This week’s free image – istockphoto.com

When you’re running a non-profit on a shoe-string, it is important not to spend extra cash that could be saved and used for the mission. It is also important to keep your work at a high professional quality.

The pity donations and support provided by a cute dilapidated hand-made craft project made by six year olds will only get you so far. A high impact non-profit must look like a high impact non-profit.

Having quality images on your website and in print materials is a huge plus. People these days are visual learners and they are also very quick to judge a book by it’s cover or…an organization by it’s website. I’ve encountered countless organizations that are doing great work but they have not made the step into the 21st century yet and are still using animated gifs on their site. For me and most other people it’s easy to dismiss such organizations because it appears that they don’t have any idea what they’re doing.

So, you may ask, how do I get high quality images for low or no cost to use on my website?

There are many ways, but my favorite is istockphoto.com They have very professional stock photos that come up free every week. So, each week you can download a new photo each week until you eventually have a small library of stock photos to choose from to spruce up your website, blog post or brochure.

Here’s the direct link to the archive of free photos.

Another great thing about istockphoto.com is that they also have stock video, audio and vector images that come up free in a similar fashion. I would recommend building libraries of all of those media. Even if some of the images or videos seem odd, you may have a use for them later that you can not foresee now.

I know there are many other ways to get photos and images that are superior to drawing your own in Microsoft Paint, using animated gifs or paying way too much for an image. So, please post your comments about more ways to do so…

I’ve been wanting a solution like this for a long time.  Here’s a cool tool to help you keep your off-line word docs sync-ed with your online google docs.

It’s called: Offsync

I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks promising.

This weekend, my apartment was struck by lighting during an intense thunderstorm.  In addition to causing the fire alarm to sound, sending 3 fire trucks to our parking lot and causing me to wait in the car, it also fried my  motherboard.  

I had taken the precaution of using a surge protector and thought it was odd that the breaker on the surge protector had not tripped.  It turns out that the surge that fried my motherboard came in through the ethernet cable.  The onboard ethernet card transfered the surge to the rest of the motherboard and now my computer doesn’t turn on.

So, from now on, I think I might try keeping my computer wirelessly connected to the web.  At least during thunderstorms…

It turns out you can use the Google Apps IMAP migration feature with the IMAP setting from gmail to get all your mail to transfer painlessly.  (Remember to leave the prefix field blank)

There are a few problems though.  

1. You need to go to All Mail, select everything and click move to inbox. (The migration tool only ‘sees’ the inbox folder)  You can re-archive everything once it transfers.  This is no longer true.  Just be sure that when it asks for your IMAP prefix, you leave that field blank.  I had mistakenly put what I thought they wanted in there and it only gave me the inbox and then only migrated some of the messages.
2. If you use labels a lot, as I do, they will not transfer.  Also, no longer true.  If you leave the prefix out, it will catch your labels automatically.
3. You will have to import your contacts and filters separately.
4. You must have the Education or Premium version of Google Apps to use this feature.  If you’re a non-profit, getting the education version is no problem.

If I find any more positives or negatives, I will update my post.  The migration is in progress now.

Here are some other potentially useful links:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Apps/thread?tid=33b0d54f7fcf121a&hl=en

http://almaer.com/blog/migrating-from-gmailcom-to-a-hosted-google-apps-account

http://www.ericdaugherty.com/blog/2008/05/migrating-email-from-gmail-to-google.html

http://www.thamtech.com/blog/2008/03/29/gmail-to-google-apps-email-migration/

I haven’t used this software before, so I can’t give my stamp of approval.  However, for a small operation such as a college or high school group that doesn’t have much cashflow, this could be helpful.

In my opinion, Internet Explorer, the default web browser installed on all computers with Microsoft Windows, will only slow you down on the internet.  As an Impact Activist, your time is your most valuable resource.  So, I recommend that you upgrade to Mozilla Firefox now.

The first time I heard about Firefox, I didn’t think there was any reason to switch from Internet Explorer.  However, once I switched, my productivity increased noticeably.  Some of the reasons that Firefox was better than IE are no longer relevant because IE 7 took notes and improved some of these.  However, usually it was too little too late.  I will talk about some of the reasons I use Firefox in later posts.  Here is a short list:

1. Tabbed Browsing: IE 7 finally added tabs to their browswer, however, it was too little too late.  The tabs are bloated and take up more screen space.  Firefox tabs are faster, cleaner and smaller.
2. Easy Find: Use ctrl + f  and start typing to automatically find a word on the page you’re viewing.  This helps immensely when you’re digging through a cluttered or unending web page. It is also a lot more user friendly than the IE search function.
3. Download Manager: Have you ever downloaded something and forgot where you saved it? Or, saved it in a temp folder by clicking ‘open’ instead of save, only to need the file later.  The download manager shows a list of downloaded files for easy access.
4. Security: It’s got fewer security loopholes
5. Speed: It runs faster and uses fewer system resources
6. Size: Very small download and program size
7. FREE! It doesn’t cost you a thing

Business Opportunity?

Upon this realization, I immediately thought I should start a business of summarizing and distilling these books into easy to read, short documents.  I found such companies and figured that breaking into that market would be difficult and very time consuming.

Free Solution:

I recently searched the web for free summaries about David Allen’s classic book ‘Getting Things Done.’  I had read this book about a year ago and the principles were getting fuzzy.  So, I wanted to brush up and revamp my organizational mindset.  You know, sort of a spring cleaning for the way I stay on top of things.   A simple google search, revealed a few different sites with free summaries. Here are my favorites:

My Favorite GTD Summaries (Thus Far)

Wiki Summaries caught my attention probably mostly for the whole idea behind it and the familiar look of the Media Wiki Platform (also used by wikipedia). After a deeper search, it looks like it has a fair number of books summarized, but it is still in it’s infancy and is by no means comprehensive.  This is my favorite so far.

How I Started Getting Things Done… This isn’t a summary site, just a blog.  However, this is a good summary of the book I was searching for.

I will continue to post updates to this as I go.  I hope to find some good summary sites that will provide consistent, valuable and free summaries of important books.

I have spent several years researching, experimenting and working with ways to increase the effectiveness of my non-profit.  I started this non-profit as a college student and went full-time once I graduated.  I didn’t have much money, but I did have time, curiosity and some technical know-how.  I spent hours finding ways to make my non-profit web presence more professional and effective.

This website is the culmination and continuation of that research.  I can teach you how you can have a website that is as professional and functional as this site for almost no cost.  Don’t pay $2,000+ to have a site designed.  You’re wasting your donors’ money!  Money that can be put to use much more effectively in other initiatives.

The first aspect of your non-profit that I want to improve is your website!

Join my email list now so you will be notified of the Grand Opening of Impact Activism.

PS Did I mention that you don’t need much techincal knowledge to have a professional and effective website?