Chris Bernard's blog

Sometimes it seems like everywhere you go, everyone is talking, texting, or surfing the web on their phones: airports, beaches, zoos, sidewalks, even at restaurants. You're not imagining it--85 percent of Americans own cell phones, and more than half of them use those phones to access the internet. They've truly changed the way we live, from how we find directions to how we communicate to how we use Google to settle bar bets.

As people become more accustomed to mobile phones, and more reliant upon them, nonprofits need to find new ways to use that technology to reach their constituents or risk being left behind. So how can  you tap into this trend? 

Idealware's research intern Tyler Cummins looked into the matter in an article for the NonProfit Times, originally as a special report in the March 1, 2013, print edition. Read it in its original format here, or on our site here.

This guest post was written by Kate Bladow, Founder & Strategist at Powered Pursuits.  

• the tweets and the location where they were posted;
• the shortest and longest paths of people who tweeted from multiple locations; and
• all of the paths of people who tweeted from multiple locations.

A few other visualizations were created as well:

• a video showing how people move around Baltimore based on their tweets (Dave Troy);
• a video following a specific person's tweets around Baltimore (Shea Frederick);
• a tool that maps the path of a specific user based on his or her tweets (Shea Frederick);
• a map of tweets where the Baltimore Orioles are mentioned (Dave Troy);
• a map of the tweets from August 27 to September 6 (Dave Troy); and
• a visualization of the words that were used and how frequently (Chris Whong).

The result: people are posting to Twitter from across the city. (To see this, choose the option to show income data on Chris' map.) Apparently, people in low-income neighborhoods are using Twitter and at a rate that appears similar to that of other Baltimore neighborhoods.  For Baltimore nonprofits this means that Twitter may be more effective tool for engaging with Baltimore's low-income communities than previously thought. Beyond their typical use of Twitter, an organization might try the following ideas.

• Identify people in underserved neighborhoods and build relationships with them to connect with those communities.
• Target a neighborhood where a specific problem is known to exist, watch for tweets from that neighborhood referencing the issue, and connect with that person to learn more or help solve the problem.
• Watch for opportunities to use the data to learn more about specific events or issues. For example, Dave was interested in how the Grand Prix affected neighborhoods outside of the Inner Harbor, so he mapped specific posts that referenced the Grand Prix. (Hosting the Grand Prix has been a controversial issue in Baltimore.)

Most of you probably don't live in Baltimore, so this data has limited utility for you, but Dave Troy has made his code available to others, so that they can replicate this project for their communities. You can find it on GitHub: Capture tweets for a given lat/lon bounding box and Parse tweets from baltimore.twittervision.com. Chris Whong has already put it to use for New York City.

But there's a bigger lesson to learn from this project: Many communities have people who understand technology, are invested in making their community better, and may already be working on projects that your organization doesn't likely have the resources to try. To find them, check out technology meetups, find your local Code for America Brigade, talk with local technology councils, or use Twitter. People like Dave Troy, Chris Whong, and Shea Frederick likely exist in most larger cities. You just need to find them.

(Hint: If you are in Baltimore, find them by joining the Baltimore Tech Facebook group or coming to Groundwork, an event about using data to make Baltimore better.)

This is a repost from an entry that originally appeared at http://onlinempa.unc.edu/social-media-for-social-good-infographic/, UNC Chapel Hill's MPA program website. Shared with us by Logan Harper, the program's community manager, who helped create the graphic, we're grateful for the chance to share it with our audience.

Social media—through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content—is a powerful and accessible tool. With free online tools such as Facebook, Twitter, andGoogle+, governments, nonprofits, corporations, and individuals all have the ability to communicate their messages and participate in conversations with a global audience. Social media allows nonprofits and groups promoting social causes, even those with limited budgets, the opportunity to magnify their voices. In our hyper-connected world, individuals have the tools to effect change, raise millions of dollars, find volunteers, and make a global impact.

In our new infographic, Social Media for Social Good, we profile several successful grassroots and nonprofit campaigns, explain tactics that increase the impact of a message, and explore emerging trends in charitable giving and volunteering. Highlights include:

Making a Global Impact

• The day following the Haiti earthquake of 2010, CNN’suser-generatediReport had 1.4 million page views.
•  Twestival, a global offline event supporting various nonprofits, raised $1.75 million in 45 countries.

 Giving Back

• One in five adults in the U.S. has donated to a nonprofit online.
• TweetDrive 2011 harnessed the power of Twitter to organize 38 in-person events in which people donated more than 4,200 toys.

MPA@UNC: Online MPA

For better or worse, we are witnessing a race to fill the Internet with information. Millions of pages are added each day at a rate far greater than they are removed, leaving lots of outdated content for people and bots to crawl through. Old info provides an unfavorable user experience, but is simply removing it from the website or search engines the best alternative? Find out in this guest post by Andrew Garberson, a non-profit SEO consultant at LunaMetrics.

The answer is no. And if the old page in question has inbound links, social shares or other SEO value, the answer is NO! For starters, deleting a page with oh-so-valuable links turns them into orphans because they point to a nonexistent address. Any SEO benefit derived from them is gone, leaving them to wander the world alone (and unlike Annie, they’ll never find their Daddy Warbucks).    

Take a look at a client of mine, who we’ll lovingly refer to as XYZ.org. It is a midsized advocacy organization that frequently adds content to stay current. Their longstanding practice was to delete old pages from their site, making way for the new and newsworthy. Then they met me. A quick glance at Google Webmaster Tools showed that they had about 100 broken URLs that resulted in 404 errors.

To make matters worse, those 104 pages had attracted several hundred inbound links that suddenly never made it home. All of that SEO credit was tossed to the curb.

Sometimes webmasters prefer to de-index old pages so search engines do not display them in the search results. That doesn’t exactly get me giddy, either. De-indexing old pages keeps them away from potential visitors, but it also keeps them away from potential visitors! See the problem? Cutting away at organic search traffic is never good for business.

So, if deleting content is not an option, and neither is removing it from the index, what’s a SEO-savvy webmaster to do? Well, you have come to the right place. Here are three healthy alternatives to consider.

• Update the information. Perhaps a page has been live for several years and it is starting to show its age. The dates have long since come and gone and procedures and price points reflect different times. After all, a lot has changed in the business world since 2008. Simply revise the content to reflect current happenings. Small corrections do not impact on-page metrics so no need to fear a fall in ranking. Search engines will barely notice. Unless, of course, those little corrections are, say, in the title and headers. If that’s the case, it is probably best to consider a 301.
• Apply a 301 redirect instead of making big changes to title tags or large portions of content. 301 permanent URL redirections automatically shuffle visitors to a more applicable page and send with them most of its predecessor’s page authority. A redirect is perfect for a retired executive’s profile. It likely accrued lots of links over the years and it would be a shame to let them go to waste. A 301 permanent redirect to the directory of managers or the executive’s replacement would serve the website (and all of its visitors) very well. For more general pages, however, a redirect might not seem appropriate. It would make more sense to simply create all new content under the existing URL. 
• Write new content. Widgets were not selling well so the company decides to go in a different direction. These big changes can’t be made by updating tidbits, but the URLs and brand can be left as-is. It’s time to rewrite. Wipe everything clean but the URL, leaving the inbound links intact, and start from scratch: newly optimized title tag, appropriate Meta description and fresh content. It might not be the best option because search engine results and ranks will change, but all of those authority-building inbound links are spared from the orphanage, which is better than what would happen if you delete entire pages.

Moral of the story: don’t abandon accrued SEO credit. Never ever. Condemning links to a life of solitude on the street is neither good for you nor society. So, do your part and keep this world a better place.

For more insight from Andrew, read his article about SEO tips for non-profit blogs.

In light of the recent announcement that Blackbaud would be retiring its Common Ground product, and the conversation that generated in the nonprofit community, we thought it would be a good idea to provide a few answers to some of the questions we’ve been hearing. Jana Eggers, Blackbaud’s Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing, was kind enough to weigh in.

First Jana wanted to clarify that the announcement only affects organizations using the Common Ground product, not Blackbaud’s Common Ground Enterprise or Luminate products. You can determine the product version of your Common Ground application by looking under the Quick Help section in the left sidebar within the application itself. Affected Common Ground clients are on versions 4.0 and above.

We asked six questions. The following responses are unedited, though we did ask Jana to clarify twice when we thought her answers were vague. We appreciate her taking the time. Note that Idealware is not endorsing any of Blackbaud’s statements reflected in this post—we’re simply sharing them with our readers.

Jana also agreed to field a limited number of follow-up questions from the comments, so if you’ve got one to ask, fire away. Idealware will choose two or three to pass along.