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Wednesday, 21 July 2010 11:37 |
 Flickr: Lutz-R. Frank
NTEN is in the final stages of updating our Member Directory, but we need a handful of volunteers to help us test it out before it goes live. If you have an half hour to spare next week (7/26 - 7/30), send a quick email to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
to sign up for a user testing slot. (If you need more of a reason to help, we'll also be offering an NTEN Prize Pack, filled with books and other NTEN goodies, to all our volunteers.)
For the rest of you, this is a good time to go... |
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Tuesday, 20 July 2010 11:46 |
 "I'm on a horse."
Those are the words that turned the once-stale Old Spice brand into something refreshing and new. The folks at Proctor and Gamble, who make Old Spice, took it a step further last week when they launched an Old Spice Guy response campaign, creating dozens of personalized responses to the tweets, emails and Facebook posts from his many fans, including George Stephanopolous (presidential abs!) and Alyssa Milano.
Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb did a bang... |
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Monday, 19 July 2010 12:32 |
 Flicker Photo: Ben_Smith _UK
Have you been living under a rock recently? Probably not, so you've surely heard of -- and probably even gotten sick of -- the hub-bub over "Antenna-gate". For those of you who haven't been caught up in the story (lucky you!), it's actually quite familiar, and the nonprofit sector can certainly find a few key takeaways. Here's what happened: June 24 - Apple releases the iPhone 4 into the world in its most successful product launch to date. June 26 -... |
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Friday, 16 July 2010 12:48 |
 Flickr: cambodia4kidsorg(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharingtheir nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.)
Sean Powell, of PMGDirect, wrote up a great how-to, with United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) as an example: how to customize your Facebook page to convert your fans to your email list. Step-by-step read!
Kira... |
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Friday, 16 July 2010 12:12 |
 Flickr: Craving Creativity
We're entering uncharted territory as a species, particularly in the United States. Americans consume 3.6 zettabytes of information every day. It's an unfathomably huge number (especially to those of us who remember playing Ultima IV on a 64 kilobyte computer). One billion trillion bytes worth of television and radio broadcasts, YouTube videos, e-mails, tweets, Facebook updates, and yes, even print. Every day.
I'm (pretty) sure you'd agree that your work is more... |
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Thursday, 15 July 2010 11:46 |
 Flickr photo: BrigitteLet me start by saying that I love the phrase "accidental techie." It's fun to say -- and, in the early part of this century, it was the only way we could describe the growing legion of people who suddenly found themselves mastering a new vocabulary of acronyms: LAN, ISP, RAM, CPU, CRM. My great colleague Sue Bennett even wrote a book called "The Accidental Techie."
Yet, like certain organizations, I think it's time for a rebrandng.
You have to... |
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Wednesday, 14 July 2010 10:53 |
 You, dear NTEN community, know the importance of technology in meeting your missions. For us, technology is more than e-mail servers or software installations. Sure, we need those things to do our work well, but we know the real impact lies elsewhere: using handheld devices to collect data in the field, crowdsourcing maps to help under-resourced communities get the services they need, putting the power of your mission right into the hands of your stakeholders with mobile apps.
We're glad... |
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Tuesday, 13 July 2010 13:21 |
 We’veadded a new element to the ongoing saga of NTEN’s adventures in Facebookland, this time of the choose-your-own variety. You know the type: turn to page 45 if you want Alice to go down the rabbit hole, turn to page 63 if you don’t.
We’reprofiling NTEN members, posting our brief introductory interview (5 questions each) and then turning the reigns over to all of you. The member in question has promised to hang around our Facebook page to share their vast wealth of knowledge... |
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Friday, 09 July 2010 10:39 |
 HaitiAidMap from InterAction(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharingtheir nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.)
I noticed that this post from Beth Kanter was re-tweeted quite a bit yesterday, so I think it qualifies for nptech awesome online. She addresses the "time suck" argument and fear for nonprofits... |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 11:32 |
 Flickr photo: KayCey97007
I find it highly ironic that so much energy has been spent debating slacktivism. Dozens of articles, a slew of conference sessions, all devoted to a discussion of, essentially, laziness.
The best part is, we're not just talking about this in our little corner of the universe. The debate has hit the mainstream media. I was tickled to see Nancy Lublin -- author of "Zilch", and a person with whom I would really like to have a cocktail -- take up the topic in... |
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Friday, 02 July 2010 12:50 |
 Flickr: Sean Dreilinger
Back in college, my friends and I used to sit around discussing the magical moment when the majority of the population would have internet access at their finger tips. These discussions involved the ability to write a URL on a bathroom stall, billboard, or whathaveyou, and then everybody would immediately go to that URL and sign on to our ideas.
As most of you know, that time is already upon us. Well, almost.
I attended this week's AMA/Aquent webcast with Chi Modu... |
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Friday, 02 July 2010 12:34 |
 (Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharing their nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.)
Who's your Mayor? Farra Trompeter wrote up an amazing article about Foursquare+Nonprofits (and other location-based social network tools). Farra, along with Thomas Negron and Charles Lenchner, invited Foursquare founder Naveen... |
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Thursday, 01 July 2010 16:06 |
 Flickr Photo: Paraflyer
I was in DC last week with the famous Anna Richter getting our 11NTC ducks in a row. Our conference hotel, the Washington Hilton was just up the hill from the metro station, so I kept walking down Connecticut to get there. (Or to the Chipotle; I may have set a record for burritos consumed in one trip.)
Each time, I walked past a gallery set up for AED. I know that AED is a big international nonprofit, but I have never known what the heck AED stands for. So, on my way... |
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Wednesday, 30 June 2010 17:35 |
 At the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference, we gave our session evaluation system a major tech overhaul by highlighting a mobile text messaging option in addition to our normal paper evaluations -- as well as an online option that was added at the last minute. At the 2010 NTC in Atlanta, we built on what we learned and took this one step further by moving to a completely paperless evaluation system.
How It Worked
One of our main concerns in implementing a paperless system was excluding... |
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Tuesday, 29 June 2010 12:22 |
 Technology used to be, as Jane Messeck of Microsoft Community Affairs puts it, transactional: it was about moving a document from point A to point B faster, making it easier to store and find things, making sure everyone could print. Technology was about efficiency.
Of course, technology is still about efficiency. As nonprofits, we're really good at efficiency. We know that if we can be more efficient, we can spend more time on our mission. For a long time, this has also meant that if we... |
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Monday, 28 June 2010 11:52 |
 A monthly roundup of our favorite nonprofit tech resources. Read more posts on our blog.We have so many data-themed links this month, you should probably take a moment to consider what all this information may be doing to your brain. According to the NYTimes, it's not good. Can somebody make a PSA-style poster to illustrate this? Yes, they can!The problem may have to do with a lack of feedback. A land line phone plays back your own voice at low levels. The feedback keeps you from shouting... |
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Friday, 25 June 2010 10:46 |
 This past April, how did you file your taxes? Did you mail them or e-File? How did you pay your last parking ticket? Find your last job? Watch a funny cat video?
I'm betting the answer is the same for all of these: online. Even phone calls aren't phone calls anymore; increasingly they are Voice over IP calls that happen over the internet.
This all works because the Internet is one thing above all else: OPEN.
Because the Internet is open, our nonprofits can share knowledge, empower... |
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Thursday, 24 June 2010 10:18 |
 Brett Meyer, NTEN
You may already know you can use Google Analytics to track your Google AdWords campaigns. Makes sense: Google would integrate puppies into their products if they thought it would help. [Ed. note: Actually, they have.]
Because they had to standardize the system used for this tracking, you can co-opt it for your own purposes to track click-throughs from your e-mail campaigns, banner ads, links in blog posts, even paper mailings (if you use it in conjunction with a URL... |
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Thursday, 24 June 2010 10:14 |
 Marissa Goldsmith, Beaconfire Consulting
I love details. I could write a three-page specification for an "Email this page" button. I challenge myself to find new and exciting OS/Browser combinations to test. (Yes, I do still have Lynx on my computer). And when it comes to cutting HTML, I'm a total pixel-pusher. (Shouldn't that column be one pixel over to the right?)
So when I log into Google Analytics, I never even glance at the dashboard, but instead dive straight into meaty... |
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Thursday, 24 June 2010 09:47 |
 Shabbir Imber Safdar and Shayna Englin, Englin Consulting, LLC
Everybody's on Facebook, so clearly your non-profit should be there, too, right?
Probably, but given limited resources it's important to get a better handle on the specific value your organization's investment of time and resources on Facebook is delivering toward your bottom line. It's time to make it accountable.
Commercial marketers, who blaze the trail 2-4 years ahead of us nonprofit marketers, have been using the... |
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Nonprofit Tech Network
