Aaron Long, Business Development Director with Schipul - The Web Marketing Company (www.schipul.com) discusses the benefits that nonprofit organizations can realize by aggressively incorporating the latest social media tools in their overall communication strategies.

https://www.tendenci.com

Hi I'm Aaron at Schipul, I'm a partner
in the company and in charge of the

business development team, and I've been
a Schipulite for eight years

There's more available for nonprofits at
a lower cost. A lot of it is free - Google

Grants, YouTube video channels, editing
the links - there's many things that you

can do that you couldn't do before
because of the great giving of large

companies. The theme for 2008 on has
been to remove applications from a housed

application on a server, your computer, to
the internet. Some people call it clouds

or whatever it is, but this entire move
has opened up exciting application

development for companies. Most of these
large companies - Google, salesforce.com,

Volusion - they're offering the
applications that they do for free to

nonprofits as a way to give back to the
community, so a nonprofit organization

can use Salesforce foundation 10 free
license to manage their development

database. The database will be online, you
can integrate contact forms with

salesforce.com so that the contacts get
pushed directly from one place into the

database instead of having it locked
away on a computer where the only way to

integrate that technology is to pay the
company enormous amounts of money to

build extra applications. The extra added
benefit that you get is that part about

connecting people, organizing events,
sharing information, networking and

promoting can be done by your core
through social media, so it's in addition

to. And when it comes to the
infrastructure within an organization or

Association I think we could almost all
agree that an executive director's

position used to be a lot less work than
it is now. It now includes editing web

information, doing public relations, managing
membership, in some cases for small

organizations actually running the
database fundraising. There's an enormous

amount of work an executive director has
to do and how is that done and an

organization has to
make a transition between people doing

those jobs and using the right mix of
technology to get it done.