Kathy Reid gave a great presentation at Making Links 2008 on the topic of free software for nonprofit organisations. Kathy has written about her experience of the Intensive Web Day. Kathy shared her expriences and opinions on various free tools such as Joomla, Moodle and WordPress and then led a discussion on which CMS to use. It was a great session, lots to learn. Here is her slideshow:
14 Nov 2008
12 Nov 2008
Geographical domain names - for example http://www.bundanoon.nsw.au/ - are being offered to Australian nonprofit and community organisations. The domains are issued solely for the purpose of operating a community-run website that’s developed for the benefit of the entire local community.
Leonie Dunbar gave a presentation about geographical domain names at the Making Links 2008 conference. Apparently they are a world first and I think it’s an interesting, potentially very valuable idea. Read more »
12 Nov 2008
The Making Links conference has begun. We’re at Melbourne University this year, where I just gave a presentation on using WordPress to power your nonprofit’s website. Here’s the slideshow:
What else is happening at the Making Links 2008 conference? Read people’s comments here and look at photos here.
28 Oct 2008
The Baptcare website publishes an RSS feed so that our supporters can subscribe to hear about our news and events. Recently I added another feed, for our vacancies.
I just checked the stats and discovered that Baptcare’s jobs feed has five times as many subscribers as the news feed. What’s more, plenty of people are clicking the link to visit the page on our website where they can download the position description. Methinks a job feed could be a really useful recruitment tool. Read more »
16 Oct 2008
In the bad old days - just a few years ago - spam was frequent and filthy. Nowadays very little junk arrives in my email inbox and it’s often unnervingly polite.
This week I’ve been offered pet nail trimmers, tips on growing my lawn, a $7500 line of credit, a government grant and airline tickets. There was only one slightly naughty ad and it euphemistically suggested I needed a bigger canoe. That’s a far cry from the language of spam a few years ago.
The bad news is that appalling, horrible, offensive, disgusting spam is still prevalent online: it may not be in your inbox but if you’re not careful it’ll appear on your website. And you don’t want that, especially when your charity has a respectable image to uphold and clients and supporters who might be offended.
Comment spam on blogs is one of the biggest problem areas. Read more »
13 Oct 2008
Baptcare was recently awarded a Google Grant, free publicity that has doubled our website traffic. Using that Grant we’ve created adverts to promote our nonprofit organisation’s vacancies and seen a big rise in the number of job applications we’ve received. Maybe you could do the same for your website’s job ads.
03 Oct 2008
Let’s say you run a small nonprofit organisation. You want a website and that’s going to cost you two main things: staff time and money; but what if you have no budget? Absolutely zero. Provided you have the staff time to contribute, you have options: Read more »
22 Sep 2008
LASA’s Computanews magazine is now free as a download (it used to be a paid subscription). If you’re from a nonprofit organisation and are generally interested in improving your use of IT, then Computanews is well worth a read.
It’s not aimed specifically at techies, it’s easier to read and perhaps more relevant to charities than some other publications. It’s written in plain English and spells things out for you.
For example the current edition has an article on news feeds. It explains in simple language what feeds are, why they exist and how you can subscribe to them, and discusses whether you could offer them to your own website’s visitors.
Contents
Blog topics
