Live broadcasting couldn’t be any easier than it is with Vpype.  “Tell you story to the world,” is Vpye’s slogan, and isn’t that what every expert advises non profits to do when they are communicating with their constituents through social media?  Video brings your story to life.  Personal stories have an immense impact on others.

 NTC ’10 has come and gone, and as usual, it was another great conference.  I’ve had time to reflect on what I learned this year, and I’ve listed my top tips and takeaways.

NTEN's annual conference (NTC) starts tomorrow in Atlanta, GA. Just like the last two years, I'll be posting updates to the blog.

This year you can get a taste of NTC without leaving your office. NTEN partnered with Causecast.org to livestream six sessions, starting on Friday, April 9 at 8:30 am (EST). You'll be able to participate via online chat. Check out the NTC-Live site for specific instructions.

Friday's Live Sessions: April 9th (EST)

8:30 AM: Opening Plenary: Andrew Sullivan, Journalist, The Atlantic10:30 AM: From Spreadsheets to CRM: How to Accomplish a Successful Organizational Transformation to CRM and What That Means.1:30...

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As many of you know, every Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC), kicks off with a Day of Service, which provides NTEN members the opportunity to volunteer their talents to help local nonprofits.  This is my first time volunteering, but my boss, John Dukovich, participated in the D.C. Day Service in 2007.  I’ve enjoyed this process, I learned a lot, and it just plain feels good knowing that I hopefully helped make someone else’s job a little easier.

Recently, I attended an NTEN  webinar entitled:  No Wrong Door:  Tools for NP to Collect & Share Resource and Client Info with One Another, which was presented by Doug Zimmerman, President and CEO of VisionLink

Mgive and The American Red Cross have teamed up to raise funds for the relief effort in Haiti.  By simply texting 90999, you can donate ten dollars to American Red Cross, where 100% of your donation will go towards their fundraising campaign. 

Jing.  It’s not the latest slang word that you have no idea what it means.  Jing is a great FREE online tool that allows you to share pictures, video or screenshots.  Jing’s slogan is, “Instead of typing at people, show them what you’re talking about…pronto.”  How can your organization use Jing?
After quickly registering at www.Jinproject.com, you’re ready to record your voice and your mouse movements so you can walk through examples for your clients or your employees.   You can also share screen shots and pictures.  Jing lets you highlight the area of your screen that you want to share, and then you begin recording.  It’s that easy.

 Some organizations have asked us about the quickest, simplest way to set up an e-commerce system for them to sell their publications, software, and podcasts.

 PayPal buttons are easy to set up and PayPal’s standard payments product  has no monthly fees. However, once payment has been accepted, if you want to control what the purchaser can download from your site you will need to set up a decent amount of coding to track and allow access to your product(s) for specific users, and consider many other details.

When it comes to shopping cart software for your website, there are a lot of options.  Most shopping cart systems are set up for typical retail applications – allowing users to select from a variety of products, account for taxes, discounts, and shipping costs.  Tailoring them for product downloads can be cumbersome and often complicated database links are required.  

So, we decided it would be worthwhile to look for some systems that would handle payments for website product downloads and would be simple to set up and use.

Reliability, price, features and customer service are important factors to consider in your choice. 

E-junkie and FastSpring are two popular choices.  

Free website templates are advertised all over the internet, so how do you know which one(s) are reliable, don’t involve any hidden fees and are, most importantly, easy to maintain? Recently I’ve been experimenting with two sites that fit these exact criteria…free, reliable and easy. In an afternoon you can have a new website for your organization. Webnode and Weebly are two popular free website building tools. The sites are quick and easy to use because within hours the results are immediately live on your site, without having to upload and transfer files. Thanks to the use of WYSIWYG, you don’t have to have any previous website building knowledge to construct a professional looking website. Whether you’re looking for a website for your business, a nonprofit or to highlight your hobby, you can’t go wrong by choosing Webnode or Weebly.

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NTEN just released their survey results from the 2008 Content Management System Satisfaction Survey. The report is free to NTEN members and it’s available for $50 to non-members. They also provide a sample of the report on their site. Their purpose for publishing the report was to help non profits in their CMS decision making process. “Once you have identified two or three systems that meet your organization's needs, this report can help you to make your final decision as to which system is right for your organization.”

Over 1000 people took their survey. This caught our attention at Green Moon Solutions because we have implemented and recommended Drupal in the past, and we wanted to see how it fared when compared to their competition consisting of other opens source software, such as, Joomla! and Plone.

We’ve analyzed the report, and we agree with how our peers have rated Drupal. We’d also like to add that from our experience as Drupal novices, we found Drupal to be easy to use once you familiarize...

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