toolbox
Internet Toolbox: Google Trends, Insights for Search, TweetNews
Today, Social Ch@nge brings you a grab bag of internet tools: Google Trends and Insights for Search, as well as newcomer Tweetnews. All of these sites can give you a deeper understanding of where the collective brain of the internet is at - and maybe understand your supporters a little more, too. Read more...
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Grassroots.org Toolbox
The Grassroots.org Toolbox will empower nonprofit organizations by granting free access to a suite of fully configured & hosted online tools, including content management, online event registration software, and CRM.
Above all else, we need financial support to help lay the foundation for the Toolbox’s ultimate success.
We know what technology tools our grassroots nonprofit clients need. We know how to configure those tools, we know how to build infrastructure to deploy those tools on a massive scale, and we have partners who can help us host those tools. We even know how to train and support those tools. What we need is the initial support to help us turn this knowledge into action.
Our ultimate goal is to empower 10,000 nonprofit organizations with the $10,000 worth of services through the free technology in the Grassroots.org Toolbox. Your seed funding will help make this is possible. Help us help us others grow.
We need development assistance specifically for:
- The integration of a client intake system with a CRM.
- The development of a custom provisioning system to automate Toolbox deployment.
- Additional tools and resources. Have a tool that you'd like to make available to nonprofits for free? Think it meets a demonstrated need among grassroots organizations? Work with us to make it happen!
We currently offer a complete guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) available at seo.grassroots.org. Alongside this service, we also offer free telephone consulting, made possible through in-kind donations from an SEO consulting firm.
We'd love to expand the SEO project to cover other aspects of internet marketing for nonprofits (how to use blogs, leverage social networking sites or bookmarking sites, use new media, etc to further a nonprofit organization's mission). Assistance could be in the form of expert articles or guides, telephone or online consulting, or something entirely different. Surprise us.
Many of the tools we are integrating into the Grassroots.org Toolbox are open source, and thus have been freely downloadable for years. However, “Free†though they may be, these tools cost thousands of dollars to install, learn, configure and support. In short, these tools may have no list price, but they are far from free to implement. The result? They're not empowering as many nonprofits as they could be.
- The Toolbox will automatically:
- provision and install these technology tools,
- configure them correctly for immediate use,
- host them permanently,
- -provide comprehensive training and support resources (both in traditional text and in new media, such as screencasts and training videos)
All for free.
To achieve this, we'll build an integrated user interface to manage Toolbox applications and services, under which we'll develop a flexible and scalable automatic provisioning system. We are assigning multiple staff members to develop exhaustive training and support materials in response to the needs of incoming clients and creating a publicly-available end-user guide for each of the tools we offer. The goal is the technological empowerment of nonprofit organizations everywhere.
