Category — Tools

The Oxfam New Zealand Christmas Video did the rounds in 2006 and is available on YouTube. It’s about a minute and a half long, and is a humorous encouragement by cartoon farm animals: Don’t buy crap this Christmas, buy me.

This refers to Oxfam’s Unwrapped campaign that encouraged people to combine giving:

…something special to your friends or family and … something extra special to people who haven’t got much at all.

Gifts include items such as mosquito nets, ducks, coffee plants, donkeys and other items that help improve the lives of people in poverty. Your direct recipient received a certificate and an overseas aid programme received funding.

Oxfam’s campaign has now won the Not-For-Profit Marketing Award, at the TVNZ/NZ Marketing Magazine Marketing Awards.

… rather than use the well-trodden and worthy “do something for someone less fortunate” angle that many charities adopt, Oxfam decided to have some fun and focus on the rubbish most people give each other at Christmas time. That led to the release of an online song called Don’t Buy Crap This Christmas.

… After watching the video, viewers could click through to the Unwrapped website to purchase any of the ‘Oxfarm’ band members (the animals) or other quirky, but life-saving gifts.

The budget was tiny, but the only media cost was the initial seed email ($1188 in send costs). … It worked! Fewer people bought “crap” than ever before. Instead they went online in their thousands and bought goats, chickens and donkeys for Africa (and other places).

Read the full article at the AllBusiness.com website. Warning: the site is atrocious, with pop-up rubbish and flashing, distracting garbage, and weird frames.

Read: TVNZ/NZ Marketing Magazine Marketing Awards : Don’t Buy Crap | Society, Social Assistance & Lifestyle > Philanthropy from AllBusiness.com.

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TechSoup has come to New Zealand, bringing donations of software for community organisations:

TechSoup New Zealand provides donated software and hardware from companies such as Microsoft to eligible New Zealand Charities, Voluntary and Community Groups registered as a charitable organisation under the New Zealand Income Tax Act 2004.

If you’re still persevering with costly proprietary software — programs such as Microsoft Word — this could be very useful for your organisation.

There’s not a lot there for Mac users at the moment: 2 programs. Virtual PC which is of use only to people using older Macs that don’t have an Intel processor, and Powerpoint for those who don’t use Apple’s own Keynote.

Windows users have more than 100 programs listed.

Linux users are likely to use Open Source software anyway.

… New Zealand organisations have already begun to register and receive software donations.

There are minimum product and ordering frequency requirements for eligible organisations with charitable status. So it is important you register now and then think about what your software requirements may be over the coming year.

The software itself is donated free of charge, but there is an administration fee of only 4% of the retail value of the product. This amounts to a mere $13+GST per copy of Windows Vista (Business version), only $27+GST for Office Professional Plus 2007 and $89+GST for Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition.

[Via : CommunityNet Aotearoa.]

There are, of course, plenty of other options — we often write about them here. For many purposes you can replace Word, Excel and Powerpoint with Google Docs or Open Office, and Mac users have an excellent suite of Apple software in Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

There’s loads of Open Source software available to handle almost everything you can imagine doing with a computer, and many online web applications take the emphasis off storing and using information on isolated computers and allow greater collaboration. For example, Basecamp is an excellent online collaboration tool.

Explore Techsoup and see what it can offer. There may be something there that can save your organisation hundreds of dollars, freeing up funds for more exciting online initiatives.

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Here’s Google Calendar version of the Wellington conference agenda so you can add it to your own calendar using it’s iCal feed

To learn how to create your own public Google Calendar showcasing your own events read our guide: Make Your Public Event Calendar Usable To All

What’s the conference about - this:

This is a conference pitched at an introductory level. If you’ve ever wondered how the web could be better used by your organisation; or know what a blog is, but not how it could be useful; or are a little nervous about opening a Facebook account, then this is a conference for you. If you think the internet is for geeks, or young people, or those with nothing better to do with their time, then this is a conference for you. And if you want to move beyond using email and having a simple website, then this is a conference for you.

This is a cross posting from MiramarMike.co.nz

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YouTube videos are a powerful way to not only communicate a message but have it spread quickly and easily. One extremely useful feature is that they make it easy for, and encourage, bloggers and others to share a video, perhaps by embedding it in a blog post, like this one.

Each video includes code at the end that viewers copy and paste to share the video around. Those who find the cause interesting can quickly and simply ‘pass it on’.

Take a look at The Girl Effect as an example.

Unfortunately they’ve done themselves a real disservice by creating their website in Flash — on my machine it was slow to load and then I was unable to copy and paste crucial information from the Fact Sheet. +1 on the easily shareable YouTube video. -1 on the hard to share website.

[Via : eggs benedict and two flat whites - News > The Girl Effect.]

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When you’re on-line and found that great article that you know you’ll definitely/probably need again tomorrow/next year what do you do?

You can save it to your browser bookmarks/favourites … and lose it in the swamp that is everything you’ve ever thought you’d want but never actually did. You can use an on-line social bookmarking site such as Delicious … and hope you remember what you tagged it as. Or you can do what most people do, pretend you’ll remember the site name and then pray to all things saintly that you find it in the next 5 hours by dredging through every Google search you’ve ever done and some you’ve just made up to see if they work.

How about using a wee on-line Notebook? Google Notebook to be precise.
I have to say it’s not one of the Google services I am that familiar with but over the past few weeks I have met more and more people that swear by it.

What does it do - this from their FAQ:

With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that’s accessible from any computer. Planning a trip? Researching a product? Just add clippings to your notebook. You won’t ever have to leave your browser window.

So there, it’s a place you can “bookmark/favourite” pages but in typical Google fashion they have tried to make it much more than the simple function of keeping a list of website addresses by looking at it as somewhere where you can organise and share them in a logical (to you) fashion.

Google have defined Notebook as having three distinct parts to it:

1. The mini Google Notebook (the browser extension version)
   
   

   Download the extension to access Google Notebook; you can view your notebooks, organize them into sections, add notes of your own, and more. Quickly add clippings of web content (images, text and links) straight to your notebook by highlighting the content you want and clicking the “Clip” button in the mini Google Notebook.

2. The full-page view (the web site version)
   

   Keep all your notes organized by creating multiple notebooks or by dividing a single notebook into several sections. You can also easily rearrange. Click the “New note” button to add text notes to your notebook, or click the “Add comment” link within a note to add comments to clippings you’ve collected. Find any information in your notebooks using the search box at the top of the page.

3. Collaborate and share with others
   Now this is probably the more interesting part but I’m not sure how well used it is and as with all modern web services the more people use them the more useful they become.

   Invite your friends to collaborate on a notebook with you, giving them full access to edit that notebook and add their own notes. Or just share your notebook with everyone on the web by making it a public web page. Your published notebook will be assigned a unique web address that you can then share with friends and family. And finally, search for notebooks that others have created and published to the web

I suspect Google Notebook will evolve and become integrated into some of the more well known Google offerings, possibly Google Reader, but even so it certainly has potential.

How about we all give it a go and let me know if it solves the issue of finding that long lost article you knew you’d want.

(cross posting from MiramarMike.co.nz)

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