Friendly Web Tools Blog

Easy Scheduling with Doodle

Talance — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:00:38 +0000

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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Creating and Building Community Online

Talance — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:00:08 +0000

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?

Helpful Resource on Nonprofit Marketing

Talance — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:00:55 +0000

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.

InterfaithFamily.com’s Traffic-Boosting Tweaks

Talance — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:00:56 +0000

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:

Give each page a unique title
Create URLs that match the article titles
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.”

Gadget Monday: Teeny Weeny Keyboard

Talance — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:16:55 +0000

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.

Why Donate Your Computer

Talance — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:00:35 +0000

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).

Really Deleting What’s on Your Computer

Talance — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:00:05 +0000

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:

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.
Remove e-mail contacts and messages. People often remember to delete bank information, but forget these things.
Clear out your browser bookmarks/favorites. You might have sensitive information marked for easy retrieval that you forgot was in there.
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.
Remember to delete your photos, journal entries or any stored frequent flyer or credit card information.
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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Don’t Squander Your Money: 10 Essentials for All Websites

Talance — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:41:39 +0000

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.

Careful When Throwing Away Computers

Talance — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:00:52 +0000

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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Gadget Tuesday: ASUS Eee PC 2G Surf

Talance — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:29:48 +0000

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.