Greenlights Technology Lunch and Learn Recap

With non-profits like Ronald McDonald House of Austin, Mother's Milk Bank, and Psychology Beyond Borders on IT Freedom's roster of clients, we are proud to announce that we have officially partnered with Greenlights!

Greenlights, also a nonprofit, is an organization focused on improving and impacting nonprofit performance and excellence through education, collaboration, and pursuit of innovation. As a new business partner, IT Freedom led an informal educational class today, focusing on inexpensive online tools and resources for Greenlights' members.

A Summary: Online Tools and Resources for Nonprofits

Project Management -

Internally, IT Freedom utilizes the 37 Signals suite for projects and tasks. Basecamp, their project management platform, is a relatively inexpensive that nonprofits of any size can use to manage projects like event planning, communications, marketing initiatives, or any other activity. Basecamp lets you add milestones with due dates, assign tasks with due dates, and send messages to team members. It has a time-tracking function that makes it easy to allocate and manage project time for billing, it also let you upload files for sharing, and it has a Writeboard feature that is perfect for brainstorming. Basecamp starts at $49 per month for 35 projects, 15 GB of storage, and unlimited users.

Email and Collaboration -

The Google Apps service, which includes Gmail, is a fantastic tool to use for organizations that are just getting off the ground, and it is a service that can scale with you as you grow. Besides email, it features group calendaring, online documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that can be collaborated on in realtime. Many organizations don't realize, though, that you can use your company's own domain name with Gmail and Google Apps, to maintain a professional image. Best of all, Google Apps is free for nonprofits up to 3,000 users. A 40% price reduction is available for nonprofits with 3,000+ users.

Email Marketing -

My Emma is a rising competitor in the email marketing sphere. Pros for this service are ease of use: The My Emma staff design your initial email template for you, and it's very easy to include surveys and forms in emails and automate features like welcome and follow-up emails. My Emma also selects 25 nonprofits every year to receive their service for free for a lifetime, so look out for that opportunity at the end of every year. Austin's own Dress for Success made the list in 2010! Pricing begins at $24 for 1,000 emails sent in one month.

Customer Relationship Management -

We know that some nonprofits use Salesforce. IT Freedom is a previous user of Salesforce, but from our experience, Salesforce is too unwieldy for most small organizations. Recently, IT Freedom jumped on to a platform called Nutshell, a web-based CRM that's lightweight, agile, and customizable. Nutshell allows you to easily track contacts, email communication between your organization and the outside world, allows you to set triggers, define processes within the platform, and has reporting capabilities like projections and what leads are currently being worked on. It starts at $49 a month for 5 users with a free 30 day trial.

For the other organizations out there with more complex technology needs, what technology tools are you using for collaboration, communication, and marketing? Comment below and share the wealth with your fellow nonprofits and small organizations.

*** All tools recommended above are tools that IT Freedom currently uses internally or has had experience with.