Have you wondered whether you should be writing “email” or “e-mail”? Should be “Web site” or “website”?

To help with questions like these, Yahoo has recently published “The Yahoo! Style Guide: Writing, Editing, and Creating content in the Digital World”, and hopes will be the definitive style and grammar guide for online writing. (To answer the questions above, they weigh in with “email” and “website”.)

The Yahoo Style Guide stands to serve as a convenient reference for grammatical questions and writing style for the web. While the free, online version is said to only contain excerpts from the printed book, it still contains enough content and advice to serve as a stand-alone reference for many users. Those interested in reading the full version can purchase print copies from several online book sellers. Here are a few of the rules included in the online guide to give you an idea:

• Don’t include the http:// before a website address or the slash (/) at the end when writing. For instance, when writing out a web address, use npowerseattle.org or www.npowerseattle.org instead of writing out http://www.npowerseattle.org/ . The “www” part of internet addresses is optional.
  
• File names should remain in all lower case letters (setup.exe), but extension and file types should be in all caps (JPEG, GIF).
• Use their word list to look up how to spell out or use tech-related words. In addition to preferring “email” and “website”, they also prefer “3D” over “3-D”, and they say that we are not supposed to use “Google” as a verb. (Use phrases like “search for” instead.)

More than just new spelling and grammar rules, the guide has a lot of great tips for writing content for the web. Visit their “Writing for the Web” section for a lot of good articles on topics like identifying your audience, search engine optimization, writing for mobile readers, gender-neutral language, and site accessibility.

Take a look through the Yahoo! Style Guide and let us know what you think in the comments. Are you an “e-mail” person? Do you have other style guides that you prefer for online writing?

Good Morning NPower world. It’s been a great first 2 weeks on the job. My enthusiasm and excitement for our work continues to grow.

As you can imagine, it’s a little overwhelming to join a new organization. But thanks to the amazing staff team, highly engaged board, generous investors in the organization and lots of patience with my zillion questions, I think I’m off to a good start.

Yesterday, I got my first view of the impact we’re having on the community. We completed a large project with our friends at the Faith Trust Institute. We revamped their website and built a backend data system. I was curious to see how we did. The site is beautiful, easy to navigate, informative and very quickly I found myself drawn into the amazing work of FTI. And then it hit me, technology doesn’t change the world, people do—our technology combined with their commitment to end domestic and sexual violence will save a life and save the world. (You can check out their site and amazing video http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org/about-us)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

-ACW

Last month Kivi Leroux Miller at Nonprofit Marketing Guide reported on the results of what she called her “donation experiment” where initially only 3 out of 10 nonprofits acknowledged a donation she’d made. Her report made a bit of a splash — the Chronicle of Philanthropy covered her experiment and asked her to be their guest expert on a weekly online chat, which also generated lots of comments on their site. Why the surprise? Because one of the most dearly held tenets of the fundraising world is that you thank your donors. Thank them often. Thank them repeatedly. So to turn over the rock and find such a low response rate out of 10 groups is a shocker.

What’s happening here? At NPower we do technology, but humbly acknowledge that technology alone doesn’t change the world, people do. To carry over into the thank you arena, technology doesn’t thank people, people do. A person pens the handwritten note on a donor’s birthday, a person composes the individualized thank you note to acknowledge a donation. People build connections to the mission of the organization so that donors want to invest. Yes, automation helps support the process, and our Web and Database consultants have helped organizations like Arts Corps and others to improve communication with donors, but technology doesn’t do it all. The organizations in Leroux Miller’s experiment learned that in a hard and very public way.

For a reminder about the importance of thanking donors and tips on how to do it effectively, see local fundraising luminary Susan Howlett’s slides and webinar recording from a presentation she developed in partnership with NPower and Communities Connect Network. The presentation is about a year old, but the advice from Susan is timeless.

Oh – and thank you!

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 

Our friends at NTEN are offering a series of trainings designed to help organizations who participate in the Google Grants program to use thier grant and AdWords more effectively.

The cost for the series is $100 for NTEN Members / $200 for Non-members

Sessions Include:

• Setting Goals and Setting Yourself Up for Success (02/25/2010)
• Evaluating Performance and Monitoring Your Google Grants Account (03/04/2010)
• Optimizing Your Google Grants Ads and Keywords (03/11/2010)
• Optimizing your Google Grants Campaign and Maximizing Your Online Initiatives with Google Nonprofit Offerings (03/18/2010)

> Register Now for Google Grants Advanced Series!

Not quite ready for the advanced series? NTEN also offers the Google Grants Beginner Series: Learning to Use and Maximize Your Google Grant.

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

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.

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!

In case it missed your attention, today (the last Friday of July) is System Administrator Appreciation Day.  While this has not been elevated to Hallmark status (yet), please take a moment to show your appreciation for the system administrator, accidental techie, or resident geek who makes all things computer possible in your office.

My grandfather was a teamster–a team of horses teamster– in the teens and twenties in South Boston. When businesses adopted gas-powered delivery trucks, he stuck with his horses. As the adoption of automobiles became more widespread, Pop didn’t budge. He waited too long to make the transition to the new technology. When there was no call call for his skills, he spent the end of his working life in the stock room of the local grocery, no doubt pondering how a man in his 50’s ended up in a job populated by teenagers in search of walking around money.

Throughout 2008, I’ve been acting a lot like my grandfather when it comes to the rise of Social Media. As more and more nonprofits started asking us about Twitter and Facebook and Ning and such, we counseled them to wait and see what happens. We’d wave our hands and say “Focus on getting yourself to a stable and secure IT infrastructure, an easy-to-manage Web site, a CRM system, and a great email marketing service.”

That’s all still true. If you have inefficient, always-breaking-down systems, all the Twittering or Tweeting  in the world is not going to make your organization better. But, in the past four months or so, I think we’ve hit a critical mass. Your donors, volunteers, and–increasingly–some of the people you serve are using the Social Web. Right now, ignoring the Social Web is missing a big opportunity for extending your reach and depth of engagement. Soon, ignoring it will be like my gradfather’s horsebound intransigence.

So, I’ve been thinking about tomorrow’s Innovation Awards Luncheon as sort of like NPower Seattle’s Social Web coming out party. We’ve invited two of the leading thinkers about harnessing the power of the new social technologies–Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li–to speak to us all about this phenomenon. There are still seats available –join us for a couple of hours that will change the way you think about the Web.

As an aisde, I should mention that one of the Innovation Awards finalists, our friends over at the Washington Health Foundation, have been gearing up their use of “Web 2.0″ tools in the past few months.–with great results. A few members of the WHF team were planning on being in DC for the Inauguration last month, so they brought along some relatively inexpensive flip cameras. The results were quick and easy to produce, and pretty darn cool. Check it out at their Healthiest State blog.