Worlds Touch

Tools List

I realize this list is incomplete--what list wouldn't be? But this is a roundup of the urls of the free tools I like and use...many of them. I plan to start a toolbox at Social Source Commons for the Cool Free Tools List. So you can still get on board. Leave a comment with your favorite tools...or add to my toolbox as SSC!

Tools for Organizations

Open Office

Everything Microsoft Office can do, for free!

http://www.openoffice.org 

Drupal/Plone/Joomla

Open Source, Free, web site templates for interactive and community web sites

http://drupal.org/

http://plone.org/

http://www.joomla.org/

Constant Contact

Design and track your mass emailings

http://www.constantcontact.com

SurveyMonkey

Online surveys of your community, friends, clients

http://www.surveymonkey.com

TechAtlas

Technology assessments to accomplish your mission. Guided tech planning

http://techatlas.org/tools/Default.asp

Google Documents and Spreadsheets

Upload, edit online and download documents

http://docs.google.com/

Slide Share

Share your PowerPoint presentations on the web

http://www.slideshare.net/

Mapbuilder
MapBuilder lets you tag locations on a map and publish it on your own site.
Mapping is now easier than ever. It's free.
http://www.mapbuilder.net/

Video blogging tools:
All you need to start your own video blog or put videos on your existing web site or blog, all free:
http://freevlog.org
http://blip.tv
http://youtube.com (recently acquired by google)

WikiSpaces

Wikis are collaboration spaces for members of a team, a community or a work group.
http://www.wikispaces.org

Tools for Nonprofit Organizations

The fund raising pyramid

Chart your donations large and small with this little piece of graphic software

http://www.metgroup.com/content/index.php?pid=59

ChipIn Widget

Only one of several small squares you can add to your web site that will show the progress of a fund raising effort. Your supporters can copy and paste it easily to their own blogs, web sites, emails, etc.

http://www.chipin.com/

Also, see http://networkforgood.org for more free charity badges and donate buttons. 

Organizer's Database

Free Database to track and manage donors, monitor campaigns, send email blasts, etc.

http://www.organizersdb.org/

Salesforce if you're small enough

Manage contacts, relationships, projects, donors, volunteers...all in one place

http://www.salesforce.com

Dreamhost if you're a charity

Web hosting for free

http://www.dreamhost.com/

Continuous Progress

Free website for planning advocacy evaluation, with different tracks for funders and advocates.

http://www.continuousprogress.org/

PointK

Organizational planning with evaluation built in from the start using interactive tools. free tools and resources for assessment, accountability, communication, and program improvement.

http://www.innonet.org

CitizenSpeak

Free email advocacy service for grassroots organizations

http://citizenspeak.org/

Social Networks for anything

You have a cause? Create an online community, get members, exchange ideas.

http://www.ning.com/

Tools for Individuals

Climate Care:

A tool for figuring out how much carbon-dioxide you contribute to the global air, and then gives you places to donate to offset the amount you use.

http://www.climatecare.org/

SlimTimer

Down with timesheets when you can create tasks and then click on them one at a time to find out how much time you spend on any given project.

http://www.slimtimer.com/

GoogleEarth

Explore the world

http://earth.google.com/

Google Video

http://video.google.com/

Google Calendar

http://calendar.google.com/

Google Reader

Subscribe to the Internet sources you want to read

http://reader.google.com

Picassa

Find, organize and share your photos.

http://picassa.google.com

Gimp

Open Source PhotoShop. Photo retouching and manipulation.

http://www.gimp.org

WordPress/Blogger/LiveJournal

These are the primary blogging sites. You can sign up and blog away in minutes, free. Each of these has its plusses and minuses. WordPress allows you to create nonblog pages, just like a web site. LiveJournal has its great "Friends List" so you can see what others are saying with one click. Blogger allows for a very easy change in the way your blog looks.

http://wordpress.org/

https://www2.blogger.com/start

http://www.livejournal.com

Audacity

Free and open source for recording and editing sounds

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Skype

Free computer calling all over the world, to others on the Skype network

http://www.skype.com

Instant Messaging with MSN and Yahoo!

Not just for teens. Use these tools to communicate with co-workers, clients, and volunteers in faraway places.

Yahoo:

http://downloads.yahoo.com/

Windows Live Messenger

http://im.live.com/messenger/im/home/?source=MSNTDLINK

hotmail and yahoo and gmail

Free email services

http://www.hotmail.com

http://www.yahoo.com

http://www.gmail.com

Flickr

Photo sharing plus a world-wide community, social networking through photos

http://www.flickr.com

Frapper

Map your neighborhood, your city or the world for organization members, events, or just friends.

http://www.frappr.com/

LinkedIn

Professional online Rolodex of your contacts and their contacts and their contacts

http://www.linkedin.com

Sites to search for more tools

All kinds of Info from Tech Soup

http://www.techsoup.org

Social Source Commons

Toolbox extraordinaire! Share software tool information, get expert advice on tools.

http://socialsourcecommons.org/

Paul Lamb: Cool and Conscientious

A whole web site filled with cool ideas for using the internet to leverage support for your cause.

http://cooltool.ning.com/

A Charity Ball for Geeks?

In Greensboro, NC, there is an organization that trains handicapped people to refurbish donated computers and then turns around and gives those computers away to poor kids who couldn't otherwise afford them. What a great idea! Handy Capable Network is the name.

David, my board member with his finger in every pie in town, sent me an invitation to HCN's fund raiser that was to take place last night. I called Barbara Davis, the lady in charge of the org so I could get on her mailing list. Handy Capable Network might come in handy for the work I'll be doing at West End Ministries. They can set up computer centers, Barbara told me, and so that may be some cool partnership we can create.

Oh, by the way, Barbara said, can you do a booth on "Cool Free Software Tools" for our tech fair? She asked NetCorps, the OTHER nonprofit technical consultants in town, and they weren't able to do it. Great, says I. I've got piles of addresses for free online tools all over my filing system and it will be a great exercise for me to put the list altogether. I'll be there on Saturday night with bells on.

I worked steadily on it during the week and designed a one-page flier about Worlds Touch to go with the Cool Tools handout. I'll be putting the whole list up here later today, and I'd love to hear from anybody who has any other suggestions or ideas. In fact, the internet is just overflowing with free options for just about everything you want to do-- from office systems to fund raising to email systems to a funny little graphic to show your org's donations.

But who is going to show up on a Saturday night for a TECH FAIR? I put my materials together, donned my Worlds Touch t-shirt and drove over there. I must say, I was amazed. This turned out to be a funky, cool, fascinating kind of charity ball.

Around the walls of the room-- a medium-sized conference room-- were tables set up with little signs, letting the event's attendees "ask a geek" questions on various topics. There were folks with info on avoiding email spam, the Web Wizard (a dynamic lady with Professor McGonagal's velvet hat on) for web sites, a guy promoting the use of the Linux operating system, a blogger, a group that protects you from identity theft, an expert on RSS feeds, people selling televisions, somebody who knows about protecting kids from online porn. There were a couple of computer guys who make house calls to fix ailing computers.

In the middle of the room were a bunch of clients of HCN in the process of building a computer, one of them a fellow who is blind! There were a couple of islands filled with very tastefully arranged food-- wine, cheese, humous, crackers, and far too many pastries. There was a whole set of incredibly cute little MICE made out of chocolate cherries and Herseys kisses. Get it? Mice? Computers? Just too cute.

Then there were the fund raisers. Several baskets had been built with all kinds of new, donated goodies worth lots of money-- from coffee mugs with bags of coffee beans to gift certificates to restaurants or spas. You could buy tickets (12 for $10) and "vote" for the baskets you wanted by depositing your tickets in glass jars in front of the baskets. Gilda and I saw a whole church fund raiser once of just this kind of basket-of-goodies with ticket votes. At some point, they draw the winning ticket out of the jar and the person gets the basket.

You could also buy $5 tickets on the computer that was being built. I threw a twenty into THAT endeavor.

And there were the silent auction items as well. A woman who paints computer mice had donated a bunch of her beautifully decorated items to the auction and people went around bidding on paper for those.

Who came? Well, I got the impression that there is a whole group of people who support Barbara and her work with handicapped folks, and they came to support her and the work of HCN. Certainly there were families of clients of HCN. And people who just like a different kind of charity ball. It looked to me that an enormous amount of work went into the whole enterprise. In fact, so much that it boggles my mind entirely. I'm going to have to ask Barbara how she managed to pull the whole thing off.

I hope she made a bundle! I know I donated a twenty when she asked me to come do a booth, and then last night bought raffle tickets for the baskets and also for the computer. I figure about $50 in all. Since this is more than I usually contribute to causes, I'm pretty impressed with how much this cause and these folks got me to fork over.

Well, and it was fun. The room was well-lit and well-appointed, the geeks around the room friendly and interesting (to another geek like me, anyway), the handicapped folks made the event feel diverse and accepting, the food was yummlies, and the whole thing had the atmosphere of half-upscale, half-just-us-chickens.

The only thing missing was music. Hmmm. What kind of music would you bring in to a technology/ help-the-handy-handicapped charity ball?

Anybody for Free Tools?

I'll be doing a booth on "cool free tech tools" at a tech fair here in Greensboro, NC tomorrow, and while I've already got a good list, I thought you all might like to contribute your suggestions. Here's what I have so far, more or less off the top of my head:

The fund raising pyramid
SlimTimer
The whole Google suite, including Earth and Picassa
ChipIn Widget
Organizer's Database
Open Office
Drupal/Plone/Joomla
Constant Contact
Gimp
WordPress/Blogger/LiveJournal
Salesforce if you're small enough
Dreamhost if you're a charity
All kinds of Info from Tech Soup
Social Source Commons
TechAtlas
PointK
Skype
IM with MSN and Yahoo!
hotmail and yahoo and gmail
Flickr
Frapper
Slide Share--
LinkedIn
WikiSpaces

Some of these tools require the user to be small, or a registered charity, or both. Anyone else want to chime in here? Thanks.

One Woman's NTC 2007

What follows is my own personal experience at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, the biggie conference for people in my field.

Wednesday night: Internation Dinner with Teresa Crawford, Bill Lester and the CIO of Save the Children. It was a fine dinner but I didn't feel it advanced my network of international service providers, though I did have a good contact with Bill Lester, the big name in Engender Health. Teresa and I have had some contact before this, so even though I'd never met her, it was as though I had and we were just renewing acquaintance.

Thursday: Make your newsletter work better: Left--looked like a wrangle about whether newsletters are valuable at all.

What technology can do for your mission: This was presentations by two orgs (I missed the first one, Ashoka), one a poverty org in Philadelphia where their techie talked about using "Effort to Outcomes" software to really document the outcomes of the work they do. He made a very good case for intensive documentation using this software. After him, there was the CIO of Conservation International, and I got a glimpse into what a truly large and well-funded international org can look like. They have offices all over the world with the goal of making them all equal. Which means nearly 100 per cent online, email that functions all the time, and satellite connections everywhere. It's a huge committment of time and money and it pretty much daunted me.

How Low Income individuals use technology This is one of the most valuable sessions I attended, since it gives basic foundational information about how our clients use the internet, their cell phones, etc. This gives me some very good ideas about how to offer services at the Community Tech Center, when and if we get one up and running at the West End Ministries (WEM) community center. There is also a web site that is tailored to low income clients-- language they can read, and services they want: FAFSA, Income Tax Credits, Diabetes monitoring, etc. It's The Beehive.  

Building better online fundraising campaigns This was also an eyeopener, since it was a very detailed look at how to craft an email appeal for funds. It broke the email into component parts and then took you through how to maximize donations using the different parts together. The second speaker here talked about how to test for your own email list. By the way, the minimum number for a decent return donation is a list of 20,000 subscribers that you continually grow, since you lose a certain percentage every year. I've also since found an email company, Constant Contact, that has really reasonable rates. Since WEM wants to launch an email appeal, this is an excellent info. I doubt they have anything like 1,000 names on their email subscriber list, but they are all also previous donors.

Friday:

Nonprofit Tech Consultants Affinity Group: Left--too much going around the room listening to people talk about how they got into the field.

Community Technology Centers & Programs The once-federally funded CTCnet has lost much of its federal funding and is now lacking an ED. This was one of the sessions where the audience, notably some of the important people (I gathered) in the CTC field, basically took over the whole session and the kids who were trying to run it were out of their league. They kept trying to say damage control things, but really, they have lost their momentum. Consequently, I'm not at all sure what these people will be able to do for us as we move into the CTC fold. But there are two very important orgs in the area that ARE doing the community technology center thing, and I know who they are and how to contact them, so that will be one of the first jobs once I'm at work for WEM.

IT Budgeting: Templates for IT budgets This session fit right in with the financial management session from the Duke course. I now understand accrual basis for accounting, and also how to project costs for IT into the future of the equipment. The session puts some very basic items that most people don't think of onto an excell-like template and puts out some information about the steps involved in coming up with a budget projecting three-to-five years into the future. With these two courses, I'm feeling much more solid in the whole finances field. I know that I don't want to handle our finances or do the bookkeeping, but I have a much clearer idea of what our financial person is going to do.

Effective management of online collaboration tools What somebody said at the end of this session is that this is much more about project management, any project management, than it is about collaboration. But the slides were funny and effective, and available at their wiki, once you join the community. And a really funny video about herding cats.

Networking and Friend-Building I know this is an essential part of any successful nonprofit, and any successful consulting job. I watch other people just zip in there and before you know it, they are exchanging cards and promising to get together and thinking their careers will go forward with this contact. There are times and places where I'm better at this than others, but the techie crowd and a huge conference is not one of them for me. I went wanting to meet the people behind the names on my email lists, where I've learned so much in this field. I saw one from a distance, met one really, and actually talked to one. I made one lunch friend and he gave me some good advice and we exchanged cards. Another fellow, from the Dallas Central Ministries, I will contact since they are already doing what we want to do at West End Ministries.

All in all, I'd say that I focused most of my efforts on sessions that are directly relevant to West End Ministries, where I'll be working for the next year. That's appropriate, I think, though I'm so attracted to the GIS, wireless and radio possibilities that maybe at the next conference, the Grassroots conference in Lowell, MA in June, I'll be able to explore some of the edgier ideas.

Multiple Channels

The other day, I received the Christmas newsletter that my friend in Oregon sends out every year. It came in the snail mail. Even though I had received it a couple of months ago via email, I had never read it. But when it came in an envelope, I opened it and sat down immediately to see what my friends have been up to.

Reflecting on it today, I realized that this is a similar situation to that of my Sunday Salons. Since mid-January, I've been inviting like-minded people to my living room to see the photographs from last year's trip around the world, taking it country by country. I have a set of email addresses over at gmail, and I set the event up on my Google calendar. I invite folks from there.

I know, however, that Paul and Jackie rarely open their email, and that both of them are plugged directly into their cell phones wherever they are. So I call. Now that I'm thinking about it, hmmm...I wonder if I could do a wholesale text message reminder to the people with cell phones? That might reinforce the event in their minds.

Now, I've got a small living room, so I don't really WANT a surge of salon attendees, but the point, both for me with newsletters and for Paul and Jackie, is that our contacts, our networks can very easily operate on several channels at once. Super computer saavy folks like me might still want to read that newsletter from a piece of paper held in their non-virtual hands. Some people might need a couple of emails to get my point, while others would simply feel spammed.

What may be coming is that in addition to asking for your name, address, phone fax and email, we'll be asking people which is their preferred channel. Some people really don't want a phone call, while some, it's the only way to make connections. It may be true that the key to reaching out and touching someone is knowing which of their stations to tune in to.

VISTA and Worlds Touch

I'm not sure how much of this news has already leaked to my vast readership, but I wanted to announce officially that I'm starting a year's contract with Volunteers in Service of America (the VISTA program) to provide technology services to a local neighborhood organizing agency called West End Ministries.

WEM has all the characteristics of an outfit that Worlds Touch is always searching for: It is small, it is grassroots (though my partner and friend Gilda claims that this word won't translate in some parts of the world because it'll come out as fodder or in the dirt or something), and it is already successful. WEM has worked with the local police to reduce crime in the neighborhood by 40 per cent, and has kept that reduction over several years. It has a thriving thrift store, a soup kitchen, girls and boys clubs, and has recently bought a building that is going to serve as a community center. This winter, the three pastors who make up the core of the effort, along with the board of directors, decided that the homeless women in town needed someplace to spend the winter nights. So they opened a shelter in the basement of the community center. The shelter is temporary, but the dedication to addressing the problems of the poor in this neighborhood is permanent and strong.

So what can Worlds Touch (aka travelertrish and company)do for these folks? Like most charities, WEM can use technology to raise money, to improve communications, and to manage information, and we've planned to address these issues this year. They would also like to see a computer center for elders and other community members, if we have time, and if we can find the money for the startup.

I head to Atlanta for training the last week of April, and then start the job on May first.

I'm pretty excited about this opportunity. The executive director of WEM is what we learned in my Duke course in people skills to call "a connector." This is someone with superior social skills, someone who knows a lot of people and a lot of people know him. I'm looking forward to working with him and to building a network of supporters for WEM's technology initiative. It will be a showcase of what we can do for this type of poverty-fighting organization, and I'm hoping it will help expand the number of people who support Worlds Touch, who are willing to volunteer their time and energy for our mission, and who can see, first hand, why we also need to bring these kinds of tech improvements to our friends in the developing countries.

Trish World Traveler

Trish World Traveler, originally uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg.

Beth's photo of me at the conference

Debriefing the Conference

Deborah Elizabeth Finn, one star among many that I didn't get a chance to meet at last week's NTEN conference, has posted a call for debriefing comments about the conference.

Actually, I'm all set up today to go through the huge packet of advertisements, business cards, conference slides on the jump drive they gave us, and notes for just that purpose, so this is timely.

I agreed with DEF about the information management issues, not having everything on one page with times and locations. I also found it difficult to find some of the conference rooms, the map in the front of the conference booklet being relatively unreadable. I also missed the usual conference giveaway of a pad of paper for taking notes. I picked up a tiny one at one of the vendors' booths, but really, I needed a notebook and left mine at home, thinking erroneously "Oh, that'll be in the registration packet."

This was my first NTC, and I did feel a bit like a very small and invisible fish in a large pond full of glittering superstars. I had hoped to meet all my heros and heroines, and I did manage to meet three: Bill Lester, Beth Kanter, and Teresa Crawford. Teresa spearheaded the very small circle of international techies and orgs with a dinner on Wednesday night. In one way, I'm glad there wasn't more INTL focused sessions because I'd have been torn between attending those and making it to the practical sessions for my upcoming VISTA project in a US neighborhood organization called West End Ministries.  I didn't find it possible to meet the others, probably because I didn't have a clear plan or strategy or elevator speech or intro brand to put forward.   

Yesterday, on reflection, I thought that at some point, I'd like to do a session on International eRiding with a focus on getting international gigs on the fly, something I've done in Nepal, India, Cambodia and New Caledonia over the past three years. I know of one or two others who do this kind of work-- just go, and see where they can be useful and helpful-- and it might be fun to think about sharing this experience with the larger community.

I learned a whole lot at the conference, however, and I want to stress this.  Because this was done on a total shoestring, I stayed with friends and so wasn't able to attend the social events or even the speakers, as I didn't arrive before 10 am and had to leave at 5 because of where my friends lived. So what I got this time was sessions.

I'll be reporting on those later today and throughout the week, and on how they directly speak to Worlds Touch and our upcoming project at West End Ministries here in High Point, NC.