Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

I love gadgets. I love office supplies. I go crazy in kitchen supply stores. How many different bundt cake pans and muffin tins does one woman need, my husband wonders. I think this is why I am toying with so many different ways of doing the same thing online with my blogs and websites.

My rationalization for this behavior, of course, is that I like to test lots of online tools so that I can help my clients make better decisions about them. It makes it tougher for me to keep track of sometimes, but I like learning about the pros and cons of various options, and the best way to do that is to actually use them myself.

Take my blogrolls, for instance. “E-Courses and Tip Sheets” is in my Wordpress template. “My Other Sites” and “Selected Clients” are generated from del.icio.us links. The rest of the blogroll (the links to other blogs) is generated by NewsGator, the RSS reader I use the most. On the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants page, I use bloglines to manage the “Big Top” Blogroll. I also use Furl, but that doesn’t show up anywhere on this blog right now.

I also like playing with Wordpress plugins. I’m experimenting with two new ones since I’ve updated this blog’s template: Democracy, the polling plugin, and Social Bookmarks, which places social bookmarking site icons at the bottom of each post, so you can save the ones you like.

I’m also experimenting with content management systems (CMS), but on a smaller scale. I manage my EcoScribe and NonprofitAnnualReports.net sites with regular ol’ HTML. I’m using Wordpress as a CMS on NonprofitNewsletters.net and NewsletterWritingTips.com. Writing911.com currently uses Lore, but I’m in the middle of converting it to Joomla. I’d also like to try Drupal one day.

For the three blogs I write (this one, a personal one about my kids, and Writing for Nonprofits, which is for freelance writers), I’ve stuck with Wordpress. I looked at several other platforms, but found Wordpress to be the easiest to learn and most flexible for my various needs.

Got any opinions to share about these various tools or some to recommend I try?

I get this question all the time from clients who are trying to update their publications. I am nowhere close to a font expert and will usually scan one of the online font directories looking for something close. Those days are over, as I just learned about a cool feature at www.myfonts.com. Click on “What the Font” and you can upload an image of a word. As a test, I tried it with a client’s logo where I knew the font. It didn’t return the correct font, but two of the three choices it did return were so close that I couldn’t tell the difference. And it only took about two minutes. Much better than endless scanning of font directories!

Another font ID site is www.identifont.com. I’m less crazy about this site, but if you don’t have an image you can upload, it could work. It asks you a series of questions about the font you are trying to identify. It asks about the way specific letters look, so you need a good sample of text to make it work. I tried it with the same client’s logo, which contains only three letters, and gave up after answering about 30 questions, because it kept asking me about letters I didn’t have in front of me.

If you want to learn how to produce a top-notch email newsletter or ezine, my favorite site, far and above all others, is Ezine-Tips.com. The site isn’t for nonprofits specifically, but many of the lessons shared there can be applied easily to the nonprofit sector. The site covers everything from design and formatting to content creation and list management.

Here are three of my favorite articles, just from the last month or so, with good lessons that apply to the nonprofit sector:

Ezine Content Sources To Help Make Choosing Your Next Email Newsletter Topic a Breeeeeze!

Ezine Readers - Do Your Email Newsletter Members Pay Attention?

How Do I Make Any Money With An Email Newsletter?

Use the search engine on the site to go deep into the archives. If you are new to email newsletter publishing and you’ve got a question, I bet Chris Knight has covered it.