Adobe has long produced professional software for creating compelling documents and media, but many nonprofits have been stuck by their donation policies and steep costs in the past. Many of those nonprofits are likely to be overjoyed with TechSoup’s news yesterday that  Adobe has just loosened their donation program rules to allow many more nonprofits to access their products at reduced rates. While there are several changes to their policy, one of the most biggest moves is that now more health care organizations are eligible for the discounts. In the past, only health care organizations providing services to people with disabilities were eligible, but now organizations including “nursing homes, rural medical facilities, mental health organizations, and family planning organizations” will be able to receive the discounted software as well.

For more details on their software donation guidelines, read TechSoup’s page outlining their program, and you can also use TechSoup’s new tool to help you determine whether or not you are eligible. For organizations who are still not eligible for their discounted software, TechSoup also keeps a stock of non-current Adobe products that these organizations can purchase at reduced rates.

Here at NPower, we have also seen the benefits of Adobe’s increased generosity in regards to the kinds of trainings that they are supporting financially. Many NPower clients have appreciated the 50% discount on Adobe classes over the last few years. Starting this summer, Adobe has begun to allow us to also subsidize private trainings on their products and educational coaching sessions. Now, all private Adobe trainings will also be discounted by 30% from the regular consulting rate. The discounts on NPower trainings are available to all nonprofits, even if they don’t fit into the eligibility for discounted Adobe products at TechSoup. Visit this page on our website to learn more about the discounts on our public and private Adobe trainings.

Adobe is also providing support for a wider range of training offerings at NPower, so you will see new offerings in our upcoming class schedules. On September 23rd we are holding the first of these new offerings, InDesign and Photoshop Educational Coaching. In this session, students will bring in InDesign or Photoshop projects to receive guidance and support from our expert trainer. As each student will receive a great deal of personal attention, registration to these sessions will be limited to 5 students. Keep an eye out for the October edition of our newsletter to hear the details about our Website Projects Educational Coaching offering.

Thank you Adobe for your continued support of our training offerings, and for allowing more nonprofits access to your products at reduced rates!

As a continuation to Alison’s post on Working Wikily, I am moved to share my top three take-aways from attending a webinar offered today by Heather McLeod and Diana Scearce, keepers of the Working Wikily blog and consultants at the Monitor Institute.

Peg’s Take-Aways from the Working Wikily webinar on June 8, 2010:
First, I am clearer and more able to take in the advice of experts like McLeod and Scearce thanks to a couple of reminders about the true significance of terms that get tossed around a lot:

1. Social network: people connected by relationships. Note: connected primarily by relationships, not by technology tools. McLeod and Scearce echo Clay Shirky’s advice to remember that’s it’s about people assisted by technology. I can get behind that. We certainly echo that advice at NPower Seattle, where we start every website and database project by mapping the relationships and communication needs that the technology will support.
2. Working Wikily: this one I’m making up a bit based on the examples offered by McLeod and Scearce. I think it’s an emerging way of relating and communicating whose key ingredients are greater openness, transparency and decentralized decision-making. Emerging means I get to practice, learn from mistakes, and try again, right? I can get behind that.

Secondly, I’m clearer about why I am challenged by working wikily. You bet I am. Scares the daylights out of me some days because I’m used to working with defined teams and I’m used to holding decisions kind of private until they’re “fully baked.” In fact, I place a value on more controlled and private processes as being responsible. Another challenge is that it seems to take lots of time. McLeod and Scearce shared a whole list of reasons why it’s hard, including:

• Brand and message control
• Privacy concerns
• Dealing with information overload
• Learning and leveraging new technologies

Thirdly, I see the value of working wikily. If there’s value, I’m willing to try it. I desire to make the shift not only because I am newly convinced that working wikily works, but because making the shift to relating and communicating “wikily” is what will keep the organizations I’m involved with current instead of becoming irrelevant, or worse, extinct. Thanks to McLeod and Scearce , I see that working wikily has a positive side that I’m excited about, including this list of potential outcomes shared on the webinar:

• Weaving communities
• Accessing diverse perspectives
• Building and sharing knowledge
• Mobilizing people
• Coordinating resources and action

Interested in learning more? You can follow the conversation about working wikily on the Working Wikily blog, and browse a summary article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog . And NPower’s Social Media training is a great starting point to learn more about the technology tools and how to use them effectively.

I’d love your comments, questions and thoughts here. What do you think? Can you become a convert like me and get behind working wikily? How would you describe the role of technology in social networks – is it primary or secondary to relationships?

WithinReach is a Seattle nonprofit whose mission is to serve as the foremost catalyst for improvements in maternal, child and family health. For 22 years, WithinReach has worked to ensure optimal health for Washington State families by connecting them to the programs, resources and information they need to build healthy families. Major programs include:

• Information and Referral Services through 4 statewide hotlines and ParentHelp123.org
• Nutrition Outreach Program for Basic Food (Food Stamps), First Steps, WIC
• Statewide Coalitions including Immunization Action (IACW), Breastfeeding (BCW), Hepatitis B
• Public Health Materials placed in doctor’s offices, schools, and health clinics

From NPower’s perspective, one of the key assets at WithinReach is a team of long-term staff members who are forward thinking about technology and who have worked with the same NPower consultant for the past nine years. One of the staff referred to the NPower consultant as “my hero” and all agreed that he is a trusted partner and honorary staff member.

With NPower’s assistance, WithinReach has navigated various organizational expansions and shifts over the years, and has built out their technology infrastructure in a thoughtful way. They have a stable and secure infrastructure with planned upgrade and replacement schedules, including budgeting realistically for the total cost of ownership. As a result, they are able to provide reliable and far-reaching services statewide, including:

• Internal hosting of a call center providing statewide service.
• Managing the call center and ParentHelp123 website thanks to a consolidated database.

Looking forward, WithinReach plans to stretch into new areas with advice and assistance from NPower along the way, including learning more about social media at an upcoming NPower training, exploring mobile broadcast to support virtual attendance at their annual fundraising event, and more sophisticated use of email communications to remind clients when their public assistance benefits have expired.

Thank you WithinReach for the pleasure of serving you for the past nine years, and for your work on behalf of families!

For more examples of the impact in the community of NPower’s services for nonprofits, see our library of TechImpact profiles.

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.

A wild weather day in Seattle is the perfect time to be thinking about the other Cloud… the one that according to the folks at NTEN  “is much more than a different way of getting software; it will transform the way we create social change.” If you’d like to find out more about what that means, Holly Ross will be hosting NTEN’s March Ask the Expert Session with guest George Durham, Program Manager of Global Community Affairs at Microsoft.

Some of you will remember George from the brown bag NPower hosted earlier this month about Windows 7. Here’s another chance to hear what’s ahead and ask questions about how it affects you.

Learn more and register here. (FREE for NTEN Members)
When: Wednesday, March 31st, 11 am PT / 2 PM ET
Presented By: George Durham, Microsoft

How to order donations, and where to find how-to videos:

• Are you considering upgrading to Windows 7, but have already used your MS donation for the year? No worries! Through TechSoup, Microsoft is allowing nonprofits an extra donation for Windows 7. You need to place your order by June 30th, and you can read the other “fine print” here .
• Thank you to Microsoft Community Affairs for assisting with our Windows 7 presentation last month. If you missed the presentation, check out Microsoft’s helpful Windows 7 How-To videos  .

The Confluence Gallery and Art Center has flourished since 1988 as a hub of the arts community in Twisp, Washington. The nonprofit gallery holds seven group and individual exhibits each year, showcasing the work of local and regional artists from North Central Washington. Special exhibitions draw from farther afield, highlighting noteworthy artists from the Pacific Northwest.

As participants in NPower’s statewide training and technology support program funded through the Greater Everett Community Foundation in 2008 and 2009, Confluence Gallery completed a Stable and Secure Assessment which pointed to a severe need to upgrade aging hardware. NPower consultants assisted Gallery staff in selecting a new desktop system, provided funds to cover the purchase (thank you GECF!), and procured software donations (Microsoft Windows and Office — thank you Microsoft!) to support key accounting and grant writing functions. In an “extreme makeover” story, Executive Director Sybil Macapia says Confluence Gallery is now in a much stronger position to support the administrative needs of the organization, and recently procured a much-needed grant that she links directly to the availability of that single new computer system.

Congratulations, Confluence staff! And thank you to the Greater Everett Community Foundation, Microsoft and our other supporters who make miracles like this one possible for nonprofits in Washington state.

Is your organization still trying to figure out how to use social media tools like blogs, Facebook and Twitter to communicate with clients, donors, funders and community members?

Are you wondering if it makes sense for you to blog or tweet about your services, news and events?

NPower has teamed up with Philanthropy Northwest to help you explore how Social Media can support your organization’s communication and advance your organization’s goals. Join us for the first offering of this exciting class on Wednesday, February 24th.  In Social Media for Building Community, you will:

• Articulate your organization’s goals, identify messages, and explore social media tools.
• Evaluate the time needed to employ new communications tools vs. their value for your organization.
• Learn practical strategies for effectively connecting with various constituents using Web 2.0 tools.

Join us for Social Media for Building Community on Wednesday, February 24th. Learn more and register to attend at npowerseattle.org/socialmedia

Adobe, through TechSoup, is offering Photoshop, Creative Suite Design, and some of its other titles for Macs in a special promotion. These products are available to organizations that are not typically eligible for their discounted software, including health care organizations and schools and educational institutions. In addition to the Mac software, there are a few books on their software available through the program which can be used by Windows users. Here is the TechSoup page, which outlines this special offer.

We also have some Adobe classes for nonprofits coming up (all taught on PCs), and thanks to Adobe’s generous funding, these are all offered at half of the regular tuition rate:

• Photoshop Intermediate - February 9th at 9am
• Dreamweaver Foundations - February 16th at 9am
• InDesign Intermediate - February 17th at 9am
• Photoshop Advanced - February 18th at 1pm

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.”