Herzl famously wrote, "If you will it, it is no fable." This quote, made into a cliche over the long century since it was uttered, succinctly expresses the fundamental credo of a pioneer:

pioneers will the future into reality.

The first course: Last night, the PresenTense organization sponsored an evening in Jerusalem with three special pioneers, visionaries, as they hosted a conversation around the future of Israeli Education. All three (Sarah Kass, Beverly Gribetz and David Moatty) have already led the way in willing dreams to become tangible facts on the ground. The visionaries have been asked:

• What is your vision; why is it transformative?
• Why this path rather than others?
• What will change if your vision becomes reality?
• What will it take ...
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  Tags: connect, creativezionism, educate, innovate, Jewish Incubators, web 2.0

Whoa, Nelly! Web 2.0 is Cool, But … By Peter Deitz At last month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, nonprofit techies and professional fundraisers met up to discuss the emerging best practices for fundraising using social networks and social media. Their conversations were overwhelmed by one small detail. Few nonprofits have succeeded in raising large amounts of money using blogs, widgets and fundraising applications for social networks. Nine months since the high-profile launch of Facebook Causes and well over a year since the first articles on Web 2.0 fundraising started to appear, members of the nonprofit tech community seemed to be turning against the new-fangled tools for online fundraising. The traditional staples of online fundraising — a well-cultivated e-mail list, the ...

10 Questions Every Blogger Should Ask Themselves Before Posting

To help you in these crucial editing stages, we thought we would lay down some important questions bloggers can ask themselves so they can make an honest, constructive and critical appraisal of their work before posting it up for the world to see. Asking these simple questions could mean the difference between a hastily written blog article that remains obscure and a well-written, influential and accessible blog that courts a loyal audience with ease.

1. How quickly can my readers understand what my post is about?
2. Does my blog offer something novel or unexpected?
3. How helpful is my content?
4. Why should my readers trust me?
5. Does my content speak ...
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   Tags: educate, innovate, web 2.0

10 Steps to Being Found on Search Engines

by Laura Quinn, Director, Idealware

Does your organization show up on the first page of results in search engines like Google or Yahoo? The content and structure of your website can have a dramatic effect on how easily potential constituents can find you via search engines. This article explains how.

Let's do an experiment. Go to Google and type in the most commonly used version of your organization's name. Do you show up first in the resulting list of sites? What if you type in a short phrase describing the type of work you'd like ...

From the recent NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference we would like to share Mark Rovner and Katya Andresen's overview of donors' seven needs to feel fulfilled. With all the shiny technology tools out there, it's easy for us to be blinded to the fact technology is about bonds, not wires. It's human connections that matter. In other words, some very human principles make or break the success of absolutely everything we do online. From the discussion of "The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We're Forgetting) about Online Outreach," here are the seven things everyone wants:

• Need 1: To be SEEN and HEARD
• Need 2: To be CONNECTED to someone or something
• Need 3: To be part of ...
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  Tags: educate, web 2.0

ShaBot 6000, the continuing cartoon saga of a pious Jew who purchases a robot to work as the Shabbos Goy for his household. The inquisitive robot, ShaBot, decides that he is Jewish, and is therefore unable to fulfill his duties as servant. ShaBot spends his days asking questions about Judaism, trying to find logic in a religion that sometimes just DOES NOT COMPUTE. ShaBot 6000 a comic strip for the 21st century. for more ShaBot 6000, check out Day of Rest.

for an explanation of this week's comic strip and more cartoon archives visit www.shabot6000.com

As some of you know, we have been in the process of redesigning and testing our daily updates. Comparisons are difficult; partly because Feedburner analytics (our original provider of choice) are not the best; even for evaluating their own emails! Keep in mind, you must always test; we have discussed testing in the past and will continue to in the future. We cannot say it enough.

Whether it is the message, the subject line, the time of day, whatever, you must test. And test some more. One of our goals is to improve the look and readability of our communications; another to provide you, our readers, with additional information on a regular basis. In trying to evaluate the results, ...

The NonProfit Times announced the launch of an online portal that gives free access to corporate donation data for fundraising research to nonprofit grant writers and others researchers. The address is www.nptgrantsearch.com.

The research portal was launched with more than 4,300 searchable records of corporate donations valued at $1 million or more to U.S. charities.

 

The only free service of its kind, users can search, view and save information about the corporate donor, ...

Back in December, I wrote about viral marketing and the preview launch of this site. At the time, I mentioned a conversation I had a few weeks before with Carlton Evans, Marketing Director for The Tribe and how by using only a viral marketing campaign they won film festival awards and reached success on iTunes. Being curious four months later, I decided to check-in and see how this word-of-mouth, a.k.a. 'viral' phenomenon has proceeded. You can judge for yourself:

• The Tribe hit the number 1 position on iTunes most downloaded film list
• Reached over 150 thousand people
• Won 11 awards including Grand Jury and Audience prizes
• Screened at over 80 film festivals plus over 100 additional public ...
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  Tags: social networking, web 2.0

As we wrote about on December 23rd in, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II Takes Up YouTube, today we find a very different use for this video channel as governments are learning to leverage the Internet and control their own message. The Office of the Prime Minister (here in Israel), has now followed suit. According to Haartez, "The government recently posted three videos showing images from the terror attack at Jerusalem's Mercaz Harav Yeshiva earlier this month in which eight students were killed." The paper continues, "TheMarker has learned that the Prime Minister's Office was actually behind the uploads to the popular video site. This is the first time that a government body has used the site in response to a terror attack. The first ...