The TechSoup Blog : GreenTips

Online Community Meetup: The Five Steps to Growing an Engaged Online Community

Susan_Chavez — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:34:00 GMT

May’s Online Community Meetup featured Randy Paynter, co-founder of Care2. Paynter’s talk, "The Five Steps to Growing an Engaged Online Community," examined how to build and sustain online communities by relating some of the lessons he has learned through managing the Care2 community since its inception.

Founded in 1998, Care2, a B-corporation that works with over 700 nonprofits and has more than 15 million members, defines itself as a social action network. Care2 provides visitors to their site green-living advice and the opportunity to act on behalf of the causes they care most about. The Care2 community is largely composed of women, a valuable and powerful consumer segment when one considers that women control 83% of consumer spending and are more inclined to spend in line with their values. Technology and social networking means, according to Paynter, “Community has never before been more important for organization success.” The following are Paynter’s steps for growing an engaged online community:

Create Critical Mass: Organizations can create critical mass with viral services and content. Care2 started with e-cards that gave back and webmail in 1998. It followed up on that success by creating the Petition Site the following year. By getting people to share through online items that would become viral, like e-cards, petitions, contests, and so on, Care2 was able to and continues to grow its community; the proof is in their membership of 15.9 million.
Get Engaging Content in Front of Members: Paynter concedes that although it is, “much easier to respond to content than it is to create content in the first place,” Care2 has instead endeavored to provide content that its users will find engaging. Care2 has achieved this by providing healthy lifestyle tips and articles through their blog and news feature, the Care2 News Network. The Care2 News Network allows users to submit news stories and vote for content that should be featured more prominently. Meanwhile, Care2’s blogging network is comprised of 80 bloggers writing compellingly about a multitude of causes that matter to its membership.
Give Positive Feedback: Care2 features its own unique member incentive system, Butterfly Rewards, which can be earned by completing positive actions. Points are earned for completing any number of actions such as signing a petition related to a cause one cares about or vetting news items on its Care2 News Network. Points can be used to purchase socially good items such as a day’s worth of clean drinking water for a child in a developing country or planting a tree. Paynter finds that along with content, getting some form of positive feedback and interaction is also important to keeping community members engaged. However, the most important caveat to implementing a rewards system is to make sure that the incentives offered are appropriate to the community, at the risk of creating disincentives.
Maintain Members’ Trust: The first method by which Care2 works to maintain their members’ trust is to protect their community from spam and trolls to maintain a safe online community. The site does have an internal system by which to do this but other methods used include deputizing members, allowing members to take collective action, and providing a customer service channel. Another facet of trust is respecting members and being consistent to the community’s core values. A for-profit company, whose practices conflicted with Care2’s stance on the environment, once approached the leadership at Care2 for a sponsorship opportunity. As appealing as the potential sponsor’s money was in the short-term, in the long-term it would have cost Care2 their integrity among their community members had they chosen to put money over values.
Make It Sustainable: When Care2 was founded it was intended to be an engine for good. As the community has grown, it became ever more important to generate revenue to ensure the capability and resources necessary to serve its members. Care2 has developed a number of ways to generate revenue including charging nonprofit organizations a reasonable fee for new donor leads, advertising for private companies, and a “Take Action Platform” widget, used on over 100 partner sites that drives traffic and advertiser dollars to its site. While some might see a conflict in developing partnerships with for-profit companies, Care2 believes that including businesses rather than excluding them is a more productive way to move businesses towards making more ethical choices.

Following the presentation, Paynter answered audience questions that revealed more about Care2. For instance, Paynter revealed that initially Care2 focused on environmental issues, however, it was discovered that although people generally came to the site to learn about or support one issue they could be appealed to take action on other issues because most people are not “one-issue” people. Using the technological tools at their disposal, the staff at Care2 can cater to the individual preferences of their community members by allowing them to customize the newsletter content they receive or using individual member history to send out petitions for causes that will most likely appeal to those people. Despite the proliferation of sites that take a more niche approach to embracing causes, Care2 believes that taking a holistic approach to advocating for progressive causes is the best approach for them because it allows them to draw people in via issues that interest those individuals and then exposes them to other worthy causes.

The Care2 community, like those found on other social networking sites, includes a small number of “super users,” who account for a large volume of online activity, with a much larger number who are more casual users. In an effort to make the site’s resources available on-the-go for community members, Care2 plans to do more to capitalize on mobile technology and make their site mobile friendly. Although Care2 does not have the resources to create opportunities for its community to connect offline via a published magazine or meetups, it will continue to focus on its strength: the online community. Part of that strategy includes more outreach on popular social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, while still providing valuable content for their community members who may not be on nor will be persuaded to use those channels. And if the community member who drove 700 miles to visit another lonely community member over the holiday season or the community connections that resulted in marriages are any indication, the Care2 online community is indeed strong and on the right track.

Use All-in-One Printers: Save Money, Office Space, and the Environment

Anna — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:45:46 GMT

What is an all-in-one printer or multifunction printer (MFP)? About.com has this to say, "When you've got a small home office, an all-in-one printer, also known as a multifunction printer, is a great buy. All-in-one printers can print, scan, copy, and sometimes fax."

Theses devices tend to be reasonably priced and can come as inkjets or laser printers. While all-in-ones are usually larger than a stand-alone printer, they combine 3-5 devices (some also have wi-fi) into one machine and therefore can save a tremendous amount of space, money, and resources to build them. They can be a great option for a smaller office which may not need or want traditional full-sized, enterprise-quality office machines.

In the first post of this two-part series, we'll review the green benefits of investing in these smaller, multifunction machines as well as helping to reduce overhead costs for your nonprofit.

Green Benefits

Reduce energy use

If you only have one machine idling instead of four, you will save a considerable amount of energy.

According to Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (see table below), the average inkjet printer, inkjet fax machine, flatbed scanner, and copier together use 30 watts while in standby mode and the average laser versions use 156 watts. (The average set of these four inkjet devices still uses approximately 10.5 watts when they are OFF.) Compare these numbers with the average multifunction devices and you see a savings of 21 watts in the inkjets and a whopping 107 watts in the laser variety.

Reduce toxins

If they are only building one machine instead of four, the manufacturers of these devices are obviously saving a tremendous amount of plastic and other hazardous materials. Although several of the top manufacturers now claim that they are RoHS Compliant, which restricts the use of cadmium, mercury, lead, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), it doesn't mean that those toxic elements and others are not used at all.

Reduce paper

If you fax directly from your desktop (no printout) or you can scan documents and email them instead of faxing, you will reduce the amount of paper you use. Hopefully, whoever receives your file won't need to print it out. These devices can help you to keep or transfer documents to electronic form, therefore reducing the need to purchase, store, and print on paper.

Other Benefits

Less space is required to house one machine versus four or five individual machines.
Lower cost of purchasing one machine instead of several purchases or leases, as well as lower maintenance and ink costs. In addition, the decreased wattage, will lower your energy bills.
These devices can help you easily store documents, images, and files electronically.

Green Usage Tips

Buying green is one factor, however did you know that by changing a few simple use habits you can be greener and save much more money? Follow these tips from ConsumerReports.org to use your device(s) most efficiently and effectively. Many manufacturers also offer tips for using their products in a more earth-friendly way.

Next week, in part 2 of this two-part series, I will point you to some helpful buying guides and to several of the top-rated all-in-one printers.

Data

Standby Power Summary Table: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

"We measured the standby power of many, many, products. The table below summarizes those measurements, with the average, minimum, and maximum power levels observed while in standby. Power consumption is listed in "watts" (W). See the FAQs for a detailed explanation. The "Count" refers to the number of products that we measured."

Product/Mode	Average (W)	Min (W)	Max (W)	Count
Printer, inkjet
Off	1.26	0	4	25
On	4.93	1.81	22	25
Printer, laser
Off	1.58	0	4.5	7
On	131.07	1.7	481.9	5
Fax, inkjet
Off	5.31	0	8.72	3
On	6.22	2.89	14	8
Fax, laser
Off	0	0	0	1
On	6.1	6.1	6.1	1
Ready	6.42	6.42	6.42	1
Scanner, flatbed
Off	2.48	0.27	8.2	6
On	9.6	1.71	15.6	10
Copier
Off	1.49	0	2.97	2
On	9.63	3.6	14	3
*^Combined, Inkjet
Off	10.54
On	30.38
*^Combined, Laser
Off	5.55
On	156.4
Multi-function Device, inkjet
Off	5.26	0	10.03	23
On	9.16	3.9	17.7	24
Multi-function Device, laser
Off	3.12	0	4.7	3
On	49.68	5	175	4
^Difference, Inkjet	Savings
Off	5.28
On	21.22
^Difference, Laser
Off	2.43
On	106.72

*Combined = printer + fax + scanner + copier
^Calculations are my own derived from LBNL data.

Office Greening for the Holidays: Closing Up Shop

Anna — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:21:48 GMT

Update: This post was originally published in December 2008, but since it holds lots of useful information for closing your office over a holiday break, we wanted to update it and put it at the top of our list for the 2010 holiday. Enjoy!

If your organization is like many others in the U.S., your office may be closed for several days during these weeks. Here are 10 items to check off your list while shutting down for those days. In addition to helping the environment, you will also save money on electricity and prolong the life of many of your office electronics.

1. Shut down all computers; don't just put them in sleep mode. Computers in sleep mode still use a lot of energy.

2. Consider turning off servers that will not be used. Obviously, you can't shut down the server running your website or email, but do you need the file server or the print server running? Before unplugging computers and servers, please check with your IT department if you have one. They may be planning upgrades and backups while you are away from your computer.

3. Turn off all peripheral accessories like monitors, speakers, docking stations, etc. This can be easy if you have a smart power strip.

4. Turn off other office machines; don't just put them in sleep mode. Copiers, printers, scanners, projectors, and maybe even your fax machine. Look for those machines around your office that have a little green light glowing on them. If you can, shut them down or unplug them. Unplug TVs, VCRs, and DVD players. Unplug chargers for computers, cell phones, iPods, and other chargeable devices. Shut off as many power strips as you can.

According to Green Home Huddle "Your cell phone charger, iPod charger, laptop charger, etc. keep drawing electricity even if your phone/iPod/laptop/etc isn't charging. So if your phone says "charge complete" (or worse, isn't even attached), pull out the charger."

In addition to your technology, look for these other resource-wasters:

5. Turn down the heat. If the office is empty, no one will complain if it gets a little chilly, but make sure to keep it above freezing so your pipes don't burst if you live in a below-freezing area.

6. Look for personal lights, radios, fans, and heaters left on around the office. Switch them off or unplug.

7. In the kitchen, unplug coffee pots, the microwave, and anything else that has a clock or is needlessly using power in standby mode.

8. Make sure no water is dripping and no toilets running.

9. Did you plug in festive lights and decorations? Please unplug them while you are gone.

10. Before going on break, you might also consider doing a little technical house-cleaning. Throw away files and emails you no longer need, organize your files so you can find things more easily, and reboot the servers that will continue to run over the vacation like email and web servers. If you are storing less, you need fewer and smaller hard drives and your backup systems won't have to work as hard.

Lastly, don't forget to turn off the lights!

Happy Green Holidays from all of us at TechSoup's GreenTech Initiative. See you all in the New Year!

Software as a Service (SaaS) Is Green, but Is It Right for You?

Anna — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 02:05:06 GMT

Software as a service (SaaS) is an undeniably green alternative to traditional computing. It's one form of cloud computing in which people use software applications that are located on the Internet rather than on their own computers or networks. A very common example of it is web-based email. The green aspect of SaaS or cloud computing is that it shifts the computing power responsibilities to a relatively small number of Internet servers and can slow the continual demand for hardware upgrades to meet the needs of new software. Essentially, a software hosting provider can utilize a server more efficiently than you can in your office; it can also make setting up and managing your software a whole lot easier. As you rely more on the cloud, you may find that you rely less on an in-house IT person. It also usually lowers your upfront costs since you no longer have to buy and maintain the server or the software. But is it the right solution for you and your organization?

Risks

Since these services usually charge some sort of subscription fee, the lower upfront costs need to be balanced against the generally higher operating costs to determine what is right for your budget. Check out the thoughts and concerns of some of our forum users in this thread (read past the first few posts about the initial article to get to the real discussion). Their main concerns were around security, potential for data loss and availability. Major SaaS providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have had significant outages causing inconvenience to their users, but more importantly, one actually lost data in the process.

Popular Types of Software as a Service

Gartner has researched which types of functionality is most often delivered as software as a service. Office suites, customer relations management (CRM), Human Resources (HR) management systems and Digital Content Creation (DCC) seem to have the most overlap for nonprofits and also often embody the least risk. We have also seen nonprofit adoption of hosted fundraising software and project management / collaboration software like Basecamp.

"Many factors are driving adoption of SaaS, including the benefits of rapid deployment and rapid ROI, less upfront capital investment, and a decreased reliance on limited implementation resources," said Sharon Mertz of Gartner. "Greater market competition and increased focus by the "megavendors" is reinforcing the legitimacy of on-demand solutions. Many enterprises are further encouraged by the fact that with SaaS, responsibility for continuous operation, backups, updates, and infrastructure maintenance shifts risk and resource requirements from internal IT to vendors or service providers."

Determine for which functions SaaS is most appropriate within your overall software strategy before you begin looking for a service provider. Learn more about cloud computing for your nonprofit or library on TechSoup's cloud page.

Resources

Read these articles to help you find the right balance for your organization.

The Truth About Hosted Software Packages: How do you decide if hosted software is right for your nonprofit?
Comparing Online vs. Traditional Office Software: Will desktop or online office software fit your nonprofit needs best?
Who's Reading Your Google Docs?

This post is part of our Unpower Yourself! campaign to help you reduce energy use.

Photo: karma-police, CC license

How to Get Longer Life Out of Your Laptop Battery

Anna — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:33:00 GMT

By following these tips, you should get more hours out of each charge of your laptop battery and save electricity to boot:

Close unused applications or software programs. The information to run the programs is stored in memory, which requires energy to keep active. If you're not using it, close it!
Turn down the brightness of your monitor. (This may also help preserve your eyesight!)
Set your power settings to sleep your monitor and hard drives at a more aggressive interval.

Turn Down the Brightness Setting on Your Monitor

Anna — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:31:29 GMT

The brightest setting on a monitor consumes twice the power used by the dimmest setting. (Climate Savers Computing)

Set Your Monitor to Sleep

Anna — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:43:18 GMT

Even if you don't want to set your entire computer to sleep, consider turning off your monitor at night and set it to sleep during inactivity (after two to five minutes) during the day.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tested dozens of monitors and found that the average LCD (flat screen) display uses over 27 watts while on, but only 1.38 watts while in sleep mode. In contrast, the average older-but-cheaper CRT displays use 65 watts while on and still use over 12 watts when in sleep mode. Even in off mode, both types of monitors still draw approximately 1 watt of energy.

To make your monitor sleep, go to the "Power Options" on a windows PC or if on a Mac go to "System Preferences," click "Show All" and select "Energy Saver" from the "Hardware" row. More details with pictures can be found at Climate Savers Computing.

If you are using a bulky old CRT monitor (not flat screen), another thing you can do is set your background screen color to a dark color. White takes more energy to project. The Energy Star Frequently Asked Questions is a good resource to learn more about basic power management.

Screen Savers Are Not Energy Savers

Anna — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:01:31 GMT

Screen savers often will override your sleep settings and prevent monitors and computers from going into sleep mode.

Also, LCD (or flat-screen) monitors will not burn-in, so they do not require a screen saver like the old CRT monitors did.

Find more information at the US Department of Energy. Save your energy and save your screen by putting your computer to sleep without using a screen saver.

Recycle Your Rechargeable Batteries!

jimlynch — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:22:58 GMT

Most mobile phones and laptop computers use lithium ion rechargeable batteries. Find out where to recycle them at Call2Recycle.org.

Learn to Use "Track Changes" in Microsoft Word 2010

Anna — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:43:05 GMT

This blog post from Addictive Tips demonstrates how to use the track changes feature of Word 2010.

The "Track Changes feature allows MS Word to keep track of the changes you make in a document. It is also known as redline, or redlining. Its real usage can be seen when, two or more persons need to edit the document."

It looks like the new version of Word has some nice options you can choose to format the tracking just the way you like.

The more you use this feature, the less printing you will need to do. I also find, it is much easier to gather feedback from one or more people when collaborating on a document.

Reduce Printing: Keep Your Email Signatures Short

jimlynch — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:04:44 GMT

More length to your emails means more paper and toner if someone prints your message. Add a brief "Please think before printing" note to your signature but otherwise keep it short.

See more tips on reducing printing and paper use here!

Consider a Laptop Instead of a Desktop

Anna — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:43:45 GMT

Climate Savers Computing reports that laptops typically consume less power than desktops and are usually powerful enough for most users.

This is backed up by research performed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The average desktop consumed 74 watts while on, but idle, where as the average notebook consumed only 29 1/2 watts, while on and fully charged and only 44 watts while charging.

The most surprising thing for me was that even when turned OFF, the average laptop still consumed nearly nine watts of energy. To stop this vampire energy waste, try plugging your computer and accessories into a powerstrip and turning that off when not in use.

Cool Green Charger for Hand-Held Devices

Anna — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:55:25 GMT

Looking for a green way to charge your cell phone? The new nPower┬« PEG gives you the power to recharge your cell phone, iPod, or other hand-held device when you when you're on the move.

Some of the features are:

Charges over 3,000 hand-held electronics
Charges through kinetic energy generation (it generates power as you walk or bike)
Stores energy for later use

Yesterday was the first day anyone could order these. They first ship in June. I have not had an opportunity to test this personally, but am excited to give it a try when they are available.

Free Webinar: Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Nonprofits May 4

jimlynch — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:03:19 GMT

Find out all about the new Microsoft cloud-based CRM database service for donor management, pledge management, membership management, event management, and case management. Learn more about the event and register today!

Check Out Second Life with the EcoCommons One Year Anniversary

jimlynch — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:14:22 GMT

Nonprofit Commons in Second Life's environmentally-focused EcoCommons turns a year old this Earth Week! Join us for a special Earth Day EcoCommons event featuring environmental organizations from around the world in Second Life on Friday at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time.