Andrew Perry demonstrated a free and open-source product called CiviCRM at the Connecting Up conference. It’s a customer relationshop management tool that you can install on your own webspace; and if you use either Drupal or Joomla to run your website, then CiviCRM can integrate with it.
CiviCRM helps you manage your relationships with donors and supporters, sign up people to attend your events, run your memberships and handle your email newsletters and other communications. Lots of nonprofits are using it and I can see why, it has a lot of very useful features. Read the full article »
Published on May 21st, 2008
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A charity recently contacted me because through no fault of their own their website had vanished. Their calls and emails to the hosting company were simply being ignored and many weeks later they had received no explanation or resumption of service. These are the decisions we had to make quickly to get their website up-and-running again… Read the full article »
Published on January 10th, 2008
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Do you run a church website? If so, take a look at this checklist of features that every church website needs. It’s good advice from the ChurchBrilliant blog.
What I found interesting was the emphasis on using websites to involve people in real world events. Apparently, surveys on many church websites have shown that as many as 60% of visitors are looking for information about events they can join in with. As the blog notes, that makes a church website an important advertising tool.
Published on January 7th, 2008
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I’m at the Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia. It’s a forum for workers from non-profit organisations to discuss ICT.
Yesterday’s all-day workshop, by Laurel Papworth, was about social networking. Laurel’s a great trainer and it was an interesting session that covered so much I can’t do justice to it here.
What’s social networking? Well, it covers a wide variety of online tools and websites that enable people to make friends, find people with similar interests, socialise, form discussion groups and share video, photos and information. For example, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogs and even games such as World of Warcraft are all social networking tools. Read the full article »
Published on October 30th, 2007
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Online discussion forums enable your website’s visitors to have a conversation. Your website could host a busy virtual community; and if you are a health organisation you could even use forums to provide an Internet-based support network. In 2007 the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust won an eWellbeing award for its use of online forums in building social networks. This case study explains what was learnt along the way. Read the full article »
Published on September 19th, 2007
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When I ask charities about their backup routines, they all know they should backup their documents, their emails and so on but few mention their website. That’s an unfortunate oversight because it’s fairly easy to lose control of your own website and it’s good practice to have backups and documentation to hand - just in case. Read the full article »
Published on September 5th, 2007
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A content management system (CMS) is a tool that can be installed within your website to make it easy for you to edit your own pages, text and graphics from any Internet-connected computer. A CMS means never having to pay your web designer to do simple updates. I’d like to explain why I think a CMS called WordPress is especially suitable for nonprofits. Read the full article »
Published on August 15th, 2007
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