A few of our (other) favorite things.

At Tivix, we are big believers in the whole concept of “Cloud Computing”. The advantages are many for any organization, and are especially significant for nonprofits. No internal IT support required, no software to buy and install, everyone on the team has access from anywhere through a simple web browser – all of those are especially important benefits to nonprofit organizations.

Our favorite cloud-based applications, of course, are from Tivix! But we have a few other favorites which every nonprofit should know about.

Box.net
At its simplest level, Box.net is place where you can have online folders which you can share with others on your team. But Box.net is actually oh so much more! With Box.net you can create an entire online workspace for project files, add comments, assign tasks, start discussions or create new content. Upload a file and have it automatically turned into a PDF. Upload a word doc and fax it directly to someone, for free, without needing a fax machine! This is cloud computing at its best, a service which allows all of your staff members and volunteers to collaborate together in a way which makes them more efficient and more impactful – anywhere, anytime, from any computer. You can read a case study on how some nonprofits are using Box.net today.

MailChimp
There are bunches and bunches of email marketing providers out there, from Constant Contact (one of the best-known), to tiny ones no one has ever heard of. Our favorite, by far, is MailChimp. The first thing you gotta love about MailChimp is the personality. Their chimp mascot leads you through every process, and says encouraging things to you like “Nice job, you deserve a banana!”. But more important than the cute personality, MailChimp has deep and powerful functionality which make it, in our opinion, the best email marketing tool available today. You can create custom email campaigns, check them to make sure they won’t get blocked by spam filters, an view your final email design in all sorts of different email programs, so that you make sure it will look good to all your recepients, no matter what kind of computer and software they are using. And, of course, MailChimp has deep analytics so that you can track the effectiveness of your email campaigns (including A/B testing). As a legitimate nonprofit organization you want to make sure you are “white hat” in every way, complying with anti-spam laws (and common decency), and MailChimp’s tools make it easy to use the power of email marketing, while respecting the wishes of your donors and supporters.

We’ll write more soon about some of our other favorite cloud-based solutions for nonprofit organizations, but we wanted to start with two of the absolute best – Box.net and MailChimp.