Blogging tools and grant seeking--liberal activist resources
22 December 2005
Good Morning,
Capacity building is grantmaking designed to develop the strength and effectiveness of nonprofit organizations and to increase the leverage of philanthropic dollars.
Developing what organization’s need is the first, and most important, step in grant seeking. This oft overlooked step can be sidelined by a search for money at any cost. Such short-sighted perspective leads to problems down the road—problems that can be costly and time-consuming to correct.
Blogging is fascinating in the same way as webpage development. In fact, blogging makes websites easier since only the space for the actual text is needed and updates are, by definition, regular. A side benefit is that writing skills develop with continuous authorship.
There are plenty of places to get blog and website templates. The internet abounds with graphic artists giving away basic designs in hope of selling more complicated designs.
The following block quote about blogging software is lifted from Nonprofit Online News; where you can sign up for weekly email of relevant news to nonprofit communications. The writer, Michael Gilbert, is particularly interested in the use of computer technology and the internet to support the missions of nonprofit organizations. The newsletter usually also has items of interest to a more general reader (ie, me).
In my article on the content management workflow for Nonprofit Online News, I mentioned Ecto, a desktop blogging application that I admire, but don't use. Ecto is available for Windows and Mac OS, although not for Linux. It plays well with all the major blogging platforms. It supports per-post control of trackback, comments, post time, categories, and tags. It is a top notch writer's tool, with spell check, integration with other content tools (like iPhoto on Mac OS), word count, rich formatting, and filters. Unfortunately, there is one important protocol (involving a separate element for links to which individual blog entries point), essential to the one link per entry model of the Nonprofit Online News platform, that Ecto doesn't support. I think this is an elegant example of the connection between a core aspect of a communication model and a technical protocol.
I use Blogger for Word when developing longer posts due to the ability to publish directly from my word processor. There are limitations of editing blog entries in Word; particularly, in posting HTML links. Word automatically converts links to HTML causing a double entry in Blogger—which is a dead link when published. If anyone out there has a good work around that doesn’t involve hand-correcting the post in the Blogger edit box I would love to read about it.
Interesting site and links to anti-anti-corporate activists--I've never seen that before. (Usually it is corporate support versus anti-corporate support. Guess I'm proving my moderate liberal position.) Gifthub includes links to other satrical sites and one site called Activistcash.com that attacks efforts to influence policy directed at social change. This all gives a very different way to think about liberalism in modern post-industrial capitalism. Here is a philanthropy blog to check out again: gifthub.org/.
