I recently wrote about a donation/discount program offered by NOZA and managed by TechSoup. The team at NOZA has recently added some additional and free features for grant seekers - I took a quick tour of the website to see what I could find, and did a quick search for a pair of local foundations, The Seattle Foundation (19 results) and the Allen Foundation (15 results).

The database sees pretty speedy, and also contains a PDF link to the appropriate tax filings documents.

I can’t vouch for the completeness of the database - but it looks promising and the price is right!

You can perform a search here, and I would also recommend a quick look at their Frequently Asked Questions, too!

Terrific article available online (tip of the hat to my brother Frank for sending it along) about how Starbucks has launched a customer forum (powered by one of the tools NPower Seattle uses, Salesforce.com) to solicit customer feedback.

I’m excited about this for two reasons:

1. We haven’t used Salesforce this way for any of our nonprofit customers yet. But now that we know how it is being used elsewhere - we can add this to our list of ways to leverage Salesforce to help nonprofits better meet their mission.
2. It’s easy to forget that the people we serve can provide and seed innovation, can help us better understand the difference between how we think we’re doing and how they think we’re doing, and much, much more.

The article is worth a read, even if you don’t follow the rest of the links.

I’ve been an avid Adobe Photoshop users for years. To me it is one of the best programs out there for editing digital photos. I’ve used both the consumer version - Photoshop Elements, and the pro version - Photoshop Extended. Today Adobe announced a web-based version that’s aimed at every day people who just want to touch up their photos so they can share them with friends - Photoshop Express.

Macword has a nice article about this service at:

http://www.macworld.com/article/132715/2008/03/photoshopexpress.html

Or you can check out the Adobe news release from the Adobe site: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopexpress/?promoid=CBTVM

I’m really excited about this product for a couple of reasons, even though it is currently in Beta.

1. It’s going to be Free!
2. I get questions all the time about photo editing and program recommendations
3. And it’s Adobe Photoshop, one of the best programs out there.

Now with that said, I haven’t played with it yet so I’m not sure how good it is. But I have high hopes.

Make sure you read the requirements, you need to have a high speed internet connection and Flash 9 player installed in your browser.

If you decide to use it, let me know what you think. Either post a comment here or email me, I’d really like to know what your experience with it is like.

Ever find yourself spending way too much time hunting through menus for an option you know is there somewhere? You know what it’s called but you just can’t find it.

Well InDesign will actually let you sort your menu alphabetically. Before clicking on the menu name, hold down the CTRL + SHIFT + ALT keys and then click on the menu name. You should see all of the commands in A to Z order. Very handy. Once you clicked on the menu name you can let go of the keys, if you move your mouse over to a different menu it will also be sorted A - Z.

Joel Spolsky creates software in New York, is an author, writes a frequent blog and is an overall smart guy - I read him a lot because I almost always learn something - even though I may not always agree with him.

He’s recently written about website standards - and that’s a topic near and dear to my heart - not because I’m a coder, but because I manage our web team here at NPower Seattle - and I know how frustrating it can be for my coders to deliver a website that looks just like the design in IE 6, IE 7, Firefox, and maybe a handful of additional browsers, too. And how frustrating it is to our customers when their websites “break” - they looked great in Firefox, but not so great in IE 7.

Joel’s recent article is well worth a read - it’s a little techie, but not overly so - and it’s funny. He uses headphones, Martians, and politics to talk about some of the reasons why trying to solve this problem is hard.

And maybe that’s the key lesson: Solving browser compatiblility is hard.

I was playing around with Acrobat 8 this weekend and came across one of the best new features that Adobe has added to Acrobat in a long time. I create forms all the time, using Word or InDesign. Up til now I’ve had to either add the form fields manually, one at a time, using Acrobat or bring my PDF into the Adobe LiveCycle Designer (which most people don’t even know about) to add the fields.

Acrobat 8 has a nifty command that you can run on your PDF to automaticall add form fields. The Run Form Field Recognization command, under the Forms menu, will scan your PDF for areas that it can recognize as fields that you may want to fill out. While not perfect, it did recognize many of the fields in my PDF. And it automatically created the field and named them. In all cases it was correct too! So my Name field was for a name, Address for addresses, and so on.

I recommend giving it a try.

Have you ever wanted to seperate the contents of one cell in your data into multiple cells? For example, I have an export from my database where the name of my constituents is located in 1 column, giving me both the first & last name in one cell. But I want to do a mail merge where I can address my letter using just their first name.

Currently this won’t work because Excel has both first & last name in the same cell. So I want to seperate them into 2 cells. This is where the Text To Columns command can save the day.

If you have Microsoft Excel 2007, the Office website at Microsoft has a great video tutorial walking you through the steps of using this command. You can find that tutorial at:
http://office.microsoft.com/home/video.aspx?assetid=ES102539721033&width=884&height=540&startindex=0&CTT=11&Origin=HA102474891033

If you’re using Excel 2003, don’t worry; that command is still available to you. Watch the tutorial, the wizard steps are the same in 2007 and 2003. But you’ll find the Text To Columns command under the Data menu in Excel 2003.

And yet another tip from Tech Soup - this one about backing up all of the crucial information you have stored in Outlook. (Some Outlook users use Microsoft Exchange Server, and some don’t. This tool is for the folks that don’t have an Exchange Server!)

If you are using Outlook and your organization does not use an Exchange server, all your Outlook information, including your contacts, calendar entries, and e-mail, is stored in a personal folders file (.pst file). This add-in simplifies the oft-neglected backup of this file, by adding a menu item directly on your Outlook client, and can be set to remind you of your backup. This backup and then be stored on a file server or taken off-site for disaster recovery purposes.

And the link to get the tool!

If you haven’t subscribed to the weekly “By The Cup” email notice from the great folks at Tech Soup, you should. They arrive just about weekly, and feature tips, tricks, notices about software donations and more.

They recently highlighted a new offering in their Tech Soup Stock tool kit - Noza, a tool that allows for searching 30 million donation records. It appears to be priced well, too. Here’s a link, and the blurb from Tech Soup:

Noza Prospect Database Access

Description: NOZA is a Web-based database of charitable giving intended as a prospect-research tool for nonprofit organizations. The database includes listings for individual and company donations as well as charitable foundations. Users can research prospective or existing contributors by searching the database by donor, or they can search by cause, region, or gift amount to find the donors most likely to support their organization or project.

The information in the NOZA database is collected from publicly-available Internet sources including organizations’ newsletters, financial reports, and more. All of this information is freely available on the Internet or was available when it was gathered. If the content is still available, NOZA provides links to the Web pages where the information was found, allowing users to learn more about the context of a donation before contacting a potential donor.

Note: I haven’t used these tools yet - just passing along the tip!

PC Magazine occasionally creates a list of their top/favorite free tools. It’s worth a read to see if there are any tools that are available that might make your work better/easier/more efficient. They’ve broken those tools into several different categories -and while I haven’t used all of them - here are some of my favorites for nonprofits:

• Operating Systems
  • None of the above! Overall, I’m bullish on open source software - but choosing an operating system of any sort (Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix) based on price alone probably isn’t a great idea. If you opt for an free operating system - make sure that you’ve done your homework!
• AntiVirus/Anti-Malware
  • I used the avast! home edition for years and it kept my home computer virus free. You’ll want to check the license agreement to make sure you can use this somewhere besides at home.
• Firewalls
  • I’m also a fan of ShieldsUP! - a tool that scans your computer and lets you know if your firewall and other settings are protecting your computer. It’s speedy, effective - and if you aren’t sure of what the results are telling you - call your local tech provider to make sure you’re protected!
• Security
  • Hotspot Shield sounds terrific - it creates a VPN (virtual private network) between your laptop and the router at a public wi-fi hotspot. I haven’t tested this - but it sounds like a great option for adding a layer of security to your wireless browsing!
  • Send Shield strips out all of the tracked changes in an MS Word document - great for those documents that have had so much internal review that there might be untidy language in your final copy!
• Finance
  • None of the above! Your nonprofit should be using a tool that works for nonprofit and business organizations, not a personal finance tool.
• Office
  • Gliffy is on online diagramming tool - terrific for a mockup of a website, to show how data moves through your agency, or to figure out how to arrange your office furniture!
• Calendar and Personal Information Managers
  • Power Calculator replaces the Windows Calculator with a mathematical one - better for anyone needing more than a simple calculator.
• Backup / Synch
  • DriveImage XML. If you’ve ever had to replace your hard drive, you’ll know that even with all of your data backed up - you’ll have to reinstall your operating system, apply updates, and do the same for all of your software. An Image tool takes a snapshot of your hard drive so you can reinstall more quickly.
• Blogging
  • Windows Live Writer is a what you see is what you get tool that lets you compose and format blog postings offline - and I’ve been using it for more than a year. Simple to use - and works well with Word Press and other blog platforms.
• Video
  • Ready to start moving some of your “how to” information online? Jing will let you record what is happening on your screen so you can create a screencast to share with others.