In our last blog posting for 2011 we wanted to encourage some meaningful reminiscence over this past year and what it meant for the nonprofit world and to inspire some thinking about the possibilities for 2012. Making lists and checking them twice is a time-honored way to prepare for the holidays, so we present a list of lists and the opportunity for your organization to break onto a list when they are compiled in a year’s time. We have compiled this list based on our own experience with apps, platforms, and issues discussed on these lists.
First on our list of lists concerns the ‘Top 10 Tech Tools For Nonprofits’ drawn up by the Layla Grace Foundation, a nonprofit that works with families whose children are diagnosed with cancer. For hardware, the Foundation is Apple-centric, whatever the philanthropic challenges the company faces. Social-media references include many of the known heavy-hitters, as well as Flowtown (recently acquired by Demandforce), which might not be on many nonprofits’ radars (yet).
The folks at Flowtown have compiled a ‘Top 10 List To Improve Your Local SEO‘ – a list that includes such issues as using Google Analytics, creating new content on an active blog, and seeking out guests and industry leaders to make contributions to your site. We strive to put all these practices into our own work, and we have encouraged our readers to do the same.
How often has the MKCREATIVE blog discussed Facebook this year?! We encourage you to check out our archives! But also review Nonprofit.org’s blog review of the ‘Ten Recent Upgrades To Facebook Your Nonprofit Needs To Know About.’ Your presence on Facebook can be streamlined (if you have duplicate info on Places, Organizations, and Personal pages), and your organization’s story can be emphasized via the reworked ‘Stories’ feature developed from ‘Status Updates.’
As for the communications stories of 2011, the blog for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ImpatientOptimists.org, offers the ‘Top 10 Global Development Communications Stories of 2011.’
Most of us move toward the new year with some thought to the mistakes we made in the current year. If your nonprofit is not paying attention to its online avatar, or is not prepping videos of its members’ great work, or is not developing a coherent blogging strategy, then your organization is part of NonprofitTech’s ‘Top 10 Mistakes Made By Nonprofits On Social Media.’
Video is taking on ever greater importance, so our list would be incomplete without SocialBrite’s list of ‘Eight Great Examples of Nonprofit Storytelling.’ Including this example, which highlights the fact that your organization needs some planning, not a Hollywood budget, to get its story out there:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8IEykapya4[/youtube]
We want to help your organization’s efforts make one or more of these sorts of lists next year. You can help yourself by registering for the Nonprofit Technology Network’s Conference for 2012 (NTEN) this April 3-5 in San Francisco. Early-Bird Tickets are going fast, and they can save your nonprofit over a hundred dollars for the opportunity to gather priceless information and numerous new contacts.
Was your organization on a list that we did not include? Do you know a list we should have included? Please let us know in the comments!
Finally, we wish to thank our contributors Scott Caldarelli, Don Akchin, Maria Lilly, Susan Emfinger, and Cate Nielsen for their submissions over this past year – and we wish all our readers, follower, clients, and friends a joyous holiday season! See you next year.