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.  

Tronn Carson was a friend and an invaluable contributor to Green Moon Solutions. It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to him and extend our sympathies to his family. 

I was recently asked to provide a summary of online file sharing tools. I thought I'd post that summary here. I touched on some of these tools in a previous blog about collaboration, but I will describe more resources here. I have listed the tools in two categories: web-based and desktop-based. Web-basedBasecamp (Milestones, To-Do Lists, File Repository): www.basecamphq.comProject Spaces (Document library/version control, task lists, calendar): www.projectspaces.comBox (Workspaces, document sharing/version history, document commenting): www.box.netDrop.io (a free service up to 100 MB, private shared spaces): drop.ioFiles Anywhere (Synchronization, version control): www.filesanywhere.comiCloud  (store, organize, open,...

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Many Windows computers are believed to be infected by the "Conficker" worm virus. The worm is due to activate on April 1st, 2009. No one seems to know exactly what it will do. However, its ability to duplicate itself and avoid detection has many security experts worried. You can read more about it here and here and here.It is pretty easy to protect yourself against it.First, make sure you have installed Windows updates and patches: http://update.microsoft.com (you must access this site by using Internet Explorer).Second, make sure your antivirus program is updated.Third, if you cannot reach both of the following pages from your browser, you...

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I only recently heard of PowerShift because a friend of mine was involved in it and he thought I should go. On first glance at the information posted on the event website, I wondered why -- the event was geared toward high school and college aged environmental activists. Now, I consider myself an environmentalist, but it seemed like I would be out of place at the conference.However, as I looked through the many workshops and panel discussions, I realized that I could learn a lot by attending. Young adults are very technologically savvy and they are now driving changes in how the Internet is being used. I thought that surrounded by 12,000 enthusiastic, smart, young people, it was quite likely that I would hear or see something that would benefit my work and the work of other non-profit organizations.So, are there any breakthrough technologies that these young people are using that we don't know about? No. However, what I did find is that they seem to...

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I have been attending technology conferences, reading articles, following blogs, and working with my own clients and if I had to make a prediction for the best use of technology for organizational efficiency in 2009 it would be in the area of collaboration.Hot on the nonprofit technology arena are ideas for collaboration. I cannot tell you how many of my clients e-mail Word documents around and ask people to review and update them. Most don't take advantage of Word's "track changes" features (which allow multiple people to comment on and edit a document, color-coding their changes, and provide for a central person to accept or reject their changes). It becomes a nightmare of figuring out what the changes are and how to resolve conflicting changes.Some organizations have embraced Google Documents (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, forms). Once a document is created (or uploaded), it can be shared with others. However, each individual sharing/collaborating...

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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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