In the past 5 years the ability to share pictures and photos online has become second nature. It has been suggested that over 2.5 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every month. That’s ridiculous. Back in September the popular photo sharing site Flickr announced that its 5 billionth photo had been uploaded. We all love to share photos and we have lots of them. Speaking as a father with young… read more →

  No one would likely doubt the importance that text messages play in our culture’s communication practices these days. From teens to grandparents, an increasing number of individuals are relying on text messaging to communicate with and avoid phone calls :). Even things like text message marketing are starting to become a reality. Potentially, text messages will start to be as interuptive as email is these days (um, which is… read more →

Churches, nonprofits, and associations are all member-driven organizations. The more involved the members are, the higher the likelihood that the organization will reach its goals. This is even true for schools with active parents. Quite simply, you need your members, constituents, and people to be engaged! Here are 10 ways that you can use technology to help engage the people in your organization.

Back in 2007 Mashable put together a post where they listed 60+ collaborative tools for groups. That’s a lot of different tools to help your “group” get organized and collaborate. Notice how I said “group” and not “groups”. That post was almost three years ago and today there are plenty of online solutions where “a group” can go online to have discussions, share files and photos, and sync up on… read more →

In Part 1 of our 5 Keys to Effective Group Communication Online we considered that group members need to acknowledge when they understand others, get to the point fast, give examples, re-state your points and know when to take things offline. Here are five more ideas to help group communication flourish online.

There are plenty of choices available today for groups to communicate online. Everything from simple discussion boards and forums to complex real-time collaboration tools. Regardless of the platform it is imperative that people understand how to work in an online group if effective communication is going to take place. Here are some keys to make sure that your groups communicate effectively with online tools.

Are people in your organization still calling the office to get someone’s contact information? How much are you paying that person to answer phone calls and look up information?  How much time do your members spend calling in? Do your members know how to reach other? Do you give members access to some sort of online, searchable directory. Is it up-to-date? Can your members edit their information? Can they print… read more →

There is now a new option that administrators can adjust to allow anyone in their organization to create a hub. Our high priority for design often leads us to kill the preferences, but this one really seemed to be a 50/50 split for you guys. Some of you wanted to allow members to create new hubs and start their own communities. Others did not. So we’re giving you the option.

Facebook has a revamped their Groups feature. In an attempt to address one of the most common feature requests, Facebook is giving users the ability to publish content, share and communicate with only a group of friends rather than all your friends. This seems like a natural enhancement for Facebook, but it’s also easy to speculate that this move is a reaction to the continued onslaught of criticism that Facebook… read more →