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Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media

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Category Archives: Tools

Developing New Tech Projects, Part 2: Test Pages

(Check out part one of this project here! ) We’re getting closer to launching our webpage for nonprofit learning resources, designed for anyone concerned with using and making decisions about technology for social change. We appreciate all who shared helpful feedback on our digital page mock-ups. Now, we’ve brought these mock-ups to life in a […]

Resources: How to Protect your Email

With great honor, Aspiration gets to join Jack and Jamila from Palante Technology Cooperative for a session on “PGP Encryption for Our Movements” at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit on June 19-22, 2014. The AMC is a “collaborative labratory” where activists, techies, artists, and educators create and share transformative media. We always have a […]

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 […]

Preparing Your Computer for Translation Purposes

Here at Aspiration, we love to use free open source software, so our go to office suite is LibreOffice. For those of you who do not know what LibreOffice is, it is basically the equivalent to Microsoft Office suite, but better because it is free! I was recently doing some work in Spanish. If you […]

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 […]

Wall Street Journal Data Transparency Weekend Tools

Recently, a group of coders gathered together in Greenwich Village to put together tools to promote privacy, security and data transparency. This was the The Wall Street Journal Data Transparency Weekend. Aspiration was excited to be involved in such an important movement happening in tool development. You can see photos from the weekend on Flickr […]

Facebook Page vs. Group Post Updated

Hi Folks, just wanted to let you know that we’ve updated our Facebook Page vs. Group blog post to match current, April 2012 reality, knowing full well that it will change after I hit “Publish” 🙂 Take a look at our updated chart below and click on it to get more details from the post

Matt’s Tools for Putting Together an HTML Email Newsletter

Continuing the email newsletter support that started with Why HTML Email Newsletter Editors Suck, I put together a toolbox on Social Source Commons of tools that I use at Aspiration to create our HTML email newsletters. The Custom Description Text of each tool tells you a little bit about why I use the tool and […]

Using Closed vs. Open Web Site Tools as a Nonprofit

Recently, we had a conversation with an organization who was getting pressure to use a closed tool called Jimdo rather than the open-source tool, WordPress for their web site. Jimdo seemed easier and quicker and they wanted to know what we thought about it. Here’s a couple points that we brought up with them: Using […]

Breakups are Hard: Departing Staff and Tech Security

Photo courtesy of zebedee.zebedee Ending any relationship is hard. Creating a standard set of processes can ease the pain of the schism. When a marriage ends, there are legal filings, transfer and division of property and the surrendering of keys and changing of locks to ensure security. When an employee leaves your organization, similar processes […]

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