Technology

Analytics has become a buzzword that newspapers, magazines, blogs, and even television advertisements talk about. But, what is analytics, how can it help your nonprofit organization, and how can you get started? The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the world’s largest professional society for advanced analytics, defines analytics as “the scientific process of transforming data into insight for making better decisions.” INFORMS has recently launched Pro Bono Analytics, where we match analytics professionals who are willing to volunteer their skills with nonprofit organizations that would benefit from their techniques. Our Pro Bono Analytics volunteers are experts at [...]

  Tuesday’s #AppleEvent brought great news – two new iPhone models, the new Apple Watch and the Apple Pay. These much-anticipated releases didn’t fail to deliver great new bells and whistles, and with the Apple Watch, a completely new mobile technology with features that haven’t been grappled with.   Apple is known for its innovation and quality products. But they’re also the source of frustration for many companies who’ve got to shell out cash every time there’s a system update to make sure their apps are compatible.   It seems like there’s something new out every single month. And while it’s [...]

What does one do when the Internet fails? Today, there were widespread interruptions reported along the east coast. The culprit: an Amazon AWS S3 outage, as reported by TechCrunch and others.  According to the TechCrunch post, even though Amazon S3 is "...used by less than .8 percent of the top 1 million websites," it was having a major effect. Users of popular applications including Canva, Mailchimp, Trello, Wix, Buffer, and even (ironically) isitdownrightnow.com were all experiencing issues, keeping social media managers for those companies very busy on Twitter as they tried to reply (in multiple languages) to frustrated customers. There were also tweets [...]

Since I’ve started my own freelance business, I am constantly perusing the Internet and talking with friends about really great (mostly free) tech tools they can use to help build their business. There are tons, people. All of them have their own quirks. Some of them (compare Google Hangouts to Skype) are a matter of which platform sucks less.   But some of them, like answerthepublic.com, are just PURE GOLD. One of my clients is a company that sits in a pretty complicated and highly regulated industry. In fact, most people glaze over when you start to talk about the business [...]

I have a subscription to a small professional website, I suppose we could call it a social network, called MosaicHub. This website has a Questions and Answers feature (similar to LinkedIn’s old Questions feature, it’s just categorized much better) that I spend a lot of time sifting through. A question popped up a while back that asked if a business needed to have a website or if a Facebook page would suffice.   Here is my response: “This is a tricky one. Depending on your business, it's not a good idea. I think it makes sense for something like a photography [...]

A few weeks ago, one of my clients had its website hacked. A small nonprofit here in Columbus, Ohio, we couldn’t figure out why our website wasn’t loading properly and what had happened to all of the content. Then, we received the simple explanation from our web manager: “We got hacked.” "We Got Hacked" At first, there were laughs around the room. And then we realized that this was actually a real thing. And it happened just in time for our holiday give campaign to start. (Cue: Sad Trombone Sound) Nonprofits assume they’re exempt from the threat of hacking and cyber [...]

My day job as an independent project manager and consultant is morphing into a role with one of the companies I've worked with closely. Several business partners of mine just merged their branding and user experience (UX) agency (Why.) with a large European development group (Masters of Code) to form User10. This means that their capabilities just expanded, but also that we can get more flexible with pricing. Obviously, for organizations and companies that can afford the full package (see below), you will benefit from going that route, but I know from experience that many nonprofits and companies need quality work [...]

This post was originally published on 2 Dogs Media's blog. It is being shared here with their permission. Your nonprofit website is critical in helping you achieve your goals – but without proper analysis and data, there is no way you can know how to properly market, target and modify your website to meet those goals. NONPROFIT GOALS A typical non-profit website will want to achieve the following: Educate — let people know at a glance what your nonprofit does – then allow them to click a link to learn more about the mission. When you properly educate your visitor – [...]

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the world. With that kind of popularity, it makes sense that WordPress is an attractive target for hackers and attacks. Does this mean WordPress is less secure than other CMS’s on the market?  The simple answer is no.  It is the popularity of the platform that makes it attractive and there will always be a percentage of those websites that simply do not take security seriously and leave their sites vulnerable. So, this mini-guide is going to get you up to speed on WordPress security, why you need to take it [...]

The Wildlife Conservation Society is leading the pack (pun intended) at using technology to connect more deeply with their constituents. Here are 5 things they did to improve engagement: 1. Remove data silos so you can engage people the way they want to engage Avoid a scenario where the “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) used Salesforce to get a 360-degree view of each constituent. When you remove data silos, you can engage with people the way they want to. Jonathan Palmer, Executive Director of Strategic Technology at the Wildlife Conservation Society, shares: [...]