Non Profit IT Department

I are still here.

Tim Laughlin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:31:52 GMT

It has been a long time since I have contributed to this site. I am going to make an effort to at least keep up this blog section. So where have I been? Well the real job and family have been keeping me busy. As well I have been assisting a few folks with their Google Apps for Non Profit setups. As I offered before you can request setup assistance and I will try my best to assist. Please remember you must be in the United States be a registered 501c3. I unfortunately I do not have the time to assist folks who are not non profits.

A lot of new and excite technologies are emerging out there for Non Profits. I will recap them individually in future posts, In the mean time don't forget Google and all there offerings.

VerticalRespone has a very generous Non Profit pricing discount.

Tim Laughlin — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:16:19 GMT

A non profit I have been working with inquired about the best way to send bulk e-mails to their members and web site visitors. Like all responsible web citizens they want to make sure they conformed they conformed CAN-SPAM act. As well they wanted to ensure they where respecting their constituents expectations of a good Internet citizen. This included, double opt in, easy unsubscribe.

Furthermore, the non profit wanted to make the process of sending messages was easy to manage and to track it success. I narrowed the field to three choices, Vertical Response, Consent Contact and Bronto.

In general Vertical Response came out be the least expensive option, even at the full retail price. However, the real story for 501(c)'s is the inclusion of 10,000 outbound messages per month for free. For the non profit I am working with this will probably be the only thing they will need. However, if the 10,000 message isn't enough they can buy addition message unit at significant discount.

Vertical Response also has surveys. I have not looked into those as of yet. However, the discounted prices also apply to surveys.

I just want to thank Vertical Response for providing this kind of program to Non Profits.

Kevin Sproles - Entrepreneur of the year?

Tim Laughlin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:57:43 GMT

Kevin Sproles is the CEO of Volusion and he is on the short list of Entrepreneur of the year. Volusion is a very non profit friendly company offering their hosted E-Commerce solution to qualified Non-Profits at no charge. Of course the are not as big as Google and Salesforce, so they can't offer as many grants, but they still do a great job for giving back. They give away 10 new stores a month to Non-Profits, that is a very generous offer!

As to technology I recently set up a store for NOAH, a Non Profit I do a lot of work for, using Volusion. Does everything that I can think of. Inventory addition was painless, order fulfillment is painless. Overall, pretty painless.

So to show our support of Non Profit friendly companies like Volusion, please cast a vote for Kevin.

A Gadget to keep your members involved

Tim Laughlin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

So have your web site up, or even better your community site. You have few people who visit everyday. They write their post get involved and are stars of you community. Then the large majority just come back when the think of it.

Slowly they disappear.

We have a client (NOAH) who has this issue with their Community Sever site. Community Server like most community sites provide RSS feeds for different content sections. The web savvy add the feeds to their feed readers. However, a large majority are not that savvy. In comes the Google Gadget that we built, with a lot of borrowed code.

Users can add this to their Google homepage and see updates when the want without having to go to the site directly. Add to that Google Donate (Support NOAH) tab. Keep them involved.

If you would like something similar let us know and we can work with you to customize for your needs. Or if want the source let us know and we will be happy to get for you. If you have other ways your using Google Gadgets promote your mission please share.

Have us set you up on Google Apps for free

Tim Laughlin — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:05:00 GMT

The Offer

For a limited time Non Profit IT Dept will assist qualified 501(c)3 get setup on Google Apps for free. Google has been offering Google Apps Educational Edition to non profits for free for quite some time. We would like to honor that example as along as we can financially do so.

The Reason

We have been focused on showing Non Profits what IT tools are available to them. We’ve tried to explain the benefits of using them. Many of you have seen that products like Google Apps could be quite useful. However, you just don’t feel comfortable with setting it up with out some assistance. We know how set up and we can do it for you.

The Process

Please fill out the form below and we will contact you on first come first serve basis. If you are a qualified 501(c)3 then we will evaluate your current configuration and more than likely be able to work with you to move to Google Apps. direct link to Request Form

Free Donation processing using Google Checkout

Tim Laughlin — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:42:09 GMT

Without donations most Non Profits would not be able to provide their services to the community. Google recognizes this and is doing their part help. They are offering Google Donate, part of Google Checkout, with no fee transactions through until 2009.

Adding Google Donate your web site is very easy. Google also makes it very easy for the your non profit to verify their status and begin collection donations with no fees. What does mean? You can now accept credit cards for donations and not have to pay any setup fees or transactions fees. Google is offering free processing through December 31, 2008.

If where to setup a credit card donation section on you web site you would need to obtain a merchant account. Have someone build the application, and buy a SSL certificate. With Google Checkout you only have to copy and paste their code into any page you want. If you group has bloggers with their own blogs you can ask them to display your Google Donate button.

Set is simple:

Go to https://checkout.google.com/seller/npo/ and read all the details.

Google for Non Profits announced!

Tim Laughlin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:36:00 GMT

Google as launched a site for non profits. At this time there are no new services announced. But this is a great one stop shop for everything Google related to not for profits. Google for Non Profits was announced on Google.org Blog. So sign up the the Google Group and stay tuned. This is how big things a Google start with little one page sites! Plus now we have an index for our posts. We will keep trying to bring you all the great news from Google and all the other IT vendors who help the Non Profits succeed at their goals.

Pembroke Academy Team Discovery

Tim Laughlin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:22:00 GMT

Team Discovery is the First Team for Pembroke Academy, in Pembroke New Hampshire. They are in need of financial support to get the FIRST National Event in Atlanta on April 16, 17 and 18th.

FIRST is a Non-Profit that with mission of:

Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication and leadership.

How does first accomplish this goal? To sum it up they get teams of High School students to built some amazing robots designed specifically to participate in this years challenge. Please visit the FIRST site and see some of the amazing robots these students are creating.

Team Discovery participated in the Granite State Regional completion and WON! So now they are eligible to compete in the championship. Of course this cost money, and given the short time line has made this a very big challenge. That is where we started to help Team 134. To think that we can do this alone is unreasonable. However, we are doing what we can.

Team 134 had no web presence; so our first goal was get them a domain name a set up a web site. Then we went into our bag of trick and started throwing our free resources at the problem to date we have done the following:

Registered firstteam134.org, which was done during the setting up for Google Apps for Domains.
Signed up with Google Apps for Domains
Set up Graffiti CMS, under their free license.
Signed up with Google Checkout to collection Donations
Add some content, lots more to do here.

Good luck to Team Discovery!

P.S. Non Profit IT Department will be hosting Teams Discovery's Google Donate button until their competition in April.

SalesForce integration with Google Apps?

Tim Laughlin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:44:19 GMT

I know we have not covered SalesForce.com on this site. That is primarily due to a lack of time. SalesForce.com is very generous to Not for Profits. To understate what they do, they are a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). They, like Google, are a hosted system and thus no software to install.

We promise there will be posts forth coming on SalesForce.com.

However today's buzz that it seems that something is brewing between Salesforce.com and Google. Basically, some guys have been poking around their Google Apps and found internal references to SalesForce.com logos intermixed with Gmail and all the other Google Apps. These references, where found in some internal Cascading Style Sheets.

Historically Google and SalesForce have had good relationship. At this there is only speculation of how the integration will occur. But in my opinion, any tighter integration of these two companies is only gong to make things better for Non Profits. We will keep an eye on this post as things come to light.

Google Spreadsheets - A not for profit practical example

Tim Laughlin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:46:00 GMT

Your the treasurer of a non profit organization and it's time to prepare the annual budget. In years past this has been a challenge. Your executive committee isn't the most technically savvy bunch.

A couple of them don't even have Microsoft Excel. Of course being a number crunchier, or at least playing one in your organization, you depend on a spreadsheet. You spend hours in Excel getting all your formula's right and balancing the income and expenses.

Now you are ready to share. So you email a copy to Exec members who have Excel. You PDF for those that don't. Off it goes and everyone has feedback. Your VP faxes back a print out of the PDF with her changes. By the way she can't add, but what is a zero or two between friends. The others edit your spreadsheet and send it back, of course one forget to attach it to the e-mail. Now how do you merge that all together make it work? More hours adding all the changes, just to send it out again.

Enter Google Spreadsheets; part of Google Docs. Which is included in Google Apps for Domains, have I mentioned I like Google Apps for Domains?

So here is what our budget looks like in Excel, you can download it if you would like.

Now we need to upload it to Google Docs. There quite few ways to do this, but for this demo we will use the Google Docs web interface. We open our web browser and go to Google Docs for our domain. For this demo I am using Google Docs associated with NonProfitITDept.com. So I navigated to http://docs.nonprofitITDept.com/. Obviously your URL will be different.

Then I simply login

Press upload from the menu bar.

And here is our spreadsheet ready to be shared and edited. The formatting was maintained, but more importantly so where all the formulas.

Now we click on the share tab and enter the email address of those we would like to share with.

There are many more features of this application that I have not covered. Hopefully this will get you started and can experiment with Google Spreadsheets.