Here’s a little preview:

We like free money. The 37 cents you find in between your couch cushions. The crisp, flat dollar bill you left as a bookmark in some random novel three years ago and are just now rediscovering. The friend who pays you back that ten spot from two months back you forgot you ever loaned him.
Free money is good money…

Read more here.

But hold on, don’t click away yet. You might use some of Google’s basic features, but have you really looked into what they do for non-profits? Read on a little more and you’ll see some of the great resources at your fingertips – all through Google.

Google has a dedicated products and services area for non-profits. Their tagline is “You’re changing the world. We want to help.” We like this, because it’s customer-service oriented from the start, and the truth is, they do want to help you do the best job you can, however you’re changing the world. Here are some examples:

Google Grants: This is a no-brainer. When a non-profit applies for a Google Grant, they can use the money towards things like Adwords, and save thousands of dollars for a year or more to bump up their search engine optimization, click-through and conversion rates, and more.

Google Analytics: Analytics is a free, easy to use tool to track site metrics like visits, page views, referrers, keyword searches and more. All it requires is pasting a snippet of code on your site. Metrics. Done.

Some other features include Checkout Apps, Map & Earth, and YouTube. Recently, Google began publishing a monthly newsletter so the public can learn about the nifty technology tools that Google has for non-profits, which can be a very useful to stay updated on the immense amount of work/updates that Google may have for any of its products/services.

As you may know from reading our blog recently, many PICnetters volunteer their time outside of their full time job for non-profits of their choice. They do this by choice because they are passionate about fighting for social causes and help those organizations that have a small or zero technology budget. Some of these PICnetters have also used Google’s tools and have applied for Google grants to help these organizations, and seen great results.

We encourage everyone to sign up for the Google newsletter here, and encourage non-profits to explore and find how these tools can be applied to you. Not sure where to start? Just ask, and we’ll get you on your way.

This is a lighter-weight version of their CRM application that leaves out many of the frills… but comes at a much lower price at $9 a month per user. This is great news for non-profits who have been itching to use it but feared the steep cost.

It may be missing some of the bells and whistles, but it’s still a pretty impressive way to manage your contacts. It will still integrate with your email – from Gmail to Outlook to Yahoo – and will track your emails and present them in preconfigured reports.

But what is really cool – especially for many PICnet clients – is that the Contact Manager Edition integrates with Google Apps automatically.  Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and more are intigrated into the new system, so there are no extra database integration steps needed when using these two systems together.

Step over to www.safesforce.com for more info. We hope this will be something useful for you!

Working virtually is a reality for many these days. PICnet, for instance, at any given time, has employees in four different locations. My volunteer work for the Emerging Leaders Council of Americans for the Arts (AFTA), for whom we serve hundreds of young professionals, is completely virtual save two meetings per year. And now I’m finding myself in San Francisco, helping a friend in Oregon organize a fundraising event in our Southern California hometown for her younger sister who has been diagnosed with brain cancer. Being able to coordinate communications, documents and tasks in a central location is key to any project whose members are remote.

The tools that we use at PICnet, while adequate for project management on a small enterprise scale, would not hold water in the non-techy environment of AFTA or among my friends where networking is at the root of collaboration. (I actually heard of MyQuire through the annals of AFTA as I have been pushing them to become more transparent and innovative with their Council and constituent organizing.) I decided to give MyQuire a test run with my fundraising event to see how easy it would be to replicate for AFTA’s purposes.

Before I begin my review, I should state that MyQuire is in Beta right now, so I am hoping that some of these issues will be fixed by the formal launch in late Fall.

Overall
MyQuire’s interface is great. The design is clean and intuitive and you can’t beat the price. It’s free for a user with five projects or less, and it only costs $9.99 per month if you need to coordinate more projects. The founder of the company is a person with a vision to remedy a need by nonprofits, and they are even awarding grants to their nonprofit users. The application cannot be wrapped under the guise of a nonprofits’ website look and feel, but I hear they have plans to do this in the future. And that is wonderful because in the long run, does an organization want to look like it’s coordinating through MyQuire, or through its own technical prowess?

Communications

Stokes:
I created our project, “Lauren’s Fundraiser,” added Jason and Lisa, my co-coordinators, and we track all our communications through the website. We each have created our own profiles much like the current popular social networking sites, so you can see our interests, our other projects, any photos we upload, and who we know.

We are even given a specific email with the project name: laurensfundraiser@projects.myquire.com, that acts as a group email list. Another great feature is that I am able to chat live with my co-coordinators if they are online. If you are feeling like dropping a w00t! or some kudos, post a comment to my wall

Bummers:
What I’d really like to show you- RIGHT NOW- is a link that goes directly to my project. Much like how you can see MySpace pages from the Web. I’d like to have a one pager that has a picture, the event details and who is coordinating the event so I could pass it around to all my friends. Even better, a way to RSVP for the event! How cool would that be?

MyQuire: Think guerilla marketing! Your domain would be in all the links.

Documents

Stokes:
They have enabled a system much like Google Docs or any wiki that provides for online collaboration. I can create a meeting agenda, and Lisa and Jason can add whatever items they need to without re-uploading a new document. I have uploaded Word docs to share, however I haven’t tried any Excel, Power Point or Visio files. I’d be interested to know if those fly.

There is also an area called “My Hard Drive” that looks promising with a Window Explorer feel. It breaks down all your items- photos, projects, files, etc- into directories.

Bummers:
Lisa is Mac user and Safari doesn’t support much of the mentioned functionalities. I also had trouble navigating back to the “Files” directory once I opened a document. There is no close or cancel button, and the back arrow on my Firefox browser landed me back to my profile. Lastly, I only see the html document I created in MyQuire in the Hard Drive section. Where are the Word docs?

Tasks

Stokes:
I assign tasks with due dates to Jason and Lisa and mark milestones on the project calendar. I can subscribe to my project’s calendar via Outlook, iCal, or Mozilla Sunbird and superimpose it on my Google calendar to help organize my hectic lifestyle.

Bummers:
I can’t track time spent on a task nor have a Gantt chart view of the project. Resource allocation and tracking would be a nice addition. Finally, the link to subscribe to the calendar didn’t work.

All in all, MyQuire has been a good resource to coordinate my fundraising event remotely. I think that after their launch, MyQuire should have the solid foundation which will make it recommendable to AFTA.

]]> http://blog.picnet.net/2007/10/01/myquire-a-handy-collaboration-solution-for-nonprofits/feed/ 0 http://blog.picnet.net/2007/06/11/handling-multiple-gmail-accounts/ http://blog.picnet.net/2007/06/11/handling-multiple-gmail-accounts/#comments Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:51:28 +0000 Christopher Garvis http://www.picnet.net/blog/2007/06/11/handling-multiple-gmail-accounts/ Last week I made the leap to Google Apps and I’m loving every minute of it. Having all my email in GMail is saving me so much time. Problem I ran into was monitoring over 6 emails through GMail. You could sign-in to each email and check, but who wants to do that. Or you could have multiple tabs open, but thats gets so cluttered. Solution? GMail Manager. Its a Firefox Add-on just like GMail Notifier but allows for multiple GMail accounts. Definitely in my top 5 Firefox Add-ons.

Tomorrow I’ll be attending a few sessions at the Googleplex, led by Joomla team members including Louis Landry, Wilco Jansen, Hannes Papenberg and Laurens Vandeput. Their Google guide for the trip, Leslie Hawthorn, is a wonderful mix of open source developer mom and supporter of everything that leads to happy developers. She’s even talked about the great open source speakers series that they’re having a Google these days, including our Joomla devs.

Throughout tomorrow I’ll do my best to post updates to the blog, including some video and photos of the talks. I’ll also make sure to provide fully detailed reports on the Google cafeteria food, which I promise to eat until fully stuffed.

(Photos and video after the page flip…)

Update: Lunch time at Google

So, when you eat at Google’s Mountain View campus, you’re treated to quite the amazing array of food options. My stomach went a little dizzy with a few plates, orange creme soda, Coke, and well, some other things that hit my tray.

After lunch, we had Louis and Wilco present to a crowd of Google employees about the life of Joomla, its amazing growth, and how Google Summer of Code has helped it become what it is today. Nice to have the support of people like Google!

Update: Summer of Code review by Hannes and Laurens

The rain is still drizzling outside, but inside the Googleplex, Hannes and Laurens are working the crowd with a great overview of Joomla and their Summer of Code experience with Google. One important thing that comes across is the idea that Summer of Code really helps the Joomla (and other open source communities) really find great developers that will then become the next generation of core team developers.

SITEMan is one of the projects that our Joomla members overview. It allows users to manage all the content on the Joomla Web site without needing to be connected to the Internet! This will be a very powerful system for those with high cost Internet connections, as well as those that need to change content on the road. It runs off a Java code base, and runs on both Macs and Window systems.

One of the co-presenters was a wonderful Drupal developer named Angela Byron, who shared her Summer of Code experiences as well.

Update: Some videos and photos from Google

Now this doesn’t say that Joomla! is better than any of the others, its just showing that more people search Google for Joomla!. It’s the popular one. But the trend with open source projects is that the more people like the project, the better it is.

“This isn’t new – Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo already have similar products. But Google is also offering, as an option, to bundle the service with Google Adsense ads and share revenue with websites that embed the custom search engine into their site. Only Eurekster currently shares revenue with users. Yahoo’s product, which got a lot of press at launch, has barely been mentioned in the nearly three months since then.” ~ Michael Arrington