Blog Tips

With the help several people, I spend a lot of time collecting and updating my list of nonprofit blogs, which I publish on my Delicious list. Over the past months, this list grew to 549 blogs.

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Yahoo Pipes is a free Internet service by Yahoo, which allows you to aggregate and manipulate RSS feeds. I use them extensively for several of my aggregation sites like Humanitarian News and AidNews, to name a few.

Recently, Yahoo Pipes silently went from “Beta” to “Production”, a migration which was only noticed as the word “Beta” disappeared from their logo.

Let me correct that statement: when they went from “Beta” to “Production”, the only thing the users could notice was that their service became unreliable. Since about four weeks, users have been complaining on the Pipes discussion forum about problems saving and running their “pipes”.

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Once upon a time, wandering through the forest of nonprofit blogs, I stumbled upon a blog, managed by a team based here in Rome. Over the past years, I got to know most of the people involved, as a bunch of great individuals, driven by enthusiasm and passion about their cause: the ICT-KM team at the CGIAR – the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

The ICTKM team at CGIAR

The ICT-KM team recently revamped their blog, and merged it with their website. The outcome was a sparkling new blog. I wanted to know more. Time for a talk with two of the ICT-KM members: Antonella Pastore and Enrica Porcari. An interview which touched on many issues dear to our heart: “What are the benefits of social media to nonprofit organisations?”, “What motivates people to blog?”, “Migrating a blog from one platform to another”, “the difference between blogs and traditional Content Management Systems”, “Blog traffic and the importance of good content”…

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I wrote before on how to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog. I also published a short case study about the influence Twitter-generated traffic had onto my blogs.

Most of the evidence of Twitter-to-Blog traffic was circumstantial though: Google Analytics only tracks referral site traffic. As More and more people use a desktop or mobile applications, most of the visits from people clicking on Twitter-ed links are registered as “direct traffic”, and not originating from Twitter. Quid?

Now the mystery is solved, thanks to bit.ly, the URL shortener I use for all my Tweets. Bit.ly always tracked the clicks per link. Via their website you could track exactly that: the clicks per link, which looked like this:

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Social Impact conducted an interesting survey of 200 nonprofit executives to explore how their organizations are using social media and the value they derive from these efforts.

They summarized their key results as:

• 88% percent of nonprofits are widely experimenting with social media, but only half (51%) are active users.
• 79% are uncertain of how to demonstrate social media’s value for their organizations.
• 92% of executives say their online presence raises awareness of their organization, keeps external audiences engaged (86%) and reduces costs relative to traditional media (77%).

Here is a slide show with their key findings:

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