My interest in Ning continues unabated, especially after seeing that over 100,000 networks have been developed so far. Marc Andreesen's post on the accomplishment indicates that one of the reasons for their incredible growth is that Ning developers are focusing on making it ridiculously easy to set up your own network. I'm here to tell you that they're succeeding with that plan. You can definitely set up a network in... Read more →
From Career Distinction comes a nifty little tool that will calculate your "online identity score" and help you determine how effective your online personal branding efforts have been. When you go to the site, you're instructed to run a Google search, enter in the total number of results returned, determine how many of the results on the first three pages relate to you and then how well you think these... Read more →
Nathan reports on the success of a wiki as a company-wide intranet. Don't be scared away their price tag --a wiki solution can be had for much less money. Wetpaint has many of the features most nonprofits would need to use a wiki as an intranet and these are available for free. Wikispaces is another option, although it's $50/year to keep your space private. Aside from the obvious success of... Read more →
My latest shiny Web 2.0 toy is Ning. Up until about a month ago, I'd only dabbled in it, mostly visiting and joining other Ning communities, but in the last few weeks since I started Building a Better Blog, I've had Ning on the brain. I've since started Beyond the Glass Ceiling, as well as two other networks for clients I'm working with. So I'm getting a lot of experience... Read more →
A few months ago I wrote that the best blogging strategy for nonprofits may be a group blog, where a number of writers are all contributing to creating posts, rather than relying on a single writer. Now I want to share a few tools that can make a group blog--or any group writing project--even easier. Writing Posts with Google Docs Google Docs lets you create and share documents online, which... Read more →
Today is the last day in our series on how to build a nonprofit website using Wetpaint. In this screencast I give a brief overview of the administrative settings, including adding Google Analytics and setting up a domain name. As with the past screencasts, you may want to visit the version I have at Screencastomatic, where I've added notes to mark the different segments of the screencast. I hope that... Read more →
We're back this week with the final two posts on how to build a nonprofit website using Wetpaint. Last week, I showed you how to get started with your site. Today we're going to actually start adding content. A Few Key Points Before you take a look at today's screencast, (expect some jumpy audio like in the first screencast) a couple of points I wanted to make: In the screencast,... Read more →
A few good nonprofit tech pieces in my feed reader from the past week. Read/Write Web It was nonprofit week over at Read/Write Web and they had some great posts. Two of my favorites: Nonprofits' Web Tool Kit--a nice round-up of various nptech resources, from tools to build a website to the ever-popular fund-raising options. Notes from the Real World--From one of my favorite nptech bloggers, Beth Kanter, a post... Read more →
This week I'm showing you how you can use Wetpaint to set up a free nonprofit website. Monday we looked at why it makes sense to use a Wetpaint wiki to set up a site. Tuesday we looked at a couple of examples of organizations that are using Wetpaint as a website. Now I'm going to start showing you how to set up your own Wetpaint site. In today's 6... Read more →
Continuing this week's series on how you can build a free website for your nonprofit using Wetpaint, today's post is going to give you a guided tour of some sites that other organizations have created. I'm hoping that by showing you how it's already being done, you'll start to see the possibilities for your own site. Before we get started, though, in case you need convincing that your website is... Read more →