Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 28, 2008

On my recent visit to Hong Kong, I was able to see the amount of excitement and interest in social entrepreneurism. One had to assume there's a lot going on in China, too, but it's hard to connect with. I just received an update from KK Tse entitled The Most Inspiring Story from the Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship, talking about 1KG More, a social enterprise that implemented Voluntourism: combining backpacking with delivering books and other gifts for rural Chinese children.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 21, 2008

A while ago, I joined a bunch of groups at groups.drupal.org , thinking I’d pick up some interesting ideas, and meet some folks who were doing cool stuff with Drupal. One of the groups I joined (along with “Drupal for Good&# and “Drupalchix&# ) was the PostgreSQL group. Yesterday, in my RSS feed, this post showed up. It was the suggestion to remove PostgreSQL support from the Drupal core.

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Judi Sohn

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

I had never been to a large, high-priced business conference like Dreamforce before, much less spoken at one. Oh, the details! From the sturdy high-quality conference bag, to the folks standing outside the Moscone Center dressed in white carrying cloud balloons, to the video walls and careful lighting…and the Foo Fighters! No expense was spared, and lots of open bars.

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NetWits

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Like the Sasquatch legends of lore, truly powerful uses of APIs and other connectivity technologies are more talked about than actually seen.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 30, 2008

Last August, I saw the impact of Twitter's velocity first-hand with a fundraising experiment. I was able to raise $2,500 in 90 minutes at Gnomedex. I wondered whether or not those results would be replicable ? Right before Thanksgiving , the TweetsGiving effort and Avi Kaplan helped Epic Change raise over $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

We have a partnership with the Worth Trust in Chennai, India, to do data entry for Bookshare.org, funded by the Lavelle Fund. I blogged about it in May: Scanning in Tamil Nadu. Our international Bookshare.org manager, Viji Dilip, recently wrote about making a change in what kind of capital equipment to get Worth Trust to help carry out their work: Strange as it may sound I grew up with hearing this often, "Everyone please save all your files now as the current will be going off in the next five

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

I don’t usually title my tech blog entries with quite that sort of title, but that’s how I feel after spending 3 days with one of the most fabulous groups of people I have had the honor of spending time with in recent memory. I was at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit , which was an event full of great sessions, meeting neat people of all sorts, and having lots of geeky fun.

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Judi Sohn

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

When I’m home, I sync my iPhone with my iMac, and life is good. But when I’m traveling, I only have my MacBook Pro with me. I use Spanning Sync to keep iCal and Address Book on the laptop in sync with iCal and Address Book on the Mac (and in sync with Google Calendar and Gmail). I use DropBox to make sure I have important files with me (and to hold my 1Password keychain file s o my login passwords are automatically synced ).

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See3

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

We’ve talked about the power of the Girl Effect video , which uses only typography and classical piano to make its point. It’s a very compelling piece, and has received a lot of attention exactly for its freshness and innovation. Well, Starbucks released a new ad during Saturday Night Live this past weekend that’s shockingly similar.

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Speaker: Joe Sharpe and James Carlson

Payroll optimization can be one of the most time-consuming and complex factors of small business management. Yet, organizations that crack the code on streamlining employee compensation often discover innovative avenues for growth. With the right strategies in place, outsourcing and streamlining payroll processes can result in substantial time and resource savings.

Foundation

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 12, 2008

Using Social Networks for Social Change: Facebook, MySpace and More View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fundraising advocacy ) I was lucky enough to meet Ivan Boothe at the first (or maybe second) Netsquared Conference back in 2005 and have been following his work for years. Ivan Boothe helped start the Genocide Intervention Network in 2004, and was responsible for communications, web development and social networking strategy.

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Wild Apricot

NOVEMBER 28, 2008

Checking for and fixing broken links on your organization's website can be tedious and time-consuming, but it's a vital task for anyone who manages a website. You can save time and effort by preventing a lot of those broken links, however. The key is to be a bit strategic when you're choosing which page you'll link to, and double-checking that your link is correctly formed before you ever hit the "Publish" button.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 20, 2008

Our Bookshare.org team is delighted that we've just added I Am Potential, by Patrick Henry Hughes to the Bookshare.org collection. Patrick's story is getting a lot of deserved attention nationally as a significantly disabled college student who hasn't let disabilities stop him from pursuing his dreams. What is even cooler is that Perseus Books, Patrick's publisher, reached out to us during the production process to make sure that the book was available to people with print disabilities.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2008

Getting involved in a social network, whether it be something like Facebook or Myspace, or a content-connected social network like flickr or delicious (I’m starting to get used to writing that without the dots,) is pretty easy. But there are SO many, and they all have their pros and cons. What I have learned, though, is that a social network is only as good as something that you have absolutely no control over: how many of your real friends and colleagues use it.

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Speaker: Tim Sarrantonio, Director of Corporate Brand

Is your organization ready to build a recurring giving program that not only sustains but also propels your mission forward? 🚀 In this new webinar with industry visionary Tim Sarrantonio, we’ll guide you through the critical steps to establishing and scaling a successful recurring giving program. Whether you’re starting fresh or enhancing an existing program, this session will provide the strategies you need to deepen donor relationships and secure long-term support!

Giving

Judi Sohn

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

I’m here at Terminal C at the Philadelphia Airport, waiting for my flight to San Francisco. The airport normally has nice bright displays showing all the departing/arriving flights. Not today. Folks are usually quick to point out a random BSOD on displays as an example of Windows FAIL, so it’s only fair to show that it happens to the best of ‘em.

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NTEN

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Over the past year -- or, I guess, 2 years, really -- we've seen the power of people-to-people, word-of-mouth, long-tail, whatever-you-want-to-call-it fundraising with the success of the Obama campaign's online efforts. They broke all sorts of fundraising records, and did most of it with donations under $100. What really excites me about the result is the lesson it can teach advocacy and nonprofit organizations across the country.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Source: Facebook vs LinkedIn Traffic. The illustration above shows the overlap between people who use LinkedIn and Facebook. What initially caught my eye was the demographic (age analysis) of LinkedIn VS Facebook users. We know that professional relationships are moving from the Rolodex to the social networks. LinkedIn is designed for specifically for business professional networking, while Facebook is a bit more casual.

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Wild Apricot

NOVEMBER 27, 2008

Our blog provides technology-related ideas and advice for small non-profits - professional and business associations, clubs, charitable organizations, churches, activist groups and communities. Many subscribers are also Wild Apricot software clients, so we do occasional blog posts about our software updates. Wild Apricot smart software simplifies life for people in associations and non-profits.

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Speaker: Andrew Olsen, CFRE - EVP, Fundraising Solutions at DickersonBakker | Kat Landa, CFRE, CSD - SVP, Talent Solutions at DickersonBakker

Across the nonprofit sector, organizations invest heavily in donor retention efforts, yet the struggle of cultivating lasting relationships remains. While attracting new donors is crucial, the lack of repeat donors poses significant financial risks. Through a comprehensive analysis of industry data, experts argue that there is a direct correlation between donor burnout, donor retention, and the talent retention crisis.

Donor

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

I went to Dubai for the first ever Summit on the Global Agenda. The Summit pulled together experts on roughly seventy different topics to discuss the current and future state of major issue areas: areas as varied as water, mining, nanotechnology, governance, economic development, economic meltdown (kidding) and so on. Obviously, there was a lot of buzz about the financial meltdown, especially in a place like Dubai that has built itself up as a major international business center (Dubai as an emi

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 15, 2008

I was perusing the program for a local “green&# event, when I noticed a full page advertisement for Firefox, saying that it’s software was “ 100% organic.&# I kind of chuckled. I thought, what does that really mean? For Firefox, it means, “open source, community-powered.&# And I realized that they had an interesting point. In my mind, it harks back to the arguments that Yochai Benkler made in his book “ The Wealth of Networks ,&# that a ecosystem full of open source

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Software Organization Open Source Green 100

Judi Sohn

NOVEMBER 1, 2008

No, this has nothing to do with the Presidential election. A while back I played with Disqus , a hosted blog comment management system. I like the idea of threaded comments and easier comment management/layout tools. In practice, I found Disqus to be a little klunky and so I removed it. Then Automattic, the company behind WordPress, purchased Disqus’ biggest competitor : Intense Debate.

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NTEN

NOVEMBER 20, 2008

Thon Morse, Kimbia. [This article was originally published on Kimbia's website.]. Today's challenging economic times mean a lot of nonprofits are looking for new ways to raise money. Many organizations realize the Internet presents a huge opportunity, but most have achieved limited success. If your organization, like many others, has yet to experience strong results raising funds online, the coming year provides an ideal window to experiment with new approaches.

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Advertiser: Digital Ocean

Effectively managing cloud technology is getting more complex. From cybersecurity concerns, vendor lock-in, cost increases, or lack of transparency on costs, it can quickly get out of control. Knowing what you can control and finding a platform that’s built with nonprofits in mind is key.

Nonprofit

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 21, 2008

Laura Fitton (aka @pistachio ) the Twitter for Dummies site where folks are contributing ideas and tips to help write the book. In addition, 10% of the proceeds will benefit a charity to be nominated by the community. I nominated the Sharing Foundation for the following reasons: In July/August 2007, I launched my third fundraising campaign to support the Cambodian Bloggers Summit and the Sharing Foundation.

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Wild Apricot

NOVEMBER 23, 2008

First-time nonprofit managers can often use a bit of guidance from more experienced colleagues, as well as the answers to specific questions. The problem is, there just aren't enough mentors to go around, and perhaps this is especially so in the nonprofit sector where resources are stretched to the limit. What's the solution? Well, Third Sector New England believes it's found a partial solution at any rate.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 15, 2008

My current business trip started by heading for Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I had been invited to attend the Global Agenda Council meeting organized by the World Economic Forum. It was easier to say yes than usual: I'd never been to Dubai or the region, and the government of Dubai and Emirates airline offered to fly me there business class! I was stunned when I found out in New York that the plane I was boarding was the new Airbus A380, the massive, double-decker airliner.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

I’m going to go out on a really thin limb here, and feel free to saw it off in the comments. :-). If you haven’t been to change.gov yet, you need to go. Now. I’ll be here when you come back. There is little question that Obama was Presidential Candidate 2.0. And it’s becoming increasigly clear that he’ll be President 2.0.

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Advertiser: Syncrony

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Nonprofit