Tis the season of nonprofit events! It’s a cultural tradition — gathering in ballrooms to hear about meaningful work and watch videos that make us cry and/or laugh and pull out our checkbooks.  NPower Seattle is joining the chorus with our Powerful Connections event on Friday, April 30.

The event offers a wonderful opportunity to connect with the great work NPower is doing in the community and to hear from our new ED about where we’re headed. Another draw is our keynote speaker, Scott Oki. Scott will be talking about the intersection between technology and philanthropy, highlighting the impact of efforts like www.SeeYourImpact.org . 

Please plan to join us! Registration will open the week of March 15. Check the event page on our site for details.

NPower Seattle welcomes Alison Carl White as Executive Director, effective March 10. Alison has a proven history of successfully directing teams in the areas of program expansion and implementation, operational management, and diversifying funding support – all in an effort to address critical community needs.

Alison has served for the past six years as the Executive Director for Seattle Works, a nonprofit that helps people in their 20s and 30s get involved in the community. During her tenure at Seattle Works she led teams of Board members, staff and volunteers who positioned Seattle Works as a thought leader in the areas of volunteerism and generational leadership. She also revamped programs to achieve 20% growth and created a new fee for service program to leverage staff expertise that raised over $300,000 in 5 years.

A graduate of Leadership Tomorrow, Alison currently serves on the board of directors for United Way of King County and City Club.  In 2007, she was appointed by Governor Gregoire to serve on the Washington Commission for National and Community Service and by Secretary of State Sam Reed to serve on his Seattle Advisory Board. She was selected by the Puget Sound Business Journal as a 2005, 40 under 40 award winner.

Alison has the talent, skills and passion to lead NPower through its strategic refocus and into the future. She brings solid nonprofit management experience in program management and fundraising. Alison also understands the contribution that NPower makes. As a client of NPower Seattle while at Seattle Works, Alison appreciated the dedication and support that NPower’s team provided. She understands capacity building and how to describe the role that NPower Seattle plays in advancing our customers’ abilities to meet their missions.

As we welcome Alison, we bid farewell to Gregg Johnson, our interim ED since October. Thank you Gregg for leading us through this transition time and setting the stage for our continued success!

Sharing this note from our Greater DC Region affiliate. We at NPower Seattle agree - Idealware is a great resource.

We are big fans of Idealware, a nonprofit website, which provides candid Consumer-Reports-style reviews and articles about software of interest to nonprofits. We find their product comparisons very useful and recommend them to you when you are selecting software solutions for your nonprofit. Topics covered include constituent databases, websites, email and advocacy, and a broad range of office productivity tools. They also have frequent webinars—cost is $40 for a live seminar and $20 for a recorded session. You might find some of the upcoming sessions of interest. Check out the Idealware site for more information —www.idealware.org.

Comparing Open Source CMSs: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone
Thursday January 28th, 10:00 - 11:30 PST

Getting Started with Online Conferencing
Thursday February 4th, 10:00 - 11:30 PST

While volunteers can be a great resource for maintaining or updating technology at nonprofits, they also can present unique challenges for nonprofit staff. We usually spend some time whenever we are helping a nonprofit set up a volunteer project to make sure that it is set up in a way attractive for modern volunteers, but that is only the beginning of making sure that the relationship works well.

Our colleagues at TechSoup recently updated their great manual for helping nonprofits use volunteers effectively on technology related projects. This is a great resource for anyone considering recruiting tech volunteers.

I wrote up a tip sheet on this theme a while back that may also be helpful for nonprofits considering volunteers for a tech project. The NPower tip sheet is something that I wrote up as I first started coordinating our volunteer program here, and is advice based around what I was seeing from the projects posted to our site.

If  you are looking to recruit a tech volunteer, consider NPower’s Volunteer Matching Service. Open to all members, this program allows nonprofits to post tech projects to our website to be reviewed by our volunteers. We do not have any opportunities currently posted, so your project will have their undivided attention. Here you can learn more about this program and post a project. Feel free to email me at volunteer@npowerseattle.org if you would like to talk about the program.

Screen cast snapshot

Our Web and Database teams recently completed a system for publishing and updating online store products from Salesforce to Plone for one of our customers (Faith Trust Institute). We included a short (3 ½ minute) video demonstrating the high points to help train staff on how to use the new system. See the video to generate ideas on how you might use such a publishing system, and contact us to brainstorm possibilities for your site.

Planning a software or hardware upgrade sometime soon? Don’t forget to include a plan for staff training to ensure a smooth rollout. Timely and thorough training will give your staff the confidence and skills to fully benefit from their new tools and ease any anxiety about the transition.

Leah Ankeny, our Training Manager, suggests a couple of resources on staff training:

1) For a great example of a successful upgrade and training integration, see our profile on The Seattle Foundation’s roll out of Office 2007.

2) To develop a training plan to fit the needs (and budget) of your organization, follow the tips in this Tech Soup article on replacing and upgrading technology, which include:

• How much money and effort will you invest in your training program? “Training” might consist of a few handouts if your new software only implements minor changes. It could consist of a month-long class with multiple sessions if you’re upgrading mission-critical software.
• Who conducts the training? You can assign the training to internal staff or outside contractors. Developing an effective curriculum takes a big chunk of time, so nonprofits occasionally bring someone in from the outside or send their employees to classes held at other locations.
• When do you schedule it? If you train your staff too far in advance of the software installation, they’ll forget everything they’ve learned by the time they actually need it. If you wait until after the installation, staff will have to support software that they don’t understand.

As the article says, “Being thoughtful about how much time and energy you invest in training can help ensure that your staff is up to speed on refreshed software or hardware and that your organization can get on with the real mission-based work that matters.”

Elaina Buzzell, NPower’s Senior Program Coordinator and enews technician, highly recommends this article by David Greiner on creating rock solid html emails. Elaina is elated to have lots of  links and how-to’s in one place to help untangle the snags she hits in doing our own NPowering monthly enewsletter, such as

• creating the lowest common denominator product for reader compatibility
• setting up tables to display text in columns
• working with images

If you’re wondering “Why bother with an enewsletter?”, consider this:  Greiner reminds us that despite the fact that all the “cool kids” are using social media (you can find NPower on Facebook here but no guarantee that we’re cool), enewsletters are still a dependable way to reach people. He quotes a recent survey which showed that every dollar spent on email marketing this year generated more than $40 in return, more that any of the “cool” communication channels. 

To learn more:

• Check out the Rock Solid HTML Emails article here
• See Elaina’s efforts in action by signing up the receive the monthly NPower Notables enewsletter here

Interested in hearing about new trainings, recent nonprofit Web site launches, opportunities to work or volunteer at NPower and the latest on our 5th Annual Nonprofit Technology event? We’d love to share the news and hear from you on Facebook.

Become a fan on our Facebook page!

I attended a really good training this morning offered by Kivi Leroux Miller at Nonprofit Marketing Guide. I really like her stuff (and I now have a 3-month all-access pass to her webinars so be prepared to hear more from me from this source) because she offers suggestions for best practices in ways that are easy to remember.

For example, this morning’s topic was “Writing for Social Media” and one of her suggestions was to follow the 6 G’s of Social Media, which break down into 3 ways to be and 3 ways not to be:

Be:

1. genuine
2. generous
3. grateful

Don’t be:

1. grandstanding
2. greedy
3. grabby

My ears perked up when she said about the 3 Be’s, “Do these three things and you have a social media strategy.” Aha, I thought, I know we need a strategy and if I can get there by focusing on three things then I’m a happy camper.

What does it mean to be genuine?
This is the one that grabbed my attention because often when I try to be genuine I’m pretty sure I don’t sound genuine at all.

• Kivi suggests starting by asking who you want to “friend” you so you can consider your audience regarding content, tone, or frequency of tweets/status updates.
• Next, be upfront about who’s writing this thing. Add personal details to build rapport. Give a sense of who you are as an organization and/or person.
• She also suggests picking three words that represent ways you’d like to be perceived (examples offered by the group today included friendly, knowledgeable, approachable) and writing consistently with those in mind.

Ask yourself - what’s the goal?
One other main point from today’s training is to be intentional about your goals when using Facebook, Twitter or other social media tools. Be clear about what you want people to do with the information you’re providing: Do something, Think something or Feel something. And aim for a mix of these three types of posts to best engage people, which is, after all, the main benefit of social media.

Interested in learning more? Check out these resources:

• To hear more from Kivi at Nonprofit Marketing Guide.Com, follow her on Twitter @kivilm, check out the Facebook page, or see the Web site.
• NPower Seattle will be offering a new class on Social Networking for Building Community starting in February, 2010 (exact date to be announced soon). Keep an eye on our training calendar for details, or sign up for our newsletter for updates.

Wishing you Happy “Be”ing and much success with social media!

In the spirit of Thanksgiving leftovers, it’s time for the monthly review of the top posts from the NPowering: Nonprofit Technology blog (based on page views):

• Choosing a Future of Rejuvenation: Takeaways from Paul Light’s presentation at October’s Nonprofit Governance Conference in Tacoma.
• The Path to End of Year Fundraising Success: Resources and advice for improving the message and strategy of your end-of-year appeal.
• Windows 7: Discussion on evaluating and planning for the upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system.
• 7 Ways to Change the World Video Contest: Announcement of Microsoft’s Windows 7 video contest.  The contest has ended, but you can read more about the winners in this updated blog post.
• Windows 7 Evaluation & Upgrade Resources: Online nonprofit resources for evaluating and planning a Windows 7 upgrade for your organization.  Includes guides from TechSoup, TechFlash, and Lifehacker.

Happy Holidays!