What: NTEN is holding an online workshop on social media using a Choose Your Own Expert format. They've gathered a group of nonprofit social media experts to help you devise a solid organizational strategy and learn the secrets of a variety of social media tools.  After an opening plenary by Beth Kanter, you'll choose one of 4 breakout sessions:

Mozilla Service Week is here! We've blogged about Mozilla Service Week a few times in the past few weeks, but if you still haven't gotten involved, it's not too late. The Mozilla Blog has a list of projects and challenges that still need volunteers. If you need help at your nonprofit but don't know where to start, try Jayne's list of short-term assignments for tech volunteers. Beth has some suggestions too.

All week, the Mozilla Service Week site will be featuring volunteer success stories. You can also follow the action on Flickr and Delicious.

Are you participating in Mozilla Service Week, either with your nonprofit or as a volunteer? If so, come tell us about it in the TechSoup forums.

Here's a great project that Mozilla has put together in conjunction with Idealist, Social Actions, and others. For one week in September, tech experts all around the world will donate their time to organizations and individuals who need help accessing and using the Internet. It makes sense for Mozilla to take the initiative to put together a project like this; after all, it's largely volunteer efforts that have put together Mozilla products, translated them into dozens of languages, and built plugins to extend functionality in every conceivable direction. Imagine the impact that those developers, designers, and translators could achieve by focusing all of that attention on their own communities for one week.

If you head over to the Mozilla Service Week site, you can sign up as a volunteer or as an organization in need of help.

Who doesn't, right?! This week, TechSoup has a new article called Tips for Designing (or Redesigning) a Nonprofit Web Site, that covers all the basic considerations needed in order to get a new or redesigned site up and running.

This article covers all the steps to include in your exploration process, discusses the stakeholders who need to be involved, the general timeline that most web development firms follow, and shares a variety of great resources for starting your redesign process.

I've gone through this process as the "accidental techie" at three small nonprofits before and have had site redesigns go both ways — well planned up front and not-so-well-planned. The difference in the process can make or break the success and outcome. The frustrations and the lack of deliverables when the project was wrapped up were not only greater in the not-so-well-planned process, but they also cost our organization a LOT more money longer term.

Following guidelines and thinking through the questions presented in this article can help get your project off to a good start and keep it on track through to a new site launch.

Photo: Simon Collison

Heather Carpenter's Nonprofit Leadership 601 blog posted a list of resources for people who are new to the field of nonprofit technolology.

This post lists books, reports, Web sites, blogs, and conferences that nonprofit techies — and not just those newbies — should know about.

We're happy that TechSoup is listed right at the top of the list. Feel free to add your favorite nonprofit tech resources to the list by way of commenting on the post.

Photo: Neil T

Help TechSoup with some UI/UX (user interface/user experience) testing May 11-14.

TechSoup.org is looking for Bay Area nonprofit folks to come to their offices in South of Market, San Francisco for two hours on May 11-14 and participate in user testing sessions for some Web redesign stuff we are working on. Participants will receive a small gift as a thank you and lots of good karma/social capital.

Ideal participants include registered members of TechSoup.org who have received product donations, consultants who help nonprofits with their tech needs, and nonprofit staffers are either not familiar with TechSoup.org or have not received product donations.

We will run sessions on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 12 noon, 2 p.m., 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. Pacific at our offices. If you're available and interested, please send colleen@techsoup.org your name, email address, the name of your organization, current phone, and preferred times to participate.

The Nonprofit Finance Fund has announced a special package of services designed to meet the needs of nonprofits in the current economic climate. According an email from the NFF:

We have put together a flexible combination of advice, coaching, planning tools and a variety of loan products … to help [nonprofits] manage through the recession while positioning them for long-term financial and programmatic strength. These services can be combined and customized to fit the needs of nonprofits on both an individual and group basis. They are designed to help answer questions that range from the simple to the complex: "what’s our current financial condition and where are we headed?"; "how do we decide whether to reduce, combine or cut programs?"; "how do we communicate our position to our board and funders?"; "how do we plan for different financial outcomes such as reductions in funding?"; "how do we deal with cash flow shortages?"; "what measures can we adopt that will leave us stronger when the recession is over?"; "should we consider [a] merger, or strategic alliances?"; "how do we protect our core services?"; "should we borrow and/or open a line of credit and how do we do that?"; "what should our financial strategy be over the long haul?"; or even "how can we turn the recession to our advantage?"

From our colleagues at NPower and Accenture. By the way, three people who complete the survey will be chosen at random and will win an iPod Shuffle so get on it today!

In an effort to get a fresh sense of what software is being used daily amongst nonprofits across the country and to understand nonprofit satisfaction with these options NPower and Accenture have joined together to put out a Community Technology Survey. The survey aims to identify not only which applications are in use, but the patterns of use and what drives selection.

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Don't forget, you can join our good friends at NTEN almost every day for their live office hours sessions. Each day, a nonprofit technology expert spends an hour in NTEN's chat room, ready to help out your nonprofit in his or her area of expertise.

Traci Magleby will be available to discuss off-site data backup solutions tomorrow, March 3, at 1 p.m. Eastern time. Check out NTEN's calendar for future sessions. It's easy to keep up to date with office hours: you can subscribe using Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, and similar programs.

If you haven't been to NTEN's Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) before, you don't know what you're missing. And with registration now open for the 2009 event that's taking place in San Francisco from April 26-28, you can get a leg up on all the useful sessions, workshops, and more.

TechSoup Global will be there with bells on (well, maybe not literally, but we'll have a presence for sure). For this year's event, TechSoup will be the local host and participating in a variety of ways (more details to come). We hope to see you there!

Here's more info, directly from the horse's email, so to speak:

Registration for the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference is now open! We hope you'll plan on joining us in San Francisco, April 26-28. We're pretty sure you'll like it.

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