RSS to me is going to be the next email. Alot of people make the argument that "RSS hasn't caught on as much...", but I don't completely buy it. Over 65% of consumer marketing sites use RSS feeds today...that is a huge chunk of the web! Now, what I personally feel is happening...well, marketers are not sure what to do with it.

RSS is a great way to deliver content to your constituents wherever they are through aggregators. I personally subscribe to over 30 sites to keep up with the lastest political and nonprofit technology, as well as general tech and business news. Google Reader is just as great a companion to me as my inbox; I categorize incoming news, email it to friends and archive it for research purposes.

Hi Net2, I've just written up a few thoughts on "Why We Need Group Fundraising RSS Feeds".

I'd love to have your feedback on the subject.

Here's a large excerpt:

I just posted another roundup of Nonprofit Blogs on my blog. Here are some of the blogs I mentioned that have content related to NetSquared:

Are you looking for ideas on how to improve your organization's profile on MySpace? Mara of Democracy in Action wrote an article about MySpace Best Practices for Nonprofits.

Interested in learning how nonprofits, advocacy groups, or politicians can use websites like MySpace or YouTube? Bonnie of Development Seed brings up some good points about this topic in her article titled Should MySpace be your space?.

Credit Unions are also using MySpace. There is a great discussion about this topic at MySpace for Credit Unions.

Over at TechCrunch I've been reviewing more web 2.0 startups than you can shake a stick at; while the crowd over there is generally not focused on social change, an awful lot of interesting things come our way that could prove helpful in a nonprofit context. Here are some of my favorites from last week, in order of usefulness.

 

Have I mentioned lately how much I love TechSoup?

The latest reason why I love it is that you can now go to TechSoup to see a list of  upcoming nonprofit technology events.

I'm a little disappointed that there isn't a TechSoup RSS feed exclusively devoted to these nonprofit technology events.  If one becomes available, I will certainly add it to my blog.  And of course it would make a perfectly splendid addition to the NPtech Meta Feed.

Disclaimer:  Although I have been a consultant to TechSoup on its NetSquared project, this effusion was not solicited, approved, or subsidized by TechSoup.  I am merely writing as a humble fan.


 

This article was originally published in my blog, "Technology for the Nonprofit and Philanthropic Sector," under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.  

 

Now that I've had a taste of a meta feed for nonprofit technology, I feel compelled to create a meta feed of my own.

So of course it has to be a Technobabe meta feed.  You can now go to Feed Jumbler to satisfy your craving for blog articles written by women in the field of nonprofit technology.  The official address of the RSS feed is

Would you like to participate in the NPTech attention stream but feel like it's too overwhelming? Is the whole idea new to you? Before describing the drastic measures I took to lighten a reader's load, here's the basics on what it's all about...

NPTech is a tag used by people to designate an item they find online as being of interest to the community of nonprofit technologists. People use nptech as one of any number of tags to describe an item online and that item is entered into the nptech attention stream, subscribable by RSS or email. Since it's in RSS format, you can do all kinds of things with it - see for example the feed of the tag net2 syndicated automatically in the sidebar of this site. ("Net2 elsewhere" is what it's titled.)

While recommending a new study on blogging from the University of Massachusetts, my most recent post at studio 501c also discusses some of the limitations of the research, and cautions nonprofit bloggers to beware of absolute "truths."