TA Tuesday (September 26, 2017)

Here's your weekly dose of TA. Enjoy.

Tools and Resources

  • 9 lessons learned doing social media during a mass mobilization is a treasure trove of useful advice. One of the more significant takeaways:
    Use a variety of voices and perspective to tell the story of the day.
    You have to remember that you're not always the best messenger. If you have a large audience, you should be elevating posts from smaller or less visible members of the coalition. Go out of your way to make sure you are highlighting a diversity of voices from other organizations, different communities—especially front-line communities, and people in the crowd.
  • PaperJect turns PDFs into fillable forms. While I've not used this online tool (free for 10 uploads a month), fillable forms are the best! They allow users without printers to complete, save, and return; result in clearer, more legible responses; and they are an overall time saver. If your organization uses forms which can be completed online or via document sharing (such as email) and you don't use fillable forms, try them out. They can be created in Word or Excel and converted to PDF using Adobe, Nitro, or other another PDF generator.
  • Is Twitter Launching a Way to Easily Fire Up Tweetstorms? is something to pay attention to.
  • Need content for one of your social media accounts? Never Run Out of Content to Share: 70+ Places to Curate Great Content has a list of content sources.

At work

  • While Ecobranding: Famous Corporate Logos, Redesigned To Use Less Ink may not resonate with small companies or nonprofits of any size, this may:
    "The idea of ​​creating a brand design that is more eco-friendly came in 2013, at the birth of my first daughter. I was designing a birth announcement card with many colors. On the computer it looked great, but when I submitted the design to the printer for silkscreen printing the bill was great too . . . greatly expensive!" says [ecobrander French designer Sylvain] Boyer. "So I simply reduced the number of colors, which immediately became more economical but also greener."
    Using fewer colors, using less reverse text (white text on a color background), and reducing the amount of, dare I say, gratuitous clip art can make for better design and for easier, more likely reproduction.
  • How to Treat Volunteers as an Extension of Your Staff offers three solid ways to engage volunteers. A quick, worthwhile read.

Learn something


Good reads


On the lighter side