Christine Sculati's blog » web tools

Thanks Alltop for featuring this blog on your nonprofit channel

christine — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:37 +0000

I’d like to thank Alltop.com for selecting this blog for its nonprofit channel.

If you like to stay on top of what is happening in a particular topic or issue area, Alltop is a great resource for discovering blogs. It also offers an easy way to organize blogs you read without having to fumble with RSS feeds in iGoogle or other aggregators. The site displays the headlines of the five most recent stories for each featured blog. The blogs are sorted by topic area.

Since my work thrives on filtering information and digging up “nuggests of gold,” following blog feeds helps me stay current on key topics. Once you create your own MyAlltop page, you will have a custom URL to share. My page pulls feeds across the “Good” channel and others on topics like Nonprofit, New York Times, Green and Innovation.

I am happy to share the nonprofit channel with other blogs I read like these:

Guy Kawasaki is the cofounder of Alltop.com. He is also a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures and the author of several books on marketing and innovation. His latest book is Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. Previously, he was the “chief evangelist” at Apple.

This widget features the latest blog posts on the nonprofit channel:

Bay Area open space advocates announce new technology to save biodiversity, focus support

christine — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 06:18:42 +0000

A growing number of nonprofits are using computer mapping technology to visualize and solve complex social and environmental problems and support planning, fundraising and communications. As dry as the word data sounds, streams of accessible and transparent data about our communities have great potential to spur innovative solutions for public good.

On Monday, I learned about a new interactive online mapping tool that taps unfathomable amounts of ecological data concerning the Bay Area’s undeveloped open spaces, some protected and some not, to help a coalition of open space advocates save Bay Area biodiversity. The big announcement came from the Bay Area Open Space Council on behalf of the new Conservation Lands Network. The level of collaboration and data crunching behind the effort is staggering when you take a look at the network’s product called, “Explorer.”

To check out the new tool, I thought about a hike I took last Sunday in northern Marin County.

My hike climbed the rolling slopes and oak-filled ravines of the Mount Burdell Open Space Preserve near the town of Novato. At the flanks of the 1627-acre preserve, purchased in 1977 by the Marin Open Space District and local residents, large suburban homes crept upslope, stopping at the border. Trails named Cobblestone Fire Road and Old Quarry Trail hinted of a storied past when stones were mined for San Francisco streets in 1888.

From the new Explorer mapping tool, I learned that the swath of land in and around the Mount Burdell Preserve constitutes one area prioritized as “essential” to Bay Area conservation goals.

The preserve is protected but some of the adjacent undeveloped lands are not. Honing in on the area with a drawing tool, I made a shape around the area of my hike, and with one click the system created an automated “Biodiversity Portfolio Report.” Although fairly scientific, I gathered that my hike took me through a number of vegetation types considered “conservation targets” including serpentine grasslands and hardwoods, valley oak woodlands, semi-desert scrub and a couple of rare wildflowers that grow in the preserve’s serpentine soils: Marin western flax and fragrant fritillary.

To learn more about the Conservation Lands Network, read Big Plans for Wild Lands in Bay Nature magazine by former San Francisco Chronicle environment reporter Glen Martin and visit the Bay Area Open Space Council’s blog.

Mapping resources for social and environmental causes:

MapTogether – This site offers the free Illustrated Guide to Nonprofit GIS & Online Mapping and links to several examples of nonprofits using maps as visual tools for building public awareness, communications and decision-making.
NonProfitMapping.org – Although this site has been inactive for the last year, the content is still highly relevant for nonprofits, philanthropists and journalists.
GreenInfo Network – Nonprofit that helps public interest groups, agencies and foundations develop maps and other visual communication tools.
Justice Mapping Center – Group that specializes in the use of Geographic Information Systems to better understand, evaluate, and communicate criminal justice and other social policy information.
Stewardship Council’s Youth Investment Program – This web page links to several resources and GIS maps on issues of concern to the outdoor and environmental education field.
Healthy City – Create maps of social and environmental demographics, data and services in California.

Visualizing information for social change

christine — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 21:02:27 +0000

In an information-saturated age, many of us appreciate images and graphics to help us think through complex topics and remember concepts. When I create materials using images and colorful tables to illustrate data and information, the people I work with light up. For example, a map that shows where an organization is doing its work coupled with demographics that show the socio-economic conditions of those communities can be illuminating.

With more tools out there to help us create information graphics, data has never been more appealing. Here is a roundup of online articles and inspirational uses of informational graphics:

Edward Tufte is widely known as the guru of information design and informational graphics. His website links to a feature story about his work titled, “The Minister of Information” in New York Magazine (June 18, 2007)
Watch for interactive graphics in news articles. Many news organizations and journalists are experimenting with ways to use new tools for creating interactive graphics for online readers. Take, for example, Mission Local, a news site run by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. According to this article, they created a map of restaurant health inspections that generated over 8,700 page views the day it was posted.
A picture’s worth 1,000 words – An article on information graphics for nonprofits by Big Duck.
GOOD displays a gallery of infographic samples including this one: How to Build a Small Army of Volunteers.
Data Visualization and Infographics Resources by Smashing Magazine
Interactive Timeline by Dipity
Google Public Data Explorer – Create visualizations of public data, link to them or embed them on your website.
Wordle – Word clouds you generate online (like the one above).
Take a 3-Minute Vacation and Make Art! -Blue Avocado magazine has a little fun in this article.

11 New Resources for Social Change Organizations: Innovation Roundup

christine — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:42:46 +0000

Are you seeking to innovate the ways you communicate or deliver programs and services to achieve greater good? If so, I hope this collection of new resources can help your nonprofit organization or social venture do more with less.

New Books

1. The Nonprofit Marketing Guide – High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause
By Kivi Leroux Miller with a Foreword by Katya Andresen

If you are a do-it-yourself marketer for a small nonprofit, then Kivi’s book offers strategies and tools for achieving success on a small budget. She calls her book a “real world survival guide” and makes the important point that “marketing is not fundraising but it is essential to it.”

2. Brandraising – How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications
By Sarah Durham

I learned about Braindraising at the annual Fundraising Day conference in San Francisco in June. Sarah Durham gave the keynote at lunchtime and asked us to ponder: When people hear your organization’s name, what do you think pops into their heads first? Is that what you want? Does every piece of your communications send out this message? The purpose of Brandraising is to “offer nonprofit leaders a proven approach to fundraising that puts the focus on marketing, branding and communications.”

3. The Networked Nonprofit – Connecting With Social Media to Drive Change
By Beth Kanter and Allison H. Fine

After following Beth Kanter’s prolific blog for a long time, I finally met her in person a couple of weeks ago at book party for The Networked Nonprofit at the Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland (generously hosted by Donordigital). With this new book, Beth and Allison want to help nonprofits “break out of their lonely silos and embrace social media.” Although there was a time when nonprofit leaders were asking themselves: Should we use social media? Is this just a fad? Now the concern has shifted to: How can we stay relevant in the new world of social networks?

Online Articles and Guides

4. Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide

By Idealware
This guide walks you through a step-by-step process to decide what social media channels make sense for your organization.

5. For Those Facebook Left Behind

A very basic “clip-’n’-save guide” in the New York Times to four of the most common social networking services: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Foursquare

Productivity Tools

6. 12 open source tools for nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, foundations

By Socialbrite.org
This is an excellent collection of open source tools to support your nonprofit office from CiviCRM, a constituent management system, to Audacity, a sound editing suite.

7. Springpad

This is a free personal organizer to save and use just about anything – products, ideas, notes, articles, and more. You can access everything you save to Springpad from any web browser or mobile device – it all syncs up.

8. Dropbox

This software lets you syncs your files online and across your computers. With this service (which has a free option), you store your files on Dropbox’s secure servers so that you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website. 2GB of online storage are available for free.

Interactive Tools for Building Your Case Statement
Follow the The Communications Network to learn more about tools like these.

9. The Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book

This is a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the United States

10. Obesity Trends Among U.S. Adults

When did obesity start to increase so sharply in this country? How prevalent is it today? Click “animate” to view the yearly progression, or select an individual year. Clicking on any state will take you to full details for that state.

11. Out-of-School Time Cost Calculator

You can calculate the cost of high-quality after school programs with this interactive tool by The Wallace Foundation.

Widgets for civic engagment

christine — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:58:38 +0000

Today I read a new post by blogger Amy Gahran on the News Leadership 3.0 blog of the Knight Digital Media Center (a project of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism). Her article reminded me of how easy it is for changemakers to embed third party widgets and gadgets into their blogs and Web pages to promote civic engagement through volunteering.

In addition to the widgets the author describes in the article – SearchLite by VolunteerMatch, Dosomething.org and Volunteering in America by widgetbox – another widget I recently discovered is made by All for Good, a project of Our Good Works. All for Good makes an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. I initially discovered the All for Good tool on Serve.gov, a site set up in response to President Obama’s call for Americans to get out and serve in their communities. The volunteer database is driven by All for Good.

According to the All for Good Web site, the project is driven by volunteers from Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink. As a contributor, Google is hosting the All for Good website and products.

After making a few selections for place, colors and time frame – voila! – here is a dynamic listing of volunteer opportunities available for this week in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Explosion of Social Networking

christine — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:23:27 +0000

Recently the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a new report on how adults use sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. One of the report’s main findings was that the share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years – from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to a December 2008 survey.

Overall they found that social networking is more popular for personal use than professional use, and most adults are using online social networks, like Facebook, to connect with people they already know.

Last week Facebook passed its five-year mark and now has over 150 million users (70% joined in 2008 alone). The company suggests that their rapid growth can be attributed to a safe and trusted environment where everyone can have a “voice to express ideas and initiate change.”

Several nonprofits in the U.S. are using social networking as a way to engage and inform constituents. Green For All, a nonprofit that promotes green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged is on many social media channels, including Facebook, where it has over 3,500 “fans.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a nonprofit newspaper, is using the social networking site Twitter, a platform for sharing quick and short updates. Compared to Facebook’s 150 million users, Twitter, the younger of the two, has about 5 million members, and 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts open daily.

Resources for Nonprofits:

Philanthropy Front and Center blog: A map is worth a thousand words: Guest post by nonprofit technology strategist John Kenyon after a presentation at the Foundation Center in San Francisco on February 26, 2009.
Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media – Creating Your Organization’s Social Media Strategy Map
Twestival – Feb. 12 Twitter event in over 100 cities worldwide to raise funds for charity: water, a non-profit whose mission is to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Read the New York Times article.
The Pew Internet Project Data Memo: Twitter and Status Updating (6 pages, PDF)
Netsquared shares blogs, a Facebook group page and other social media to further its mission “to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.”
Nonprofits on Facebook
Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better?
The Chronicle of Philanthropy – How Nonprofits can Build Awareness and Raise Money with Facebook, Twitter and Other Social-Networking Tools (Transcripts of Live Expert Interviews) – Nov. 2008 and Feb. 2009.
Why every nonprofit needs a social media strategy | SPURspectives
We Are Media Project: The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits
The Essential Guide to Social Media

How mission-driven organizations are using new web tools

christine — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:35:00 +0000

From blogs and podcasts to social networking, if you are having a hard time sorting out which of the emerging social media tools would be beneficial to your organization, an article published by Idealware might help. The December 2006 article reviews the numerous social media tools nonprofits and social ventures are using to build visibility and raise revenue. And a Philanthropy News Digest article I wrote called the ABCs of Podcasting highlights ways Bay Area organizations such as KQED, Cal Academy of Sciences, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture are using new web-based technologies, particularly podcasts, to tell stories and broadcast their messages to wider audiences.

Every month it seems that a new free web tool emerges. While most are free, it is a good idea to be selective since the free version might include unwanted advertisements and it will take an investment of time to learn how to use the tools effectively and build content and connections. In the San Francisco Bay Area, you can also learn about these new tools at the annual NetSquared conference, which is taking place in San Jose, California this year. Or you can hear presentations by social entrepreneurs at monthly NetSquared events in San Francisco.

I recently learned about an innovative and growing online community called New Routes to Community Health, which is a project funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. With social media, one of their goals is to promote the exploration of cultures, achievements, and challenges of immigrants.

And to listen to a collection of audio recordings about Bay Area changemakers, check out Britt Bravo’s Big Vision Podcast. Britt is also one of the organizer’s of Net Tuesday.