The statistics of Twitter’s growth since 2006 are staggering, and Twitter has every right to brag about the numbers. Although research shows that most people use Twitter to follow, not to post, that statistic should be encouraging, not discouraging, nonprofits to sharpen their skills and beef up their presence on the social-media platform. Let us […]
#Tech: Cloud Computing Campaign Highlights Benefits To And Concerns For Nonprofits
In technology terms, ‘the cloud’ is the internet used as storage space (space traditionally taken up on a hard drive in a computer) and as software server (software traditionally installed on that hard drive to run applications). The internet is not new, but using it in this way is because storing gigabytes of information for […]
#Fundraising: Online/Mobile Donations Still Need The Personal Touch
First and foremost, we must mark the death of Steve Jobs, former CEO at Apple, who died of pancreatic cancer yesterday at the age of 56. He helped build a great computing tool. He reconfigured the way movies are made. He revitalized a music industry about to die on the reef of file-sharing, and he […]
#SocialNetworks: Facebook Updates User Experience With Focus on Timelines
Last week Facebook presented its latest iteration and updates with fanfare unusual even for Facebook. The changes were announced just as Google+ wanted to open its services to everyone who wanted to subscribe, so clearly the two wanted to land some PR punches against each other. Now that Google+ has been out long enough for […]
#Tech: Pew Internet Project Breaks Down Use Of Communications Tech Across Generations
The contours of the findings of the Pew Internet and American Life Project report on ‘Generations and their Gadgets’ you probably already know: Younger Americans use more mobile devices than older Americans. Older Americans generally access the internet from a desktop computer, whereas those under 35 tend to do so with a laptop/netbook. Etc. But […]
#Tech: QR Codes Offer Easy And Appealing Access To Your Nonprofit
You’ve probably seen a growing presence of QR (‘Quick Response’) Codes in your daily life: they can be found on price labels at numerous ‘big-box’ stores, they are often included on public boards and advertisements (like at bus stops or outside sports stadia), and they are starting to show up in traditional print media like […]
#Aging: Social Networks Bring The World To Seniors
The phenomenal growth of social network sites over the last decade or so is beyond repute. But for most of those years the growth came from those of Generation X (late 20s through 40s) and Millennials (born after about 1975) – both of whose members helped build as well as use the technologies of the […]
#Communications: How Twitter Helped And Hurt The Spread Of Information In Two Recent Disasters
As social media become ever more deeply immured into our technology and information landscape, perhaps we should not be surprised that users of such media are starting to be held to standards once expected of reporters at TV stations and newspapers. On the other hand, some seemingly fine reporting about being a lesbian in Syria turns out […]