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I recently had to coordinate a series of meetings among a large group of people who live far away. You can probably imagine how frustrating that was.

Enter my new friend Doodle, which lets you create a poll, forward the link to the poll to the participants and let them vote on their choice. It might be anything from what day of the week works best for a meeting, to choose the turkey or veggie sandwich for lunch.

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I mentioned earlier this week that nonprofits should think more carefully about web marketing, not only because they should think of marketing as a way to build and sustain their community, but also as a relatively inexpensive ways to do so.

One of the best examples I’ve seen for creating online community that makes a difference is the We Campaign, the project of The Alliance for Climate Protection — the nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Al Gore.

I love the action alerts, the blog, which they call “What’s New,” and the get-active, community-driven effort, which is online.

Think about your organization and how you might reconfigure your online presence to build community. Can you offer up your own action alerts? Can you start a What’s New blog? What about Facebook or MySpace - is there a way you can increase your reach by starting a group there?

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Bev Freeman over at the Boston chapter of the American Marketing Association has been working on a great series about nonprofit marketing. Check out her posts on:

Nonprofit Marketing….Really?
Using marketing to enroll people in a significant program or initiative, increase awareness about an agency’s mission, its services, or the response to a crisis in your community, and/or raise the visibility of an organization as a basis for successful fundraising or “buy-in” (acceptance) by your constituencies.

Nonprofit Marketing – Using a Plan, Considering Social Media
Outlines the benefits of a plan, encourages you to engage in planning and helps you understand where social media may fit in.

Nonprofits—Begin to learn about the social media
Set aside time every week to learn more about the social media. Nonprofit communicators have a unique opportunity to employ any of an array of social media tools – these are low-cost (often downloadable for free) and very often effective.

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Innovation is one of the first things on the chopping block during tough financial times. Understandable, especially if organizations are being asked to fund something that’s risky. But innovation has a partner up there with its neck also extended, which is marketing, I’m very sorry to note.

What many people don’t realize is that marketing is necessary for keeping your organization afloat, no matter what your organization is. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame says, “Every business is a marketing business.” That goes the same for nonprofits, because you’re constantly trying to stay in front of the people who believe in your cause.

And what is a website if not one of the cheapest forms of marketing out there?

“The Internet is the cheapest and most successful form of marketing around,” says Micah Sachs, Director of Web Strategy at InterfaithFamily.com, who I interviewed for an article that will appear in an issue of The Forward next month. He’s been using bargain basement web marketing to great effect. Namely, he’s instituted a few changes in SEO (search engine optimization) and Google Adwords.

After InterfaithFamily gave itself a modest marketing makeover about a year ago, its traffic immediately increased 63 percent. It’s seen a steady increase, and Sachs said that up through June 2008, he never saw less than a 40 percent increase.

Here are a few of the easy steps he followed to boost his traffic:

1. Give each page a unique title
2. Create URLs that match the article titles
3. Add article keywords on web pages

At first, it required a significant time investment, and he company brought in an intern who spent about 40 hours per week for 10 weeks writing in descriptions, adding keywords and generally optimizing the site’s old articles.

“But now it’s part of our culture,” he says. “Any time we create anything new on the site, we don’t even think of something as additional work. We create keywords, create title tags. It’s just a part of what we do.”

Once your organization has figured out a system for creating these three main changes, an increase in web visibility should come naturally and simply.

“This is all stuff that’s simple and straightforward,” he says. “It’s amazing how many sites of major orgs aren’t search-engine optimized. It will cost them no money; they just have to ask their webmaster to make some changes.”

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I like my keyboard, but it does have its drawbacks. It’s incredibly long, snaking down my desk with extra keypads and features and loads of shortcut buttons that I rarely, if ever, use.

That’s why Brando’s little keyboard, called the USB 2.4Ghz RF Wireless Multimedia Tiny Keyboard, is so appealing. It’s called “tiny,” and small it is, but still suitable for casual typing. It easily lays in your two cupped hands and can be pulled all around the room because it has no cords to restrict it. No wires to get tangled in your coffee cup.

It might not be the best tool for writing a full novel, but it’s small, portable and handy for taking in and out of meetings or workshops and costs less than $50.

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Last week, I found a computer on the curb and felt bad someone was willing to throw out a perfectly functional machine when many people could really use it. I’ve already advised you on how to safely and thoroughly remove all your personal files from your computer. Now here’s why you should keep your computer out of the landfill (thanks BestStuff for your list!).

E-Waste Statistics You Should Know:

1. About 220 million tons of old computers and other tech hardware are trashed in the United States each year (Environmental Protection Agency, 2001).

2. About 63.3 million desktop computers will be taken out of service in the year 2002, and 85 percent of them will end up in landfills across the country, constituting an ever-growing environmental hazard (National Safety Council, 2001).

3. By the year 2005, one computer will become obsolete for every new one put on the market (Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 2001).

4. Fifty percent of computers being recycled are in good working order. They are discarded to make way for the latest technology (Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 2001).

5. Experts estimate that we will have more than 500 million obsolete computers in the United States between 1997 and 2007 (Poison PCs).

6. Five hundred million computers in the world contain 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, and 632,000 pounds of mercury (The Basel Action Network, 2002).

7. The average lifespan of a computer has shrunk from four or five years to two years (National Safety Council, 1999).

8. About 70 percent of heavy metals found in U.S. landfills comes from discarded electronics such as circuit boards, wires, steel casings and other parts (The Basel Action Network, 2002).

9. Only 12.75 million computers, including monitors and keyboards, will be recycled in the United States in 2002 (The Basel Action Network, 2002).

10. Americans are buying more computers than people in any other nations. Currently more than 50 percent of U.S. households own computers, and therefore, generate the most e-waste (The Basel Action Network, 2002).

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Yesterday I stressed the importance of scrubbing clean your computer before donating it (or putting it in the trash). Charitable organizations generally don’t remove the data from your computer when you donate it. Consequently, they pass all your private electronic data on to the next owner.

Here’s what to do in order to prep it for donation:

1. Copy everything on your old computer to your new one. Be thorough, you never know what you’ll regret having trashed. Try the SimpleTech Signature Mini, which I wrote about earlier.
2. Remove e-mail contacts and messages. People often remember to delete bank information, but forget these things.
3. Clear out your browser bookmarks/favorites. You might have sensitive information marked for easy retrieval that you forgot was in there.
4. Likewise, clear out your Internet cache. Here’s how to do it in Internet Explorer, and a nice little video on how to do it in Firefox.
5. Remember to delete your photos, journal entries or any stored frequent flyer or credit card information.
6. Delete all your documents, including what’s in the recycle bin or trash folder.

Now that you’re done with that, realize that you’re not done. What happens when you delete a file is that it’s not really gone. It’s just made available to write over. It’s like an Etch-a-Sketch. When you’re done making concentric circles (the only thing I was ever able to do), you don’t throw it away. You shake it so you can draw another picture.

So first step is to call your computer manufacturer’s technical department and ask how they recommend to your personal files. They built it, they should have ideas on how to delete it.

Depending on what they tell you, you might be asked to pick up some disk-cleaning software. There are many free versions available; just type “file shredder” into your favorite search engine and pick one. If you want to spend money, try Symantec’s Norton SystemWorks for about $50. But pick something, and make sure you clean it up.

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This Halloween I might dress as the economy. I can’t think of any scarier. You’re right to be scared too, especially if you’re a nonprofit and beholden to funders, because you’ve got to make the case why you need a good website.

Hold on. Reality check: you aren’t thinking of cutting funding for your own website, are you? That would be a grave mistake. Websites are not only the public face of your organization, but the best tool you have to information and create a community on a budget.

Now that we’ve got that straight, let’s look at the top 10 things your website should have so that it gives you a good return on your investment. And just hanging in there won’t cut it. People will stop visiting your site - and thinking about your organization - if they don’t see some worthwhile action happening online. This is one of those times you need to invest.

In no particular order (because they’re all important), here are 10 things your website simply must have and that will wind up saving you money.

1. Contact form. You can always post your e-mail address on your website, but be prepared to be overrun with spam. Avoid this by putting a contact form on your site to make it easy for your website visitors to reach you and to avoid spammers at the same time. You might also think of adding a Captcha to your form.

2. A place for feedback. This could be a contact form, but better yet, let your website visitors leave comments. This might be on your blog, on news postings or on articles. You can also allow ratings, which lets people cast their vote.

3. Consistent navigation. Make sure people know where to go on your site by putting your navigation in the same place everywhere.

4. Regularly updated information. Freshness keeps people coming back. At the very least, make sure you’re cycling through new content on the homepage on a weekly basis. Blogs and Twitter accounts make this an even easier way to create an online community through content.

5. Analytics. Try a tool such as Clicky or Google Analytics to find out when people are coming to your site, where they’re from and a whole load of other stuff. Analytics tools are way more powerful than a counter.

6. Donate now button. If you’re a nonprofit that accepts donations from a constituency, make it clear and easy.

7. Address front and center. A street address. With a phone number. Do it.

8. Search tool - for your site, not someone else’s. A search box will help your visitors find exactly what they need. But don’t make the mistake of putting a Google search box or a search tool from another site on yours. You just make it easier for people to leave.

9. Really good URLs. This starts with your web address (I know nonprofits are swimming in alphabet soup, but don’t make everyone else guess your acronym). Then make sure you have Clean URLs installed throughout.

10. A CMS. A content management system will make these things a bajillion times easier to do if you have a publishing system in place. Here’s how we do it.

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Sometimes it pays to go for a walk around the neighborhood on trash day. Last week I found a Mac computer sitting on the curb waiting for the garbage guys to take it away. It didn’t look like anything was wrong with it, so I lugged it home, plugged it in and waited for something like an explosion.

Guess what happened. Nothing. Or rather, everything, perfectly, without any errors. The operating system booted up, the anti-virus software checked everything out and had no complaints and I had instant access to a computer that had absolutely no problems other than it was a little slower than the machine I’m used to using at home.

Two things were occurred to me when everything lit up: 1) We live in a rich society that can throw out a high-performance piece of equipment like this with no regrets, and 2) people are very, very stupid about what they leave on their computers when they get rid of them.

What we have revealed in the course of setting up this computer to see how our web projects look on a Mac, we’ve found e-mail, photos, addresses, names, maps, instant message chat transcripts, about $1000-worth of music and a heck of a lot more. Holy moly, in the wrong hands, the teen girls who shared this machine could be in deep trouble.

So I beseech you donate your computers to needy causes, but before you do, make darn sure they’re clean. Deleting files isn’t enough. You need to make sure that stuff is gone before you give it away. I’ll explore a few ways to clean up your computer in this week’s blog postings. I’ll tell you what to remove from your computer, how to make sure it’s really clean, and how to donate it.

Make sure you subscribe in your news reader so you don’t miss anything.

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My partner spotted one of these at the jQuery conference in Boston on Sunday. It’s a cheap ($249.99 on Newegg.com) and adequately powered (2GB) tiny (2 lbs, 7″) laptop. It’s the perfect little buddy to take with you to conferences, off-site meetings or other events.

It’s also got a solid-state disk, which means you can knock it around relatively worry-free, since nothing is going to come loose inside. It’s also got a built-in WiFi that that the manufactures claim “automatically detects and connects to the Internet at any hotspot.”

It runs Linux rather than Windows, which keeps it fast and cheap. But the downside is that you won’t have a copy of your Outlook for mail or other Windows programs you’re addicted to. Some report that it doesn’t handle video well, although the manufacturers tout sharing videos on YouTube and Flickr. It also comes pre-loaded with Skype, one of my favorite programs for the nonprofit.

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I found a great thought on one of my favorite websites Useit.com the other day, and a powerful argument for having your own name for your blog.

Jacob Nielsen says:

Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Letting somebody else own your name means that they own your destiny on the Internet. They can degrade the service quality as much as they want. They can increase the price as much as they want. They can add atop your content as many pop-ups, blinking banners, or other user-repelling advertising techniques as they want. They can promote your competitor’s offers on your pages. Yes, you can walk, but at the cost of your loyal readers, links you’ve attracted from other sites, and your search engine ranking.

Sure, Wordpress and the ilk are free, but you can have your own domain name for just a few bucks more - I’ve seen for less than $10 per year. Make the investment up front, and own your blog yourself.

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Sometimes, you have to hate them. When your computer stops working, it’s their job to fix it, and pronto. Who can blame you for popping a few capillaries when you’re on hold for countless minutes or waiting for a response to an e-mail you sent last week? The poor wretches whose job it is to listen to your gripes are almost asking for it. Yep, when something’s gone wrong, there’s no better punching bag than the help desk.

I’m somewhere in the middle, because I provide support for Talance’s clients and also have to appeal to our own tech pros for help when I’m having issues myself. So I know what it’s like to start kicking trashcans because you’re not receiving the help you want and also when you’re not receiving the most illuminating questions from someone confounded by technology.

Thankfully, I adore our clients, and there’s never any animosity when they call for help. But that doesn’t mean I can’t hear the frustration. So I thought I’d offer up a few items you can keep in mind when it comes to working with your tech support person. (Note: this goes for the phone company, cable company, internet company, etc.)

Step 1: Take a deep breath

Preparing yourself with the right information before calling the help desk is certainly important, but of greater significance is remaining polite when you’re on the line. As frustrating as it can be to describe a problem you don’t understand, take some deep breaths, get a glass of water, do a couple neck rolls – do whatever it takes, just as long as you are calm when you pick up the phone.

Step 2: Check the cables

Things come unplugged and you might not know about it. If your monitor is black but the computer is humming along nicely, it could be disconnected. Save yourself – and the help desk tech – a load of agony by jiggling the cables to make sure they’re in place.

Step 3: Read the manual

Remember that you can eliminate most problems with a little forethought, thus avoiding the issue altogether. An effortless glance through the manual can end a lot of help desk frustration. You might be surprised that manuals exist for the equipment on your desk. Ask around to see if you can get a copy.

Step 4: Get the serial number

Assuming you’ve read through the manual and found nothing that can help with your problem, flip to the back of it and get the serial number of the product in question. This lets the help desk zero in on the right piece of equipment.

If you’re having problems with software, note what kind of computer you have (PC or Mac), what your operating system is, what kind of browser you’re using and what you were doing when the problem arose.

Step 5: Call the right number

Relax your help desk trigger finger for a minute and make sure you shouldn’t be calling the software maker instead. It works the other way around too. Many people don’t realize that if you bought a Dell computer, that company will provide support for the Microsoft Windows operating system. This is important because Dell tech support comes part and parcel with the computer, while you’ll have to pay for Microsoft’s help (and they don’t have a toll-free number either).

Step 6: Volunteer the correct information

The number one question to answer is, “Has this has ever worked?” Address that question first, then tell the support person what you were doing when the computer broke. With this information, he or she may determine the root of your problem before you even begin explaining it.

Remember, help desks are chronically understaffed. Understand there’s a human on the other end of the line, and they’re probably doing their best to help. Don’t be afraid to just call up when everything is running smoothly and say, “Thanks for all you do.”

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In the next few years, we’re going to be hearing even more about so-called microblogging. So it’s not a bad idea to start reading about it now. Besides, many organizations are using microblogging with products such as Twitter to great effect (follow me on Twitter, if you’re curious).

An article in BusinessWeek talks about how airlines are using Twitter to handle customer support. Look at this example from the article:

Christofer Hoff tweeted his displeasure with Southwest (LUV) on Apr. 28, when his flight was delayed and his luggage disappeared. The next day he received the following message from Southwest: “Sorry to hear about your flight—weather was terrible in the NE. Hope you give us a 2nd chance to prove that Southwest = Awesomeness.” In a blog post about the incident, Hoff wrote that it was “cool and frightening at the same time.”

Think about what parallels you might be able to draw between Southwest and your own organization. Can you use a microblogging site to …

• Notify your community about a successful fund-raising effort? (E.g., “Hurray! We just hit the $8000 mark! Help us get to $9000.”)
• Update volunteers on an upcoming opportunity? (E.g., “Friends of the Burlington Library: we still need four people for the book sale. Bring a friend on Saturday.”)
• Bring about social action in real time? (E.g., “Help us protest for fair wages. We’re meeting at 4th & Filmore. Bring your T-shirts and pickets.”)

Twitter or another microblogging site might not be for you and your organization. But it doesn’t hurt to educate yourself. Zappos (the company that sells shoes online) has a handy quick-start guide to Twitter, which is a pretty good intro for anyone.

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Backups are the buzzkill of most people who work on computers. Being organized is often tedious. But spending a few minutes on a regular basis making sure that the information on your computer is safely stored somewhere else for emergency retrieval is time well spent.

SimpleTech Signature Mini makes the job a little less tedious, because this external backup device was designed by Italian sports car designers. It’s also very handy, because it’s about the size of a deck of cards, and you can bring it with you wherever you travel.

This one includes local and online backup and comes with Fabrik Local Backup software, so you can schedule automatic backups from your computer relatively easily and store around 2 GB - quite a lot - of your important information. Not all backup drives do this.

It’s also worth noting that you can use this cute thing not just for backing up documents, but you can have a handy place to put your photos, songs, or anything else you might want to bring along for a lecture or meeting presentation.

Think about using an external tool for backing up your important data. Check out this post I wrote earlier on handy tools for saving your data from yourself.

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[This is the third in a series about e-mail. Read earlier posts under the category e-mail.]

Emoticons, short for “emotion icons,” and also known as smileys, are punctuation combinations that can help soften an informal message. Here are some frequently used emoticons and their definitions. Use them in moderation; too many can make your messages look too doodled-on.

: ) happy

: ( unhappy

; ) wink, jest

: D laughing

: O shocked

: p giving the raspberries, poking out tongue

>: ( mad

: x lips sealed

<:-| dunce

:-\ unsure

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[This is the third in a series about e-mail. Read earlier posts under the category e-mail.]

Here are a few easy tips for tidying up messy messages:

Check spelling and grammar before sending. Spell-check goes a long way toward making you sound smarter, but some people surprisingly don’t use it.

Don’t use all caps. I thought everyone knew this, but apparently not. Type the way books read. Otherwise you’ll look like you’re yelling. DON’T DO IT. See? It looks like I’m mad at you.

Don’t use all lower case. You’re not e.e. cummings. Properly capitalize.

Use a descriptive Subject line. Subject lines are summary lines. They should give a good indication of what’s to come. Still, I receive many messages that say things like, “Hi” or nothing at all. Write your message first, then come up with a good summary based on it to use in the Subject field.

Keep your temper. Don’t say anything in e-mail you wouldn’t say to someone’s face. You have to be so, so careful with e-mail. Take extra care not to sound snippy.

Overall, be selective in who you send messages to. If you’re not going to mail something to 150 people, then why would you e-mail it?

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[This is the second in a series about e-mail. Read earlier posts under the category e-mail.]

It seems e-mail overload is inevitable as long as people reach for the sometimes sinister “cc” field. By including everyone in your address book, or even a handful of people who you might like to include in a discussion, you can create an overwhelming influx of mail. The cc field also has political issues. Some employees will include a higher up simply to make the main recipient look bad.

Here’s a simple rule to institute in your e-mail policy (your organization does have an e-mail policy, doesn’t it?): If someone needs to know something, then send it. But if it’s just nice to know, don’t cc it.

If you simply must forward a message, make sure it’s readable. This includes deleting all the irrelevant To and From fields and sending it in a usable format, even if it requires copying the contents of message attachments and pasting them into another.

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E-mail has seemingly boundless attributes and has shaped the face of modern correspondence, but it can create unequaled debacles. In the right hands, e-mail is a speedy and effective way to pass news and keep in touch. But careless fingers can send sensitive material into the wrong in-box, clog up disk drive space and spoil relationships.

Even though everyone uses it these days, it’s worth stepping back, looking at the way we communicate with each other, and figuring out how that can be refined and improved. This week, I’ll look more closely at e-mail etiquette and practices and offer a few tips and tools to help you massage the most common missives you send in any given day.

First up: turn off type-ahead.

Most e-mail programs have a type-ahead, or auto-complete, function that remembers and stores addresses you send to. When you begin to enter a previously contacted address, your e-mail program will recognize it and offer suggestions for completing the text for you. This is meant as a time-saver, but it could get you in trouble if you continue to be nudged with the wrong address. You might jut choose the wrong one.

By sending a message to the wrong person, or hundreds of unintended recipients, you can create wasted time and disk space, not to mention a heap of trouble.

Be especially careful of group distribution lists, which can be a hazard if you work for a large organization. You may have a message - either incriminating or innocuous - that you mistakenly send to a larger group of people if you accidentally send it to a distribution list rather than an individual.

You can turn off type-ahead altogether, if your e-mail program will let you. Each one is different. Gmail doesn’t let you turn off auto-complete (someone correct me if you have different information - all I can find is others complaining about this). But you can delete stored e-mail addresses from the drop-down box by using the arrow keys of the address you want to delete, and then press the Delete button.

How to turn off auto-complete in Outlook 2003/2007:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click E-mail Options, and then click Advanced E-mail Options.
3. Under When sending a message, clear the Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields check box.

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If any of you have started podcasting or video blogging, you might have noticed a discernible difference between what you’re doing with your computer microphone and what the pros are doing when they’re making voice-overs. Namely, you’re likely to hear very pronounced P sounds as you talk into the mic.

We’ve addressed a couple different ways to get past this (such as talking past the microphone rather than into it or getting a good yet inexpensive headset), but this excellent article in Nextplease shows you How To Make Your Own Microphone Pop-Filter.

This article will show you how to make your own microphone pop-filter. A pop-filter is a small screen that goes between a microphone and your mouth to prevent sharp popping sounds (known as plosives) like “P” and “B” words from overloading the mic level and distorting.

The whole thing, which is essentially a pair of pantyhose stretched over a wooden embroidery ring, costs about $6. I’ve found similar results by stretching an old pair of hose over a hanger and placing it in front of the microphone when doing my own voice-over work.

You’ll be surprised how much this small adjustment can make a difference in the way your recordings sound.

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Very nice! Our friends at STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal) have launched a new YouTube Channel to promote their programs and to aid in their ongoing quest to educate synagogues in the powers of technology.

I believe one of the tools they use to put together their web videos is the Flip camera, which I’ve mentioned here in the past.

Check it out and click Subscribe so you can receive updates from this great organization.

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