Nonprofit Blogosphere Roundup #2

Here is a summary of what nonprofit bloggers have been writing since my last roundup:

Social Networking

Are you looking for ideas on how to improve your organization's profile on MySpace? Mara of Democracy in Action wrote an article about MySpace Best Practices for Nonprofits.

Interested in learning how nonprofits, advocacy groups, or politicians can use websites like MySpace or YouTube? Bonnie of Development Seed brings up some good points about this topic in her article titled Should MySpace be your space?.

Credit Unions are also using MySpace. There is a great discussion about this topic at MySpace for Credit Unions.

Website Accessibility/Web Design

Some of my readers might remember an entry I wrote in February titled Target being sued over inaccessible website. This is in the news again and nonprofit bloggers are writing about accessible websites. These entries include Is Your Web Site Accessible? and Website Accessibility.

Is your website effective? Betsy of Betsy's Blog writes about this topic in her entry titled A Note About Effective Websites.

Are you interested in learning more about RSS or creating your own RSS feed? There is a great article about this topic on Blue Sky Collaborative's Fundraising Blog titled RSS is an opportunity for nonprofits. It has a brief introduction on what RSS is, information on how RSS is a powerful tool for nonprofits, and a step by step guide on how to create your own RSS feed.

Other Topics

Are you visiting another country or city and interested in learning about the nonprofits in that area? Marc of the npMarketing Blog was planning a trip to Ireland and wrote an entry titled NPO Marketing in Ireland about organizations in the area.

Also on the npMarketing Blog you will find an entry about some topics he learned about at the Games for Health Conference he recently attended. Marc hopes to bring The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society into the gaming scene.

Are you interested in a fundraising project that involves art? The blogger of the fundit is interested in this and wrote an entry about the project that The Urban Forest Project is doing in New York.

SOS Community Services , an organization that serves homeless families and children in MI, posted a blog entry titled Helping Homeless Families Over the Holidays about ways for groups and individuals to get involved in helping the organization during the holidays.

Jeff of the Donor Power Blog wrote an entry titled Three ways to make email work for nonprofits . He points his readers to E-Mail Energizes Nonprofit Efforts, an article in DM News about ways e-mail can help nonprofit marketing and fundraising and has examples of what nonprofits have done with e-mail.

Through the ASPCA Blog, I learned that ASPCA has a website for education, by reading the entry titled Educators and Parents: Teach Kids About Emergency Preparedness. ASPCA Education has resources for educators and parents about learning to care for animals in homes and communities. This blog entry points us to their resource about pets and emergencies.

Web 2.0 in Education

Using Web 2.0 technologies in an educational setting is a topic I am very interested in. While researching this topic, I discovered two education blogs.

The first blog I discovered is called Education as a Conversation. This blog contains lots of information about web 2.0. One of my favorite entries in this blog is titled Social Software and student collaboration: blog, wikis, and del.icio.us groups . This entry describes how a class divided in groups can work together in their group using these tools. Another interesting post on this blog is about social bookmarking and tags.

The second blog I discovered is called Word of Mouth Blog. I came to this blog by learning about The 19 Best Elearning Blogs post. While browsing the blog, I read the newest post on the blog titled Elearning 2.0 is About People.

Nonprofit Blogosphere Roundup #1

Here is a summary of what nonprofit bloggers have been writing about in the past few weeks.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had a Cat Photo Contest. In their blog, they posted pictures of the 2006 Cat Photo Contest Winners. The ASPCA blog just started using tags in their blog.

Celeste at Studio 501C wrote about a guide for nonprofit publications. This guide is called PR 2.0 Essentials and "it would be helpful to nontechies in nonprofits who want to learn how to interact with external audiences through social bookmarking, RSS, blogs, podcasts, and more."

The Artful Manager wrote an entry about planning presentations with links to resources on this topic.

There was a recently a Blogathon where bloggers raise money for charities. One of the charities that bloggers raised money for was First Book, a member of the Nonprofit Blog Exchange. They wrote about the results of the Blogathon in their blog. Nine bloggers blogged for First Book and they raised more than $2250 for the organization, which will buy over 900 new books for children in need.

The Wellspring, a blog about youth affairs opportunities in Australia & the United Nations (UN), wrote a series of entries about developing your own website - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Care2's blog, frogloop, has an entry titled The Value of Planning which is about a recent article on GetActive about e-mail communications .

Network for Good has a new study titled "Impulse on the Internet: How Crisis Compels Donors to Give Online." Beth of Beth's Blog wrote a blog entry about this study at her entry titled Network for Good Study of Disaster Giving.

While on the topic of disasters, Where Most Needed has an entry about a recent report about the Indian Ocean Tsumami. This entry can be found at Tsunami Report Calls for Accreditation of Charities.

Are you interested in making your website more donor friendly? Jeff of the Donor Power Blog wrote an entry on this topic titled Nonprofit Diseases: Web Blockage.

Resources from July

I am still catching up on my reading from July. Here are a few resources I would like to share with my readers.

• Using the internet to raise serious money for your nonprofit organization is a book about using tools like websites, blogs, podcasts, and other technologies to fundraise
• Your Attention Please is an article from BusinessWeek about companies/nonprofits using new technologies
• Web 2.0 - it means more than blogging
• Ten Ways to Use Web 2.0 to Change the World
• Pew Internet Bloggers Report

Tips for letting your visitors know about your updated website

Have you recently updated your website? How can your visitors know that you have updated the site?

There are two things you can do-

1. Add a page for what's new and link that page to your index page.
2. Have a section on your index page listing and linking the content of the website that is new.

What other ways can you think of?