TechSoup Blog

In honor of the U.S. celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday, TechSoup's San Francisco offices will be closed tomorrow and Friday. We'll be giving thanks for some much-needed days off and will pick up our blog updates, community activities, new webinars, regular newsletters, and donation fulfillment requests upon our return to work on Monday. Our U.S. office also manages some services for TechSoup Canada, so even though the TechSoup Canada offices may be open this week, customer service will still be closed until Monday.

You can continue to place online donation requests while our offices are closed, but phone and email support will not be available. The office will reopen at 8 a.m. Pacific time on Monday, November 30. If you're trying to register your organization or are waiting on a donation request, customer service representatives will continue plowing through them next week. Currently, faxing documents in to our office has the shortest turnaround time at about one week. There's about a three week backup for emailed requests. Average wait times for calls are just under 10 minutes. Learn more about how to contact us here.

If you'd like to understand how TechSoup's process works for getting donated products into your hands, check out this earlier blog post that details the steps and why we're experiencing such a big backlog right now.

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Last year, Elliot penned a post about TweetsGiving. What, pray tell is that, you might be asking? Here's a smidge from his post:

If you haven't heard about it yet, be sure to check out TweetsGiving, a project of the nonprofit Epic Change. Tweetsgiving is using micro-blogging tool Twitter to raise money for a classroom in Tanzania. Along the way, they're also compiling a log of what Twitter users are thankful for this year.

This year, they're also enabling people to participate by tagging blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and blip.fm recordings. So far, they've had more than 13,000 thank you notes tagged with #tweetsgiving and they've raised more than $16,000. In the spirit of a season of thankfulness, feel free to Tweet, blog, Facebook, or otherwise share the things that you're grateful to have encountered in your life.

We just concluded our third TechSoup GreenTech campaign after three weeks of great tips, actions, and content to reduce energy use on your IT. My GreenTech cohort  Anna Jaeger and I would like to thank the many of you who entered our Unpower Yourself Contest to report in on the things you've been doing to use less electricity with your computers. It looks like our 5 Things You Can Do in 5 Minutes to Reduce Your Power Use was a useful approach to identifying small ways you can make an impact.

Nearly everyone who entered the contest reported that they're now turning their IT equipment off at night, closely followed by those who are setting their power management (sleep) settings on their computers. About half of our respondents will start using smart power strips, and a quarter vowed to buy EPEAT gold- or silver-rated computers. The big surprise is that fully half of those who entered the contest are "deep green" and either spread the word on this or signed up with Climate Savers Computing Initiative to join the IT energy conservation movement.

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Mojave Basin Youth Corps was another organization that impressed us with their video story, winning them an Honorable Mention in the Digital Storytelling Challenge. I got the opportunity to learn more about the organization behind the camera by connecting with Luis H. Lopez.

What organization do you work for and where are you located?

I work for Mojave Basin Youth Corps (MBYC), Inc. in Adelanto, California.

Tell us briefly about the mission of your organization and your work.

MBYC was established May 18, 1999 as a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization to develop our youth by providing a meaningful education, employment skills, low-income housing, and training opportunities through projects that conserve natural resources, increase awareness of recycling, thus benefiting San Bernardino county.

As far as my work with the organization, my official title is IT Supervisor, but my work here is much more than hardware/software updates and network/server support and maintenance. Because I have a background in construction I also assist in the construction training aspect of our organization, I am a PACT (Pre-Apprenticeship Certificate Training for construction) certified trainer, and work closely with our Senior Construction trainer to provide our participants with the Green Building Certification through the PACT training.

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Two weeks ago, the tech world was abuzz with a rumor that Google's Chrome OS would be launching not in late 2010 as originally announced, but this month. My response was a bemused "Yeah right," but it turns out there was some truth to it.

Chrome hasn't officially been released to public yet, but recently Google officially made the operating system open-source. That means that if you know what you're doing, you can compile the code yourself and run the system on your computer. For the brave among us, TechCrunch has provided step-by-step instructions for downloading a virtual machine image via file-sharing sites so you can test it in a virtual setting.

As the details of Chrome have materialized, some interesting possibilities for the nonprofit community have emerged. When you use Chrome, all of your data is stored remotely, possibly making it easier than ever to work with older, donated computers. TechCrunch quotes Sundar Pichai, Google Vice President of Product Management:

In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. All the data in Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works.

Are we ready for a completely cloud-based operating system, given recent security concerns (not to mention lingering questions about Google and privacy)? Will the obvious benefits of a software as a service operating system outweigh the perceived risks?

The writers at Gizmodo, a technology blog focused on gadgets and new technology, did a comprehensive blog post on backing up your mobile devices. Smartphones are certainly becoming more ubiquitious, and data sprawl is becoming rampant. They list backup methods by each mobile platform, so there is a solution for all users no matter if they use an iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, or Windows Mobile device.

Attention 501(c)(3) nonprofits and libraries in U.S. Territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Federated States of Micronesia, Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. Minor Outlying Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands! You can now request technology product donations through TechSoup.org.

Organizations in the territories are subject to the same program eligibility and donor partner restrictions as organizations based in the 50 United States and are able to participate in the Microsoft product donation program as well as many others. 

The following is a list of all donation programs open to organizations in the U.S. Territories:

• Acteva – online event management.
• Alpha Software – software for building database applications for desktops and the web.
• Atlas Business Solutions – human resources management software and scheduling solutions.
• Blackbaud – starter fundraising package for new, small nonprofits.
• Bytes of Learning - keyboarding instruction software.
• CitySoft  - web-based operations, communications, and fundraising management.
• Comodo - Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance solutions and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) digital certificates.
• Concentric – web and email hosting.
• ESRI (not available in Puerto Rico) – mapping software.
  
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Continuing on last week's discussion about Causes leaving MySpace, TechSoup's own Amy has written an interesting guest post on Sean Stannard-Stockton's Tactical Philanthropy blog. Amy discusses the Causes fallout as well as Ideablob's sudden disappearance. She gets at some of the big questions nonprofits should be asking about the tools we're using. It's definitely worth the read.

We can count our Twitter followers or how many people have commented on our blog post, or could have counted the number of supporters on Causes or voters on Ideablob, but that doesn’t mean we connect with them. Now that Causes removed itself, its content, and any related data from MySpace, organizations cannot connect with their supporters who were using Causes. Ideablob participants are locked out from seeing any comments or feedback on their ideas. The fact that access to data, whether it’s supporters’ email addresses, tracking actions taken, or anything else, is instantly gone should be a big alert bell to those working in a "networked" way via social media to grow their community. To connect with supporters, organizations and individuals working on projects will need to be sure that data gets back to them. How are you encouraging your supporters all over the web to connect with you directly? For example, when you post a message (whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook, or even Change.org) telling your supporters that you’re ramping up for some big news, a new project or something else, include a link where they can sign up with you to be on the email/announcement list. When supporters sign a petition or take action on your organization’s behalf in social media platforms, include "thank you" and "learn more" links wherever possible that link to ways to connect directly with your organization, ensuring the contact information is in your database, not just Facebook’s.

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As mentioned last week, our Customer Service Representatives are working their tails off to dig out from a huge backlog of donation requests following the launch of Windows 7 last month. In order to help do that, they will not be taking calls today so they can go through the mountain of email requests and hopefully decrease the wait time for everyone in the coming weeks. So, even though they won't be answering phones today, they'll be plowing through your emails all day long.

The Center for Accessible Technology (CforAT) and California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) today named TechSoup Global one of three winners of the 2009 California Digital Inclusion Program Award. The award recognizes nonprofits, government agencies, and corporations responsible for raising awareness of and improving web accessibility for Californians with disabilities.

Microsoft's SharePoint/MOSS system enabled TechSoup to incorporate web features that ensure compliance with federal Web Content Accessibility Standards (WCAG) 2.0. Upgrades include website text that can now be read by assistive technology and navigation aid is available on every page. Our content and web production teams collaborated to make our webinar series accessible, an area where many companies and organizations struggle. Last month we premiered our first closed captioned video. This was made possible by several volunteers who transcribed the text and time coded it to match the video.

Help us make more recorded webinars accessible by becoming a volunteer transcriber! Email webinars@techsoup.org for more information.

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