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Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media

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Category Archives: User Story

Graphic Design Toolbox: Designing the New Aspiration Shirt

Less than two weeks into my role at Aspiration, I was granted an enormous challenge: design the 2014 Aspiration t-shirt. From this high-profile task emerged a series of challenges. The first was simple: how could I support free and open software and produce the kind of visual graphics I’m used to getting with proprietary 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 […]

Developing New Tech Projects, Part I: User Testing

We’ve been working on something that we’re pretty excited about—a new part of our website that gathers all of our training resources in one place. It hasn’t gone live yet, but we’d love to share our progress and get your feedback on this page mock up as we move forward! For years, Aspiration has been […]

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 […]

Forced to Use Facebook = Horrible

Recently, being a geek about Newsletter templates and HTML, I found myself voluntarily clicking on a link to vote for the best of a user-generated collection of email templates at Vertical Response. Excitement to participate soon disolved to other-worldly rage when I realized that the only way to vote was to click the Facebook “Like” […]

Ramping up a New Hire with Our Nonprofit Tech

New Hire = Unicorns & Technological Infrastructure Aspiration recently had the pleasure of welcoming a new employee, Misty Avila! This is awesome, we love her and everyone is holding hands in the unicorn and rainbow fields. Flash to the next day when Matt has to ramp her up to Aspiration’s technology practices. As you may […]

Conversations Across Channels

A couple of days ago, on the Aspiration Facebook page, I asked if people thought it was cool and kosher to take screenshots of Facebook comment threads and stick them into blog posts. The replies were varied and I encourage you to take a look at this screenshot of the comments đŸ˜€ I took out […]

What Do You Wish You Had Known About Email Blasting Tools?

Javascript is disabled. To see the toolbox, please enable Javascript or see the toolbox page. The Background Stop. Put down the Outlook. Emailing a billion people (or just 25 or so) through your Outlook BCC line can put you on a spam list faster than a whozeewhatsit flegs a bongersnaf. You heard me. But seriously […]

Social Media for Events

On a day to day basis, it’s easy to ebb and flow your social media efforts depending on what’s going on at your organization and how much engagement needs to be done with your community. But what about social media surrounding events? With Aspiration putting together so many events lately, (OSPcon, Open Subtitles Design Summit, […]

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 […]

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