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Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media

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Tag Archives: best practices

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 […]

Engaging Network Hubs

One of the best ways to take advantage of social networks is to realize that they work just like in-person social networks. Well. Maybe not JUST like in-person social networks. There isn’t much handshaking going on, but the underlying strategies and mutual back-scratching of in-person relationships and network-building are still there. One tactic to broaden […]

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 […]

A Template for Calendaring Your Messaging

One of the best practices often overlooked by many “I’m spinning too many plates on long skinny poles” nonprofits is calendaring out the messaging your organization is going to send ahead of time. Akin to flossing, calendaring your messaging ahead of time is something that organizations think that they should do but don’t see the […]

Are Your Emails Skim? Or 2%?

The first rule of email messaging as an organization is that no one reads emails. People skim emails. Making your email blasts as skimmable as possible is the best way to get your point across to the people you are trying to reach. When it comes to email newsletters, skimmability becomes even more necessary as […]

Email Best Practice Questions on Answr

There have been some great questions around email communications submitted and answered on our sister (beta) site Answr and I wanted to throw up (?) a quick blog post to highlight a few of them. Answr is a site dedicated to questions and answers around nonprofit online communications (focusing mainly on email at the moment). […]

Looking at Communications Tools as Organizational Processes

We spend a lot of time on this blog and on the interwebs in general talking about the Good that software tools can do for an organization. Whether it’s a tool that makes collaborative editing easier or a piece of code that automates a repetitive task, software has the possibility to be a big value-add […]

Twitter Policy Head-Scratchers

There are many questions to ask yourself when putting together a policy for your organization’s Twitter account and Aspiration and Social Source Commons are asking them. Because of the casual, disposable nature of Twitter’s medium, organizations may think that they don’t have to pay as strict attention to it as an online communications channel. However, […]

A Quick Note on Cross-Posting on Facebook Fan Pages

Many organizations use Facebook as their primary social network (as opposed to Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace). We have a Facebook page for both Social Source Commons and Aspiration on which we periodically update our statuses in addition to the resources that we push out through our Twitter page. One feature that I don’t think many […]

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