Cook Family Foundation

You may have already heard about a recent addition to the NonProfit Capacity Building Program, “Tech Talk” networking.  It began in December 2014–but it’s not too late to join in!  If you’d like to be a part of it and haven’t yet signed up, reply to this post, or Tweet us @ShiaNPCB or @awolber

The tech group will meet again on March 3, 2015 at the Shiawassee Arts Center (206 Curwood Castle Drive, Owosso, MI) where we’ll focus on Building Your Org Online.

Build your org online: Site + Social + Stats  by Andy Wolber (@awolber)

Step outside for a moment. Turn around. Look at your organization’s offices.

Is the location convenient for the people you serve? Do the people you serve find your organization’s presence appealing? Does it support the organization’s purpose? What can you change to make it better, easier, or more convenient? How many people do you help as a result?

Even better: ask the people you serve these questions. The answers should inform where — and how — you engage physically.

Pull out your phone (or laptop). Search for your organization. Explore the results. Ask the same questions as above. The answers should inform where — and how — you engage digitally.

Unlike the people you help at your physical office, you might not see the people you serve digitally. You need to seek stats — from the web and social media — to make these virtual people visible.

Online engagement often consists of three things: a site, plus social media, informed by stats. Here are a few ideas to consider as you build your organization to connect with people online.

Site: facts, stories & actions

Make it easy to find all the important facts about your organization on your site. Your event calendar, your programs, your address, your budget, your board, your donors, your staff, your mission, your history, your 990… you get the idea. (See a sample website content checklist here.) Use a content management system to share these facts without worrying about the form.

Showcase stories that demonstrate your organization’s work. Make sure that people can see, hear, or read every page of your site on a phone, tablet, or laptop. Build your team — and web tools — so that multiple people involved with the organization know how to create and share stories with video, pictures, sound, and/or text.

Support visitor actions. Make verbs easy: let people… plan a visit, sign up to volunteer, register for an event, donate money, request help, learn how to…, etc. You might want to add a database to your website to make information about these actions easier to manage (for examples, see tools such as NationBuilder, WildApricot, MemberFindMe, or Artful.ly). These systems make it as easier for people to act and for your team to support the action.

Social: community conversations

Find, join, and participate in conversations with people who share your organization’s concerns. In the U.S., these communities often are active on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. “The Art of Listening: Social Media Toolkit for Nonprofits” may help you connect with communities that share your cause.

Use social tools to listen, learn, and discuss… not to simply post press releases. Social media lets you work out loud and show your work, both of which allow more people to be aware of your efforts.

The best conversations on social media — or your blog — might merit a new post or page on your website. (Or even an article in your newsletter, if you still print one!) Ultimately, social media is all about engaging in a conversation with people, regardless of the platform.

Stats: measured change

Numbers measure different things. For example, popularity is not the same as support. A significant increase in traffic to your site following an announcement may indicate that people care about an issue — that it is popular. A poll on your site might measure each person’s opinion on the topic. Take care not to confuse the two.

Analyze your online stats as a total system. You might use Google Analytics to understand behavior of visitors to your website, Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics to explore social media engagement, and MailChimp reports to analyze email campaigns. The whole system matters: an email link click might take a person to a Facebook post.

For advanced users, A/B testing and outcome analysis is also possible. For example, Google Content Experiments allow you to test how people respond to two different messages on a web page. Does one message prompt more people to donate than another? MailChimp’s A/B testing tool offers similar capabilities for email. Combine the two, and you can conduct rather complicated multivariate experiments. Test. Measure how people behave. See what works. Do more of that.

Site + Social + Stats = Engagement

Put all of the above together, and you’ll have a fairly complete picture of your online engagement. Don’t worry if you don’t have all the components fully mastered. Keep in mind that — much like a building improvement — an enhancement to digital engagement require people’s time, skills, and resources. Take things one step at a time: Update your website today; learn more about Twitter tomorrow.

Now, pull out your phone. Do a search for your organization — and start to improve your organization’s online engagement today.

As part of the NonProfit Capacity Building Program, Tech Talk networking began in December 2014–but it’s not too late to join in!  If you’d like to be a part of it and haven’t yet responded, reply to this post, or Tweet us @ShiaNPCB or @awolber

The tech group will meet again on January 27, 2015 at Safe Center (1300 North Hickory Street, Owosso, MI) where we’ll focus on security.  Read through the following to learn a few ways to improve the security of your accounts and devices. If you want to improve your security setup, bring your phone and laptop to the session for some “hands-on” help.

Improve Security with 3 Apps by Andy Wolber (@awolber)

Too often, headlines proclaim “Millions of passwords stolen”. The news may cause concern. But unless you’re hacking or hiring for the compromised company, there’s not much to do after a security breach except change your password and monitor your accounts.

Yet you can improve your security with three apps: two to protect your accounts, and one to protect your device. The apps? A password manager app, a two-step authentication app, and a device remote management app.

Protect your accounts

1. A password manager app

A password manager app solves two problems: length and re-use. A password manager generates a long, random string of characters for each of your online accounts. With a password manager, you never use the same password twice. Should a site be hacked, you only need to change the password for that single account.

I use LastPass, which works on most operating systems (Windows, Linux and Mac) and with most browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer). I pay $12 per year for LastPass Premium to access LastPass on mobile devices (Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phone). You might also consider Dashlane. (See “The best password managers for PCs, Macs, and mobile devices” by Tim Ferrill at Infoworld.com for more reviews.)

Both LastPass and Dashlane encrypt your information, then sync your passwords to their servers. This encrypted data syncs to each of your devices. Because of this, use a strong password to secure access to your password manager app.

2. A two-step authentication app

A site that supports two-step authentication requires you to login with your username and password, then enter a six-digit number for access. You obtain the six-digit number from your phone, either from an app or a text message. Even if someone hacks your username and password, they’d still need your phone to access your account.

You need two things for two-step authentication to work: you need a phone to obtain the code, and the site needs to support two-step authentication. Facebook supports two-step authentication, for example, as do Apple, Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft. Follow the links to instructions to enable two-step authentication at each of these sites. See https://twofactorauth.org/ for a long list of others sites that support two-step authentication.

Protect your device

3. Device remote management app

Apple, Google, and Microsoft all allow you to lock, locate, or erase your phone remotely. Follow the links to configure these capabilities for your Android, iOS, or Windows Phone device.

If you lose your phone, lock your device first to protect your data. Then login to your account online to locate your phone — or force it to ring, which is helpful if you’ve misplaced it nearby. As a last resort, send a signal to erase your phone the next time it connects to the network.

Similar tools protect laptops or desktops. For example, Prey protects Windows, Mac OS, and Linux systems, as well as Android and iOS devices.

Additional security

For most people, the three steps above will improve security. A few other actions help, too, though.

• Install updates to your system and software regularly to protect against known exploits (more on this for Android, iOS, Windows 7 or Windows 8, and OS X).
• Require authentication — such as a username, password, pin code, password, or fingerprint — for access. Set this up on Android, iOS: passcode or Touch ID, Windows 7 or Windows 8: password, PIN, or picture, or OS X.
• Connect securely to password-protected WiFi networks you trust. Use a VPN, a virtual private network, when you access WiFi elsewhere. Lifehacker explains VPNs and suggests a few VPN providers. I use PrivateInternetAccess.com.
• Encrypt information wherever possible. Encrypt information when stored, to prevent access to your data even if someone achieves access to your storage. In other words, if I remove a drive from your laptop, I can bypass the operating system and access the data, unless you’ve encrypted your information. Follow the links to learn more about system encryption for Android, iOS, Windows, or OS X systems.

• Backup your data automatically, wherever possible (more on this for Android, iOS, Windows 7 or Windows 8, and OS X).

To ensure complete computer security, build every part of your system from scratch — and never connect it to a network. Since that’s likely not practical, then at least install and configure the apps above to make your accounts and devices more secure today.