As 2013 is getting ramped up, one of my goals (again) is to take full advantage of the time I have and be intentional in how I spend/invest it.  I’m sure I’m not alone in this pursuit and want to share several cool tools I’ve found that help me make the most of my time.

SoundGecko logo by Diesel Laws

SoundGecko

Imagine you’re sitting in traffic and using that time to catch up on the latest nonprofit blog post or New York Times article.  I know what you’re thinking – don’t check your phone while driving. Exactly my point… May I introduce SoundGecko. It’s a web based service that will convert any website, RSS feed, or pdf document into an mp3 format you can listen to. I personally love the iphone app that allows me to listen to articles as I scurry about the Austin traffic but SoundGecko will also let you listen from your computer, Android device or GooglePlay.  One of the best features is the GoogleChrome add-on. With one click Soundgecko captures the website content and sends it straight to my account where I can listen from my iphone. The technology still has a few snags, sometimes things aren’t said with the tone or inflection we would use in conversation, but 90% of the time I have found this app to save me a few minutes.

Lastpass

The next tool has been so helpful in keeping me and my plethora of user accounts organized.  It’s called Lastpass and is an online password management tool.  It remembers your passwords for you (safely!), keeps your accounts organized with folders, and allows you to share logins. I have also found it to be extremely intuitive and user-friendly. I’m looking forward to trying out the Premium features that will allow me to go mobile with my password security ($12 a year).  No more fumbling for account log-ins, setting and re-setting passwords, or risking security by writing down all your passwords. And if you’re anything like us here at Greenlights, you want to keep your organizations’ access to passwords safe and secure, but also allow multiple staffers to access sites they need.  Lastpass has a feature that allows you to securely share log-ins without sharing the password itself. Personal and professional use!

Have you used any of these tools/services before?  If so what did you think about them?  What other free tools are you taking advantage of to make the most of your time?

Are you looking for a way to spice up your presentations and reports? Perhaps you just want some fun ways to collaborate with colleagues or clients? If so, you might enjoy my favorite free (or low-cost) data visualization tools. First of all, big thanks to Susan Kistler, Executive Director of the American Evaluation Association, for sharing these with a wall-to-wall, standing room only crowd Eval 2012. It was my favorite session by far! Her list was even more expansive; these are just my top ten.

Paloma Faith from Visual Journalism

1. WallWisher is a site where you can create your own post-it wall to brainstorm, collect feedback, share stories, or simply make lists. As the owner, you can move the notes around and group however you see fit. Here’s a sample of my friends and I sharing some of our favorite birthday memories. (Double click anywhere to add your own story!)
2. Office Timeline is a free add-on that helps you create dynamic project timelines in PowerPoint. It’s perfect for multi-month or multi-year projects and super user friendly. View samples here.
   

   Lincoln Tagxedo by Glenn Wiebe

3. Poll Everywhere gives you instant feedback using interactive, live audience polls. If your phone can send text messages, you can vote! The service is free for up to 40 people. We’re not live, but I’d still love it if you answered my very serious poll question here. Thanks in advance!
4. Pinterest. Everyone knows about Pinterest by now…right? (Alanna’s page is one of my favorites to follow.) But did you know lots of folks are using the site to create online pinboards to share and curate information regarding their work? Check out this one on Better Evaluation Reporting.
5. Tagxedo is a site that creates word clouds using your customized data set. You can choose from several stock shapes or use your own. It’s similar to Wordle but has a much more streamlined download feature. I just came across Glenn Wiebe’s Lincoln Tagxedo that you see on the right. Pretty impressive, non? (Speaking of impressive, Daniel Day Lewis is pretty much a shoe-in for the Oscar, right?)
6. Fiverr is a place for people online to post jobs they’re willing to do for $5. This isn’t exactly data visualization per se, but you could use the site to find someone who can photoshop an image, reconfigure a logo, or create your Facebook business page. You can also find someone who will wear a panda costume and deliver a customized message for you, so…there’s that.
7. Tableau allows you to upload a data set in excel and choose from hundreds of ways to display it. It’s also smart enough to suggest some ways for you. You can then embed your graphs wherever you like. (Note: to use the free version, you must make your data set public.) View samples here.
8. amCharts is another site that helps you display data using its interactive chart library in Java. They’ve worked with NASA, you guys!
9. Amaztype is a typographical book search that uses Amazon’s library, creating any word you select by stacking books with that word in the title. Make sense? Here’s a fun example for all you CSS fans out there. Tip: shorter words work best.
10. Visual Journalism is last but certainly not least, considering it gave me one of the best infographics of all time (Paloma Faith up there). You can’t upload your own graphics, but it gives great examples of how to “show – don’t tell.”

What are your favorite tools to display your data?

I don’t know about you, but to me the word “benchmarking” brings thoughts of enormous quantities of data, indecipherable graphs, and 50-page reports. Even with my background in math and science, and a love for excel spreadsheets… there’s only so many numbers a girl can take.

Looking at reports and gathering/comparing data can be difficult and time consuming. And to what end? For many small- and medium-sized nonprofits, these benchmarking reports aren’t even an accurate reflection of what we do each day.

Do I believe that if you can’t track it, graph it and benchmark it you shouldn’t do it? No.
Do I believe that you should blindly go about your day not thinking about what’s behind all your hard work? No.

There must be somewhere in the middle.

So then what? How do we get to a place where we can feel good that we’re improving on the stats that count? But not spend day and night manually gathering data and creating spreadsheets for everything you do throughout the day? Oh, and also not spend any money on it… Comparison does sound like the thief of joy! But it doesn’t have to be.

Here at Greenlights we’ve been talking about measuring “online engagement” — you know, that elusive metric that marketers talk about — so I’ll use this as an example of one thing you might be need to benchmark.

Pick a few key metrics.

This is often the hardest part. How do you know what’s important to look at in the first place? Think about two things: (1) your current organizational goals, (2) the resources (time and money) you actually have to do this. For example, in our online engagement metric, we could keep track of every fan, follower, retweet, mention, like and share, but with our resources, that would be impossible. Instead, each month we look at total social media fans/followers (although this number can be misleading and isn’t really a measure of “engagement” per se), and we look at referral traffic to our websites. Looking at how many people we can potentially reach and how many of them click on our content is good enough to tell us how we’re doing.

Stay consistent.

Whatever metrics you pick, keep with it. Plan on gathering this information for a period of time that makes sense (probably at least 6 months). But also plan on scheduling time to re-evaluate after this test period. Did the numbers come out as you expected? Was it much more difficult to gather than you originally thought? Is this number even still important? Reevaluate and, if needed, adjust your metrics to make sure they’re helping you reach your overall organizational goals.

Compare yourself to yourself.

If you’ve been staying consistent, the benchmarking against yourself should be relatively simple. Are you improving over time or not? Be patient! It may take a while to even see any changes over time. Just like looking at total online engagement is daunting. But instead looking at the metric of “how many people are clicking through to our site” is much more actionable. In this case use more hyperlinks and put content on your site worth linking to, for example.

Compare yourself to others.

This is where those reports come in about average online engagement, right? Not always. You can certainly look at those stats for general guidance, but you’ll often get more helpful guidance by asking your peers. One of the best ways to get anecdotal data (yes… solid examples and qualitative information does count as data) is to compare what and how you’re doing relative to organizations around you. While a research report may give you a sample size of 1,000 “medium-sized” nonprofits and tell you that you’re “in the 29th percentile for this data point,” that information is rarely actionable (or accurate).  However, small-scale comparison will allow you to say, “it looks like we’re a little behind compared to organization similar to us.” And that’s good enough to do something about. Understanding how others accomplish similar goals can tell you a lot about your own efforts’ successes.

Greenlights’ newest resource, the 501(c)ommunity is a great place to do just that. By asking questions about the challenges you’re facing, how other organizations are tackling them and what results they’re seeing, you can more easily gather information to help you make decisions. Yes, this is my shameless plug. But I truly believe that especially in this sector, it’s important to learn from one another. What’s working, what’s not working, and even how do you practically manage all of the information you’re asked to track. Helping one another will ensure that all of our metrics, whatever they are, keep on an upward trajectory!

Guest Blog by Ritu Sharma, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Social Media for Nonprofits

Ritu Sharma, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Social Media for Nonprofits

As we prepare for our first Social Media for Nonprofits in Texas, coming up in Austin on 10/23, we thought it’d be helpful to share some of the concrete insights and actionable takeaways shared by our 100+ presenters with our global audience of 4,500 nonprofit leaders and counting. And what better topic than online fundraising, always an area of interest for just about any nonprofit.

Of the $317B donated to nonprofits by individuals, currently about 15% is transacted online, but it’s growing at a whopping 35-55% a year. With Facebook now boasting over one billion active users and the “value” of a like now established as $217/year for a nonprofit, social media is clearly playing an increasingly important role in helping causes secure the support they need to maximize impact.

We all wish we could raise more money online, but are there a select few tried and true ways for making that happen without investing tons of time or money, both of which are in short supply at just about every nonprofit? Thankfully, the answer is a clear yes!

Whether you’re raising money through your website, Facebook, and/or a social fundraising platform, there are three simple things you can play with to optimize your online fundraising efforts:

1 – Make your Donate Button Shine!

When the online fundraising service, Network for Good, changed its donate button’s color from gray to red, donations immediately went up by 30%. Sometimes, it’s just that easy, so run a little experiment and systematically change your button’s font, color, and size to see what combination gets you the best results.

2 – Default Levels are Key

It’s usually important to give potential online donors default donation levels (i.e. $25, $50, $100, $250, and other/fill in the blank) to guide their generosity. But just like with the other tips, embrace data vs. gut- take the time to play around with these levels and see what maximizes dollars in the door. Every once in a while, deleting these completely can work, although that’s very much the exception to the rule, so if you don’t have any levels, integrate them into your efforts ASAP! Also, be sure to plug a monthly sustainer program to generate revenue you can count on throughout the year.

3 – Map Donations to Impact

Sally Struthers had at least one thing right: giving changes lives. But the key is helping potential supporters understand the incremental impact their contribution will have on your efforts. As Kay Sprinkel Grace says, “people don’t give to you, they give through you.” So help make their gift concrete: for instance, a $100 donation may feed 50 children in a particular war torn region, a mere $50 purchases life-saving medication for 60 pregnant women in Africa, etc. Every default donation level must have a specific impact associated with it, but toy around with how you operationalize your impact to gauge what moves people to dig a bit deeper.

We hope you decide to take advantage of these simple yet powerful tips and that you’ll join us at the Social Media for Nonprofits- Austin conference on 10/23 for more insights, tips, and tools, and we encourage you to follow us on Facebook or Twitter for more takeaways and announcements. Come see great speakers and senior leaders from leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, plus nonprofit executives from National Geographic, American Red Cross, Greenpeace, Kiva.org, Story of Stuff, DonorsChoose, and charity:water. To ensure broad accessibility, we keep conference registration fees down to about $100, including breakfast, lunch, and access to the full-day program, plus there are always scholarships available for smaller nonprofits.

Nearly three years ago, when I interviewed to join Greenlights, I presented the seed of an idea: taking what Greenlights does well in-person – convening nonprofit people to learn from and collaborate with each other – and extending it online. I wanted to create an online hub where nonprofit people can collaborate and gain access to the information, resources and connections they need.

Fast forward to today, and that seed of an idea has evolved and transformed into something that terrifies and inspires me each and every day.  I am thrilled (and still a bit in shock) to announce and share with you a dream-turned-reality: the 501(c)ommunity!

But how did we get from crazy-thing-I-said-in-an-interview to an online community developed for nonprofit collaboration?  …It wasn’t easy.

Putting the Dream to Paper

How do I describe this idea, what does it mean, what will it take to make it tangible? Through discussions with Greenlights staff, we talked about what an “online hub” means and what we wanted to achieve through this project. To create a safe, trusted, online environment for quality learning and collaboration, we felt that an online community was the best solution.

I drafted my first “online community plan” in January 2010. It consisted of a two-paragraph description and a few bullets related to goals and needs. Two years later, it had grown from less than a page to 6+ pages and included an outline of the project phases, plans for an advisory task force, and a project budget.

How will we pay for it?

Greenlights is a nonprofit organization, so, like most nonprofits our size, we don’t have a lot of extra investment income lying around to throw at new projects like this. After multiple grant proposals we found a winner with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, who were also looking to create an online community to engage with their grantees — a perfect win-win scenario.

Now that we can pay for it, how will we build it?

We dove right into researching community platforms and talking with consultants and developers. After months of research, we decided that Small World Labs could provide the solution to build our community as well as the expertise to guide us in a project that would be completely new to team.

Preparing to Launch

Once we landed on a name and acquired the URL, things started moving fast. With only five months for design, development and testing, we started discussing project requirements with Small World Labs (which resulted in a 40+ page document) while gathering feedback from our members in focus groups and one-on-one meetings. We created use cases, talked through processes and procedures, drafted tons of copy for the website and marketing materials, and I lost countless hours of sleep wondering “if we build it, will they use it?”

In August, we brought on Evelyn Galante to manage the community and started testing the site with pilot groups. In September, we launched the community to a wider audience at the 2012 Texas Nonprofit Summit.

While we’re still in a beta phase, we’ve remained on schedule and are pleased with the level of activity in the community. However, a website is never “done.” We have a variety of upgrades planned out through the first quarter of 2013, and we continue to tweak the site and our processes to improve user experience and engagement.

Got a dream project you turned into a reality? I’d love to hear about it! And I’d love to see you in the 501(c)ommunity!