Non Profit IT Department: Web Site

A Gadget to keep your members involved

Tim Laughlin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

So have your web site up, or even better your community site. You have few people who visit everyday. They write their post get involved and are stars of you community. Then the large majority just come back when the think of it.

Slowly they disappear.

We have a client (NOAH) who has this issue with their Community Sever site. Community Server like most community sites provide RSS feeds for different content sections. The web savvy add the feeds to their feed readers. However, a large majority are not that savvy. In comes the Google Gadget that we built, with a lot of borrowed code.

Users can add this to their Google homepage and see updates when the want without having to go to the site directly. Add to that Google Donate (Support NOAH) tab. Keep them involved.

If you would like something similar let us know and we can work with you to customize for your needs. Or if want the source let us know and we will be happy to get for you. If you have other ways your using Google Gadgets promote your mission please share.

Free Donation processing using Google Checkout

Tim Laughlin — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:42:09 GMT

Without donations most Non Profits would not be able to provide their services to the community. Google recognizes this and is doing their part help. They are offering Google Donate, part of Google Checkout, with no fee transactions through until 2009.

Adding Google Donate your web site is very easy. Google also makes it very easy for the your non profit to verify their status and begin collection donations with no fees. What does mean? You can now accept credit cards for donations and not have to pay any setup fees or transactions fees. Google is offering free processing through December 31, 2008.

If where to setup a credit card donation section on you web site you would need to obtain a merchant account. Have someone build the application, and buy a SSL certificate. With Google Checkout you only have to copy and paste their code into any page you want. If you group has bloggers with their own blogs you can ask them to display your Google Donate button.

Set is simple:

Go to https://checkout.google.com/seller/npo/ and read all the details.

A simple way to collect data

Tim Laughlin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:43:23 GMT

So you have some questions you want to ask you members? A survey would be great, but they are expensive to mail and your return rates will probably be low. I have just discovered a nice way to collect data in a form and have each participants results saved to a Google Spreadsheets.

So assuming you have signed up for Google Apps for Domains, you have everything need, for free. Google Spreadsheets lets you create forms that can be filled out by anyone. So you can create a form and email to your members. They can fill it out directly in their e-mail. Or you can build the form and publish the URL. People can then fill out the form on Google's site. Want to see it in action?

Here is how you create the form.

Log into your Google Doc & Spreadsheets account. Remember this part of your Google Apps for Domains package.

Create some questions:

Choose the share tab.

See the 'to fill out form" choice? Choose it, it well worth the mouse click.

Now we press the the big start editing you form button.

You can see that hovering over field reveals an edit option.

Let's do some editing.

Ready to send.

Want to see the finished product? Please fill out our survey.

If you are using this approach to collect member's opinions I would love to hear how it worked out, or not.

Graffiti CMS - A first impression

Tim Laughlin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:35:55 GMT

This site is build with Graffiti CMS (beta 2) from Telligent. Since this is my first full Graffiti implementation I thought I should share my impressions while it's fresh in my mind.

If you read the About Us section you will see that this site and it's resources are inspired by my work with NOAH. If you visit their site you will see that it is in desperate need of a redesign. One of the organizations biggest issues with their site is updating content. This is not uncommon; and today there literally hundreds of content management systems out there. One of the systems we are evaluating is Graffiti CMS. One of the main reasons is that we use Telligent's Community Server for the Albinism Online Community.

The organization has some loose requirements:

Easy to update content
Look professional
Is search engine friendly
Price of course

Being the geek on the project. I have some additional technical requirements:

Must run on Microsoft .NET - My company host these sites on one of our production servers. We are a Microsoft centric shop and will not install other systems like PHP on to our servers. This does not mean there are not good CMS system written non Microsoft technology. It more of a cooperate decision. To get free hosting you must play by the rules of host.
Must be easily "skinned".

Over all, Graffiti has meet these requirements. Still some unanswered questions as to implementation and the need to be non beta. As well, The pricing is a little steep out starting a $399. At this time I have not inquired about non profit pricing. Telligent did have a 10 % discount on Community Server, so hopefully something similar for the new product. I am sure I will have more to share after I am done popping the bubble wrap on this site.