The Tactical Technology Collective is a nonprofit based in Amsterdam that has been doing great work distributing Free/Open Source technology to the global NGO sector.
This morning I was reminded (via Worldchanging) that they are working on creating several different “best of” software compliations for NGOs– kind of like that lovely old mixtape you have [...]

The Committee to Protect Bloggers is shutting down! Can anyone help?

If you are an individual or a company with sufficient funds to sponsor the Committee’s activities for a year, please contact committeetoprotectbloggers(at)gmail(dot)com.
Website: http://committeetoprotectbloggers.civiblog.org/

The CPB has long been (um, in internet terms, I mean, that being all of 2005) a great resource for finding information about [...]

The concept of eRiders is deceptively simple: people with lots of tech skills don’t need to be on the staff of every NGO or nonprofit, they can “ride” a circut of folks that they help. This idea is being presented at WSIS this week, and I think it is an incredibly powerful idea that will [...]

If you need a free place to host your website, make sure you check out AmbitiousLemon. They look very good at what they do; they at least have a very capable open source software setup on their server, with Ruby On Rails, PHP, Perl, Apache etc. :
We are not a company. Our aim is [...]

Here’s a link to a nice comparison of Google Scholar and Scrius. It points out that Google Scholar has become neglected and is no longer updated regularly. This is a super-unfortunate development; Google is the web’s best hope for easy, inexpensive archiving of scholarly research. (In other news, however, Amazon is now offering scholarly articles [...]

Evaluation is an important, albeit rarefied, science of promoting nonprofit organizations. Do you need to measure the effectiveness of a specific program — or your entire organization? Well, there’s an entire discipline devoted to helping you do just that.
Unfortunately, as with most rarefied, important sciences, the “discipline” part tends to mean something more like [...]

Summary: There is a new, exciting model for programs exporting technology to the developing world. But the real issue is about education, not just setting up a rural network.

Here’s the scene: A decade after the technology-sector collapse in the highly industrialized world, a humbled tech industry has begun to take interest in exporting basic [...]

Here’s an interesting article from an old Harvard Business School Working Knowledge series. It’s about branding, which from my perspective is a very diffucult thing to incorporate in online communications.
Websites and emails, for example, need to reflect some kind of graphical relationship with the rest of your organization. But I think they should also [...]

There is an interesting discussion going on (for some time now) over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review forum about charitable donations and the new “ranking systems” that have emerged to help the public find the most best organizations to give to. The rankings are extremely flawed in the eyes of many, and may be [...]

Mission-Driven nonprofits have, I think, the most to gain from blogging than any other organization or type of individual. If your organization has a site, I think you really should have a blog. There are a number of clear reasons. Seriously.
The reasons to maintain a blog are all about education — which is at [...]

Registration is now open for the RTPnet Conference, North Carolina’s only annual statewide conference that focuses specifically on nonprofit technology. The conference mission is to help nonprofits use technology more effectively. It’s May 20th.
Conference subjects this year will focus on: Technology Volunteerism, Technology Infrastructure and Technology Innovation. More than 100 people are expected to attend [...]

There’s always a lot of curiosity about online fundraising among organizations that are new to the web. Rightly so. Having a “donate now” link could be, by itself, a reason to have a nonprofit website. You can give out the address of your site with all correspondence and know that you’re getting the plate passed [...]

How do nonprofits grow? That’s a much discussed — and much answered question. There are thousands of books, articles, consultants even entire schools devoted to the subject of growing your nonprofit.
But there’s not much to growth if you don’t have a similar rise in creating change. And growth doesn’t necessarily make an organization stronger in [...]

If you need to easily display slideshows online, there are a couple of options that I have recently run across. The simplest, though not as sophisticated, process is to use a site called Flickr, which was recently acquired by Yahoo! and can be a lot of fun. You just upload your pictures and folks can [...]

Here’s a chart of evaluation software packages form the Evaluator’s exchange. The list is untested by yours truly, but the Evaluation Exchange (From the Harvard Family Research Project) is an excellent resource for folks working with children.
Here’s a bit from the article, the chart is about a 60K PDF.

A wide variety of software [...]

Stephen Pinker writes in his book How Minds Work that “the emotions are mechanisms that set the brains highest-level goals.” This, it seems, is a good description of why small, mission-driven nonprofits exist despite the innumerable difficulties of keeping such an operation afloat. It’s also an essential idea to consider when advertising your organization.
People are [...]

NetCorps is now providing the “technology of list enhancement” for nonprofits in NC. I have’t worked directly with them but they do good work (in Durham, NC and in Oregon). They have worked with folks at Volunteers for Youth that we are beginning a project with.
If you are interested in nonprofit technology, check out NetCorps [...]

The Linc project (based in NY) has an interesting article on their use of del.icio.us (a web service that maintains lists of links for you.) I really appreciated their technical description of everything they’re doing with it, but it isn’t a beach read.
LINC Support Grab Bag Archive: Are you del.icio.us?
Here’s a bit:

Are you maintaining [...]

If you like to think about branding (not a really pleasant idea, I think), you’d do well to visit the wealth of information at the PND Nonprofits By Design Column.
Read it: PND Nonprofits By Design

There are some very sophisticated techniques emerging into the semi-mainstream this year. You may not have noticed, and you may not care. But if you can get the hang of it managing the blogosphere, there’s a lot to be learned.
Rediscover your interests and your profession with the new tools of online networking: Blogs, tags [...]