Non Profit IT Department: Blog

Kevin Sproles - Entrepreneur of the year?

Tim Laughlin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:57:43 GMT

Kevin Sproles is the CEO of Volusion and he is on the short list of Entrepreneur of the year. Volusion is a very non profit friendly company offering their hosted E-Commerce solution to qualified Non-Profits at no charge. Of course the are not as big as Google and Salesforce, so they can't offer as many grants, but they still do a great job for giving back. They give away 10 new stores a month to Non-Profits, that is a very generous offer!

As to technology I recently set up a store for NOAH, a Non Profit I do a lot of work for, using Volusion. Does everything that I can think of. Inventory addition was painless, order fulfillment is painless. Overall, pretty painless.

So to show our support of Non Profit friendly companies like Volusion, please cast a vote for Kevin.

Google for Non Profits announced!

Tim Laughlin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:36:00 GMT

Google as launched a site for non profits. At this time there are no new services announced. But this is a great one stop shop for everything Google related to not for profits. Google for Non Profits was announced on Google.org Blog. So sign up the the Google Group and stay tuned. This is how big things a Google start with little one page sites! Plus now we have an index for our posts. We will keep trying to bring you all the great news from Google and all the other IT vendors who help the Non Profits succeed at their goals.

Pembroke Academy Team Discovery

Tim Laughlin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:22:00 GMT

Team Discovery is the First Team for Pembroke Academy, in Pembroke New Hampshire. They are in need of financial support to get the FIRST National Event in Atlanta on April 16, 17 and 18th.

FIRST is a Non-Profit that with mission of:

Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication and leadership.

How does first accomplish this goal? To sum it up they get teams of High School students to built some amazing robots designed specifically to participate in this years challenge. Please visit the FIRST site and see some of the amazing robots these students are creating.

Team Discovery participated in the Granite State Regional completion and WON! So now they are eligible to compete in the championship. Of course this cost money, and given the short time line has made this a very big challenge. That is where we started to help Team 134. To think that we can do this alone is unreasonable. However, we are doing what we can.

Team 134 had no web presence; so our first goal was get them a domain name a set up a web site. Then we went into our bag of trick and started throwing our free resources at the problem to date we have done the following:

Registered firstteam134.org, which was done during the setting up for Google Apps for Domains.
Signed up with Google Apps for Domains
Set up Graffiti CMS, under their free license.
Signed up with Google Checkout to collection Donations
Add some content, lots more to do here.

Good luck to Team Discovery!

P.S. Non Profit IT Department will be hosting Teams Discovery's Google Donate button until their competition in April.

SalesForce integration with Google Apps?

Tim Laughlin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:44:19 GMT

I know we have not covered SalesForce.com on this site. That is primarily due to a lack of time. SalesForce.com is very generous to Not for Profits. To understate what they do, they are a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). They, like Google, are a hosted system and thus no software to install.

We promise there will be posts forth coming on SalesForce.com.

However today's buzz that it seems that something is brewing between Salesforce.com and Google. Basically, some guys have been poking around their Google Apps and found internal references to SalesForce.com logos intermixed with Gmail and all the other Google Apps. These references, where found in some internal Cascading Style Sheets.

Historically Google and SalesForce have had good relationship. At this there is only speculation of how the integration will occur. But in my opinion, any tighter integration of these two companies is only gong to make things better for Non Profits. We will keep an eye on this post as things come to light.

The release of Google Sites

Tim Laughlin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:33:03 GMT

Google just released Google Sites. This is yet another cool service of Google Apps for Domains.

This will probably prove to be a great collaboration tool for non profits. I have not played with it completely and will add posting when I do. The initial glimpse is very promising. An event committee could create a site for planning the next event. Invite just their members to participate. It appear to integrate with all the other Google services like Docs and Reader. Stay tuned, I will kick the tires a little and see what I find. If you are already a Google Apps for Domains administrator you can add this service.

Login to your Google Apps dashboard, choose add services and Google Sites should be available to add. If you have any feedback please feel free to share it here.

Graffiti CMS 1.0 Released

Tim Laughlin — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:58:13 GMT

Yesterday we wrote about first impressions of Graffiti CMS. Today we are happy to announce that version 1 has been released.

In that post we mentioned that product was still in beta 2 and we would want it to be released before it would be a solution for non profits with limited IT resources.

We are waiting on our license key before we upgrade this site to version 1. We ordered a license under the prerelease pricing. There where a few bugs in Beta 2, so hopefully they will be addressed in version 1. We will post our opinions here once we have had a chance to try it out. Stay tuned and while we kick the tires. If you have any feedback on Graffiti CMS please feel free to share them here.