As we have all come recognize, the Internet can be a hazardous place.  As a result, you likely have different types of filters in place that help to ensure potentially dangerous email is blocked.  However no filtering mechanism is 100% reliable and malicious messages will get past this line of defense.

As a result, we as individual computer users need to be attentive to the email arriving in our Inboxes.  If something does not look right, then it probably is not.  Although the people sending these messages are smart and clever, there are some common clues that are dead giveaways:

• Security Updates: Be particularly aware of any messages that contain either an attached security patch or a link to download such a patch.  Security updates and patches are not distributed in this manner.  Your computer is likely configured to automatically update itself with minimal or no user interaction required.
• Misspellings/Odd Grammar: Messages that contain misspellings or oddly constructed grammar are likely to be malicious.  Many of these emails originate from places where English is not the primary language so, for once, our ridiculously complex grammar rules can be beneficial.
• Generic Messages: While we all send out form letters from time to time, there is typically some sort of personalization.  A common clue that the message might not be from the named sender is the lack of a signature (or the expected/standard signature).  Even mass form letters will be signed in a standard manner that should be familiar.  That said, be wary of messages that are signed by official, but anonymous, sounding people (e.g. “The IT Support Administrator”) of whom you have never heard.

The folks over at SonicWALL have collected a few examples of phishing attempts.  It is worth taking the quiz (there are only ten examples) and reading the explanations.  You can get there from here: http://www.sonicwall.com/phishing.

Let’s be careful out there …

This just in from Microsoft: a free webinar next week highlighting their Dynamics CRM tool.

If you’re shopping CRM (Constituency Relationship Management) tools, sign up to hear news about nonprofit templates for MS Dynamics CRM at a free webinar hosted by Microsoft on Tuesday, May 4th from 11am – 12:30pm Pacific Time. One of the presenters will be Shawn Michaels from NPower Oregon, an advisor to our database team here in Seattle.

Register here .  This webinar is free, but space is limited, so register today.

Last week Microsoft gathered a group of nonprofit IT Leaders to talk about unleashing technology for economic and social change. I found the sessions to be inspiring and exhilarating. As an ever optimist, I think the opportunity of the next decade is to apply our best practices thinking to solving our most pressing community needs. As we head down this pathway I see technology as a valuable tool for leveraging our resources.

Want to read more about Microsoft’s thinking, check this out. Unleashing Technology

One of the best parts of the day was the crash course on the future of the cloud. If you’re like me and feeling a bit intimidated by what the cloud is/does/could be Wikipedia has a great explanation that is easy to understand.  Cloud Computing.

I think it’s safe to say that over the next decade we’ll see continued migration to the cloud. As NPower continues to vet new technology solutions for the sector, I’m confident one of the ways we’ll gain economic efficiencies it to leverage the power of the cloud.

We want to learn from you. What are your most pressing technology needs? Is your organization thinking about the cloud? Do you see potential for creating efficiencies in how you do your work? Tell us.

-Alison

At NPower’s Powerful Connections breakfast on April 30th, keynote speaker Scott Oki will share insights about the intersection between technology and philanthropy, and the power of nonprofit technology.

Scott Oki is the Founder and Chairman of Oki Developments, Inc. and is a professed entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist, and community activist. For the last 17 years he has been focused almost full time on philanthropy, participating in over a hundred non-profit boards and founding over a dozen non-profits. Scott’s personal mission statement is “to marry my passion for things entrepreneurial with things philanthropic in ways that
encourage others to do the same.”

To learn more about Scott, see his bio on the NPower website. To learn more about NPower and to support the work we do in the community, register to attend the Powerful Connections breakfast . Register soon — seats are going fast!

Last week I had a chance to spend time with my good buddy, Diane Douglas from City Club. We were talking about how civic engagement activities are changing as technology evolves to give people different ways to be involved. She shared a great article with me called Working Wikily 2.0 from the Monitor Institute.

The article talks about the creating social change with a network mindset. It’s an interesting read, because it’s not actually about the technology but rather what the values of the technology are bringing to community activities. I must admit, it blew my mind a bit, and I’m still digesting what it could mean for NPower and the sector.

But there were a few things worth mentioning (and by the way they have nothing to do with using Twitter, FB or a wiki):

• Design your experiments around a problem to solve, not a tool. How many of us have started with the end product in mind and not the identification of issue. As NPower works to translate our new strategic framework to our annual plans, we are being especially conscious of not assuming the way we’ve always done things is our pathway forward.
• Experiment a lot, invest in understanding what works and what doesn’t and only make new mistakes. It’s scary to try new things, especially when the old things seems to be working just fine. I challenge us all to be learning organizations, to take calculated risks and not expect a different result from the same way of always doing things
• Prioritize human elements like trust and fun, in the end it’s about people, relationships and creating the common good. Don’t forget to laugh a little and say thank you for a job well done. And doesn’t a 4 o’clock popsicle break sound good?

-Alison

Back in February, I saw a great post from Mashable on how to build a landing page for Facebook and instantly thought of it as a great way to promote our upcoming fundraising event, Powerful Connections, coming up on April 30th. Here, I will walk you through the basics of setting up a landing page for your organization, and share some things that I learned while setting up ours. In this process, you will essentially be creating a simple Facebook application for your page, and you can do this with some HTML knowledge or a tool like Dreamweaver.

Facebook landing pages can be relatively complicated, mini-websites like the page for Microsoft Office, or they can be simple, like our recent page displaying the invitation to our event. Landing pages are going to be the first thing that non-fans see when they visit your site, so they can be a good tool for welcoming them and letting them know what they can expect as a fan – Walgreens’ page is a great example of this. People who are already your fan will not see this page by default, but it will be visible and accessible as an extra tab on your regular page.

While setting up the app in Facebook has several steps, the biggest piece of this project is to create the HTML that you want displayed. If you know HTML, you could build this page by hand. You can also use tools like Dreamweaver to create the code for this new page. In our case of building a page based off of the e-invitation to our upcoming event, I created the invitation in Vertical Response, our e-marketing tool, and copied the code over from there. That worked out well, since, as with an e-newsletter, building a Facebook landing page doesn’t require any CSS. There are many options for creating the code, but no matter what, you may have to make some adjustments as not all HTML tags are usable in Facebook. Here, Facebook outlines the allowed tags – I found that I only had to cut the HTML and BODY tags, and our invitation worked just fine.

You will also need to host all the pictures that you use for your landing page somewhere, and only reference their location in your code. It does not work to upload the pictures to your Facebook page, as then all of your fans and visitors will see this album of disjointed images - you can’t hide pictures that you upload to your Facebook page. Assuming that you have a website for your organization, it will well to host the pictures there. Most websites will have an images folder that you can use to host these pictures without them being visible to the public.

Once you have your code created, you need to set up the Static FBML application, which will give you a place to put it on Facebook. (There are a few other applications you can use, but this is what we used and what the following blog post recommends.) Mashable’s article has great, step-by-step instructions for how to set up this application and finish setting up the landing page. Here are a couple of additional helpful hints that I noticed while going through the process:

• Facebook limits the length of your tab’s title to approximately 12 characters - it seems to be a width measurement rather than a firm number of characters. Even when that tab is selected, the title does not expand completely. This is why I named our tab “Annual Event” rather than “Powerful Connections”.
• Even if you are not setting up a landing page, you can use the  “Wall Settings” step of the process to direct new visitors to important information, such as your information page or your cause.
• I decided to include a link at the bottom directing visitors to our regular wall.  To access the address of your wall tab to provide a link, click on the wall tab, and copy the contents of the address bar. (Do not just enter your page’s address, as that will bring them back to the landing page.) Alternatively, you could just include a sentence directing visitors to click the “wall” tab to the top.
• As this will not be obviously visible to fans, you may consider posting to your wall to let them know that you have something special going on.
• If you would like to see what this page looks like to someone who isn’t a fan, you can type in your page’s address while you are logged out of Facebook, or you can look at it using a different browser (i.e. if you use Firefox, open up and view your page in a new Internet Explorer window).

This is just an overview, but hopefully, you have a good idea of how to add these tabs to your Facebook page. Feel free to leave us any questions in the comments section. You may also want to visit some of our upcoming classes to learn more. Roughly once each month, we offer Dreamweaver Foundations and Intermediate classes which can help you learn how to use that tool to generate HTML for Facebook Pages, e-Newsletters, and websites. We also offer our Social Media for Building Community class regularly. This is a basic, intro-level class on how nonprofits can use Social Media, and is intended for nonprofits who are just getting started (no landing pages covered). Learn more about these classes and all of our offerings on our class calendar.

Before joining NPower, I spent 7 years as the Executive Director of Seattle Works. While I was at Seattle Works we enjoyed a tremendous growth in our engagement of people in their 20s and 30s. As I reflect back on what made the growth possible, I’m struck by the impact technology had on our operations. On the surface it’d be easy to think that our adoption of working in the cloud or the excellent social media strategy we employed is what I mean. The real change occurred not because of the technology we employed but the mindset it gave us to think differently about how our work gets done.

I had the great pleasure of spending time this week with our friends from Microsoft to talk about ways to increase the effectiveness of the nonprofit community through technology. Admittedly, we’re all pretty biased that technology is cool—but more importantly we agree that technology is going to be one of the game changers for the nonprofit sector in the coming years. We’re fortunate to have a trailblazer in our backyard to guide and inspire us in the achievement of our community vision of vitality for all. Thanks Microsoft!