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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What web 2.0 tools should you be using now and in the future? The answer is simple: Many.

Why?

Your site needs to be diversified in order to appeal to a variety of people. The readers that may not read your blog may be interested in taking an on site quiz or adding their own volunteer experiences to your site in your testimonials or on your forums.

A website that effects people’s emotions will be effective at drawing your readers in and it will have them coming back for more information and stories. The example used by John Kenyon at the 2008 NTEN conference, stated that the website that has a short one minute video describing how of a former homeless person that your organization helped to get a job, and he expresses what your organization did for him, is a lot more effective then you writing his story and posting it on your site. Video touches people and puts faces with the story.

Use flickr to pull in photos for your site, or have...

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The NTEN Conference (Nonprofit Technology) is in full force.

I've already learned a lot in the first full day of sessions, including why we should all be using Google Analytics, and how to determine the ROI on the latest Web2.0 techniques. I've also learned about the new, at least to me, open source tools available.

All of these topics, and more, will be discussed in my upcoming blogs.

Stay tuned...

Check back later this week for live updates from the NTEN Conference in New Orleans.

I'll be discussing the latest ideas and tools that will help your nonprofit succeed.

Customer feedback is a key element in any business. Online surveys are a great tool for obtaining valuable information from your clients, In this blog I’ll review three online survey sites, including, SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo and Zoomerang. I chose these three survey sites because they are all popular sites, and SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang have been in business since 1999. I decided to also review SurveyGizmo since lately they have been getting a lot of good press, so I wanted to see how they would measure up to the tried and true survey sites.

All three sites offer a free version of their product which includes basic survey features. Each of the company’s basic service has their own set of limits, so I’ve outlined them below so that you can quickly analyze their features. For the research purposes, I created a survey on each site with the same ten questions. All three sites are user friendly, and it only takes about twenty five minutes to set up a quick survey that you can post as a link on your website or send out in your emails. I also reviewed what discounts each survey site offers to nonprofit organizations, and I provided links to each sites subscriptions rates and features.

Basic Survey Features Comparison = Free Service

Basic Service – Free

10 Question Limit100 ReponsesCreate Survey Questions from Scratch – Templates are only provided at the subscription levelSection 508 CompliantSupport – Video TutorialsSurveyGizmo

Basic...

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Squidoo put out their list for 2006 listing the 50 Smartest Online Nonprofits. So what can we learn from the best of the best? Is there a common thread between the diverse group of nonprofits? How does your nonprofit’s online activity compare to the top fifty? You can view the article at the end of this blog.

The Criteria Used in Determining the Best:The article states, “These charities were chosen for their excellence in online storytelling and collaboration with their donors. We didn't play favorites to one cause over another, nor did we look at their fundraising goals or number of members. Instead, these organizations are winners because of their web 2.0 smarts and a willingness to engage their constituents far beyond asking them to dig into their pockets.

These are organizations that give their volunteers and members a voice and get out of the way. They're pros at mobilizing awareness online. They're experimenters. Innovators. On a mission. They're fearless.”

What can we learn from the Best?...

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