Data? Metrics? Analytics? It doesn’t have to be scary-hard to deal with, even if you’re a small nonprofit’s part-time fundraiser who’s just kind of figuring it all out as you go along. Analyze This: A Nonprofit’s Guide to Event Fundraising Analytics is a truly useful free ebook for nonprofit event fundraisers, written by Jono Smith (formerly of Network for Good) for Convio and Event360 , that shows, step by step, how you can use the data collected from your fundraising events to create more successful…(read more)

Video is hot with online audiences, but there’s one big problem for video producers: search engines just can’t deal with the “talkies”: Images and audio are behind a glass wall when it comes to indexing for search results. And if your nonprofit is going to take the initiative to produce and post a video, obviously you’d like it to help being visitors to your blog or website from the search engines. Better SEO for YouTube Videos Until recently, search engines had to rely on title text and tags to…(read more)

With all the buzz about social media, it’s easy to forget that offline media attention can be equally valuable, especially for community-based nonprofits who want to get attention to local projects or recruit local members and volunteers. Offline media attention is good. Getting it can be hard, however, in the digital information age. Challenged by online alternative news sources, print newspapers are slimming down, cutting pages to cut their costs. To save on staff, newspapers increasingly bypass…(read more)

No posts this week while I’m at the 2010 NACHRI Creating Connections Conference in San Diego. Want to know what’s going on? Follow #2010cc or check out the Connected Thinking blog to find out about the latest happenings.
addthis_pub = ‘ewengel’;

My top 5 Favorite Sayings/Quotes:

1. Cheap – Fast – Good. Pick 2. (any engineer I’ve ever known)
2. I feel sorry for people who don’t drink – when they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day. (Frank Sinatra)
3. Measure your life in love. (the musical Rent)
4. Tell me, what is it you plan to do – With your one wild and precious life? (Mary Oliver)
5. Muriel Duckworth told me that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, and she is a 97-year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee. She didn’t wait until she felt she could do things perfectly before she did them. (Audra Williams, This Magazine, March 2006)

addthis_pub = ‘ewengel’;Got some good ones yourself? Share them in the comments.

• The Dalai Lama’s tweets. Yes, @DalaiLama is now on Twitter. It looks like someone is probably tweeting for him, but I’m hoping for good things.
• Tapping the power of LinkedIn to be more than just a Rolodex that updates itself (I really need to get on this myself),
• JNott on how following “best practices” holds us back.
• Don’t put all your socmed eggs in one platform basket (but seriously, what’s up with the blonde?),
• Blast from the past – 1995 Newsweek article about why the Internet will fail – it’s a fad, I say!
• Confused, Conflicted, Clueless and Cranky – great piece about what’s going on (or not) in health care reform.
• Simple tips for promoting your blog.
• Just started Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Don’t really have an opinion yet other than to point out that’s she’s pretty much universally brilliant and I’ve loved her other books I’ve read, so I have high expectations.

addthis_pub = ‘ewengel’;