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Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media

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Tag Archives: nptech

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Are You a Twitter Spammer?

Recently one of the organizations that we work with had their account suspended on Twitter. The situation looked something like this. The organization started tweeting about a video/petition. No biggie, right? Well, they started to tweet at people (putting the @username at the beginning of the tweet). A lot. And not just anyone. Celebrities, big […]

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). […]

How to Manage an Email Discussion List to Invite Collaboration

Some Nonprofit Tech Discussion Lists NTEN Discuss NOSI Riders Tech Riders Talk Open Translation Tools Email discussion lists or listservs (name comes from a specific piece of software called LISTSERV), while increasingly overshadowed by social networks, can still be a great way for a like-minded community to carry conversations and discuss issues online. Originally, discussion […]

Keeping Track of Your Dashboard Feeds with a Listening Matrix

We, like a lot of other people, love using a “listening dashboard” like Netvibes to listen to the social web. It’s free, pretty easy to put together and it does all the work for you of tracking down when your name or organization has been mentioned online. Fun stuff. The magic is all in finding […]

Tools to Introduce Online Communications Best Practices

We spend a lot of time here at Aspiration and here on the SSC Blog talking about online communications best practices, trying to help nonprofits and social justice organizations find ways to use technology cheaper and more effectively for their missions. As part of that effort, I put together some interactive tools around eAdvocacy Readiness […]

Facebook Groups: Banished to the Archive

A couple of days ago, one of the organizations we work with emailed me to ask about what it meant that Facebook was going to “archive” their Group. Apparently Facebook is doing a major push for old groups to upgrade to the new Groups format that they’ve developed while getting Groups not suited to its […]

Tools for Nonprofit Volunteer Management

Javascript is disabled. To see the toolbox, please enable Javascript or see the toolbox page. When nonprofits talk to us about taking on volunteers for major projects, Aspiration often plays the negative Nelly of the group. We believe that when considering a volunteer: Expect Nothing. Be Happy with Anything. Volunteers can be the mirage in […]

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