NCTech4Good

where tech meets social change

where tech meets social change

The Future of Energy is Sustainable

posted on

Speaker: Girard Newkirk – Discussing blockchain technology and renewable energy. Giving perspective on how a renewable energy based future can remove barriers to energy access, empower millions and create a dynamic green economy.

Girard Newkirk
Girard Newkirk is Founder and CEO of KWHCoin. A green technology company with a mission to connect the over 1.2 billion people around the world that are off grid to renewable electricity. Before founding KWHCoin in 2017, Girard Newkirk was Vice President for Macys in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley Market. KWHCoin won the Regional Startup World Cup Championship in Nairobi, Kenya in 2018 and the company has developed blockchain courses for Cape Fear Community College. Girard is a social entrepreneur and measures success on social impact as well as profits.

What’s Next? Emerging Technologies and What Nonprofits Should Know

posted on

With today’s hyper-connected, on-demand consumers, there is no such thing as meeting expectations. You either exceed expectations or you fall short. This never-ending uphill battle can leave even the best organizations stuck in neutral and not sure how to move forward. That ends here.

With today’s hyper-connected, on-demand consumers, there is no such thing as meeting expectations. You either exceed expectations or you fall short. This never-ending uphill battle can leave even the best organizations stuck in neutral and not sure how to move forward. That ends here.

In this program, Evan Carroll and Jeanne Allen will break down emerging technologies into real ideas for nonprofit innovation.

During this interactive experience, Evan and Jeanne offer the audience multiple technologies to choose from and explore each with explanations, ideas and case studies—if they happen to exist yet. Frequently requested technologies include:

  • Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
  • Internet of Things
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Blockchain
  • Biometrics and Wearable Technology

Evan Carroll
Evan Carroll, veteran technologist, IBM Futurist, and author, is a professional keynote speaker and workshop facilitator who inspires companies to leverage technology, data, and analytics to drive customer loyalty and advocacy. The results? Engaged employees, inspired to use technology to create world-class customer experiences.

Evan is the co-author of Blue Goldfish, which highlights businesses leveraging technology, data, and analytics to improve the experience for their customers and co-author of the book, Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter Are Your Estate, What’s Your Legacy? Evan was recognized by the American Marketing Association as its 2017 National Volunteer of the Year.

Jeanne Allen
Jeanne Allen, a nonprofit consultant, is an expert in board and leadership development, strategic planning, change management, volunteer management, and social media strategy.

Additionally, Jeanne is an Instructor in the Duke University Nonprofit Management Certificate Program, she is a Newswire Contributor for Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ) daily online journal and on the Editorial Board for Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN). Jeanne is a BoardSource Certified Governance Trainer with expert knowledge of effective governance principles and a Certified Instructor in the Service Enterprise Program, sponsored by Points of Light Foundation. As a volunteer, she is a local organizer for NC Tech4Good.

Get Your Automation On!

posted on

Do any of these questions keep you up at night?

  • Are all these emails we send out actually advancing our organization’s goals?
  • What content on our site do people really care about enough to become more engaged?
  • Are we investing our time and money in the right digital areas?
  • How do people find us online … and do they care once they do?

If any of these questions are on your mind, your organization could benefit from marketing automation. Automation helps you get more valuable contacts through your digital channels, convert more contacts into passionate advocates, and optimize your ROI for digital marketing efforts, all while minimizing the demand on your staff’s time and attention.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn:

  • Why automation is a critical component of a modern engagement strategy
  • Where automation software fits in with your current engagement stack (website, CRM, email, social)
  • How to create a roadmap for researching, purchasing and deploying automation software
  • Who in your organization should own and support automation efforts

Participants will walk away with a clear understanding of how automation could best serve their own organizations, and practical first steps to identifying the right automation solution.

Adam Good
Adam Good has been helping mission-driven organizations connect with their audiences online for over 13 years, leading engagement efforts for advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, think-tanks such as Brookings, and member-driven associations such as the Urban Land Institute. His current passion is helping organizations reframe their use of digital tools (email, CRM, automation, analytics and social media) into a cohesive and intentional platform for engagement.

Growth Hacking Strategies for Nonprofits

posted on

Ever hear the terms “growth hacking” or “marketing funnel”? These are terms popular technology companies use to describe their growth strategies. What if you could apply those same strategies to grow your non-profit. This bootcamp will outline strategies and tactics high-growth companies use to build awareness, engagement and revenue, then apply them directly to your organization to grow your audience and donors. These are the exact strategies I applied as Director of Marketing Communications at UNC-TV, one of the largest nonprofit member organizations in North Carolina. Leave knowing how to combine digital marketing and growth hacking strategies to create an army of supporters for your business.

Tivi Jones
Tivi - rhymes with 'privy' - has been a professional marketer since 2004. She currently serves as a marketing, branding and communications consultant and has worked with a wide array of brands including Carolina Parent magazine, Cisco, UNC-TV, NC State and more. Her work for her clients has gained the attention of Publisher's Weekly, PBS Blog, NBC17, ABC11 and more. She loves the brand and community building opportunities marketing presents. While she enjoys working with big brands, she also likes helping small companies and non-profits use effective media, awesome marketing and contagious moxie to create sustainable businesses.

Google Data Studio, The Best Free Tool You’re Not Using

posted on

Google released Data Studio in 2017 with little fanfare. This reporting tool offers interactive reports and dashboards that can be easily shared with your staff, board and other stakeholders. This intuitive and easy to use tool can visualize your website and other data with a few simple clicks. In this session I will demonstrate how to build custom reports and dashboard that can be shared with anyone. Don’t spend hundreds of dollars on high end reporting solutions when you can do it for free!

Brian McDonald
A technical marketer with a passion for design and communication, I have been designing and managing digital marketing campaigns for 15+ years. During this time I've created strategy and implemented websites, SEO/SEM/social media campaigns, as well as video and mobile applications. For the past several years I volunteered with the Triangle Chapter of the American Marketing Association to create one of the leading chapters in the nation. I had the opportunity to create the chapter's initial social media and content marketing presence and was the 2011-2012 chapter president. Speaker/Moderator at Ignite Raleigh, Converge South, Internet Summit and Digital Marketing For Business Conference.

Design to Inspire

posted on

What if we could inspire good deeds through our designs? We need to ask why our work matters, and why we want it to matter to others. Here I will present a few principles for designing products and services to inspire goodness in others.

Madeline Coven, Twitter: @CovenMadeline
Fokus Labs
Ignite Talk

Speaker Bio
I am a UX intern at Fokus Labs. I got interested in UX as it is at an intersection between my extensive humanities background and technology. I volunteer at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and I love a good chocolate cheesecake.

7 Simple Secrets for Creating Stunning Slides

posted on

When was the last time you looked at a presentation slide and thought, “What’s your point?”. Yesterday, right? And it might have even been your own slide (yikes!). Presentations have become our visual voice—the way we communicate visually. Yet, on a daily basis, we see slides that are laden with words, images, and data and we have no earthly clue what the slides are saying. Whether we’re presenting to our executive board, to potential funders, or to volunteers, our slides need to clearly, visually communicate to help our audience see our point. How can we create slides that clearly communicate our message without confusing our audience?

This session entwines a bit of brain science with easy-to-use secrets for designing presentation slides that help learners and audience members see your point. We’ll explore secrets and hacks for imagery, font and more. We’ll discuss, demonstrate, and apply the secrets to sample slides donated by the audience or even your own slides.

Wendy Gates Corbett, Twitter: @RefreshTraining
Refresher Training, LLC
Concurrent Session

Speaker Bio
Wendy Gates Corbett is an escaped global training executive on a quest to repair the relationship we have with dull, sleepy presentations—as presenters AND as audience members. She is on a personal mission to inspire others to use their voice to instill more hope, health, and happiness into this world. Wendy left a successful but unsatisfying career in corporate training to dedicate her presentation superpowers to the greater good.

She is a leader in the training industry, a sought-after speaker, and a published author. Wendy served as the Slide Designer and Speaker Coach for TEDxRaleigh 2016. She currently chairs the National Advisors for Chapters and serves on the international Board of Directors for the Association for Talent Development, the world’s largest non-profit professional organization for corporate training.

Her company, Refresher Training, LLC serves professional speakers and professionals who speak by amplifying their messages and presentation materials so they’re vivid, inspiring, and unforgettable. Her team provides redesign and coaching services as well as training programs for the DIYers who want to learn how to refresh their own presentations.

Mapping Durham Civil Rights History with Drupal 8

posted on

In 2015, Savas Labs engaged with Barbara Lau and the Pauli Murray Project at the Duke Human Rights Center to rebuild their faltering, and previously vibrant online map of historical locations and events associated with the legacy of Pauli Murray. The site had not been updated in a while, and due to automatic updates to the Google Maps API, had been rendered fairly unusable.

To reclaim the powerful community resource, Savas Labs decided to rebuild the map in a then beta version of Drupal 8 to leverage some of the advantages of the newer platform while incorporating a new design, transitioning to free and open source tools that removed the previous bounds of Google Maps integration, while learning at every turn.

Come to this session to learn more about local history, the Drupal platform, generally, Drupal 8 and designing in Drupal 8 more specifically, and modern web mapping tools.

Chris Russo
Savas Labs

Speaker Bio
Chris has been a professional web developer since 2007 and made his first website on geocities.com when he was 11. He was a big fan of and was deeply saddened when it was deprecated. For Savas Labs, Chris relishes in the success and growth of his clients and team, and writing in the third person. When Chris is not behind the computer, he’s often on a bicycle. He is the former board chair of nonprofit hospitality network WarmShowers.org, served on the board of his local bicycle advocacy organization Bike Durham for 3.5 years, founded a bicycle-powered food scraps recycling company called Tilthy Rich Compost, and rode his bicycle 6,000 miles across the U.S. in the summer of 2008.

Communication Planning & Implementation for Small Non-Profits

posted on

Are you the only person running your non-profit? Do you have a small staff? Do you have lots of volunteers and need to get information out quickly? Do you find it really hard to find time to communicate with all of your stakeholders regularly?

If you answered “Yes!” to any of these questions, then this session is for you!

This session will overview various technologies that you can use to maximize communication with your constituents, convert social media likes to supporters or donors, strengthen your board, and raise monies. These web-based tools can be easily used, set up, shared, integrated, and maintained. It will also focus on the need for a social media plan which can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet.

This session will focus on the real-life implementation of various online tools to support non-profits and will include a portion for sharing ideas with the other participants.
Some of the tools which may be discussed will be: Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, E-Newsletters, YouTube, PayPal, Square, Crowdrise, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Volunteer Sign-Up Programs, Surveys, and more. We will also talk about mobile devices and how to maximize their usage!

Speaker: Kathy McCullough-Testa

Organization: Beach Food Pantry & KMT Consultants

Speaker Bio: Kathy McCullough-Testa is the President & CEO of KMT Consultants, Inc., and serves as part-time Executive Director of the Beach Food Pantry in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Kathy helps her clients “Transform Visionary Ideas Into Reality” on a daily basis.

She is a motivated, personable business professional with experience in multiple industries including health care, government, financial, real estate, non-profit, retail, and education.

Kathy is the first executive director of the Beach Food Pantry. In her nearly two-year tenure, she has helped increase fundraising goals by 50%, increased volunteer participation, and strengthened and expanded community support through outreach events, fundraisers, and social media.

Session Tags: social media, communication, beginner, intermediate, blogs, marketing

Make your Organization Wikipedia Official: Insider Tips, Tricks and Strategies

posted on

So your team has done it all – you’re on Facebook, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn, and Instagram? Now, it’s time to turbo charge your organization and take it to the next level with a Wikipedia page!
Join us to learn how to build legitimacy and reputation as well as premium placement within the first five Google search results for your organization, by getting your organization onto Wikipedia.

Kasey Baker and Frank Jones, Wikipedia’s former Regional Ambassadors and Coordinators for their Education Program, will give you an advanced crash course in how to start, actually write, or even improve an existing Wikipedia page for your organization. You will learn:

1. Why is it so important to have a Wikipedia page?
2. Why it is so hard to get into Wikipedia?
3. What you need to do to become a “Notable Organization.”
4. Tricks for writing your first article.
5. Tips for handling conflicts with “Wikipedians.”
6. And an open Q&A session.

Do not waste months just to have your article rejected, learn how to do it right and even if a Wikipedia page is best for you. Established organizations with active social media and existing community presence will gain the most from this presentation.

Speakers: Kasey Baker & Frank Jones

Organization: The Wiki Wizards – www.TheWikiWizards.com

Speaker Bio: Kasey Baker was the former Regional Coordinator for Wikipedia in the Southeast and Midwest regions of the United States from 2011-2014. During this time he also acted as the in-house Wikipedia Ambassador at Western Carolina University where he regularly guest lectured graduate level policy courses and ran training workshops for Wikipedia for new professors. He has helped hundreds of students, professors, librarians, non-profits and many others both write articles for Wikipedia and add content to existing articles. Baker also has been an active Wikipedian editing hundreds of articles and responsible for creating policy articles that received recognition by Wikipedia as an explanatory article,

Frank Jones acted for eighteen months as a Regional Ambassador for the Education Outreach Program at Wikipedia in the South East region, Jones has worked with professors and classes throughout the United States. While he spends most of his time working with his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jones has also supported classes at the University of North Georgia, Davidson College, and Appalachian State University. Jones is also an active Wikipedia and contributes inn his free time to articles on exotic locals he visits during his travels across the world.

Session Tags: Wikipedia, intermediate, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, organizational building, Google Search results

WordPress SEO

posted on

Nonprofit organizations need to get the most out of every dollar spent and hour volunteered. WordPress is the platform of choice for organizations that need a professional looking website, but don’t have tens of thousands to spend on development. With a few simple plugins and best practices, you can generate search engine optimized content that drives traffic to your website. Best of all, these tools and tactics are so easy to learn that you don’t need to spend hours training volunteers and staff members.

Speaker: Frank Jones

Organization: FrankCJones.com

Speaker Bio: Frank Jones is the organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup and a co-organizer for the Triangle WordPress Meetup. Since 2009, Frank has helped clients develop content that is loved by search engines and human audiences alike. Additionally, he assists small to medium-size organizations by managing their WordPress installations. Thanks to the location independent nature of his work, you may find Frank in Raleigh – but you shouldn’t be suprised to find he’s telecommuting from Spain or Turkey. You can learn more about Frank and the projects he has under way at FrankCJones.com.

Session Tags: WordPress, SEO, beginner, intermediate

Don’t Guess! What We Know About Website Users

posted on

Making a website easy for your visitors to use is essential for a terrific website experience. Great content is often crippled by poor usability. Understanding usability principles can inform your design and content decisions to make websites more user friendly and successful. No more guessing how people use websites! Based on publicly available usability research, we’ll discuss what we know about users in terms of both big-picture concepts and nitty-gritty details. For example, how do users engage with photography on websites? We’ll also discuss items to keep in mind for visitors on mobile devices.

We will look at website examples to see common problems that non-profits make that cause their websites to be user-UNfriendly. We’ll also talk about potential solutions. You’ll walk out with practical tips that you can immediately use to better your website. Resources will be suggested for further learning.

Speaker: Melissa Eggleston

Organization: http://melissaegg.com

Speaker Bio: As a content strategist with a UX focus, Melissa Eggleston aims to help organizations create memorable website experiences so they can connect to their “tribe.” In 1996, she wrote her first online stories about soccer and violated all the rules we now know about writing for the web. Now as a freelancer, she consults and creates content for all types of organizations – from dentists in California to an e-commerce design firm in New York to a religious non-profit in Kentucky. Previously she worked for Duke University and Bloomberg News. Melissa gained her multimedia skills and love of usability at UNC-Chapel Hill where she got her Master’s degree. When not working, you’ll likely find Melissa on her yoga mat or trying to convince her 3-year-old daughter that their cat Luna really doesn’t want another hug.

Session Tags: usability, user experience, content strategy, intermediate, beginner, website design

NCTech4Good, an affiliate of NTEN and TechSoup’s NetSquared, is the local resource for nonprofit technology information. Join the sharing and networking at monthly meetings on the third Wednesday of the month, 6:30-8:30 p.m. usually at UNC-TV, and our annual conference, http://www.nct4g.org/. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @nctech4good, and with the hashtag #nct4g.