Many of the TechSoup Stock donation programs allow eligible organizations to receive a fixed quantity of discounted hardware, software, and online service offerings between July 1st and June 30th of each year (their fiscal year).  Check out TechSoup’s website for a list of donation programs affected by the fiscal year end.  Eligible organizations can maximize their TechSoup benefits by submitting your donation request before Tuesday, June 30th and then become eligible once again on July 1st.  Please note that the Microsoft Software Donation Programs are NOT affected by TechSoup fiscal year end.

My co-worker Peg has been helping us document the community impact of our services. She is off to a good start with three profiles completed:

• Friends of the Orphans (Salesforce CRM)
• The Seattle Foundation (private training)
• Treehouse (scheduled support)

We will be highlighting each one for a time the NPower Seattle homepage, but the full library (which will be growing) is available at: http://www.npowerseattle.org/about-us/tech-impact/.  Or if you will be attending the NDOA Spring Conference next week, please drop by our table to say “hello” and pick up a printed copy of the reports.

For an iPod shuffle. I posted a couple of weeks ago a link to a quick, 2 question survey. Well today I drew the first winner from the respondents of that survey. But don’t despair! You can still win, did you think I’d only have 1 to give away???

If you haven’t taken the survey, you still can. Again it’s only 2 questions and it will help NPower help your nonprofit by determining what your needs are. You can find the survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB22992K7SGQS.

Brett over at NTEN included a really cool application in his post of Things We Like (May 2009). It’s called UMapper and is a way for you to add interactivity on top of a map. I checked it out and see lots of potential for nonprofits. You can see for yourself how it works at http://www.umapper.com/.

One of the things I cover in NPower’s InDesign Intermediate training is applying effects to your shapes & frames. Corner Effects are really cool, adding a Fancy or Bevel makes things stand out. The down side of corner effect is that they’re applied to all of the corners. What if you only want 1 or 2 corners to be rounded?

Turns out you can do this somewhat easily. Adobe included a script that allows you to apply corner effect individually. The folks over at The Graphic Mac have a step-by-step post on how to use the script. Check it out at http://thegraphicmac.com/creating-rounded-corner-boxes-easily-indesign-scripts

The folks over at Layers Magazine published their 100 Hot Tips for Adobe CS4. It includes tips for Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects, and Premier Pro. That really runs the gamut of Adobe products. You can check it out at http://www.layersmagazine.com/fourth-annual-layers-100-wicked-tips.html

Many thanks to Bob over at InDesign Docs. He had this and some others in his Best Links in May post.

Boy this has been a hot topic for me lately. I presented at a conference with 2 of my coworkers last month and at a local association as a favor for my ED of the board I’m currently on.

Here at NPower we’ve received plenty of nonprofits asking about Social Networking such as Twitter & Facebook. There are so many options out there! One of the presentations we gave at the conference was Strategic Planning for Online Communications. We focused on those two services and the importance of being strategic in choosing and using Social Media as part of your online communication strategy. 

For the conference; we had 3 local nonprofits in a panel session where they talked about the Social Networking tools they use, why they selected them, and how it’s worked. It was great to hear from the front lines, so to speak. One of the participants, Sarah with the ACLU of Washington, was kind enough to tape the session. It included her, Zan from the Pride Foundation, and Jessica from Treehouse. They all provided some fantastic insight into how their organizations were using Facebook and Twitter. You can check out the video at http://sarahdavies.cc/2009/05/28/video-social-media-for-nonprofits/ (be warned, it’s about 40 minutes but well worth the watch).

Sarah also recommended a great resource that’s local, Common Craft. They produce really cool educational “video’s” on a variety of topics that you can watch free on their sight. You can also buy copies to use in your educational efforts or presentation. I’m serious looking at some of them for us here at NPower. I really liked the one on Social Networking, it hits the nail on the head. They also cover RSS, Twitter, Blogs and a lot more.

I know I’ve mentioned CreativeTech’s before. They’re a Seattle company that provided Mac support, mostly to design firms. However they also offer some great training! I mentioned before in this post a series of web-based sessions on Photoshop. Well they’ve added 3 more series, Illustrator, InDesign, and Flash. Again all of these are free and a great resource.  Like the last series, they have 1,000 spots available and are hoping to have it completely full.

Check it out and sign up at http://creativetechs.com/training/

The InDesign series started on May 14th, so I’m not sure if you can get in or not. But it never hurts to try!