Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

My turn to host the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. I had planned for this weeks' edition to focus on favorite learning resources, tools, articles, books, etc., but since it looks like a lot of people are on vacation this week, I went looking for a few extras to fill in the blanks. Check out these posts:

• Kivi Leroux Miller of Nonprofit Communications shares her learning secret--taking advantage of free trial offers!

• Rosetta Thurman of Perspectives from the Pipeline writes about how blogs make one of the best low-cost professional development tools around. (Also check out Rosetta's Professional Development Resources from her Nonprofit Management wiki).

• Katya Andresen of Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog explores how to irritate a reporter and writes about how even the hardest-to-sell products can still be marketed.

• Jeff Brooks of Donor Power Blog has some good advice on how to brainstorm more effectively, using both sides of your brain.

• Soha El-Borno of Wild Apricot interviews Carie Lewis, Internet Marketing Manager for the Humane Society of the US, on how they used Facebook to spread their message (one good nugget--the Humane Society found that Facebook was better for fundraising and MySpace was better for advocacy).

• Michelle Murrain of Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology is on a hunt for good webconferencing and although there are options, she's finding that no one package seems to offer everything she wants. 

• For you WordPress bloggers out there, Dave Briggs of FEConnect describes the many plug-ins he used to create his new site. If you're using WordPress, these are some great tools for building and sustaining your community.

Finally, as host, I'm allowed to plug in a bonus post of my own. This time, though, I'm going to give that honor to next week's host, Harold Jarche who follows up his post on freeing your social bookmarks with another great one on how to aggregate this collective knowledge.

That's this week's Carnival. Remember that you can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.  .

Comments

[Nancy]

Hi Michelle,

Great post. I'm so sorry that I missed the deadline for submission -- just dealing with too many of my own deadlines pre-vacation.

Anyway, wanted to add my vote for great professional development resource(s):
1) Fellow bloggers or other peers who become a virtual community of friends doubling as experts -- Whether you're a blogger or not, online "peers" are a great resource.

2) Asking questions via LinkedIn (you need to be a member first) is another great way to get great specific advice. You can select from your own connections to query, or put the question out there to the entire LinkedIn community.

Keep up the great work.

Best,
Nancy

[Michele Martin]

Hi Nancy--great point on LinkedIn. I'm a member, but haven't used them for that purpose, although I know a lot of other people have. Facebook is another venue, especially if you belong to related groups. And of course, the edubloggers are all about Twitter right now, so that's another option for those quick questions and thoughts.

Thanks for the great ideas!