Category Archives: Best Practices
Graphic Design Toolbox: Designing the New Aspiration Shirt
Less than two weeks into my role at Aspiration, I was granted an enormous challenge: design the 2014 Aspiration t-shirt. From this high-profile task emerged a series of challenges. The first was simple: how could I support free and open software and produce the kind of visual graphics I’m used to getting with proprietary tools? […]
Twenty tactics for creating engaging online content
Do you ever find yourself asking “What’s the point of it all?” when creating content for the vast universe of the web? Don’t let your content fizzle out. Instead, consider using engagement asks to get your audience involved in the work you’re writing about. ‘Cause its not always about you. Organizing is about encouraging people […]
Developing New Tech Projects, Part I: User Testing
We’ve been working on something that we’re pretty excited about—a new part of our website that gathers all of our training resources in one place. It hasn’t gone live yet, but we’d love to share our progress and get your feedback on this page mock up as we move forward! For years, Aspiration has been […]
Text Messaging for Grassroots Community Organizing
Text messaging is more accessible than ever and can be a powerful tool in direct community organizing. Is Text Messaging Right for Your Work? Short Message Service (SMS) can be an effective method for communicating and interacting with a relatively large audience of supporters in a direct and engaging way. Despite their reputation for being […]
Trust in the Cloud
Are you considering using the Cloud at your nonprofit organization? What are some implications of the use of the Cloud for nonprofits and social justice movements? (Hold up, if first you want to get caught up on “What is the Cloud?“? Read from Mashable or LearnFree.) Calling it “The Cloud” is misleading The Cloud is […]
Pain, Passion, Fame, and Fun
Have you been thinking about how to get people to care about the information you are putting online? As you begin the process to engage people in the offline or online world, you have to figure out how your messaging reaches the people you care about by tapping into what they actually really care about. […]
Data: Your Most Important Tech Asset
As much as we love tools here at SSC, we find that many nonprofits focus too much on them when thinking about their technology strategy and infrastructure. While tools are an important and necessary piece, it’s important that an organization focus on the more crucial piece of the technological equation: the data. When thinking about […]
Why HTML Email Newsletter Editors Suck
One of the biggest complaints we get from nonprofits as they mature in their online communications is that creating properly-functioning formatted (i.e. HTML) emails in their email blaster is a pain in the @$$. The trouble is that having regular email blasts as an organization is seen as a baseline measure of organizational online competancy […]
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