The biggest list of nonprofit blogs just got bigger
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.
As quantity, but also quality is important, I use strict selection criteria:
- I only accept blogs, not mere websites
- The blogs have to be at least 3 months old, and have regular updates
- Blogs without updates for six months are deleted
- The subject has to revolve around the nonprofit sector: advocacy, fundraising, charity, development, aid, humanitarian relief…
I aggregate the latest posts via RSS feeds, and republish summaries of these blogs on The NonProfit Blogs and the NonProfit Blogs section of Humanitarian News. Both now collect a total of about 490 RSS feeds. The updates are automatically twittered via @nonprofitblogs.
As time went by, this must have become the largest single collection of nonprofit blogs you can find on the Web.
The reason why I collect these blogs:
- They give me, at a glance, an overview of what is going on in the nonprofit world
- Storing summaries of these blogs, gives me (and you) a searchable historic overview of what people write about in the nonprofit sector
- Going over the bloglist allows me to analyse statistics on the blogs, as I did in this post
- And most importantly, I collect them to learn from others: scanning through the list, and looking at the blogs, gives me a good impression what tools others use, what the common failures and successes are, the common pitfalls. It allows me to pick up basic lessons, as I described in this post on “blog real estate”.
I hope you find some inspiration for your own blog, using this nonprofit blogs list. Enjoy!
Cartoon courtesy We Blog Cartoons
Follow me
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
Thanks for the tip. Seeing the small numbers in Google analytics, i was thinking about removing the retweet button.
BTW, considering the enormous amount of you follow i follow crowd in the twitter, would people care to click those links
I don’t know if your retweet button shortens the URL with bit.ly, but -as described in this post- that could give you a black and white figure on the traffic the tweets give.
I do, on my links and have been astonished by the amount of traffic each tweet gives.
It is true there is a “scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” mentality in the following in Twitter, but not so much in retweeting. At least not in the social community I have created around each of my Twitter accounts.
And maybe that is key in all of it: ensure the quality of your followers. Maybe one tip: I *never* autofollow. This means that “my” social community would never follow me, simply because I would follow back.
I’d like to say they follow my tweets, because they like the content
Hope that helps a bit,
Peter
I have just discovered your site via ICT-KM, and it will keep me busy for hours…. I have been blogging for a few months now, we are one of the NGOs who want to use social media more and are still finding out how best to do that (ILEIA, see http://www.leisa.info). So your site is full of useful stuff (so far I’d only found social media for marketing your business).. thanks and keep up the good work!
Karen
While these sites may be free for us, the end user, google and yahoo take the numbers we provide for them, and they scan the content we enter on their services, and use it as fodder to sell their profitable products, such as adwords.
It is in their interest to keep these sites working well, as the critical mass we provide is the very product they can leverage to advertisers.
That being said, Michael Keizer is correct- if the service is mission critical, buy the pro account, and get on the line with their support if needed.
Do you know of an alternative to Pipes?
@Hank:
Don’t think there is any pro-account formula for Yahoo Pipes unfortunately. The only alternative I found is http://pipes.deri.org/ but looks even more of a hackers tool, and I don’t know how well it performs.
I think I will make my own…
Peter.
i just love to Twitter everyday with my friends. Twitter is much better than blogging in my opinion and it is very addictive too.
. ..
thank you for this good information
nice post . Very helpful information. Thank you.
Hi, this blog post is very well-written and appears extremely useful. But I was just wondering if you could clear something up? You mention Newsgator as a product, but the link to their website shows Newsgator is a company with a lot of products – it isn’t clear which tool or product you used to amalgamate feeds and produce script. Could you explain this step in some more detail?
If you post here please email me to let me know
Many thanks
Jez
Hi Jez,
You are totally correct. Newsgator changed their services end August. The online aggregator functions they used to have is no longer available.
If you are looking for a feed aggregator or RSS-to-script function, have a look at this post:
http://www.blogtips.org/free-rss-tools/
best,
Peter
i think the problem is solved now..
Yahoo Pipes went back up after almost 3 weeks of intermittent problems. There are still problems saving new or modified Pipes, though. That problem exists since at least 2 months….
Peter, thank you for including us in your review. I am happy you like the Dlvr.it service. Stay tuned. LOTS of good things coming. Including many more outputs – Facebook coming very soon.
Also, thanks for the feedback on the stats. In order to “provide interesting statistics,” mash the data and provide some real intelligence we use the Dlvr.it short URL. It makes the data consistent and allows us to do some interesting analysis – lots of things going on in the lab now.
Stay tuned…
Best,
Bill Flitter
Founder, dlvr.it
comprehensive post! Another tools for RSS to twitter is hootsuite, I havent tried it out.. but it gives the feature.
I just discovered Hootsuite’s RSS-to-Twitter function. Will try it out, and update the post.
Thanks for the reminder.
Peter
I agree I think social media is really more important for better communicating with your supporters and building a strong foundation and network of people interested in your cause.
These tips are great. Thanks for sharing.
[...] Which blog platform is the most customizable? http://www.blogtips.org/selecting-a-blog-platform-customizability – view page – cached [...]
[...] How successful is your Blog? [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Blog Tips [...]
[...] Blogging for Nonprofit | How to use Posterous as an alternative for Twitpic? [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Blog Tips, Old Mac Donald. Old Mac Donald said: New RSS feed to Twitter tools: Google and Feedburner entered the market of RSS-to-Twitter and URL shortening tools. Will http://url4.eu/wj97 [...]
[...] here to see the original: New RSS feed to Twitter tools Tweet This Or Share Through Other Social [...]
[...] http://www.blogtips.org/browser-size-revisited/In a previous post, we looked at the optimum “blog real estate”: the surface of your blog which is visible on a visitor’s browser window. I mentioned that, according to the statistics from 350000 visitors my main blog, 91% was using a monitor width of 1024 pixels …. You mention Newsgator as a product, but the link to their website shows Newsgator is a company with a lot of products – it isn’t clear which tool or product you used to amalgamate feeds and produce script. … [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tweeters Tools, R Dilip Kumar. R Dilip Kumar said: What is the best website width? http://bit.ly/8TKfo1 [...]
[...] Visit link: What is the best website width? [...]
[...] Ernest Hemingway’s writing tips for bloggers Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips For Writing Well Hemingway on writing [...]
[...] How to lay out the home page of your blog? [...]