Update: With two mere days until the voting closes, TechSoup is in a sprint for the lead for the Citizens Choice Award. We're up against corporations like McDonald's, Emerson, and Gap, so please take a moment to cast your vote in support of nonprofit innovation for social change!

TechSoup Global has entered The Financial Times-Justmeans Social Innovation Awards competition with winners selected by a panel of judges and presented in a New York City on March 23.

In addition to the main competition, there is also a Citizens Choice Award. Help recognize the innovative work our many partners make possible with your vote now.

The challenge focuses on corporate social responsibility with an emphasis on "traditional media and social media in the name of social innovation." TechSoup Global has entered the "Philanthropy" category. We're in great company, including Microsoft, Cisco, and the Adobe Foundation.

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As of this week, qualified nonprofits can now request donated Citrix products through TechSoup. Citrix offers a variety of web-based collaboration tools, including GoToMeeting, a product that lets you host web-based conferences with up to 15 participants. GoToMeeting joins Office Communications Server and ReadyTalk in the growing arsenal of online conferencing tools available to our members.

As Kevin reported from the RSA conference a few weeks ago, a growing number of organizations — nonprofit and for-profit — have staff who work at least part of their week at home. Telecommuting has received a lot of recent attention in the corporate world, but for many nonprofits, doing at least part of your work at home (possibly on a personal computer) has been the norm for years. It's important then, to find both technologies and business practices that make working at home as efficient as working in the office, and web conferencing is a big piece of that puzzle.

Last year, TechSoup had a GreenTech campaign on travel reduction. We discussed various technologies for making it easier for your staff to work at home, including web conferencing, online training, and online collaboration tools. Check out the campaign homepage for a wealth of travel reduction tips and ideas.

Salesforce.com is a popular cloud computing customer relationship management (CRM) database that’s used by tens of thousands of companies around the globe. Nonprofits are utilizing Salesforce CRM to manage donors, activists, community members, contacts and more. Through the Salesforce.com Foundation product donation program, qualified 501(c)(3) organizations are able to receive a donation of 10 Salesforce CRM licenses. If you want to learn more, join us for this upcoming free webinar.

Is Salesforce CRM Right for Your Organization?
Thursday, March 25, 11 a.m. Pacific time (2 p.m. Eastern)

In this free webinar, Becky Wiegand will interview Lindsey Anderson from the Salesforce.com Foundation who will discuss the features that Salesforce offers to nonprofit users, how to apply for the donation, as well as ways to learn how to use it. We'll also be joined by Wen-Hua Yang of NAPAWF (the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum) who will share some best practices, tips, and success stories about how she's implemented the Salesforce donation at two small nonprofit organizations.

This webinar is best geared toward people who are researching CRM options and would like to know more about what Salesforce can do or for individuals at nonprofits who have recently gotten a donation of Salesforce and would like to learn more about training resources to get started.

Register today!

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As some of you may remember, we had reduced our phone service hours around the holidays due to a bit of a backlog of work to get through. (We can be very popular, you know!) Over the holidays we were able to answers almost everyone's questions and begin the year with a clean and fresh start. It seems that since then, our popularity has only increased — and so has the volume of calls, emails, and faxes.

We'd like to assure everyone that we are doing our best to help every nonprofit or library that contacts us as soon as we are able to but for now our call times and fax and email response times are much longer than usual and will likely remain so while we are bringing some fabulous new customer service representatives up to speed. It may take up to 3-4 weeks to respond to your email requests and 1-2 weeks to process documentation.

If you have an urgent issue (grant deadlines, order cancelations and changes, or similar time-sensitive requests) please call us 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Pacific time, Monday through Thursday and 8 a.m. - 12 p.m. Pacific on Fridays. If your request is not urgent, we will respond to emails and all other forms of communication as soon as we are able to!

Thank you for your patience!

Below are some links that should be helpful in answering many of your questions:

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As alluded earlier in the TechSoup Blog, IT managers in the corporate sector are taking greater notice to a trend that we've encountered for many years — employees or volunteers bringing in their own computers to the office. Due to lack of funding or a dedicated IT budget, you may bring your own laptop to the office, or work on say your nonprofit's finances at home. In the short run this is mainly done as a cost saving measure, since it's often difficult to allocate grant funding to office equipment unless it's explicitly allowed. In addition, you are often likely to find great deals on computers individually, but less so for a whole office full of them.

In the long run, however, it can pose problems in terms of interoperability in the office, as well as support if devices aren't of uniform configuration. Even with the donations from TechSoup, you may be unlikely to be able to purchase computers for every one of your employees and volunteers in the near future.

At a session called "Bring Your Own Computer to Work — What Now?" the speakers offered some tips that can help IT managers and accidental techies address this increasing trend:

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Dean Haddock is a veteran IT manager at StoryCorps, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that's also a TechSoup member organization. See our recent spotlight on StoryCorps to learn more and stream one of the organization's stories.

Dean's been working in IT since he was 16, and secured a systems engineer position when he was 19 years old. He's the founder of a couple online businesses, including StreamFist.com, a site that turns related YouTube videos into a continous streaming content channel (just like the good old days of TV). He also blogs at SystemsConsciousness.com.

I asked Dean for IT tips that I could pass on to small nonprofits, and since I knew Dean was an open source advocate, I asked him his thoughts on open-source solutions for the nonprofit community.

This blog post is part of an occasional series focused on managing accounts at TechSoup.org. So far, we've discussed registration, qualification, updating your account and requalification. Watch for more posts to come!

As mentioned in the first post in this series: Registration, TechSoup.org has different features and benefits with both the individual user and organization accounts. In this post I'll be discussing the options and requirements for updating the organzation account information.

Organization profiles can be updated by logging in to the www.techsoup.org website with your user ID and password and clicking on the My Account link. You will first land on the User Profile page and can access the organizations you are associated with by clicking on the My Organizations tab.

Some changes will trigger a "Requalification" status, which lets you know that those changes either differ from what was originally verified during the registration process or that they will change the eligibility of the organization for the TechSoup Stock donation programs.

This post originally appeared on the AshokaTECH Blog. Elliot Harmon, regular TechSoup blogger and staff writer, was chosen to "Blog [His] Way to Hyderabad" for the Ashoka and Lemelson event, Tech4Society, taking place in Hyderabad, India this week. He will be live-blogging from the event so watch for more posts to come!

This morning's panel of young inventors from the Youth Venture program was one of the highlights of the conference. Youth Venture is a project started by Ashoka to encourage and reward invention among 16-25-year-olds. In cooperation with MTV and The Lemelson Foundation, Youth Venture produced a half-hour documentary on the inventors that's currently making the rounds on MTV in Latin America. Youth Venture has also produced two e-books with featured and interviews on the inventors and their ideas.