Non-Profit Chas

Blog Action Day is a way to increase awareness of an issue and encourage some discussion. This year’s issue is poverty.

I don’t work specifically with poverty issues, though a big part of my fundraising work is for camperships that provide financial aid for campers.

The term Blog Action is something of an oxymoron. Talking isn’t doing. Discussing poverty isn’t fixing the problem.

Rather than write a lot about the issue of poverty, I’d rather encourage you to act. So once Blog Action Day is over, you have to do it some justice by taking Real World Action:

• Network For Good
• Idealist.org

• VolunteerMatch

This is making the rounds, and I wanted to share it here. Especially now that you’ve taken a little bit of time to upgrade your browser, protect your computer, and get started with backups.

David Pogue of the New York Times has an excellent list of Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User. Be sure to scroll through the comments at the end for more helpful user-submitted tips. Some samples:

You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.

You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.

Just putting something into the Trash or the Recycle Bin doesn’t actually delete it. You then have to empty the Trash or Recycle Bin.

Read them all at nytimes.com…

I love data mining and visualizations. I subscribe to FlowingData and pay special attention to graphs and charts in mainstream media. The power of an intuitive visualization, chart, or map can be very effective in telling a story and gleaning information.

Over lunch with our Camp Fire executive director, I suggested that it would help to see the geographic distribution of our campers for the last year so we could determine where our marketing efforts should be directed. Both of our camps supplied lists of their campers’ home addresses, which is where I hit a snag: How do I generate a map with these addresses marked?

Sure, I could write a script to query Google or Yahoo! and get the latitude and longitude, generate a Google Map or Yahoo! Map and plot the points, and then apply some styles to make it look halfway decent. But that’s a pain in the butt and with all the mashup tools out there I figured someone had to have made this easier for me. Also, I’m impatient.

GeoCommons makes it easy

After some relatively quick searching, I found GeoCommons.com which lets you grab public data sets and generate custom maps. You can also upload your own data set and create a map. But I still needed to get the latitude and longitude of each record – a few hundred at least, so I wouldn’t be doing this by hand.

BatchGeocode is like magic

The demo video on GeoCommons pointed me to BatchGeocode.com to convert lists of addresses into lat/long coordinates. It’s amazing how easy it was to do – I just pasted the spreadsheet data into their box, hit convert, and it spit the data back out to me. I pasted their output into my spreadsheet, renamed some fields, saved it as a CSV, and uploaded it to GeoCommons.

GeoCommons makes it pretty

Once I uploaded my data it took about 2 minutes to create the new map, select my data, and add some styles. The options for maps, satellite imagery, etc. are great. Even better, you can pick some really nice colors, transparencies, and shapes to make your map look great. I’m a fan of any software that looks decent by default – see Apple’s Keynote for example.

Some frustrations and limitations

GeoCommons looks really usable and intuitive, and for the most part it works. But trying to figure out how to upload a data set wasn’t intuitive. To upload, you can’t go to My Sets or Maker. You can’t upload within your map. You have to go to the GeoCommons Finder section and scroll down.

I also discovered that you can’t upload over an existing data set – you have to delete it and re-upload. This is the same problem people have with YouTube – sometimes you need to fix something small but deleting and re-uploading is way more work and has too many costs.

The reason I needed to replace the data was that I had uploaded data that I wanted private. Apparently, you can access any map through a public URL. Clicking on a point on the map showed all the data from that record – a great feature if you want to share that info. But since I had checked the box to keep my data set private, I didn’t expect this to be here. So be careful about uploading private data.

Keep an eye on them

I wasn’t using any real data mining here – it was just plotting addresses on a map. But GeoCommons clearly offers more, and I’m looking forward to trying it out. It also appears that they are a VERY new service… GeoCommons was released on October 1, 2008. So I’m really excited about possible improvements – data mining tools, new visualization options, and any/all of the issues I mentioned above.

That’s right: I’ve read 1,916 items from 88 different websites in the last 30 days.

I do this by collecting and reading feeds. There are different formats like RSS and Atom, blah blah blah… don’t worry about the technical stuff. Just worry about the payoff and how to use them.

Feed readers are to the web as Tivo is to television

If you have a DVR (e.g., Tivo) you might get the analogy. You can record shows and watch them later. Maybe you even set it up to record a season and just watch the shows when it’s convenient for you. Feeds (and feed readers) are like DVR for the web.

This post is just one more attempt at explaining and selling you on the concept of feeds. At Notre Dame, we put up a page explaining feeds. Beth Kanter has a toolbox for RSS readers and there are lots of other posts that explain the how and why of feeds.

Why Should I Care?

The big payoff is your ability to consume a lot of valuable content in a short amount of time. There are some brilliant experts out there providing research, advice, tips, and lessons – all for absolutely free. I read feeds that will make me smarter and more valuable. It gives me an edge.

It’s still magic to me

Now that your curiosity is piqued, I ask you to invest 3 minutes and 44 seconds watching this video and learning everything you really need to know about feeds. Trust me, you’ll get that time back.

Thanks for Common Craft for great explanations of confusing stuff.

How do I get started?

1. Pick a feed reader. I use Google Reader to get me through tons of feeds and articles. Other options include Bloglines or NetVibes or any of hundreds of other readers. If you just want to get started, go get Google Reader.

2. Start collecting feeds. When you read a website and like what you see, look for a feed icon in the address bar. Or look for one somewhere on the site. Most new browsers make it easy to subscribe just by clicking on the feed icon.

3. Start reading. I organize my feeds and spend some time each day reading the work-related stuff: marketing, non-profit, personal development. I also put off some of my feeds (comics, lolcats) for a few days and read them when I have leisure time. And as usual, quality trumps quantity. I tend to skim and skip articles that don’t interest me. I unsubscribe if I decide the site isn’t providing me with enough value – I want to improve the signal to noise ratio.

Hey, if you’re not reading Non-Profit Chas by feed, look to the right column for the link to my feed and get started.

Don’t have a feed reader? Well, I’ll share some of these gems from mine.

Links!

Philantopic has a great roundup of links from USA Today’s insert devoted to charitable giving.

Donor Power Blog points us an interesting tool: create a giving portfolio tailored to your interests and available funds using the Donation Dashboard.

A public service campaign from a bunch of celebrities telling you not to vote. You may not have the budget and the friends to pull this off, but you have everything you need to be as effective: a message.

Just in time for my upcoming email campaign, Katya provides some tips for email marketing.

Also just in time for an upcoming speaking gig, Seth Godin throws out some golden tips for Powerpoint magic.