Flickr Photo: jillj14Summer reading may not bring back the most pleasant childhood memories -- think forced reading over school vacation. But we hope that you want to join us this summer for the new NTEN Book Club.

The NTEN Book Club is another way we hope to give you the knowledge you need to excel in your work environment. It's also a great reason to get away from your computer screen and put some real paper in your hands.

The first book will be Media Rules!: Mastering Today's Technology to Connect with and Keep Your Audience, by Brian Reich and Dan Solomon.

Flickr Photo: Johan KoolwaaijLot of us are missing a true luxury in our work - the ability to turn to our office mate and get a quick answer to our technology questions. NTEN thinks that's a shame, so we've set up a new program exclusively for NTEN members to help you do it, virtually. That's the idea behind Office Hours - to give you a place to ask the questions that will help you succeed at your job and create more social change.

Office Hours will begin on June 2 and we already have a good crew of volunteer experts who have committed an hour/week so that you have the opportunity to get advice in an online chat room setting.

How do you participate?

2008 Bridge ConferenceWe just heard about an online scavenger hunt for the 2008 Bridge Conference, hosted by AFP and DMAW:

Play the Find the Clues to Your Success Game and win a Free Registration to the 2008 Bridge Conference!

Play the Find the Clues to Your Success contest by searching the Bridge Conference education tracks on the 2008 Bridge Conference website and identifying the 6 gold highlighted words that make up the clues to your success. Put the words together in the correct order to create the Secret Phrase and email the phrase to mystery@bridgeconf.org. The first entry submitted with the correct phrase will win a free, fully transferable registration to the 2008 Bridge Conference.

If you don't win the contest, don't worry: if you're a member of NTEN, you get to register at the lowest rate for the conference! Contact me to find out how to register with your NTEN rate.

2008 Bridge ConferenceThose of you in Fundraising know it's all about communicating your mission and building relationships.

Those of you in Communications share the goal of growing your constituencies while increasing support for your cause.

Wouldn't you love to get together and share tips, strategies, resources, and contacts?

You got it! Brought to you by AFP and DMAW, the 2008 Bridge Conference will have over 75 sessions, more than a thousand of your colleagues, inspiring keynote speakers, plenty of networking opportunities, and the "very best of insider tips and trade secrets."

But wait, there's more! If you're an NTEN member, you have the golden ticket. NTEN Members can register for the conference at the low member rates -- and if you register before June 1st, you get to go for the best rate available!

Get in touch with me to get your golden-ticket registration details.

What's that? You're not a member of NTEN yet? Take advantage of this and other benefits of membership by joining NTEN today!

While mainstream media remains under the control of a handful of giant corporations, you no longer have to own a printing press to reach a dedicated audience. Building on traditions of public access, independent media and peer-to-peer networks, we now communicate, "many to many", across phone and internet networks with affordable and high powered laptops, PDAs, phones and gaming devices. In this major step forward for free speech, the “network centric” age enables us to "be the media", tell our stories, and make social change happen.

But what media and communication tools will make the biggest impact and have the farthest reach? Whether you are planning a demonstration, a print campaign, a web site, a viral video, or a mobile action, you need to start with a goal and a strategy. To help, we’ve compiled many of the rich resources available to the nonprofit community in a few basic steps to strategic communications.

I came across an interesting report from the IBM Global Innovation Outlook project today.

If you've been exploring new media a lot, it's full of things you probably already know, but somehow, they articulate it better. If you're just getting into all this new media/web2.0 hoopla, it's a very well written primer about the possibilities and limitations and just what kind of organization you need to be to make it all work well.

There are several little gems in the report that I would like to explore more, but the thing that stuck with me most after an initial read was the importance of authenticity. It stayed with me, because it's one of my core values, and NTEN's as well:

• We strive to be authentic and honest in all of our communications so our community knows that we say what we mean forthrightly, and mean what we say.

        AND

• We are accountable to you and to your needs and strive to engage, listen, and be responsive to you, our members, in all that we do.

These are the two parts to getting the authenticity thing right:

NPTimes has a nice short piece today about email delivery and spam scoring systems. I was under the impression that this software, which "reads" your email and tells you what spam filter flags you have in your message, could be immensely helpful in avoiding the spam trap. According to Bill Pease of Convio, it ain't so:

"Unless your organization's email content regularly involves commercial-sounding language, content-only spam scoring systems are of relatively limited utility."

Agree? What have your experiences been?

Jason Zanon, Democracy in Action
Republished With Permission at DemocracyInAction.org

Almost any thematic takeaway for the NTC would be a plausible one, simply because there were just so many different ways to look into the kaleidoscope. My personal version of the theme -- having hit sessions on screencasting, mobile, and radio both online and off -- was multi-channel engagement. It feels to me that the sector is straining against this membrane, looking for the next ah-ha moment, the next breakout into open country. Can we get Internet everywhere? Can we mate it with television, telephones, voice, thought, shoe leather? Can the multiplying tools and gizmos combine and connect? Can it get from niftiness and even effectiveness to really game-changing?

We catch glimmers. A citizen video flips control of the Senate -- hybridized data sets present the occasional but isolated dazzling perspective -- rumors circulate of flash mobs on distant shores. The Twitter froth, I suspect, emerges fundamentally from its hint of gathering blogging, texting and social networking into a bridge tenuously connecting meatspace and cyberspace identities.

Marc Sirkin, The International Rescue Committee
Republished with Permission from npMarketing Blog

I’m finally recovered from a solid NTEN experience, my first ever. I will leave most of the commentary, notes, and reflections to the great round up on the NTEN blog and will instead talk about something that is happening to our industry (or may have already happened): marketing and technology are merging into one beast.

What was evident from the lack of marketing people in attendance (or so it seemed to me!) is that marketing folks either don’t see how important this is, or have their heads in the sand. Why?

One reason could certainly be how the conference positions itself (The Nonprofit Technology Conference or NTC) certainly could throw a marketer off. What marketer would possibly want to sit around with geeks all day talking about code and open-source software? A smart marketer would, that’s who. The reason a smart marketer should attend these types of conferences is simple – but understated. While technology should never drive strategy, it most certainly does enable strategy.

Do you send out an HTML newsletter? How many times have you (quite literally) pulled your hair out trying to get it to look the same (or even decent) in different email clients? It's usually a giant guessing game to try and figure out what elements work in what clients.

Guess no more! The folks at Campaign Monitor, makers of an e-newsletter tool, have done the research and provided a nice, comprehensive guide to what you can and