Using Twitter For Activism

I’ve previously written about how organizations can start Tweeting, and last week found a great primer on using Twitter for Activism. The DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism is a concise and informative guide that any organization looking to evaluate or deploy a Twitter strategy should read. While it is geared towards activism I think that most non profits would find it helpful. With Oprah’s recent foray onto Twitter, and the rise of Celbritweets (celebrities who tweet) and the increasing numbers of Twitter users, some hardcore early adopters have suggested that Twitter has jumped the shark. While it may no longer be what it was to that group of users, the mainstreaming of Twitter offers an opportunity for organizations to reach beyond early adopters and technology industry people directly to the existing as well as new constituencies. Before making the foray into the Twitterverse, its a good idea to engage is some strategy and planning. Twitter itself is simply a technology, and without strategy and planning, it may not reap any rewards for your...

3 Interesting Articles About Non Profits, Their Websites and Donations

This week I came across three interesting articles that deal with non profits, website usability and donations. Taken together, I think they can be useful and instructive to non profit organizations working on developing new websites or optimizing existing websites and communication strategies. Donation Usability The first was an article from Jakob Nielsen on Donation Usability. While I will summarize what I found most interesting, I strongly encourage you to read it for yourself. Nielsen’s team conducted a usability study (actually watching users behavior on real websites for non profit organizations. The first sentence really sets the stage for the rest of the article: “Non-profits would collect much more from their websites if only they’d clearly state what they are about and how they use donations.” Sadly, only 43% of the sites we studied answered the first question on their homepage. Further, only a ridiculously low 4% answered the second question on the homepage. Although organizations typically provided these answers somewhere within the site, users often had problems finding this crucial information. The study reports on the leading killers of donations: 47% were usability problems relating to page and site design, including unintuitive information architecture, cluttered pages, and confusing workflow. Amazingly, on 17% of the sites, users couldn’t find where to make a donation. You’d imagine that donation-dependent sites would at least get that one design element right, but banner-blindness or over-formatting caused people to overlook some donation buttons. 53% were content issues related to writing for the Web, including unclear or missing information and confusing terms. The full report is for sale for $98 from Nielsen’s consulting company....

What Sessions Will You Attend at the NTEN NTC? Use This Downloadable Matrix To Decide!

It seems that every year there are more and more sessions at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC), and it is harder and harder to decide which sessions to attend. This year, CivicActions is not only proud to be a sponsor of the NTC ($2000 for scholarships), we’re also bringing seven people (Aaron, me, Ian, Jenn, Justine, Sadie and Zoey) on our team. With five people it is easier to cover more sessions, but this requires some coordination. I converted the NTC Session list into a matrix and put it on Google Docs so that we could collaboratively decide which sessions to attend, and have a record of it. I figured, why waste the effort on just us? So here are two versions (and openOffice/NeoOffice version and an Excel version). Use them to help plan your session attendance. I make no warranty as to the accuracy of this document, and as the NTC website says: “Sessions, session content, schedule and speakers are subject to change at any time before the...