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 the nonprofit workload desert OR they can be a valuable member of your team, ready to move Hell or High Water to get those damn file folders color-coded. A good volunteer relationship is laid out formally as an agreement with expectations so that there is some commitment between the organization and the volunteer. Otherwise (and sometimes even though), organizations can find themselves cleaning up a half-completed project when a volunteer finds a job or gets too busy.
Because the hope of volunteers is omnipresent in the nonprofit world and the circumstances around their use are so unique, there have been many attempts at successfully developing software tools to help with recruiting, selecting and managing volunteers. Volunteer-specific functionality (vs. general CRM software functionality) can include things like:
Tracking availabilities
Indexing volunteer skills
Assigning shifts
Recording participation
To the right, (click through to see, RSS readers), is a Volunteer Management toolbox full of resources to help organizations figure out how to find a Johnny-I-Work-For-Free and then actually manage him effectively.
From the projects of the Extraordinaries that allow an organization to take advantage of micro-volunteering to NABUUR, an online volunteering platform that links Neighbours (online volunteers) with Villages (local communities) in Africa, Asia and Latin America, there are some interesting tools to not only get your volunteer on but to find the perfect person for your org.
Check out the tools to the right and feel free to leave a comment on the tool if you have something to say. We want to know what you think of these tools.
What experience do you have using volunteers at your organization?
Did you find any software tools particularly helpful in the process? Or were they little better than a good spreadsheet? Let us know!
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 it into a blog post. Check it.
Regular Ol’ Links
To begin, let’s review how to make a simple link in HTML. First, make sure you’re editing in HTML and not Rich Text. You’ll be able to tell because you’ll see a bunch of “<"s and ">“s everywhere. Below is a color-coded diagram of the code for an HTML link. (If you’re a newbie to HTML, remember that your code won’t be in color)
Creating a link to automatically fill in some Tweet text is pretty simple. You just need to know some additional code to stick into the HTML link code. Let’s take a look:
To make a link that, when clicked, sends the clicker to this:
…use the following code:
<a href="http://twitter.com/share?text=An%20Awesome%20Link&url=http://www.google.com"> Share This on Twitter</a>
Blue is the HTML code
Green is the code that gets Twitter to generate a tweet through a link
Red is the text of the tweet. You can’t use spaces in this area of HTML but you can get spaces in your tweet text by typing %20 instead.
Orange is the URL that will be included in the tweet. Twitter will automatically shorten it to save space.
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 lot of people didn’t know that you can search for people linking to your website.
Searching for Links in Google
Google has all of these little commands that are basically words that you type that make your search results more specific. One of these commands allows you to search for pages linking to your site. This means that you can search for links to your different web properties in a Google Alert or Google Blogsearch and pull it into your dashboard via RSS.
To make that magic happen, you need to use the Google search convention link:organization.org in the Google search bar. “link:” before a URL searches the internet for links that point to that URL. For instance, if I search for link:blog.socialsourcecommons.org, the search results that show up are webpages that have a link to blog.socialsourcecommons.org no matter what the link text.
On the search results page, at the bottom, click on the link to “RSS” and BAM you’ve got a feed you can pull into your dashboard.
Who’s Shortening Your URLs on Twitter?
Wait. What exactly is a URL Shortener…?
A URL Shortener takes a long link and creates a forwarder that is much shorter. You can then use the forwarder just like you would the long link and save tons of space. Think Weight Watchers but for URLs.
URL shorteners are a great invention in the age of 140 character limits, but when listening for your organization on the internet how do you know when that bit.ly link points to your website? Luckily http://search.twitter.com now supports search terms that are shortened URLs. “What does this mean,” you ask? This means that you can go to http://search.twitter.com, search for your URL and it will show you results with shortened URLs that point to your real URL.
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 was a conversation to be had on some of the unique challenges facing admin. staff at smaller NPO’s.
Since most nonprofit groups are focusing the lion’s share of money and resources toward their respective missions, it’s easy to see why administration staff are tasked with bringing in their deliverables with little to no impact on the bottom line. I’m talking about tools that are free or nearly so.
My own “NP Operations” toolbox features seven tools, only two of which out and out cost money.
From to-do lists and calendared milestones to uploading documents, pictures and templates. This web-based project management tool from the gang at 37signals is fairly easy to use and a great default location for any item regularly shared by your team. Throw in automated reminders of those milestones and the ability to add Projects and you have a tool most E.D.’s will happily pay for.
On the other hand the UI does take a bit to get used to and all that functionality can be it’s own time sink. Quick, build a to-do list of milestones to add before brainstorming writeboard topics.
Google Calendar and Google Docs.
These are the calendar and web based document management tools from Google. Google Docs. is like having an office tool suite in the Cloud. You’ll need a Google account (free) to access these and the rest of Google’s tools.
As with all Google products, these are extremely useful for those looking for both functionality and some of that Cloud magic that everyone’s been on about. But the trade off is, of course, the down side of those strengths. Google will roll over like any other major corporation when subpoenaed which should frighten those orgs. doing more radical work. And unless you’re paying for the pro-level Google account, all that data is really controlled by someone other than you, and subject to their motivations and mistakes.
An alternative to MS Office’s strangle hold on productivity software.
Spread sheeting makes up the bulk of my day and if you’re anything like me, a decent suite of office tools is as important as your computer itself. But working in the NP sector means making your choices based on what’s good for the community as well as what’s good for the work. I’ll leave the soapbox in the corner, but I think it makes sense to tell Microsoft “no” once in a while.
There has been recent shifts in the ownership of OpenOffice but there are still forks out there keeping the faith, for example LibreOffice
Instant messaging, or IM, is basically phone texting on the computer. And a Client like Pidgin allows you to interact with several different IM providers (like Yahoo, Google and AOL) from the same interface. It can be great for relaying simple, time sensitive information and web links.
A “most”-in-one IM client that works on both Windows and Macs is impressive, but a free one?!? Why aren’t you using it to pick a fight with your brother right now? I mean, find out how much time you have to turn in the final budget on the last event. It also supports encryption for sensitive material.
The simple truth is that the team should be out there in the grass, with the roots. Not sitting around the office wishing someone would place a lunch order, or waiting for you to double check the validity of an Amazon receipt. Communication between stakeholders should take many forms and having several options is always a good thing.
I’m not an accountant, and I haven’t played one on TV since the middle ’90s, so having reliable and usable ledger software is important. QB certainly has the muscle to handle invoicing and check cutting, as well as layer after layer of services for all types of accounting needs. Wanna take credit card payments? Need Human Resources stuff? You can have them.
And that’s the problem really. Once you want it to specialize in your particular needs it tends to becomes unwieldy. Dialing in what, you might think, are basic operations and reporting on them can become frustrating very quickly. Have some sort of, third party, professional support, is my advice.
Skype allows users to make voice calls over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system.
I think of Skype as an evolutionary step towards free world wide communication. Overly romantic? Probably. But I once arranged three days of catering in Amsterdam, from San Francisco, for 150 people using Skype. It was easily a fraction of what traditional phone calls and slow emails would have cost. I’m currently looking at using it as a conference line option.
The interface can be a bit aggressive and it’s another potential spam channel. But if you’ve never played with it, I recommend having a look.
Operations is not very sexy. But it is the work that makes Program possible, and for that we should take pride in our contribution. I’d love to hear about the tools you use to make your own trains run on time. And if you have a more NP-centric accounting tool to share, there may be an adult beverage in it for you.
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 means that our dashboards won’t be able to tell us when people mention our keywords in blog comments.
Succumbing to Peer Pressure
Backtype has decided to throw its hat onto the increasingly ginormous pile of websites trying to be your one stop for all social media mentions, metrics and engagement. And, honestly I don’t blame them. I’m no businessman so I couldn’t tell you if the glut of similar products that I see in the same space (Radian6, Jive, SocialMention, trackur, Addictomatic, TipTop, Social Radar, Flowdock, ….) means none of them have a chance or if there actually is a niche for every single one of these tools. Maybe every single one is making mad money and it was stupid of them to wait this long. I’m just sad to lose the one tool out there that did comprehensive free searching in blog comments.
Back in the happy days when BackType and I were holding hands a lot and sneaking out at night, all I had to do was type in a keyword like “Social Source Commons” into BackType, it would search the comments of blogs all around the internet and give me back the search results with a link to the RSS feed. I could then just plug that RSS feed into my dashboard and be notified anytime someone mentioned us in the comments of a blog.
Now, not so much. Confirmed through Twitter, BackType isn’t offering blog comment search as part of their application anymore.
Sad Face. A thousand times Sad Face.
Who Will Fill Its Glorious Shoes?
Now, I have to pick up the remaining pieces of my life and start again. Sure there are a few other places that search comments but they’re all kind of lame:
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” button for the template I thought was the best. Puke.
I’ll admit it, I’m not the biggest fan of Facebook. While it’s turned out to be a hugely successful social network for individuals, I still think of it as an evil corporation collecting my demographic data to sell to advertisers with no regard for my privacy. So I get triggered when I’m required to use Facebook functionality for a site that isn’t Facebook. I basically see it as telling me to “Promote our product by allowing us to post on your wall the different things you’re doing on our site!” along with “Your action will be tracked, logged and shared with other interested parties (e.g. advertisers, governments, martians, etc.)”
Required Facebook Functionality is Spreading
When Quora first started up, it required a Facebook account to log in. Now, Jumo, the new nonprofit social network, is the same way. I don’t know about you, but I am very hesitant to connect my Facebook account to other sites that I encounter online. That connection is another pathway to get at my personal information. While sites may be after the people I’m friends with seeing their product on my wall, they also get access to my personal information. The more sites that connect to Facebook, the more information about your personal habits are accessible from different places. Not cool with me.
Lastly, by choosing Facebook specifically and only rather than giving you the choice to log in with a different account (e.g. Twitter or email), these sites are not only in control of where your personal data goes but also giving it to an organization that doesn’t allow you to have more than one personal presence on its network (See Statement of Rights Section 4). You have to be you and only one you otherwise they’ll shut the other “you”s down. All info is aggregated to that one account. Talk about no where to hide.
Plus, maybe I don’t want my friends to know I voted for the cute bunny email template on VR.
What do you think? Legit concern or behind the times?
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 have gathered, we here at Aspiration love our tech solutions and the measures we take to be technologically sustainable. I thought I would give you a peak into our world as I set Misty up with some of our essential technological infrastructure:
Organizational Email Forwarders
After setting up an organizational email address, the next step that we take with a new hire is creating any relevant forwarders for organizational accounts. Rather than have employees sign up for organizational accounts with their individual emails, we have them sign up for the account with a forwarder that pushes email automatically to their individual account. So, for example, if I were signing up for an Aspiration account on Twitter, I would first set up a forwarder called twitter@aspirationtech.org that forwarded all mail to matt@aspirationtech.org. This way we can create multiple forwarders for a single account so I can have twitter@aspirationtech.org go to matt@aspirationtech.org AND misty@aspirationtech.org AND whoever else wants those updates. It also gives ownership of the account to the org rather than the person so if something happens to me, new forwarders can be created, changed or deleted without affecting the user account.
Mailing Lists
In addition to adding Misty to the mailing lists that Aspiration itself maintains, we also want to get her up to speed with NPtech mailing lists from other orgs like NTEN, NOSI, Riders Talk and Riders Tech. The idea is that this will help her get a feel for the whackos (said lovingly and self-referentially) in the Nptech world.
Desktop clients
Setting up her organizational laptop means setting up Thunderbird (with Enigmail) for encrypted email, Pidgin for instant messaging and conference call back-channeling, OpenOffice for day-to-day docs and spreadsheets and, of course, Firefox for the rare, almost nonexistent times that she’ll need to get on the web.
Organizational Hubs Online
Aspiration also uses a few hosted tools to do work online. Basecamp is our hub where we have a shared calendar, post our weekly to-dos, upload organizational templates and useful files, and, in general, just all stay on the same page. I also introduce her to our Online Real Estate:
As a nonprofit tool, Skype is in a lot of organizations’ back pockets. Easy international (and domestic) calling, low rates and a simple interface make it a great communications tool. One glaring hole was the fact that there is no good built-in way to record conversations and video. Luckily, Gunner put together a toolbox of software on SSC for recording Skype calls (seen at the right; click through to see, RSS reader readers).
Skype has been in the news a lot recently (read: geeky tech tool news that normal, sane people don’t read). They recently acquired the startup Qik which focuses on mobile video recording and streaming. This, in addition to its new group calling features to its enterprise edition make the future seem bright for the ol’ comms tool that could. Right now, I think that most organizations see Skype as an easy way to make calls when other, more conventional ways won’t work. But with the addition of recording and easy group conversations, I can imagine a world where organizations use Skype as their go-to tool for voice conversations. Imagine if you could easily record your board conference calls in Skype? I think that alone could make many nonprofits start to drool. What do you think?
Does your nonprofit use Skype for organizational business?
What features do you wish would be implemented to help you do your work?
In the meantime, Check out the tools and let us know what you think.
As you probably have heard, an internal strategy slide from Yahoo was made public over everyone’s favorite secret-killer, Twitter. It basically showed social bookmarking site Delicious listed under a “Sunsetting” heading which many assumed to mean that Yahoo was killing off Delicous. The leaked photo immediately caused an uproar on Twitter. Many people use Delicious (some fervently) and within hours there was a popular #savedelicious hashtag, a mad rush to export Delicious bookmarks and a ticked off Yahoo looking for the person who leaked the slide. Yahoo eventually said that they weren’t going to outright kill Delicious, but were rather looking for someone to take over the property. Exhale.
What Happens to Your Data?
Let this be a slap in the face to us all. What would have happened if Yahoo had really pulled the plug on Delicious as quickly as everyone was freaking out it was? What would have happened to all of your bookmarks?
“Well, Matt, the answer is simple,” you would say. “I always, before I commit to any hosted data storage commit to a backup and export strategy so that I have full ownership of my data. My bookmarks would have been safe. Duh! Jeez, what do you think I am, an idiot?”
Or, this is what you would say, ideally. The truth is that the vast vast majority of us have no Plan B when it comes to managing our hosted data. If something goes wrong and a hosted site accidentally (or not accidentally) wipes our data, we’re screwed. When someone tells us to back up our data, we all nod our heads and say “yes. YES! You speak the TRUTH!” and then consider putting it on our to-do lists next to “Watch Dog’s hair grow” and “Measure driveway’s loss of height due to erosion.”
Losing Hosted Data is Terrifying
All it takes is one failed server and all of your data is gone. Not just momentarily unavailable but gone. Think of all the places on the internet that host your data. Gmail, Bloglines, Delicious, Twitter… Now think of all the places your organization stores data. Google Analytics, Constant Contact, Netvibes, WordPress, Basecamp… It starts to be a little scary how much info is up there.
Put Together a Back Up Plan! Then Back That Up Too…
Having a clear backup strategy for your organization and yourself puts you back in control of what we like to call your “data destiny.”
A quick Back Up Plan includes:
A list of properties that have hosted data
What data to export (if other than “everything”)
How to export the data (.csv file? straight download? copy and paste?)
Where to export it to
How often to export the data (monthly? weekly? yearly?)
Whose responsibility is it to make sure exports are kept current
To the right, I’ve embedded our (needs javascript so please click through to actual post RSS Reader readers 🙂 social media backup toolbox to get you started. Check out these links and share your thoughts about backing up, hosted data and Delicious in the comments below!
With all of this talk about channels, focuses (foci) and conversation, the elephant in the room is the Social Source Commons Facebook page. Kind of the Jan Brady compared to the Marcia that is the Aspiration Facebook page, our SSC Facebook page just doesn’t get much play. While the Aspiration FB page is full of comments, likes, participation and joy and/or happiness, the SSC FB page is rather lifeless.
This could be for a lot of reasons: The same community may be on the Aspiration FB page and already finds its value there or the SSC FB page has too few “Like”-ers to get going or maybe I’m just not putting enough love into the SSC FB page. Maybe SSC users just don’t feel a strong need to have a place for conversations and community. One thing is for sure, however, the SSC Facebook page isn’t delivering enough value for its community. So the question becomes, what is the SSC Facebook page’s “value proposition”? What is its reason for being?
This is where you come in.
What do you think the SSC Facebook page should focus on (e.g. tool discussions, polls, etc.)? Are you a “Like”-er of both the Aspiration Facebook page and the Social Souce Commons Facebook page? Is it too repetitive? Why are you even a “Like”-er? What value do you get out of it? What would you like to see?
That may be too many questions. How about:
How can we make the SSC Facebook page more useful for you?
BackType Stops Searching Blog Comments.
By Matt on February 1, 2011Millions 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 means that our dashboards won’t be able to tell us when people mention our keywords in blog comments.
Succumbing to Peer Pressure
Backtype has decided to throw its hat onto the increasingly ginormous pile of websites trying to be your one stop for all social media mentions, metrics and engagement. And, honestly I don’t blame them. I’m no businessman so I couldn’t tell you if the glut of similar products that I see in the same space (Radian6, Jive, SocialMention, trackur, Addictomatic, TipTop, Social Radar, Flowdock, ….) means none of them have a chance or if there actually is a niche for every single one of these tools. Maybe every single one is making mad money and it was stupid of them to wait this long. I’m just sad to lose the one tool out there that did comprehensive free searching in blog comments.
Back in the happy days when BackType and I were holding hands a lot and sneaking out at night, all I had to do was type in a keyword like “Social Source Commons” into BackType, it would search the comments of blogs all around the internet and give me back the search results with a link to the RSS feed. I could then just plug that RSS feed into my dashboard and be notified anytime someone mentioned us in the comments of a blog.
Now, not so much. Confirmed through Twitter, BackType isn’t offering blog comment search as part of their application anymore.
Sad Face. A thousand times Sad Face.
Who Will Fill Its Glorious Shoes?
Now, I have to pick up the remaining pieces of my life and start again. Sure there are a few other places that search comments but they’re all kind of lame:
Search results only used BoardReader, a message and discussion forum search which leaves out actual blog comments.
Awesome results but sadly only for comments on WordPress blogs
I’m sure they’re great for orgs that have budget to PAY.
I refuse to give up. There will be another effective, comprehensive, free blog comment search service. I know it.
Do you know where I can find it?