Objectives

1
Objectives

• By understanding the range of online tools
  available, you will
• feel more comfortable with the tools
• be more able to plan an approach that will
  maximize your impact while, we hope, minimizing
  your own workload and your need to employ
  expensive techies.

2
How are people feeling about technology?
Chart from dotOrganize's report Online Technology
for Social Change From Struggle to Strategy
3
Things you can do with technology

• Provide information
• Look for information and
• Work together

4
Todays tools

• RSS
• Website polls
• Blogs
• SurveyMonkey
• MeetingWizard

5
RSS

• Really Simple Syndication (or, Ready for Some
  Stories)
• A very fast, semi-automated way to scan large
  numbers of websites very quickly
• A decent plain language explanation of RSS.
• See CBC's feeds page for an example.
• I Sage, which works with the Firefox browser.
  There is an extensive list of other options on
  Wikipedia. Google Reader and Bloglines are good
  bets.

6
Website polls

• A quick and easy way to add some interactivity to
  your website and produce interesting and readily
  graspable bits of information for visitors.
• For example, CHNET-Works! polls
• One supplier http//webpoll.sparklit.com/

7
Blogs

• A chronological format where new additions to the
  site are added automatically at the top of the
  page.
• Usually entries are categorized for easy scanning
  and searching
• You decide whether visitors can comment
• Type in a box, hit Post, and its live! Very easy
  to keep your site fresh.

8
Blogs

• Examples
• THCU's Learning Community
• Experimental blog

9
SurveyMonkey

• http//www.surveymonkey.com
• A free account lets you do surveys with 10
  questions, 100 responses
• Hosted on their site nothing on your system, so
  no techie needed
• No technical knowledge needed
• Tallies non-open-ended questions for you, saving
  data-entry time

10
MeetingWizard

• http//www.meetingwizard.com
• Figure out a meeting time without endless
  back-and-forth email and/or phone calls
• You can see who is available for which dates and
  times in an easy-to-read table
• Each time you open the ONE email and visit the
  site the information is updated.