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Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media

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Author Archives: Matt

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 […]

How Do You Manage Your Passwords?

Javascript is disabled. To see the toolbox, please enable Javascript or see the toolbox page. One issue that organizations often ask us about with exasperation is passwords. That necessary headache that everyone has a different way of managing badly. How do you manage them? Do you have a text document where they’re all listed? Do […]

Why Would Anyone Use That?

You’re creating ANOTHER social network?? Photo courtesy of doctabu Here at Social Source Commons we see a lot of tools. Many of them are flash-in-the-pan or sputter out fast. What’s the problem? Organizations create tools and websites that no one uses. They tend to think in terms of the features that they can offer rather […]

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