A few days ago on January 14, 2010, TechSoup Talks! held a webinar focused on making your website more accessibility for those in need of assistive technology. Jane Vincent, Usability/Accessibility Manager from the Center for Assistive Technology, gave an overview of web accessibility and the current accessibility guidelines both nationally and internationally.

Jane walked participants through simple code and many examples to help make your organization's website more accessible for all! Examples included everything from using efficient and accessible text sizes to suggestions of usability testing to how to integrate social media into all aspects of this transition.

Thursday, February 4, 11 a.m. Pacific time

More and more nonprofits are exploring and finding benefits from using new social media tools like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter in their online communications. But while the tools themselves can be relatively straightforward to learn and adopt, many organizations struggle with how to effectively coordinate messaging and communications across their suite of online channels — from web and email, to blogs and social media, and beyond.

This free webinar will describe best practices for integrating social media into organizational websites, including basic nuts-and-bolts changes to webpage templates and enhancements to contact, staff, and email sign-up pages. Effective and simple processes for coordinating various channels and maximizing traffic between them will be explained. In addition, a range of contrasts will be drawn describing the different natures and uses of the respective channels, and methods for measuring how different channels are driving traffic to one another will be presented.

Space is limited, register today!

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Google and the nonprofit community have had a very Jim-and-Pam* relationship over the past two years, as Google has repeatedly extended the end date for donated Google Checkout services but stayed equivocal about whether we can expect to see the free services indefinitely.

Today's good news is that the checkout services will be free for another year (until January 1, 2011), but only for nonprofits also enrolled in Google Grants for free advertising. If you have a Google Checkout account and a Google Grants account, you need to link them to take advantage of the donated checkout service.

Even if you don't use Google's nonprofit offerings, it's worth looking at their announcement because it also offers an interesting discussion on suggested donation amounts. During a recent disaster-relief campaign, Google decided to run tests on various suggested donations to see which one yielded the best results. To my surprise, Google reports that leaving the donation amount blank brought in the best numbers. Of course, the big takeaway is that you should run this sort of test yourself, as results will be different for different audiences. If you're relying on intuition, you're wrong.

This week, we decided to revisit an older article, Free, Easy Ways to Add a Calendar to Your Website. This is one of TechSoup's most popular articles (thanks in no small part to Google), but some parts had gotten a little dated and it was well in need of an update.

The most obvious change is that far more nonprofits are using web CMSes and using them more intelligently than we were three years ago. Idealware's excellent report on the big four open-source CMSes (Drupal, Plone, Wordpress, and Joomla) noted that only Plone offers a calendar function out-of-the-box, but the other three support additional calendar modules. While researching the article, I found some great examples of nonprofits using these modules to incorporate upcoming events seamlessly throughout their sites, not just on a single calendar page.

The other big change is that more nonprofits are using social networking sites. If your nonprofit has a Facebook page but you don't use it to invite fans to upcoming events, then you should definitely think about it. As we mention in the article, there's even a new application that automatically converts events from any iCalendar-compatible calendar into Facebook events.

While we're on the subject of calendars, the Human Calendar (one of my favorite web doohickeys) is looking for someone in the Portland area to volunteer as the face of 2010! "Prefer someone that is out of the age 25-35 and/or caucasian demographic, but anyone is welcome."

Update: Marc has followed up with some more insight about how orchestras could improve their social media metrics. See his blog post and join the forum discussion.

Beth's Blog has an interesting guest post today by Marc van Bree, who's recently been studying how orchestras use social media. His findings are interesting not only for orchestras and performing arts organizations, but for anyone who's trying to use new media to spread awareness.

…Social media activities, familiarity, and usage seem to be widespread among orchestras. Managers find social media important and organizations are generally enthusiastic. However, the efforts are far from organized and strategic. It seems many orchestras are dipping their feet in the social media pool, but do not have the policies, budgets, and metrics in place to effectively use the tools at their disposal, even if they do recognize the need for checks and balances.

The full report is 24 pages, but it's definitely worth a look. One thing that struck me is that when van Bree asked participants what the goals of their social media campaigns were, "Increasing web traffic" was the most popular response, just above "Increasing brand awareness" and well above any goals that directly impacted revenue (ticket sales and fundraising were sixth and eighth, respectively, out of eight choices).

Respondents were right in not treating social media as a silver bullet for fundraising, but the apparent focus on website traffic seems odd to me. Web traffic is much easier to measure than most other kinds of impact, but it seems a clumsy proxy for the less transparent goals of awareness and education. Upon watching a YouTube video about your nonprofit's message, would you rather a viewer visit your website or send the video to 100 friends?

What Should a Website Cost?
Thursday, December 17, 11 a.m. Pacific time

Are you thinking about revamping your website but not sure where to start? Are you working with a web developer but wonder if you're paying too much? With all the tools and strategies available, it's hard to know where to start and what to expect. Attend this free webinar where Allen Gunn, Executive Director of Aspiration, will share valuable information about:

• The steps you should follow when framing and managing web projects to streamline the process and minimize cost.
• What you can expect to pay for different types of websites, from basic "brochure-ware" to higher-end web applications.
• The different types of website technologies.

This will be a basic-to-intermediate–level overview of the website development process and ideal for decision makers, board members involved in the process, and accidental techies. Space is limited: click here to register.

This week, the newsletter featured an older TechSoup article, Five Principles to Design By. Guest writer Joshua Porter contributed the article in 2007, but his advice is as fresh and pertinent as ever. These tips aren't only about design: they're about keeping people at the center of your nonprofit's projects, not technology.

• Technology serves humans.
• Design is not Art.
• The experience belongs to the user.
• Great design is invisible.
• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
  
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Yesterday we talked about diagramming software, the subject of this week's TechSoup article. Diagramming tools are great if you want to create a flow chart or map of your computer network, projects that are too complicated for Microsoft Paint but too simple for Photoshop.

A closely related subject is charts: pie charts, line charts, scatter plots, Venn diagrams, and the like. We use these a lot in the nonprofit world, be it in fundraising letters, annual reports, or even in staff meetings. But it surprises me how many ugly charts I see nonprofits making. Our partners at Idealware have put together a report on just this subject, A Consumers Guide to Low-Cost Data Visualization Tools. It's a free PDF download, but it requires an email address.

There are dozens if not hundreds of affordable, reliable, high-quality, green web hosts in the market today. Choose one to host your website. Here are some third-party lists of green web hosts:

• b2evolution
• TreeHugger
• WebHostingReport.com
• There is even a Twitter account that simply lists green web hosts.

When selecting a provider, consider these items:

TechSoup and Adobe announced the winners of the Show Your Impact design contest at the very end of May. Since then, we've been featuring the winners and runners-up in each of the four main categories. We ran the contest for a couple of reasons —  to show off the amazing work of these nonprofits and libraries and also to inspire the work of others. You can see the previously featured winners here and here.