Guest post by the Microsoft Citizenship Team

Last week Microsoft announced updates to our nonprofit software donations program to enable more nonprofits around the world to get easier access to the technology they need, when they need it.

We currently provide software donations to more than 40,000 nonprofits each year, but we’re still just getting started and we need your help to reach more. Even if you don’t work at a nonprofit, you can help us spread the word.

Many nonprofit organizations, including some in your local community, are not aware that they can request a donation of Microsoft software, simply by visiting www.microsoft.com/nonprofit. Together, we can ensure nonprofits have access to affordable technology to help them do more with their limited resources.

What you can do to help

There are two easy ways you can help:

1) Share the video above with your colleagues, friends and family to raise awareness of a great resource available to nonprofits. Here’s the YouTube link: http://youtu.be/jvEaOBty6xI

2) Make your cause our cause. Reach out to your favorite nonprofit and make sure they’re aware of the Microsoft donations program.  To make it as easy as possible, we’ve drafted a note below that you can use.

To those who have already helped, a big thank you from everyone at Microsoft!

To my favorite nonprofit:

I think the work you do in our community is amazing.  I know how challenging it is to try to do more with less.

So how can you boost productivity, raise more funds, increase your reach, and deliver new or better services in our community? How about a donation of software from Microsoft? I wanted to make sure you know that eligible nonprofit organizations can request a software donation.  There are still many nonprofits that don’t know about the donations program.  Do you?

Eligible nonprofis can choose from a wide range of Microsoft desktop and server products (including Office and Windows).  Check out www.microsoft.com/nonprofit to see what’s available and learn how to apply.  In fact, if you are in one of these 35 additional countries with a local TechSoup program, you may be able to get technology donations from other companies too, like Cisco, Symantec, or Adobe.

Maybe you already knew all this.  If so, that’s great.  I want you to keep doing good stuff in our community, and know that access to the latest technology can help.  It would be great if you could share this note with other nonprofits too.

By spreading the word, together, we can help millions of nonprofits get access to the technology they need to best serve communities worldwide.

Sincerely,

Your supporter

More information:

• Learn more about the updates to the software donations program.
• Review nonprofit eligibility guidelines and how to apply for a Microsoft software donation.
• Tell us more about your favorite nonprofit by tweeting @msftcitizenship with the hashtag #mycause
• What’s your cause? #Mycause is @nonprofitname – http://bit.ly/NPOlet  @msftcitizenship
• Tell your favorite nonprofit they can get software donations from @msftcitizenship: http://bit.ly/NPOlet

This article originally appeared on the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Blog.

The post Help your favorite nonprofit get a software donation appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Kristy Graves
TechSoup Global

Storytelling is one of the most powerful vehicles to convey your organization’s message. This month TechSoup Global and a number of digital media experts are helping the nonprofit community learn how to hone your storytelling chops.

Starting Thursday, Jan. 13, join TechSoup’s Digital Storytelling Event. Participate in webinars, online events and discussions to learn how to tell your organization’s story through video and photos. Then, create a digital story showcasing your organization’s work and submit it for a chance to win prizes, including Adobe Premiere Pro, Flip Video Slide HD or an Optoma Pico Projector. No production or storytelling experience is necessary – this online lab will teach you how.

Head over to TechSoup’s Forums to learn how to start storytelling. Then, use the digital story you created and put those new skills to good use. Here’s the overview:

What

The second annual Digital Storytelling Challenge. Create a 60-second YouTube video or five-panel image story on Flickr, telling us about your organization. Training and resources provided by TechSoup and its partners. Prizes for the top three submissions from Flip Video, Flickr, Adobe and more. See full details.

When

This is a series of online-only virtual events.

Jan. 13 to 31: Submit your entries.

Jan. 13: First Webinar, How to Tell Your Digital Story, with Michael Margolis of GetStoried and Rob Kershaw of the Center for Digital Storytelling

Jan. 20: Second Webinar, Tools for Digital Storytelling, with social entrepreneur Melissa Jun Rowley

Jan. 31: Close of submissions

Feb. 23: Screenings, awards and mixed reality event, more details coming soon

Who

Any nonprofit or social benefit organization. All experience levels welcomed.

Cost

Free!

Visit the Digital Storytelling Challenge page for more details, instructions/guidelines, see the expert judges, and other ways you can participate.

Follow along, RSVP and join the community online:

Twitter: #TSDigs

Facebook: TechSoup 2nd Annual Digital Storytelling Challenge

LinkedIn: TechSoup Global Digital Storytelling Challenge

If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to reach out to the TechSoup team at tsdigs@techsoupglobal.org.

Related on Socialbrite

• Digital storytelling: A tutorial in 10 easy steps

• Digital storytelling from soup to nuts

• How nonprofits should be using storytelling

• Visual storytelling checklist

• Mash up a visual story for your nonprofit

• Create video stories for your nonprofit in 6 steps

The post Storytelling goes digital with TechSoup’s help appeared first on Socialbrite.

An overview of software for multimedia editing, video hosting & podcasting

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, NGOs, citizen journalists, media makers. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

By Kaitlin LaCasse and Laura S. Quinn
Idealware

Want to get started using audio or videos to engage your current supporters and pull in new ones? There are a number of tools that put multimedia within the reach of most nonprofits. In this excerpt from the Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Fundraising, Communications and Outreach, we explore three related multimedia topics. First, we take a look at multimedia editing software, which can help you whip your audio or video files into shape for public distribution. Then we explore how video sharing websites can help you put your video into the world. Finally, we talk about podcasts, a way to let people easily subscribe to audio or video shows.

Multimedia editing

Multimedia editing software gives you the capability to create videos or audio recordings with a level of a polish that used to require a lot of expensive hardware. Good editing takes time and some skill, but a number of low-cost, straightforward packages put the tools within reach of any nonprofit.

With audio packages, you can edit interviews for length, cut “um”s and pauses, and add music or voiceover introductions. Both GarageBand (for the Mac) and Audacity (for the PC or Mac) are free, solid tools that provide all the functionality you’re likely to need. If you’re eligible for the Adobe donation program through TechSoup, you may be able to get professional-grade Adobe Audition for a $35 admin fee.

Video tools let you cut out pieces you don’t want, splice different sections together, and overlay graphics and text onto your piece. You might join an interview with a constituent together with scenes of your program participants, and put a title screen at the beginning — and even upload it to YouTube with a single click.

For Mac users, iMovie (free with the Mac OS X operating system) is a great editing tool for simple movies. The free editing software available for PCs, on the other hand — like Windows Movie Maker and Pinnacle Systems’ VideoSpin — can be difficult to work with, and often imposes insistent front-and-center ads or confusing limitations on supported formats. For PC users, a good alternative is Adobe Premiere Elements (pictured at right, $15 for nonprofits on TechSoup, or the movie editor is about $79 retail), which provides friendly features very similar to iMovie.

[Editors note: There are also a few online video editing options, including Jaycut.com (free), Motionbox.com (free), Moviemasher.com (free & open source) and Kaltura (fee-based and open source, though these solutions have serious limitations.]

If you’ve outgrown the low-cost options, or want to create more robust animations or special effects, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro provide logical stepping stones for Mac users, while Adobe Premiere Pro (a $70 admin fee for eligible nonprofits through TechSoup) is a popular option for both Macs and PCs. These products, all under $1,000 retail, provide all the power you’re likely to need. If you need more, consider hiring a professional video editor.

Video sharing websites

Videos can provide a compelling way to tell your story online. While they can be expensive to produce, both in staff time and actual money, video sharing websites let you upload videos to the web for free. Once they’re online, viewers can comment and share them with friends. In general, you maintain ownership of the videos you post, but you grant the site certain rights — before you post a video, read the site’s Policies and Terms carefully.

There are many free video sharing options, including YouTube , Blip.tv, Revver and Vimeo. DoGooderTV is geared specifically at nonprofits. Brightcove lets you show videos and video pages without any logo or branding for Brightcove itself, but starts at $2,000 per month. YouTube offers nonprofit-specific functionality, like the ability to create a branded YouTube channel, link calls to action directly in videos or accept donations directly through the video page.

Want to “go viral”? If enough people share a video, it can spread around the Web exponentially, eventually reaching an enormous audience — this rare, sought-after phenomenon is known as “going viral.” There’s no recipe for creating viral videos, but you can start by making sure it’s relevant and irresistible enough to compel people to share. And then cross your fingers.

Many of these video sharing websites also allow you to post the videos on your own Web page or blog. They provide HTML (the coding language of websites) code for you to copy and paste to embed the video. In most cases, the sites’ logos are displayed on these videos.

Podcasts: Hosting and directories

Podcasts are syndicated audio or video shows that allow people to subscribe. Once that’s done, whenever a new show is available, files are automatically downloaded onto subscribers’ computers. In fact, that’s the main difference between podcasts and other types of audio or video files — podcasts are subscription-based and downloaded via RSS so subscribers don’t have to seek them out.

Nonprofits can use them in a number of ways to create awareness or educate people about their causes. Podcasts can be useful to record and broadcast meetings, conference calls, speeches and more. Keep in mind, though, that creating polished multimedia content is time-consuming. If you have the audio or visual content or the experience to create podcasts, they can provide an interesting way to distribute information, but think carefully about the time involved before committing yourself to creating new multimedia content on a regular basis.

The first step is to record audio or video using a microphone or camera, and edit it using multimedia editing software like GarageBand or Audacity, mentioned above. Once you’ve polished the content and exported it into a standard file format, decide whether to post the podcast on your own site or on a site designed to store and share them, like Hipcast.com, LibSyn, Podbus, Ourmedia or others. These sites range from free to around $5 per month.

Once your podcast is hosted and published, people can subscribe via most RSS readers. You should also submit your podcast to a site like iTunes or Odeo that allows people to easily find it. On these sites, users search for podcasts or enter their Web addresses, and the site downloads the files directly onto their computers, iPods or other portable devices as soon as they are available.

Related

• Comparing Terms of Service at video sites (Socialbrite)

• BlogTalkRadio: Extend the reach of your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

• More in our Making media series

The post A quick guide to multimedia software appeared first on Socialbrite.

Change.org: Helping you take action online from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

One of the most impressive and influential sites in the causes space, Change.org, has really come into its own in the past six to eight months. The social enterprise is helping raise awareness about important social causes and empowering people to take action, chiefly through the efforts of leading nonprofits.

Here’s an interview I conduced with Ben Rattray, founder and CEO of Change.org, after a meetup at TechSoup’s offices in San Francisco. Ben describes the organization this way: “We’re an online community and media network for social issues, focused on engaging and informing people about the most important issues of our time — global warming, homelessness, fair trade — and compelling them to take action.”

Actions might range from joining an organization and making a personal pledge to signing an online petition or calling a congressperson’s office about an issue. “This is one of the things we’re most interested in innovating on and partnering with other organizations on — finding the most powerful actions possible for people to advance issues they care about.”

Thousands of nonprofit organizations have signed up and “claimed their profiles” on Change.org, allowing them to add additional information and interact directly with supporters and donors.

The video is a little dark because we were placed in a room not set up for video interviews. But the organization’s story is compelling. The interview is 5 1/2 minutes long.

Watch or embed video on Vimeo
Download video in high-quality H.264 from Archive.org

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Here’s a 4 1/2-minute interview with Premal Shah, president of the nonprofit microfinance lender Kiva.org, conducted at the Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp in San Mateo, Calif.

The next Bay Area Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp will be held June 20 in Berkeley. Register now — it’s always an inspiring gathering.

In our conversation, Premal discusses not just Kiva but other online services that are of great help to nonprofits, including myc4, microplace, prosper.com, Google Checkout, techsoup and Salesforce’s program for nonprofits.

Kiva has become one of my favorite sites, performing a spectacularly valuable service on a global scale. Check them out and consider supporting a small business or entrepreneur in the developing world with a $25 loan. (Remarkably, on two occasions recently I logged into the site to make a micro-loan and was told that all the applicants had been fully funded.)

Watch or embed video on Vimeo
Watch or download video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download original video from Archive.org

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