As the Chair of 2020 Communications Trust its my job to manage our governance bodies, including the full meetings of trustees and the monthly Admin committee.

Naturally we try to use the tools we promote, starting in the old days with emails and attachments. That soon gets totally unwieldy as participants add their comments, want to edit or amend documents and add or amend agenda items. The secretarial load soon becomes impossible. Time to webify the process. [Read more →]

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As one who has recently made the transition to online accounting system from having the software based on a third party's PC; one who charged us every time data was entered and even for fixing any data entry errors, I'm sold on the idea, especially for small organisations.

But the accounting profession is about as conservative as you can get - its what we pay them for and when they get "creative" or "innovative" we ALL get into deep trouble - so you might expect some resistance when you rush in with the idea to your CFO, accoutnay, auditor or treasurer. AccountingWEB.co.uk has the lowdown Accountants bring Cloud summit down to earth [Read more →]

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I've done plenty of presentations to various sizes of audience but the same problem always comes up, apart from the fact that the projector doesn't work about half the time. The other problem is that once you have finished, that's it, end of all that work. Sure, you can hand out slides but if you are using your presentation tool correctly, most of the content is missing from the slides, its in what you say and how you say it.

Enter Slideshare, a free service for rescuing all that hard work and making it available to others, those who were at the conference but have forgotten just what you said, or fell asleep during it, and especialyl those who didn't get to the event. [Read more →]

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Connecting Up Australia has created a capacity benchmarking tool for organisations wanting to know how they measure up in IT capability alongside comparable other organisations in the sector

"Are We There Yet?" lets you benchmark your technology capacity against almost 1,000 nonprofits who completed their detailed survey in October 2008. As more and more nonprofit organisations use the AWTY benchmark tool online, the richer the benchmark data will become.

They are about to add a section that also allows you to benchmark your efforts to be 'green' and environmentally responsible.

The real point of 'Are We There Yet?' is that it helps you answer the question of 'What Now?' Once you complete the survey they direct you to resources that will help you get to the next stage.

So how does this work?

1. Click the 'Are We There Yet?' button at the bottom of this page.

2. Complete the benchmark survey and click Submit. The Organisation and Email fields are optional but we'll need your email address if you want your report emailed to you.

3. After you hit the Submit button, your detailed benchmark report will be displayed, showing how your nonprofit organisation compares to other nonprofits of a similar type and size. You can print this report or email it to yourself by clicking the relevant button.

4. Click Next Steps at the bottom of the page and read some cases studies about how donations obtained through the Donortec program have assisted nonprofits.

5. Click Directory at the bottom of the Page and see the service providers and products that other nonprofits in your category are using. (The top grouping are those most commonly used but they are not in set order because these change over time.)

There are so many efforts under way to help NFPs gain more from their investments in IT, many of them little more than harangues about how others are doing this or that, often with the implication that you should to.  "Are We There Yet" at least has a go at helping you figure out where your start line is.

If you give it a whirl, leave your evaluation of it in the comments for the rest of us.

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As a dedicated keyboard short-cutter, I look for those items almost as soon as I load up on some new software, I especially like software that lets me decide for myself what shortcut I will use. That way I can use combinations of keystrokes that are easy for me to remember.

Browsers are actually full of all kinds of capabilities that can help us find our way around the web, especially to sites that we visit often. One of the shortcuts I use most often is the address bar shortcut.

The video on how to set it up is here

Do you have any favourites? Drop them into the comments please.

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