Wild Apricot Blog

Suppose you’re writing about Earth Hour (this year it’s 8:30 – 9:30 pm on Saturday, March 27th). You want a picture that attracts the eye and helps your readers to see at a glance what your blog post is about — stars? candles? a city skyline before the lights go out? — but you don’t have the time or opportunity to go take a photograph. No problem. Stock photo sites often have great deals on low-cost images for your blog or website... but what if your budget is a big fat zero? Again, no problem. Next...(read more)

If you don’t have mad PhotoShop skillz, if you don't want to install new software, or if all you need is a quick photo clean-up or fancy effect – here are three free online image editing tools you may want to give a try....(read more)

Data? Metrics? Analytics? It doesn’t have to be scary-hard to deal with, even if you’re a small nonprofit’s part-time fundraiser who’s just kind of figuring it all out as you go along. Analyze This: A Nonprofit's Guide to Event Fundraising Analytics is a truly useful free ebook for nonprofit event fundraisers, written by Jono Smith (formerly of Network for Good) for Convio and Event360 , that shows, step by step, how you can use the data collected from your fundraising events to create more successful...(read more)

Video is hot with online audiences, but there’s one big problem for video producers: search engines just can’t deal with the "talkies": Images and audio are behind a glass wall when it comes to indexing for search results. And if your nonprofit is going to take the initiative to produce and post a video, obviously you’d like it to help being visitors to your blog or website from the search engines. Better SEO for YouTube Videos Until recently, search engines had to rely on title text and tags to...(read more)

With all the buzz about social media, it’s easy to forget that offline media attention can be equally valuable, especially for community-based nonprofits who want to get attention to local projects or recruit local members and volunteers. Offline media attention is good. Getting it can be hard, however, in the digital information age. Challenged by online alternative news sources, print newspapers are slimming down, cutting pages to cut their costs. To save on staff, newspapers increasingly bypass...(read more)

Hipchat is a new all-in-one chat application that’s specifically designed for group collaboration — free for nonprofits and for very small groups. A desktop client that runs on Adobe Air, HipChat is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is similar to Yammer (but without the need for a company email address) and Campfire (but not web-based), so if neither of those are quite a perfect fit for your organization, you might want to check it out. Chat rooms - Use rooms for departments, teams, or...(read more)

For our development team, February was devoted to version 3.4 (including some features which are too big to be finalized in time for 3.4 --- so they will be released in the subsequent version 3.5. More on that later in the post). Development phase for version 3.4 has just been officially closed off, so now we have about a month of final testing ahead of us. The planned launch date for version 3.4 is March 25th --- this might still change if we hit unexpected bumps in our testing, but the probability...(read more)

This month’s round-up of free nonprofit webinars could very well be our most interesting yet, with a wide variety of topics and some high-profile speakers who’ll have lots of value to share. Space is limited for a number of these webinars, but many will make recordings and/or slide presentations available after the event either to registered participants or to the public. Check the details on the host websites to see if there’s a way you can benefit from these learning opportunities, even if you...(read more)

Do we really need another free online document-collaboration tool? Very possibly, yes — if it’s lightweight, easy for non-techies to use, designed specifically for reviewer annotation, and allows an unlimited number of users to give feedback on a document....(read more)

Did your nonprofit produce a video in 2009? The DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards is looking for the best nonprofit videos of the year, with a chance for great public exposure, $2500 for your organization, and other great prizes. Submissions are open until March 19, 2010, so get in on this contest if you can!...(read more)

Leadership and Membership management stories were the hot topics at AssociationJam.org this month, in numbers of submissions, views and votes. The Social Media category remained very active, followed closely by Technology and Fundraising. Interestingly, however, submissions to the Volunteers category dropped off significantly in recent weeks. Here’s a look at the most popular “AJam” links, by subject category, for February 2010: Membership Scarlet Letters of Association Management Judith Lindenau...(read more)

Where do your nonprofit's members, donors and supporters spend their time online? What social networks should you focus on, for the best return on investment? Flowtown can help you find out....(read more)

Good news for nonprofits: the YouTube for Nonprofits program is now open to qualified organizations in Canada and Australia, as well as the US and UK! And while we're talking YouTube, here are a few relatively new features there that you may have missed... ...(read more)

Choosing the right member-management software is a big decision, and the selection process can be both tedious and time-consuming. That's why Wild Apricot has put together a free Membership Software Selection Guide , to help nonprofit and association leaders choose the best membership website software to match their goals, budgets, and technical know-how. The free downloadable ebook lays out a series of seven easy-to-follow steps for a smooth software review process. It suggests the most common pitfalls...(read more)

You’re excited about your association or cause, and keen to share your pride in the good work it has accomplished? Great! But is your organization speaking to your website visitors... or at them?...(read more)

Your fans not only create the community around your nonprofit's Facebook Page, they define how they want to experience it and create much of the content. Here are some ways to bring some of that interactivity to your nonprofit's blog or website. ...(read more)

Do you use Twitter to remind your members of a meeting or fundraising event? Here's a free tool that easily creates a special map to go with your tweet, so people will be sure to find your event. Twitter users can even RSVP or add a comment, if you choose to allow those options....(read more)

A number of findings in a newly released study by Pew Internat on Social Media and Young Adults will be of interest to nonprofits who seek to connect with or recruit members and donors online....(read more)

Wild Apricot software news for February 2010 The first half of January was slow as most of our developers were taking some well-earned time off. (We did have to deal with a small bump — a number of clients experienced problems with the link tracking function, so we were hunting down the cause. It turned out that a small typo was made in the configuration of one of the servers when we publishes a quick fix at the end of December. As a result, some of the people using link tracking — those who happened...(read more)

Who handles the social media marketing for your nonprofit? Often, in a small organization, the job falls to the most enthusiastic person — or to the Gen Yer on staff (on the theory that “that generation knows all about this web stuff”) — but wouldn’t it be nice if there were some convenient scoring system to help you pick the right person? Tom Humbarger has come up with a skills-assessment matrix based on the D.A.R.C. framework suggested by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in their hit marketing...(read more)