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Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media

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Category Archives: Tools

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 […]

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 Page vs. Group for Nonprofits

This post updated April 27th, 2012 At Aspiration, we often talk to organizations with questions about whether to set up a Profile, Group, or Page on Facebook for their organization. I wanted to walk through some of the differences between these to help guide your Facebook set up. Define Your Goals First, if you haven’t […]

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 […]

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 […]

Creating “Share This on Facebook/Twitter” Links

Recently, someone asked me how to put together a link in HTML that, when clicked, took the clicker to their Twitter page with a tweet already filled in. She basically wanted an easy way to let people share her newsletter. I was putting this little color-coded guide together for her and I thought I’d turn […]

Discover Who’s Linking To Your Site

Being the social media geek that I am, I sometimes forget not everyone knows the little tips that have become second-nature to me when I set up RSS feeds to search for social media mentions of our organization. Leading a Building a Social Media Dashboard seminar last week at the SFNTC, I found that a […]

Hooray! Let’s talk Administration Tools

Matt asked me to take a few lines and discuss the tools I use in my role in Operations here at Aspiration. We agreed the best way to get that ball rolling was to build out a toolbox in SSC highlighting them. And not surprisingly to those that read this Blog regularly, he thought there […]

BackType Stops Searching Blog Comments.
Millions Blot Tears.

Your Favorite Blog Comment Search Service is Gone Backtype, everyone’s favorite blog comment search engine is no longer a blog comment search engine. This is terrible news for those of us who construct our own social media dashboards by pulling in search RSS feeds. There isn’t an alternative free service that matches BackType’s capabilities. This […]

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