It seems that everyone and their monkey are on Facebook these days. Recent stats show that Facebook is growing at a rate of 600,000 new users each day, swelling the network to over 140 million active users.
Photo by LarimdaMD.
For nonprofits, these numbers represent an increasingly huge opportunity to get the word out about your cause. If your organization doesn’t already have a Facebook presence, you can’t afford not to. Go and create a Facebook page, which will be your organization’s home on the popular social network. (The Wild Apricot blog has a handy guide that will get you started.)
Once you have a Facebook page, people won’t come knocking on your door without a little work. Here are thirteen tips to promote your page, help you increase your number of “fans”, and use Facebook to get the word out about your work.
- Invite your posse
You’ve got your own friends on Facebook, and odds are some of them are interested in the work you do. Send them a personal message inviting them to check out your page. Don’t ask everyone. Just your pals who may truly be interested.
- Keep your page fresh and tasty
Once your page is up, don’t make the mistake of neglecting it. Keep the content fresh. Don’t forget the viral nature of Facebook. When someone interacts on your page it may appear on that person’s Facebook feed, promoting your page to their friends.
- Suck in content from other social media
Add Facebook applications that draw your content from sites like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. This will bring new content on your page without needing to add it manually, while promoting your presence on other sites at the same time.
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December 22, 2008 · 12 comments
Have you ever started writing an email and found yourself thinking: “I haven’t had a drink in hours, yet I still can’t manage to string three words together without a typo. I must be going mad!” Only then do you glance down at your hands and realize that you’re not suffering from the shakes, but rather the letters on your keyboard are all switched around. And unless it’s nerdy April Fool’s day joke, you’re likely looking at a foreign language keyboard.
I’ve fallen prey to the non-English keyboard several times, including a long standing feud between me and a bilingual Russian/Armenian PC keyboard while living in Armenia. And although the occasional encounter during a short trip might be a minor inconvenience, regular exposure to an unfamiliar keyboard can be enough to send your head through a monitor.
Fortunately for those at risk of keyboard-induced head trauma, keybr.com offers typing lessons in a several different languages and keyboard configurations.
The on-screen keyboard shows you where the various keys would be on, say, a Brazilian Portuguese keyboard so that you can practice before you ever leave home. You can even choose to type content from any RSS feed, killing two birds with one Rosetta Stone.
Now if you’re sticking around home for a while and have decided it’s time to evolve from a hunt-and-peck typist, Mashable has profiled 8 great sites that will help you learn to type faster properly. (Whatever you do, don’t miss out on QWERTY Warriors.)
April 16, 2008 · 0 comments
A while back I worked with Tadamon, a Montreal-based collective working to build solidarity between activists in Montreal and Beirut, to develop a poster for their campaign to boycott the Israeli apartheid of Palestine. Having spent six weeks in the West Bank a few years ago, and having seen the economic and humanitarian impact of this apartheid first hand, helping them out with this was a no-brainer.
In designing the poster we tried to strike a balance between the amount of information presented and aesthetic appeal. Personally I would’ve cut down on the copy even more than we did, but we did condense the info considerably, and kept clutter under control. We ended up with a poster that got the point of Tadamon’s campaign across quickly, while including more nuanced details for anyone who decided to stick around and read it.
The finished design was silk-screened and hung around Montreal, and is now available for sale at Just Seeds, a “visual resistance artists’ cooperative’, with the proceeds going to Tadamon.
April 9, 2008 · 1 comment
Here are a few photos I shot from “Lady J”, a show that first played at the Montreal Fringe Festival this past summer. Billed as “a satirical look at the breakdown between municipal authorities and the communities they represent”, the play presents the rape and murder of “Lady Justice” by a cop, a priest and a policeman. The photos had been collecting dust on my hard drive for quite some time, but my friend Koby, who wrote the script and plays Joe the cop, was looking to spice up a grant proposal for her company, Mischief Theatre, so I finally dug the files out and got editing. It was a pretty fun shoot, set in the graffiti adorned alley behind Foufounes Electriques and lit by the three halogen flood lamps they were using for stage lighting.
This was was also a good excuse to give Adobe Lightroom 1.3
for a whirl, as I had put off upgrading for a ridiculous amount of time. I’ve been using the software since early in the public beta stage, and although I’ve been happy with it since day one, the most recent upgrades have made it far more usable. The clarity feature introduced in 1.1 is definitely one of my favourites, just don’t go overboard with it.
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December 3, 2007 · 0 comments
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