Training is often the boost I need to adopt a new technology solution. And I love a deal. If you’re like me and you can squeeze in an 11:00 a.m. webinar on August 11, sign up for TechSoup’s free webinar highlighting GrantStation. Then, if you discover that GrantStation is a good fit for your fundraising program, you can take advantage of the discounted membership available through TechSoup on August 17 and 18 ($99 membership, for a savings of around $300).

At NPower we love to share what we’ve learned.  So I’ll be back next week with a review and highlights from the GrantStation webinar. You’re invited to join in with your comments and observations — please do!

Here’s the webinar announcement from TechSoup:

GrantStation, Your Fast Track to Fundraising — August 11
Wednesday, August 11, 11 a.m. Pacific time

Join Cynthia M. Adams for a free webinar that offers a short tour of the GrantStation website. Learn how to use the tools that GrantStation provides to help you identify the right grantmaker for any program or project.

If you’re interested in learning more about GrantStation before the TechSoup special offer on August 17 and 18, this tour will help you understand whether it’s the right tool for your organization and how to get started. The discounted GrantStation membership through TechSoup is only available to eligible 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations.

Register now!

Earlier this week our friends at Microsoft Community Affairs hosted a webinar to show nonprofit organizations What’s New in Office 2010.  Product Manager Markus Weickenmeier and TechSoup Staff Writer Elliot Harmon walked the participants through the compelling new features in Office 2010.

Through our Scheduled Support customers, we are seeing a lot of interest in Office 2010 with many having upgraded already or making plans to do so.  Before diving into the presentation and demo, a quick Live Meeting poll was conducted to see what version of Office the participants were using.  The results showed that almost 20% (out of 253 responses) have already upgraded to 2010 with 44% and 27% on 2007 (or 2008 for Mac) and 2003 (2004) respectively.  It’s interesting to see a more aggressive adoption of 2010, compared to the slower migration to 2007.  I suspect that this is being influenced by the upgrade of older Windows XP computers to newer desktops running Windows 7.

Getting back to the webinar, below are some the new features and capabilities that stood out for me:

• Online Collaboration: Office 2010 allows for online document collaboration regardless of location – across branch offices, from home, while travelling, with volunteers or board members.  This is supported in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, although the implementation varies by application.  For Word and PowerPoint, co-authoring is provided through the desktop application.  Spreadsheet collaboration is accomplished using the free Excel Web App.  OneNote supports multi-user access in both the desktop and web applications.

• Social Connector: With the Outlook Social Connector, you can synchronize Outlook contacts with social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Windows Live, and SharePoint.  When one of your Outlook contacts updates their profile on one of these sites, this information will be available in your address book.  Beyond the social aspects, the Connector allows you to quickly view your history of email, meetings, and attachments with any contact, which can help with that needle in the haystack search for a piece of information that you desperately need to locate right now.  Some of the features are still in Beta, but the Facebook Connector is currently available and supports earlier versions of Outlook (2003/2007) as well.

• Photo/Video Editing: With the new built-in features, you can easily clean-up a picture or trim a video directly within Word and PowerPoint.  While not as robust as stand-alone photo or video editing software, this in-house capability greatly simplifies the process of doing minor touch-up to increase its effectiveness in a report or presentation.

• Presentation Broadcasts: PowerPoint Broadcast Slide Show allows you to easily share a presentation to a remote audience.  From the comfort of your desktop, you can broadcast a slide show that participants can quickly connect using their web browser or smartphone.  Using the video export feature, you can convert your presentation into a video suitable to be burned to DVD or shared online.

Thanks to Microsoft and TechSoup for putting this webinar together.  If you were not able to join the live event or would like to view it again, Microsoft has posted the presentation materials online at http://bit.ly/ngowebinar.  In addition, TechSoup has posted a blog about the webinar, including resources to learn more, at http://bit.ly/officewebinar.

Have a great weekend!

Update: (7/21/10) As of today, the TechSoup/Microsoft webinar on Office 2010 is FULL!  A recording of the webinar will be posted online after the event.  You can access it, along with other Microsoft Community Affairs webinars, at http://bit.ly/ngowebinar.

Join Microsoft Community Affairs on Tuesday, July 27th for a sneak peek of what’s new in Office 2010:

Event Title: Microsoft Office 2010: What’s the latest & why we like it

Event Time: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM PDT

Event Description: The latest version of Microsoft Office was released to the world last month. Should you upgrade? Should you care?  In this FREE webinar, co-hosted by TechSoup and Microsoft, nonprofits and public libraries can see what’s new with Office and why there may be some compelling reasons to make the switch.

Elliot Harmon from TechSoup, author of What Your Organization Should Know About Office 2010, will be joined by a Microsoft Office expert to highlight some of the new features like Web Apps for improved online collaboration, the Social Connector tool to bridge your Outlook to social media tools, as well as improvements to built-in image and video-editing features throughout the suite. In addition, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of upgrading at your organization, compatibility with older versions of the Office suite, and how you can go about upgrading your donation through TechSoup or Microsoft Software Assurance.

Register now!

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.

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

Looking for free online tools to help you collaborate with teams and communicate with stakeholders?  Wish you could access those tools across different devices (home computer, smartphone, and work computer)?

Check out this free webinar from Microsoft Community Affairs: Free Online Tools for Nonprofits on March 16

This free webinar will highlight free online tools from Microsoft that help nonprofits communicate and collaborate with ease.  Attendees will learn to:

• Set up an online site for your group with a shared calendar, file- & photo-sharing (25 GB free!), and online discussions
• Create online workspaces to manage projects and facilitate Board or committee work
• Easily create blog content and publish it toWordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live and many more
• Create movies and slide shows from your photos and videos and share them with your supporters on YouTube or DVD

We’ll look at free tools available to any organization.  While we won’t have time to go into detail on each tool, you’ll get a good overview of what’s out there and how to get started.
WHEN: March 16^th, 10am - 11:30am PST
Attendance is free, but space is limited, so register today!

NOTE: Webinar is open to nonprofit staff and volunteers.  It is NOT technical in nature and there are no pre-requisites to attend.  Nonprofit organizations need not be eligible for Microsoft software donations to use the tools featured in this webinar - they are freely available online.

Thank you Microsoft, host of this webinar and Presenting Sponsor of NPower Seattle’s Powerful Connections event 

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

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