Social Matchbox is DC’s longest running open mic night and networking event for startup companies that are bootstrapping, investor backed as well as those who aspire to join their ranks.

We are looking forward to get your feedback and suggestions. The event would be held at the E Street Cinema, Washington DC and the tickets are availble here.

See you there!

Thank You,

The Diditz Team

Diditz provides an easy alternative to enable anyone involved with the non profits to spare a few minutes, and create a web page for their organization using Facebook photo albums. Details follow:

Got Facebook albums? Turn them into WebPages

The biggest asset any non profit possesses is its volunteers – people who come together for a cause, who share the same passion to make a difference. These are the people who participate in protests, organize fundraisers and make it all happen. And in all probability, these are the people who have a Facebook account, and some photo albums related to those events.

Diditz provides a simple and secure way to convert those Facebook photo albums into web pages. These WebPages can be seen and shared by anyone on the internet and show up in search results for Google and other search engines, tremendously enhancing the online outreach of your organization. Imagine how many WebPages your nonprofit could get if each one of your volunteers could donate some time and create just one Diditz WebPage for your organization, using their Facebook albums!

Tell the stories. Win the hearts.

Volunteers of any non profit work at the grass root level and make it happen. These are the people who know how it is to be someone who are oppressed, helpless or underprivileged. Your volunteers have numerous stories and experiences to share and people want to hear them!

Diditz provides an easy channel for story telling within Facebook. Users can write blogs, create hyperlinks, add videos, slides and even widgets, and make a convincing case for your non profit which could move thousands of hearts. Using tags or keywords, stories on similar events, places or organizations show up in one place, which drastically reduces the need of a centralized control.

Give kudos, leave comments. Reach millions of viewers.

Any WebPages created using Diditz could be shared with millions of potential viewers on the internet using websites like Twitter, Digg, Stumble Upon and many others. Diditz provides a simple, easy and secure way to channelize the Facebook albums for online outreach, story telling and fundraising. And yes, it is absolutely free!

If you are involved with a non profit, check out Diditz now and share your stories with the world and help make a difference to someone’s life.

We are constantly adding new features to the product and your feedback is what drives us. Please let us know how we can make Diditz more useful for you and your non profit!

Thank You,

The Diditz Team

This blog post outlines some of the problems and their solutions that came up in the meeting, and hopefully other non profits will find this information useful.

In general, non-profits face some common challenges, some of which Greg outlined very clearly:

1.   Out of date websites: The primary purpose of websites for most of the non profits would be to enhance their outreach and reach out to the donors.  A website which is not designed towards this user group does not serve the purpose well. Case in point - signing up for a newsletter of Bread for the City is an arduous task.

2.  Old database technology: Hard to maintain and expensive to upgrade. Many non-profits simply lack the money or the resources to change this efficiently. Added to that, there is always some resistance to change from the management.

3.  Lack of proper analytics: Analytics could be very important when it comes to identifying the potential donors. Not having analytics and spending money on campaigns might land your non profit in pitching to the wrong audience.

4.  Lack of a dedicated staff to manage social media: Many organizations realize that “social media is free” and hence, many of them have a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a Youtube channel and presence of many other websites. Its free to signup for these websites, but it takes a LOT of time to maintain those accounts and actively engage the communities around your brands. Having a clear strategy on how to leverage these channels could be the single most powerful tool your organization could possess!

5.  Lack of sophisticated hardware (a.k.a., desktops that are capable of running run Tweetdeck and Office ‘07 simultaneously): Many non profits simply do not have the luxury  of using  high end Macs with 4 Gigs of RAM. While they want to use apps like TweetDeck or Seismic to find relevant stuff, lighter web apps are definitely welcome!

Suggestions from the particpants:

Upgrade your website: Find volunteers who are experts at web design, and get their help to implement some changes, small and big. A good way could be to reach out to students at local Universities studying web design, and have them take it as a class project. As an example, here at the University of Maryland , we have several courses related to web design and usability, at both, graduate and undergraduate levels, and almost all the students require project work. Given at least 50-70 students take such courses each semester, and the course is offered three times a year, non profits could have good success tapping such resources.

As someone at the meetup suggested, if its hard to change the entire website in one go, either due to technical constraints or administrative ones, slowly move parts of the website to a wordpress platform. One fine day, you would have a new stand alone website with better design and proper analytics. (Wordpress Rocks!).

At the minimum, make your existing website content sharable on social networks using widgets like “Addthis”. Having “Google Analytics” integrated with your website is as essential! Both these services take minutes to setup, and can pay high dividents in the long run

Be on Wikipedia: Even if your non profit’s website is not showing up in the top results of search engines, a wikipedia page will! Search engines love popular URLs like Wikipedia, Facebook and Squidoo. Make sure, your non profit is present at all of these, and have these pages direct traffic to your website. (A detailed post on how the new Facebook App for Diditz could enhance your non profit’s search ratings is coming soon!)

Empower your users and volunteers and leverage their social media precence: The biggest asset that all non –profits have is a community of very passionate people who come together for a cause. These people are everywhere on the social web: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and tons of other website. Make them your word of mouth ambassadors.

Many non-profits have a twitter account and a Facebook page, which are mostly used as a one way communication channel. Involve your fans and followers to talk to you. Get more fans or followers. Reach out to new people: They might be your next volunteers or donors!

Having trouble with huge twitter apps? You might just  find something useful in this exhaustive list.

AllFacebook has a great article on why your organisation needs to be on Facebook, and how you could attract more fans.

Many organizations already use the “Causes” application on Facebook to raise funds. The application might not help you reach your fundraising goals, but it defintely does a good job of getting the word out about your organization.

Our blog post on how to use the Facebook application for Diditz application to reach more audience is coming soon.

This, in no way is an exhaustive list of problems or suggestions. If you are a non profit, social media expert or simply love the web, please chip in your two cents. If we could get enough useful information, maybe we could turn this post into a wikipedia entry!

We are looking forward to a lot of feedback, comments and inputs from you , so if you are in DC, we would love to talk to you in person. If you haven’t already reserved your tickets, they can be found here.

Thanks You,

The Diditz Team

Presenting the all new Facebook App of Diditz. Thanks to your quick and constructive feedback, we were able to incorporate a lot of changes in matter of days and come up with the new interface for the Facebook application.

So get going, play with it and throw in your two cents. And do let us know what all features you would like to see in the future. We are listening. Always!

Thank You,

The Diditz Team

We were thrilled to have some brilliant thoughts, ideas and suggestions we got after the release of alpha version of Diditz last Fall. Among other exciting features that were suggested, one of the most popular demands was to have a tool which would allow to enhance the Facebook albums by adding relevant blogs and videos to them, and make “did-its” right within  Facebook. So we got back to work.

We are glad to announce the alpha release of the Facebook app of Diditz. The application has been live for the last two weeks, and we are getting a lot of feedback from the marvalous student community at the University of Maryland. We are constantly working on fixing the bugs and plan to release the new interface of the  application in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, we are also striving to be one of the few Facebook varified application.

We would love to hear your thoughts on  the current version of application. Please feel free to contact us at webmaster@diditz.com if you would like to play with the new interface. As for the website, there are some major enhancements on its way, so stay tuned!

Thanks You,

The Diditz Team

We are constantly getting a lot of feedback from you, and have been working on the cool new features you guys have suggested (and believe us, there are a lot of them!). Adding new features means new bugs, and we are currently in the process of weeding them out.

The website would be running smoothly in the next couple of days, and we promise you some really cool stuff when its up again. So prepare to share you coolest experiences from the Thanksgiving break with your folks!

Wishing you a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank You,

The Diditz Team

Saturday morning 8′oclock is not the best time to attend a conference - right? Well, there were 200 people who showed up. With five simultaneous sessions going on, there were a myriad of topics people talked about, and there was a lot to learn. Our favorites:

• Apps for democracy: an open innovation challenge for programmers to make useful facebook/iphone apps using data provided by the DC government. $20k in prizes! Peter Corbett from Istrategylabs tells more about the contest in the interview here.
• Business of Building webapps:Jared Goralnick, founder of Awayfind, gave a very informative talk on how to pitch to the bloggers, how to buid a community and what pitfalls to avoid as a startup when it comes to marketing.
• CSpan goes web2.0: Best talk of the day. Jvi and Leslie from Jess3/New Media Strategies gave an elaborate talk on how their team executed a full fledged social media campaign for CSpan television in less than three weeks. More details and a small interview can be found here.
• Other interesting sessions included: Iphone development Jam Session, Social Media Community Building: politics in DC and beyond,Design 101 for non designers, SSL client authentication and a lot more.

In a nutshell, the event kicked ass and Diditz is proud to co-sponsor it. We were able to interview some cool folks at the event, and a detailed coverage of the BarCamp can be found here.

Thank You,

The Diditz team

We can also be found out at http://getsatisfaction.com/diditz among other places. GetSatsfaction is a place for you to tell organizations and companies you love about what you love and what you loathe. We too are there, and we are waiting, to listen to you. We were and are still listening to you at Feedback & Suggest Something.

Thank You,

The Diditz team

The good thing about Bar Camps is the idea of getting the most done without spending a lot, and it seemed to work seamlessly at the Delhi Bar Camp. We were able to capture a few impromptu interviews from some of the attendees. You can check them out by clicking on the link here.

Looking forward to see you at the upcoming Bar Camps in Washington DC and Baltimore!

Thank You,

The Diditz team