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 »
03 Oct 2008
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.
15 Sep 2008
The Slideshare website has published the results of its presentation competition. The winner was an educational slideshow about worldwide water usage. Although not created by a nonprofit, it’s excellent inspiration for charities that want to put across a campaigning message. Notice how simple it is, with carefully chosen fonts and colour scheme and images from a photo library. You could do this!
Slideshare is a website that allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations and share them with the world. You can then easily insert those presentations into your own website (just like I’ve done here) by pasting code that Slideshare provides into your web pages.
04 Sep 2008
Over the past year I’ve struggled to get the Baptcare website to validate when tested against http://validator.w3.org/. My problem was the complexity of the IBM WebCM content management system that powers the Baptcare website and figuring out how to understand and edit its presentation templates, menus and navigation files.
But today I finally got the www.baptcare.org.au website to validate – and it’s only taken a whole year, hurrah!
21 Aug 2008
A Content Management System (CMS) can be installed behind your website, enabling you to quickly and easily create new pages and post news items onto your site. Many CMS are free and open source which makes them ideal for nonprofit use.
If your web designer suggests building your new website using Drupal or Joomla or MODx or any one of the hundred other open source CMS out there, how do you know if you’ll like it or even get the hang of it? Well, you could visit the OpenSourceCMS website and try it out. This excellent website gives you full admin rights to some of the best CMS so you can give them a try and play around with all their features.
18 Aug 2008
I recently announced that I’d been given a Google Grant to create free online ads to promote Greek Care. Two weeks later, are hordes of visitors pounding on the doors of this new nonprofit website? Er, no… not yet anyway.
That would an embarrassing end to that topic, if it weren’t for the succcess I’ve had with Baptcare‘s ad campaign, which recently doubled its site traffic. Why is that one nonprofit ad campaign works whilst another doesn’t? Here are some thoughts and ideas… Read more »
25 Jul 2008
In the first of several posts I’m going to suggest why your nonprofit organisation should apply for a Google Grant and how it can boost visits to your website. The example I’ll be using is the Greek Care website, a recently commissioned site for care providers looking after Greek elderly people in Australia. Read more »
08 Jun 2008
Baptcare is large nonprofit organisation providing care services in the state of Victoria, Australia. With over 760 staff based in several dozen locations, working in very different projects, good internal communication is vital. That’s why their Intranet is so important to them.
An Intranet is like a website except that it’s only available to people working within the organisation. It’s used to share information internally rather than to publicly promote the organisation’s services. Recently I redesigned Baptcare’s Intranet home page. Read more »