All the nonprofits I work with have one thing in common: they're working overtime just to keep up with the sheer volume of work on their plates. Adding new tools or tasks to their workload wouldn't make me popular, so I've searched high and low to find things that will increase a nonprofit's productivity at little or no cost.
Along the way, I've found three platforms or programs nonprofits should seriously consider. These suggestions aren't sexy but they're free and they can be very powerful tools. Two of them (SlideShare and YouTube for Nonprofits) go a long way to increasing a nonprofit's visibly in Google searches and who wouldn't want that?
The third, Salesforce, is not very well understood and takes some explanation. But it's an incredible value. In fact it's $15,000 worth of software as a service at zero cost to nonprofits.
So let's dive deeper into each of these:
1. SlideShare
What is it?
Social media for professionals and a place to share presentations online.
Why is it important?
You've probably heard of
SlideShare by now or even watched a presentation or two. But I don't see many nonprofits taking advantage of this platform. One reason might be that the audience on SlideShare is mostly comprised of business and IT professionals.
I can see why this would make nonprofits shy away from SlideShare. But that doesn't mean nonprofits can't begin to use it. For one thing, it's a powerful search engine optimization tool. It's also experiencing explosive growth - over 100% growth over the past year.
According to Rashmi Sinha, the CEO, SlideShare is the worlds largest professional sharing community. SlideShare gets 28 million unique visitors per month and 80 million unique page views per month. The average time on site is 8 minutes (that's a lot) with an average of 20 slides viewed per visit. All of this translates into a lot of search engine visibility - meaning your nonprofit's slides could show up on Google searches for your keywords if you optimize the keywords for your slides.
