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Easy Credit Card Payments for Your Nonprofit (Sharing the NTC Bookstore Experience)
The NTC Bookstore and the wonderful NTC Bookstore volunteersIf you bought something from the bookstore at the NTC, you may have already met the credit card app, Square. We’ve received a lot of questions in person and over email about how Square works, so we thought we’d share our experience. Honestly, I’m not sure how the actual mechanics work. You plug a tiny reader, the approximate height and length of a donut hole and width of your finger, into the headphone jack of an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch and swipe a credit card through it. Voila! ...
Five Tips to Manage Your Professional and Personal Brand in Social Media
[Editor's note: The following first appeared in the March 2011 issue of NTEN:Change. Read the complete issue of NTEN's new quarterly journal for nonprofit leaders by subscribing to the journal for free!]By Farra Trompeter, Big Duck1. Decide your goals for communicating in social media.Consider your personal goals and those for the organization you work for. Where do these goals meet and how do they differ? How you use social media can help your contacts connect both to you and the organization, while also demonstrating your understanding about how ...
Technology Trends in Grantmaking: A Few Non-Analytical Thoughts
By Cynthia M. Adams, President and CEO, GrantStation Before you begin reading this blog post, let me throw in a disclaimer. Our researchers at GrantStation are incredibly good at their jobs. They all have strong research and writing skills, and a loyalty to finding the right information for our Members that is sort of stunning. So, everything I have to say about trends in technology grantmaking is based on subjective observations made by those people who spend their days researching grantmakers. What sorts of changes are we seeing in grantmaking due to ...
Demographics Are Destiny: How and Why to Diversify Your Staff Now!
By Jocelyn Harmon, Director of Nonprofit Services, Care2Unless you've been living under a barrel, you know the demographics of the U.S. are changing. Here are some key highlights from The Changing Demographics of America by Smithsonian. I encourage you to read the entire article. The United States of 2050 will look different from that of today: whites will no longer be in the majority. The U.S. minority population, currently 30 percent, is expected to exceed 50 percent before 2050. Most of America's net population growth will be among its ...
Elephants, Triggers, and Actions: Applying Behavior Theories to Our Nonprofits and Our Work
For those of you who have read Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath – or if you were at the 2011 NTC and saw Dan's Plenary – you've probably already started thinking about the Direct-Motivate-Shape the Path triumverate for helping people change their behavior. I've got another triumverate for you, courtesy of Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University: B=MAT According to Dr. Fogg, B (behavior) happens when Motivation, Ability, and Triggers coincide. The concepts are similar to ...
Seven Tips for Techies in a Nonprofit Job Interview
By Amy Potthast, Director, Service and Graduate Programs, Idealist As a non-techie, I think I can safely say that a hiring nonprofit's current staff may have so little technical knowledge, they don't even know what skills are needed to do a job they want done. This lack of clarity on the employer's part can translate into some confusion and challenges on your part when you apply for a nonprofit job. I chatted with my colleagues on Idealist's web team for pointers to pass along. The following are some things you can do when you're interviewing for a ...
A Guide to Choosing the Right Donor Management System
We know that you know that you can't treat all of your donors and supporters in the same way. It's not a question of fairness. You need to communicate with a donor who has set up a $250 monthly recurring gift differently from the donor who gives you $15 each holiday season differently from the person who just joined your mailing list. The hard part is managing all that information effectively. That's where donor management systems come in – and no, Excel doesn't count. Also bad? Using the BCC: field to send out your messages.Navigating the choices you ...
Things We Like (March 2011)
A monthly roundup of our favorite nonprofit tech resources and other goodies. Read more posts on our blog. We had, ahem, a few problems with the wireless Internet at the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference. To try to help mitigate the problem, Holly made a funny video. After it aired on the big screen, even the Washington Hilton IT staff wanted a copy, so we posted it to YouTube. Fortunately, the NTC made up for the connectivity failures with general fabulousness, including the release of two of our favorite reports each year: The ...
Crazy for the Tools
By Steve Backman, President, Database Designs To close out our month-long look at some of the best tools for nonprofits, Steve Backman tells you about some of his favorite day-to-day software.Favorite software tools are all about managing processes fluidly. Essential categories need to be personal to the job – and actual choices, even more personal. My weeks are all about writing, communicating with clients, staying in touch with project teams, being able to touch lightly many things, bear down and provide assistance on a few, all while keeping tons ...
11NTC Round-Up: Your Posts, Highlights, and Take-aways
Last week, as I emerged from the post-conference haze of catching up on sleep and clearing my in-box, I started reading through blog posts from attendees and speakers. Then I couldn't stop! There are SO many posts to read that I figured I should round them all up in one place and share them. Hopefully, this means that all of the posts I haven't yet found will be added in the comments and we can all create a comprehensive list together.If I missed your blog post, I'm sorry! Please just drop it into the comments so we can all check it out!Session ...
Personal Democracy Forum Call on Thursday: "It Gets Better" Project
If you pay attention to the news, you've likely heard reports in the past few months of a handful of young LGBT people taking their own lives after various experiences with bullying because of their perceived sexual orientation. Out of these tragedies came the It Gets Better Project, which was lead by one of my favorite taboo-topic funny guys, Dan Savage. Once he and his partner created an initial video talking about how they met, how miserable their high school lives were, and how much better life gets as you grow out of the world of adolescent name-calling and into adulthood where you can ...
Voices from the TechSoup Community: Accounting Tools
Voices from the Community is a new series of blog posts culling popular topics of interest from the TechSoup Community Forums and other online community channels. This post was penned by TechSoup forum host, contractor, and head of Coyote Communications Jayne Cravens. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to accounting software. In addition to the variety of packages available, nonprofits use packages differently, per their unique work, sizes and approaches. In addition to TechSoup community forum discussions about accounting software at and use by nonprofits, such as this one, ...
Engaging Community Collaboration: 3 Things Community Managers Can Do to Help Communities Be Heard
This blog post was written by Susan Chavez. Susan is a nonprofit consultant and social media manager for The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. March's TechSoup Online Community Meetup, featured Jeska Dzwigalski of Wikia addressing the topic of online community management. Jeska's presentation, "Engaging Community Collaboration: Three Things Community Managers Can Do to Help Communities be Heard," provided straightforward and practical advice on community management. The presentation addressed how to encourage and manage community collaboration by keeping the ...
15 Questions to Ask Green Web Hosting Services
GreenTech has done a bit to explore green web hosting in our How to Choose a Green Website Host piece, but we thought we’d deepen the discussion a bit by profiling Enviromedia's quest to find a green host that is affordable, dependable, and that truly uses renewable energy. These days there is probably too much information on the web listing green web hosts. Websites like Hosting Review, and others offer listings of the top green web hosts. Places like ThinkHost, GreenGeeks, Sustainable Websites, and Green Web Host all claim to be number one green hosts. Back in 2007 TreeHugger did a piece ...
11NTC: Reflections on NTEN's 2011 NTC
With over 2000 attendees NTEN’s NTC conference was abuzz with lots of exhibitions displaying technology on offer as well as workshops and side events (which even included free massages provided by PICnet!). It provided a great opportunity for the American nonprofit sector to engage with the technology sector, as well as each other, to improve the use of technology for social benefit. TechSoup Global had an exhibition at the Science Fair and many nonprofits in attendance expressed thanks for donations they received from our donor partners through TechSoup, while others asked for more ...
We've Moved! Be Sure to Update Your Records
Hey NTEN! You've just wrapped up the biggest Nonprofit Technology Conference in your history. Where are you going to go now?
Just a few blocks away, actually. (But fortunately, not much farther from our favorite food cart pod.) Our new offices are at:
1020 SW Taylor Street, #800
Portland, OR 97205
While there are no amusement parks nearby, we're excited to have a little more space -- and an actual room to run webinars from, so you won't hear out background conversations while you're busy learning. Be sure to update your records.
Four Accounting Tools for Your Nonprofit or Library
TechSoup serves nonprofits and libraries of all shapes, sizes, and budgets. Most of our member organizations have budgets under $250,000 a year, but managing finances is essential to all of them, regardless of size. Whether your organization is looking for help paying the bills or tracking grants, we have the financial management tools to get the job done. And, don't forget that in addition to software, we have great learning resources for your nonprofit-specific financial needs: Join the live chat with TechSoup and accounting experts next Wednesday, March 30 at 11 a.m. Pacific time. Ask ...
You and Your YouTube Channel
We're big fans of the video work Mark Horvath has done with Invisible People, his site dedicated to giving homelessness a name. This is storytelling at its finest, allowing constituents to speak for themselves -- not just to raise funds, but to raise consciousness. And there's no reason your organization can't use video effectively, too. (If you already are, tell us about it in comment, below!) The recent DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards showed that great videos can be made even on a tight budget. Our upcoming webinar, "You and Your YouTube Channel" ...
The Challenges of Protecting Intellectual Property on Social Networks
By Geoff Livingston, Principal & Co-Founder, ZoeticaFacebook and to a lesser extent Twitter and LinkedIn have become the interstates of the social web. Nonprofits that want to connect with their constituents are almost obliged to participate on these networks. Causes and associations provide status updates on the networks, post links, publish content via tools like Facebook Notes, groups on Linked In and Facebook, and ask questions on all of the services. Yet, while the social networks hold tremendous benefit for nonprofits that successfully engage ...
New Google for Nonprofits Website
Last week, Google unveiled a new portal site geared towards U.S. nonprofits. While many nonprofits are probably using tools like Google Docs or YouTube in their organizations, Google for Nonprofits attempts to consolidate the many different parts of the Google portfolio into one site, and simplify the process to receive a donation of YouTube for Nonprofits, Google Grants, Google Apps, and Google Earth Outreach.
