboarding Guide that inventories Monitoring and Analytics tools available to track your presence online (similar to putting together a Social Source Commons Toolbox).

It’s nice to have a document describing these tools while explaining their individual integration options with Netvibes. Tools are categorized by “Monitoring”, “Listening” and “Analyzing.” However, in my opinion, it’s hard to find practical differences between the “Monitoring” and “Listening” tools. What does a “monitoring” tool do different than a “listening” tool, I ask you? Regardless, each category takes you to a list of tools and while there isn’t much of a guided walk-through, the breadth of the tools covered is impressive. Each tool page has information about the tool as well as a place to leave comments and ratings similar to SSC Tool Comments (*cough* plug *cough*).

Netvibes Dashboarding Guide

Overall, it’s great that Netvibes is putting this list together as more and more monitoring tools start coming out of the woodwork and as it becomes even easier to put together a comprehensive Social Media Dashboard. I wish there was more of a guide to how to use the “Guide” as when I first heard about it, I thought it was going to be more of a walk-through about using these tools effectively in your dashboard. Also, more filter options and designations for tools that require outside accounts (as in outside of the widget you add to your dashboard) would be much appreciated.

That being said, Netvibes has told us that this is just the first iteration so hopefully this Dashboarding Guide will mature into a great resource for those trying to navigate the world of social media tracking! So check out Netvibe’s Dashboarding Guide and let me know what YOU think!



Dearest NULL

By Matt on August 10, 2010
Sorry

In a pretty embarrassing snafoo (snafu?), our Desert Island Tool Email Blast, sent through Vertical Response, addressed many of our members as “NULL” rather than “Friend.”

This, of course, is a fail for mail merge, or when information from an address book (in our case, SSC users’ first names) is taken and automatically placed into the email. Most mail merge-ers give you an option for when a person’s record doesn’t have the requested information. So, for example, if Jimmy Potter didn’t provide his first name on his Social Source Commons account, mail merge gives us an option to provide another word to put in its place. I chose “Friend.” However, it looks like somewhere in the magic tubes of mystery and voodoo (otherwise known as computers and the internet), this broke down so that if a user did not supply a first name, instead of “Friend”, their first name was replaced with “NULL.”

As one of our users put it, it’s “Not so friendly to address your subscribers with ‘Null’…” (with all due respect to those actually named “NULL”). So if you are one of the unfortunate souls to have received a message to “NULL” rather than your (I’m sure) beautiful and lovely first name, we whole-heartedly and sincerely apologize. My bad.

Also? I now hate all online communications.

…kidding…

;) Matt



Social Media Litter vs. Valid Content

By Matt on July 28, 2010

Recently, Allyson Kapin of FrogLoop posted a blog post on social media contests: Online Fundraising Contests: Effective or Digital Litter. I thought this was pretty intriguing because it brought up the question of what is valid content in social media, anyway?

Trashy Cats
Trashy Cat photo courtesy of funadium

“Litter”, as I imagine it in the social media sense, is a category of content types (tweets, blog posts, updates, etc.) that one ignores as something that is annoying or of no value to whoever is reading it. Disposable. However, some social media sites like Twitter find value in disposability. “Tweets” are limited to 140 characters and rather than the actual post being that which you care about, they usually announce something that you then research further or they redirect you themselves with a shortened URL.

If you agree with my thought that tweets are disposable, then where does the valid/litter distinction come in? Could all tweets be considered “litter” in the social media sense? Is it more “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” situation where “litter” is in the eye of the beholder? Or is there more of a black and white situation that nonprofits or organizations can live by to ensure their social media efforts are not litter similar to the belief that everyone thinks that telephone marketers are from the devil?

What do you think? What about other social media sites? How is their “litter” different?



What Would YOUR TechFinder Look Like?

By Matt on July 22, 2010

As TechSoup Global retires TechFinder.org, Aspiration is delighted to be working with them to transition the TechFinder data to a new home, and excited to hear from you about what is most needed in terms of a resource directory for nonprofit technology services.

As our good readers (hopefully) know, Social Source Commons and Answr platforms already provide essential information on nonprofit technology. SSC is the largest inventory of software relevant to nonprofit needs, and Answr is an emerging resource that seeks to aggregate knowledge about best practices for nonprofit technology processes, from email to web publishing to social media.

Our plan is to integrate the TechFinder knowledge with these existing resources to provide contextual information on “who can help you with what”.

How will we do that? As with everything we do, we are taking a community-driven approach to the opportunity. We’ve already had a number of great discussions with friends and allies, and now we hope to hear from you.

What would YOU like Techfinder to be? Email us with your thoughts and suggestions at techfinder@aspirationtech.org. We promise to write back!

Want to be among the first to get updates as we move forward? Just let us know how to reach you, and if you’re so inclined, share your thoughts on what the future of the TechFinder data should be, and how it could be most useful to you and yours.

And if you are a nonprofit technology service provider who has any concerns about what we plan to do with the TechFinder data, please be in touch, let us know your concerns and whether you’d like to opt out of any future TechFinder data deployment.



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