10 tips for writing an impactful blog post
Guest post by Spencer Critchley
O’Reilly Network
July 2010

Tutorial: As you start a blog for your nonprofit or organization, write what you know and what you care deeply about, and follow some of the best practices that journalists and writers have long employed. Here are 10 tips on how to write an effective, authoritative and persuasive blog post.

The difference between WordPress Posts and Pages
Producer: John Haydon
April 2010

Tutorial: When you launch a hosted WordPress blog for your nonprofit, one of the first questions you might have is the difference between Pages and Posts. When would you use one over the other, and why? We’ll tell you.

A WordPress plug-in to simplify SEO
Producer: John Haydon
March 2010

Tutorial: SEO is the practice of improving the traffic to a website from your website’s organic results on Google. If you don’t understand the value of SEO for your nonprofit, ask yourself the following question: “How would sending people to our website just when they’re interested in our cause impact our online fundraising?”

10 essential WordPress plug-ins
Producer: JD Lasica
March 2010

Tutorial: If you’re launching or running a WordPress blog, here are 10 add-ons to make your blog more powerful & versatile.

How to engage your blog’s community
Guest post by Danny Brown
January 2010

Tutorial: There has been much written about what makes a good blog community. This post will give you some ideas on how you can best engage your blog community once you’ve started to grow one.

How to repost content with Posterous
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Posterous has broken down barriers to blogging by allowing users to post various types of content via email. Video, photos, videos and text are automatically formatted by Posterous. Here’s a quick guide to posting content quickly and easily.

How to grow your blog with guest posts
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Nine tips on how guest blogging could be a critical addition to your blog.

9 ways to attract more comments on your blog
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Getting more comments has a lot to do with the content and how inviting the post is to make comments. How do you solicit more comments with social media?

6 essential social media plug-ins for your blog
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Here are six mission-critical social media plug-ins for your blog — and why they’re important.

How to optimize your blog’s commenting system
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: You can tell a lot about the impact you have on your readers by the number, diversity and quality of your comments. Here’s how to lift the barriers to comments on your blog.

How to make your website more accessible
Producer: JD Lasica
August 2009

Tutorial: Some 60 percent of all websites are not accessible to the disabled. Here’s an interview with two experts to discuss specific steps website operators and bloggers can take to make their sites and blogs accessible, including adding simple things like alt tags, captions and underlined links.

How to make giving on your site more social
Producer: Guest post by Frank Barry
January 2010

Tutorial: Suggestions on how to make the online giving experience more social for your donors.

6 actions to optimize your blog’s subscriptions
Producer: Guest post by Grant Griffiths
January 2010

Tutorial: Here are six actions you can take to optimize subscriptions to your blog, ranging from design and ease of use to rewards.

How to optimize your most visited blog pages
Producer: Guest post by Michael Martine
January 2010

Tutorial: Tips on how to identify the most popular pages on your blog and how to optimize them for better reader engagement and conversion.

Essential social media connections for your blog
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: The main goal of your blog is to be a platform for connection: your readers connecting with you, connecting with each other, and connecting with your social media outposts. Here are some tricks you should know.

9 critical stats to measure on your blog
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: A guide to assessing the key metrics you should be looking at to measure your blog’s success.

How to Integrate Your iTunes Podcast Into WordPress
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: A step-by-step guide to integrating an iTunes podcast into your WordPress blog.

How to install Google Analytics on WordPress and Posterous
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Optimizing your blog presence starts with measuring it, using Google Analytics. Here’s a quick guide to get you set up.

Essential tips for updating your Facebook Page
Producer: John Haydon
September 2010

Tutorial: This tutorial will give you essential tips on the various ways users and administrators can update your organization’s Facebook Page.

How will your nonprofit use Facebook Places?
Producer: John Haydon
August 2010

Tutorial: Facebook has launched a location-based “check-in” app for mobile devices called “Places” where Facebook seeks to encourage serendipitous meetings between Facebook friends at the places they hang out. How can your nonprofit use Places?

2 big changes to Facebook Pages
Producer: John Haydon
August 2010

Tutorial: Facebook implements two changes are meant to simplify the navigation of Pages, make life easier for app developers, and enable Facebook to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.

8 ways to engage your Facebook fans in 3 minutes or less
Producer: John Haydon
July 2010

Tutorial: One self-evident requirement for nonprofit marketing on Facebook is regularly posting interesting content on your Facebook Page. I recently conducted a few informal experiments with some Facebook Pages and my own Facebook Profile, and found that folks were three or four times more likely to engage with a pithy status update over a shared URL, photo or video.

How to link your Facebook Page to your donation page
Producer: John Haydon
July 2010

Tutorial: One critical feature of your nonprofit Facebook Page is giving your connections easy ways to donate to one of your causes. This post will give you at least three ways to link your Facebook Page to a fundraising application.

How to know if your Facebook Page is working
Producer: John Haydon
July 2010

Tutorial: Facebook Pages include a variety of reports on fan growth, engagement, subscriber drop-off, preferred content, and user engagement. This tutorial will show you five ways to tell if your content is effective.

Facebook 101 for nonprofits
Producer: Guest post by Azin Mehrnoosh
July 2010

Tutorial: Facebook isn’t just a potential market that many nonprofits haven’t yet tapped. It’s also a place for real-time personal conversation and feedback from your constituents. This post will help you get up and running from ground zero — nice, easy and simple.

How to customize your nonprofit Facebook Page
Producer: John Haydon
June 2010

Tutorial: One thing that sets Facebook Pages apart from Profiles, Groups and Community Pages is the ability to create custom tabs using an application called FBML. This tutorial will share what you need to know to conduct a Facebook page makeover, using FBML.

13 Facebook Page features that will make your day
Producer: John Haydon
June 2010

Tutorial: This video answers 13 of the most common questions registrants have had about creating and managing a Facebook Page.

How to set up a Facebook Page
Producer: John Haydon
June 2010

Tutorial: Setting up a Facebook Page can be a confusing task: The starting point is hard to find, selecting your Page category can be tricky, and finding your Page once it’s created can be a challenge. This how-to sorts it out.

3 tools to measure your Facebook clout
Producer: John Haydon
May 2010

Tutorial: Your organization has created a Facebook Page but haven’t gotten mileage out of it. Here are tips on how to increase your impact.

Openbook: A new way to search on Facebook
Producer: John Haydon
May 2010

Resource: Openbook closes a gap in social conversations you’ve been looking to fill. You can now reach out to people who are talking about your nonprofit or organization and join them in conversation on Facebook.

Amplify your event with Facebook’s new Live Stream plug-in
Producer: John Haydon
May 2010

Tutorial: The Live Stream plug-in for Facebook is one that will be an essential tool for nonprofit events. Live Stream allows visitors to chat about your event in real time and share their chat on their Facebook Wall and news feed.

8 new Facebook plug-ins to socialize your site
Producer: John Haydon
April 2010

Tutorial: The new Facebook platform makes your website – and the entire Internet – social by default. Facebook plug-ins will allow you to turn any page on your site into a Facebook Page. These 8 new Facebook social plug-ins are fairly easy to install; most of them are as easy as embedding a YouTube video.

How to use Facebook Insights
Producer: John Haydon
April 2010

Tutorial: Measuring your organization’s level of engagement on Facebook, gain a better understanding of Facebook Insights and how you can make it work for your organization.

How to create a custom Facebook Page url
Producer: John Haydon
March 2010

Tutorial: Three reasons to create a custom url for your Facebook Page are: 1. It’s easy for supporters to remember; 2. Creating the custom url prevents someone else from registering it, and, 3. Improved SEO

The differences between Facebook Pages and Groups
Producer: John Haydon
March 2010

Tutorial: Here’s an ultimate cheat sheet for nonprofits deciding whether to set up a Facebook Page or Group.

How do I get my nonprofit’s Facebook fans to donate?
Producer: John Haydon
March 2010

Tutorial: Here are seven tactics to convert Facebook fans into contributors.

Choose the best settings for your Facebook Page
Producer: John Haydon
February 2010

Tutorial: When you set up a Facebook Page, you want make sure you do it in a way that optimizes the Page for best results. This video goes over all the setting in a Facebook administration panel, keeping strategy in mind.

How to turn Facebook visitors into fans
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: A look at how to create an incentive for visitors to your Facebook Page to become fans.

How to get more traffic from Facebook
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Strategies and tactics you can use to create more blog traffic with a Facebook Page.

12 steps to creating a compelling Facebook Page
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: A step-by-step guide to creating a compelling Facebook Page.

How to add a Facebook Page Fanbox to your site
Producer: John Haydon
August 2009

Short video tutorial on adding a Facebook Page Fanbox to your site.

How to automatically feed your blog posts into Facebook
Producer: John Haydon
August 2009

This video tutorial on how to import your blog posts into your Facebook Page covers the following steps:
• Adding the notes application to your Facebook Page
• Adding your blog’s RSS feed to the application
• Confirming and importing your blog posts

How to make a Facebook Page in under 4 minutes
Producer: John Haydon
July 2009

This video tutorial quickly covers the basics of what you need to know to create a Facebook Page.

11 stats you need to measure on your Facebook Page
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: A guide on how to take advantage of Facebook’s Insights feature.

Set up a social media dashboard with Hootsuite
Producer: John Haydon
August 2010

Tutorial: This screencast helps nonprofits take advantage of Hootsuite’s new capabilities. This short tutorial is one tool to manage your organization’s presence across a wide range of social networks.

How to auto-follow people on Twitter
Producer: John Haydon
June 2010

Tutorial: A simple tactic for new Twitter users is to follow users who are already conversing about topics related to their cause. The theory is that if half of Twitter followers auto-follow in return, you would get 50 new followers simply by following 100 users.

How to get supporters to retweet content
Producer: John Haydon
February 2010

Tutorial: How do you get people to share your content? Here are five essential tips on sharing.

3 Twitter shortcuts: SocialOomph, Twitterfeed, CoTweet
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: A few automated Twitter techniques to auto-follow back the people who follow you on Twitter, to promote other people’s blog post, and to post a tweet later instead of right now

13 ways to get your blog posts retweeted
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Strategies for getting retweeted as a way to measure engagement and assess relevance in the community.

How to get more followers on Twitter
Producer: John Haydon
September 2009

Tutorial: 3 reasons why getting more followers is good business
* Follower numbers are social proof of what you offer on Twitter. It’s not the only reason people choose to click follow, but it is a check box.
* Increasing your followers spreads your message. Remember the last time you met a group of completely new people? Maybe at a party, or an event? Seeds were planted, pigeons were launched.
* Increasing your followers is good for current followers. They want to meet new people too, right? I can’t count how many times I’ve been the “connector” between someone I just met, and a long-time follower. Win, win, win!

When you’re ready to increase your followers, you want to do it in a way that builds trust and self respect.

How nonprofits can use Twitter hashtags
Producer: Beth Kanter
August 2009

Tutorial: What is a #hashtag? A hashtag is the symbol: #. (See the definition in Socialbrite’s glossary.) It is also a Twitter term that describes a keyword, prefixed by that symbol, that helps people track conversations on Twitter. In this post, Beth Kanter gives you tips on how to facilitate conversation around a tag.

How to automatically tweet your Flickr photos
Producer: John Haydon
July 2009

This video tutorial explains how to simply add your new Flickr photos to your Twitter feed.

How to use Seesmic Desktop
Producer: John Haydon
June 2009

You’ve started using Twitter to find new supporters. But now you’re having a tough time managing the “stream.” Seesmic is a good way to help you organize your followers and conversations on Twitter. Here are three videos I created for folks who want to learn how to use Seesmic Desktop:

1. Why it’s useful: Manage multiple accounts, organize a Twitter stream into columns, very fast and easy to use
2: Getting started: Adding accounts, creating groups, navigating replies and DMs
3. Deeper functionality: User avatars, shrinking urls, posting images, shrinking text

Why Twitter Lists are huge for your nonprofit
Producer: John Haydon
November 2009

Twitter Lists are guaranteed to be the next huge development on Twitter. This short video covers how to use Lists and why.

6 simple stats you need to measure on Twitter
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: How to set a baseline so you can measure the impact and growth of your presence on Twitter over the next several months.

Using hashtags to enhance community
Producer: John Haydon
December 2009

Tutorial: Hashtags are a way to funnel specific discussions about a topic into a coherent thread, sort of like using Twitter to tune into specific radio frequencies. But not everyone knows how to create successful chat sessions. In this screencast, we outline the basics of managing a hashtag chat on Twitter.

How to create a Google Group discussion list
Producer: Guest post by Tim Davies
August 2010

Tutorial: Here is a One Page Guide to E-mail Lists with Google Groups, a tool for running your own e-mail discussion lists where members of the list can send a message to a one e-mail address and all the members of the list will receive it.

10 steps for planning a successful webinar
Producer: Guest post by Kami Griffiths and Chris Peters
August 2010

Tutorial: Online seminars, or webinars, are a dynamic, engaging way to convey information to a geographically dispersed audience on a budget. Nonprofits use webinars for a variety of purposes, including software training, sharing information about a new product or service, or promoting a program. Here is an outline of some of the major steps you can take to plan quality, affordable webinars at your nonprofit.

Why your nonprofit should check out Google Buzz
Producer: John Haydon
February 2010

Tutorial: Here are several reasons why Google Buzz is different from Facebook and Twitter — and why your nonprofit may find value in creating a Buzz account.

An easy way to organize applications online
Producer: JD Lasica
February 2010

Tutorial: A new app that simplifies the process of reviewing and ranking applications in a secure, cloud-based collaboration space that brings together all parties and provides deep reporting features.

8 tips for effective online networking
Producer: Beth Kanter
February 2010

Tutorial: As more organizations jump on the social networking bandwagon, people are seeking ways to make the time spent on these tools as efficient and fruitful as possible. Here are suggestions for effectively managing your profiles and contacts on social networking sites and getting the most out of social tools.

8 simple ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Tips on using LinkedIn to promote your blog, from titles to Google rank to tweeting your LinkedIn status.

How to use LinkedIn to promote your blog
Producer: Guest post by Lewis Howes
January 2010

Tutorial: LinkedIn is one of the most powerful ways to drive traffic to your blog. Here are several strategies for making the most of LinkedIn.

10 tactics to be more efficient with social media
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Ten tactics to be more efficient with social media, from task chunking and smart email to feed purges.

How to grow your blog with social media for social good
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: Within your blog strategy, make a list of non-profits that you really care about. You can either reach out to them or hop onto existing social good campaigns like TweetsGiving and Blog Action Day.

How to bridge professional and social networks with social media
Producer: Guest post by Chris Garrett
January 2010

Tutorial: Social media is not just a more efficient way of networking, and it is not just a way to avoid some of the less appealing parts of networking that you experience in the face to face world. It can in fact allow you to reach people who would be normally way out of reach

How to make social media ‘wheelchair accessible’
Producer: John Haydon
January 2010

Tutorial: A few simple solutions can tear down the barriers of accessibility, enabling these previously silenced voices to be heard and to fully participate online and in social media.

5 lessons from a crowdsourced birthday party
Producer: Amy Sample Ward
January 2010

Tutorial: 5 Lessons on how one can harness the power of the crowd for a quick & easy campaign. Here are reflections about how crowdsourcing techniques are used for a very fast-moving campaign and lessons learned that may apply to work.

Tips on fundraising with social media
Producer: Amy Sample Ward
January 2010

Tutorial: A look at the difference between organization-driven and individual-driven fundraising and how your organization can leverage the power of the crowd.

How Google’s real-time search impacts your nonprofit
Producer: John Haydon
December 2009

Tutorial: The new live search means when you now search Google, you’ll see scrolling updates from blogs, Twitter and FriendFeed published just seconds before. See our screencast for an explanation of how this impacts your nonprofit.

Digital storytelling: A tutorial in 10 easy steps
Producer: JD Lasica
July 2010

Tutorial: Digital storytelling is a craft that uses the tools of digital technology to tell stories about our lives. Done properly, storytelling can be a powerful, evocative way of communicating themes and stories, often touching us in deeper ways than one-dimensional videos that rarely probe beneath the surface of people’s lives. Nonprofits, especially, can use this technique to convey powerful, emotion-filled messages — by letting the people you’re helping tell their own stories.

8 tips to help you shoot video like a pro
Producer: Guest post by Rick Broida
July 2010

Tutorial: There’s more to videography than just taking the camcorder out of the box and pressing Record. As with photography, good videography requires a bit of know-how.

Here is list of ways you can improve your movies, or make your video creations look a lot better.

Digital storytelling from soup to nuts
Producer: Denise Atchley, Digital Storytelling Festival
July 2010

Tutorial: Digital storytelling can be used by nonprofits and cause organizations as a wonderful resource for social change.

This lengthy tutorial consists of four parts:

1. Finding your story
2. Telling your story
3. Creating the piece
4. Sharing the work

Visual storytelling checklist
Producer: JD Lasica
July 2010

Tutorial: Planning to create a video or digital story for your organization? Make sure you plan out your goals and gather the right equipment before hitting the record button. Here are steps to follow creating your video or digital story.

6 tips for shooting effective Web video
Producer: JD Lasica
May 2010

Tutorial: Watch Jessica Kizorek as she discusses six tips for shooting effective Web video:

1. Keep it short.
2. Keep it simple.
3. Use people’s faces.
4. Speak directly into the camera.
5. Use lighting effectively
6. Avoid talking heads

How to embed interactive links in your YouTube videos
Producer: John Haydon
December 2009

Tutorial: With annotated links, you can edit your YouTube videos and add text links that will link to other videos on YouTube, Playlists on YouTube, YouTube Channels, Searches on YouTube, Groups on YouTube and more.

Geolocation & mobile phones
Producer: JD Lasica
February 2010

Tutorial: A one-page handout on how to use geolocaion on your mobile device to chronicle events in your community.

How to set up an SMS campaign system
Producer: Guest post by Melissa Loudon
February 2010

Tutorial: Mobile advocacy basics, from short codes and keyword response to mobile data collection.

How to record & edit a 2-minute audio interview
Guest post by Adam Hyde and Adam Willets
May 2010

Tutorial: This guide shows you how to record and edit a two-minute interview with just one microphone and a laptop.