Nonprofit Tech

Domain Prices Going Up!

Just a quick note --- all domain prices are going up on January 14.  This will generally be the case with all domain registrars, since it's caused by an increase in ICANN fees.  So --buy those domains now!

To help encourage you further, all domains are on sale for 10% off through Jan 14.  Just enter the promotion code domainsale when you fill in the order, and the 10% will be deducted automatically.

Twin Cities Daily Planet

We'd like to welcome new client Twin Cities Daily Planet.  We have taken over the hosting contract for the Daily Planet, and will be making improvements to the site over the next several month, particularly in social media integration.  We are also moving them into a higher performance hosting environment using a Varnish front-end cache, and a high-performance back end. Go visit to get the latest news in the Twin Cities from a nonprofit source.

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Google+

The hot topic of the week appears to be Google+.  After a period of very limited availability, Google seems to have opened up at least a little over the weekend, giving me a chance to finally use the invitation that I've had for a while.  So now I'm in.

NOI announces results of email tests

The New Organizing Institute today has a useful article about conducting email tests, what their results were, and how you can do your own.

CiviCON

I'm spending today at CiviCON, a conference for CiviCRM users.  If you're not familiar with CiviCRM, it is a CRM database intended primarily for nonprofit groups.  We use it ourselves on a few of our web properties, and we support several hosting clients using CiviCRM.

The software packages is currently in a great period of change, with many improvements recently done and in the works.  This is an exciting chance to talk to other people who are working with CiviCRM, and to learn new things about the package.

More Things We Like

Droid IncredibleIt's been one of those love-hate weeks.  I got a Droid Incredible telephone.  I love it.  It's busy doing all sorts of wonderful things for me, including monitoring my servers and waking me up in the middle of the night if anything goes wrong :-).  Okay, that's part of the love-hate.

But in general I love the phone.  Everything works.  I've not found it difficult to deal with.  And after a fury of downloading apps, I've finally settled down and started to actually use it.

Here comes another hate part.  My home office is in a very rural area in a horseshoe-shaped valley.  Cell phone coverage was always sparse with AT&T, but with Verizon it has been the pits.  It's okay if I leave the house.  It's great in our driveway.  But in my office it's dropped-call-city. 

Verizon sells a small femtocell system for just this purpose.  We have great broadband coverage here (fiber to my house - in the middle of the country) but as I said, cell phone coverage is spotty.  This little puppy plugs in to my router and becomes a little cell phone tower right in my house.  Covers the house and a fair amount of the outside really well.  And is just about completely transparent when set up.  So I've gone from no bars to 4 bars of reception in my office, and my clients no longer have to put up with being bounced to Google Voice almost all the time. 

Happy Steve.

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5 Essential Ways to use your business Facebook Page

A great article on Mashable about using Facebook pages effectively for your business or nonprofit.

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CiviCRM and Drupal rate high in NTEN report

The recent NTEN report 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey has just been released, and it gives very high marks both to Drupal as a CMS for nonprofits, and to the use of CiviCRM for donor and activist management.

By the way, NTEN is highly recommended.

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American Composers Alliance

ACAA few months ago we launched a new web site for the American Composers Alliance in New York CIty.  ACA is a nonprofit that publishes scores for modern classical composers.

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