A Call for Tools

Nonprofit organizations increasingly rely on various tools to support operations and aggregate efforts across multiple channels. You may use tools to communicate quickly with one another. This brief article will provide a few areas in which to think about tools. And at the end, you’ll be asked to let us know which tools you use and love. In a future email, we’ll share the most common tools people told us they use.

Automation
This is a very generic topic. You may be automating things as simple as backups. Perhaps you are automating data imports. There are really handy tools available from many vendors designed to help in this regard. We wanted to highlight some of the most-often overlooked ones, and you’ve probably already got them, because they come with your operating systems. If your organization runs on a Windows network here are two handy tools:

Group Policy Editor. Not only can you use this tool for security, you can use it to push installs out to users’ workstations. Any .exe or .msi you have that can be run or started from a command line can be used.
Task Scheduler. The task scheduler in Windows can be incredibly handy. If the programs or tools you’d like to schedule can be run unattended, this is a quick (and free) way to do it.

Do you have a “product agnostic” tool you like to use that helps you to get things installed, updated, run, etc. in an unattended fashion?

Social Media Aggregators
There’s a lot of buzz around social media sites. Aggregators seem to have come and gone as tools inaccessible to most users, and nurturing these channels can be time-consuming for small development staffs. Do you have a strategy for monitoring and updating multiple sites from a single interface?

Online Meetings
With organizations that have multiple sites or that have people who attend meetings from a home office, an online meeting service is an excellent way to share screens as well as voice. There are many well-known options available today. What online meeting service do you use?

While vendors, like Metafile Information Systems, include certain productivity tools in their product suites, there is always space to welcome additional knowledge of tools to help one another! Are there other tools you think people should know about that help you and your colleagues? We’d like to hear from you. As the closing to this brief article, we’ll leave you with a link to a site where you can let us know what tools you use and enjoy.

Tell us what you tools you are using.