Monthly Archives: February 2011

7 Steps to Organizing a Fundraising Campaign with SharePoint Online

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Fundraising is all about teamwork, organization, and imagination. Ignite your team’s drive for communication and accomplishment by focusing some strategic energy on building an organized and efficient fundraising project site.

Creating an Organized and Efficient Project Site

1 – Define the Audience

Decide who needs to access the fundraising project site.

Write down all the possible groups of people who may need access to all or just a portion of the site. Will it be internal staff only, volunteers, partners, and/or board members? Deciding who needs access not only helps with organization, it will also give your IT staff time to prepare technical feedback on your concepts.

If you have some spare time, learn how to develop personas on Usability.gov

2 – Establish Goals and Objectives

Now decide what you want your SharePoint site to do for your audience. SharePoint can easily be setup to accomplish multiple tasks, but each section should have a specific purpose. Think about what you need each audience segment to do and map these to goals or tasks. This becomes your audience goal matrix.

Example: Volunteers need to do a call down to potential donors. In this situation you might want to have a section dedicated to communicating with potential donors with supporting documents like a telescript, mission statement, common questions, and a link to the secure list of donor names and telephone numbers where they can update status.

3 – Create a site map

SiteMap ExampleThe size of your organization will influence  the size of your fundraising project site. Based on the newly created audience goal matrix, begin listing the content needs and decide how the information will be categorized. One technique to accomplish this goal is to write down potential content categories  on notecards and group them together as a team. Remember, the site map should contain broad categories.

Get more information on Sitemaps from Usability.gov

Perform a card sort with Optimal Workshop (there’s a free version, up to 30 cards)

4 – Set up a Taxonomy to Organize Files

Taxonomy is simply information about the information and helps organize files across the organization. Taxonomy makes it easy to find and display documents regardless of its physical location within SharePoint. This essentially allows the same document to potentially be in two places at once.

Taxonomy areas to consider are:

  • Document keywords (or metadata)
  • Document naming convention

In a fundraising campaign, one might create a specific document taxonomy around the campaign name, campaign stage, and audience type. You are likely to come up with more!

Note: Even if you haven’t identified a taxonomy for your entire organization quite yet, deciding on categories now for this particular fundraising campaign is  a good place to start.

Learn more about how to manage metadata from Office Help

5 – Decide on a layout

SharePoint Layout / Template | Image from Microsoft.com

Image: Microsoft.com

SharePoint comes with some pretty boring out-of-the-box templates but times are tough and as long as the site is organized and efficient, the site will work.

The main focus during this phase is to decide where content should go on the page. Best practices suggest that, as a team, you decide on types of pages, based on your site map and documents.  This will create standardized page templates and give a consistent location for content types. This means your staff and volunteers will know what to expect and always be able to find the information they need, regardless of what campaign they are working on.

Learn more about creating a project site with SharePoint Online

Best practices on creating Wireframes from Usability.gov

Ready for more? Learn about how to customize a publishing page layout in SharePoint Designer 2007.

6 – Create content

Content can serve as inspiration for your team. Exposing key milestones in a calendar on the page and displaying a chart of total donations can make your volunteers and staff feel informed and excited about their efforts on the campaign.

SharePoint makes it easy to keep content up to date and everyone on your team can quickly learn how to update the site, regardless of their previous technical ability.

Learn how to manage content with SharePoint Online

7 – Give permissions and get ready to go!

Permissions and access to the SharePoint site are essential if you’re looking to make a SharePoint project site a success. Make sure everyone has the permissions they need to access content and double check that all private content is secure.  Having IT looped in from the beginning and throughout the stages of a SharePoint project site will ensure your site is accessible to the entire team and nothing slips through the cracks.

Learn more about managing permissions with SharePoint Online

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Vorsite is at the forefront of a new generation of cloud-based technologies, offering customers a full spectrum of cost-effective cloud solutions and services. With over 100 deployments in the last two years, Vorsite recommends the right solution for each customer’s unique business needs.

Contact Aaron Nettles at (206) 781-1797 for more information on SharePoint Online deployments or other Cloud services.

You can find more information about Business Solutions in the Cloud on http://www.vorsite.com

3 Ways Cloud Technology Helps Non-Profit

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Non-profit organizations need to be efficient and effective managing donors, employees, and other stakeholders to succeed in bringing their vision to life.

One of the realities of being a non-profit organization (especially in a tough economy) is facing some competition for funds with other non-profits to sustain critical programs. While there are no easy answers, cloud services can help your team in three ways: (1) expands IT role to take on more strategic tasks, (2) lowers the total cost of technology, and (3) brings a hardworking, mission-focused team together.

(1) Expansion of IT Role

If you’re working for a non-profit organization, your IT department is likely swamped with end user issues on a daily basis.  While the cloud doesn’t take away the end users, it does promise a 99.9% uptime guarantee.  This means your organization’s email will be up and running anytime of day and the IT department can now focus its energies on more strategic goals for the organization.

(2) Lowers Costs

Lowering the cost of hardware can make a big difference to the bottom line, which means more resources to spend on those critical programs. Cloud services provide the benefit of little to no upfront costs and since the costs are scalable, you can predict monthly budgets depending on the number of users and which services are active.

(3) Brings a mission-focused team together

Non-profit organizations work hard every day to provide essential services to their community. One way to streamline processes and reward employee dedication is to provide resources that allow for more flexibility and timely access to information. A cloud-based email and file sharing service gives employees anywhere, anytime access to the information they need and promotes collaboration with fast visibility into calendars, shared files, and online presence of other coworkers. From the office – to board meetings – to a donor’s door, the cloud can keep your employees in sync.

How People for Puget Sound Benefited from Cloud Services

Cole Coleman from People for Puget Sound speaks about his experience with the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) with an emphasis on the ease of migration and compatibility across multiple operating systems.

Friendly Advice: Be sure to discuss any changes with your IT staff or an outside consultant, as not all cloud services are needed for every organization.   If you’d like an assessment, please call Aaron Nettles at (206) 781-1797 and see if your organization is ready for the cloud!

Key Considerations Before Moving to Exchange Online

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Below is a repost of an answer that I posted on Quora…. more info can be found here http://b.qr.ae/g6plY6

Start with a trial, regardless of which scenario you fit into and then convert to a full subscription.  The trial gives complete full featured access to Exchange Online (Email), SharePoint Online (Document management and Info Sharing), LiveMeeting (Web Conferencing), and Communicator Online (Instant Messaging and Presence)
Link to 30-day trial (bit.ly/fu8Bt8 – fyi you will need to create a Microsoft Live Services Account)

Next, planning is key to a successful transition.  We follow a 3 step approach to our BPOS deployments see more here http://bit.ly/gm6B8G .
Scenario 1: Start-up Company with a clean slate and no plans
for Active Directory

This is the scenario in which there is no existing messaging system in place, and in the case of BPOS the most simple.

The items below are things that you should consider and plan out before configuring the services, this is the most timely piece actual configuration is fairly painless.

Key Considerations

  • Deploying the Single Sign-on client to employees desktops
  • Domain setup and verification
  • Account and Services Setup:  Creating users, contacts, and distribution lists. This can be accomplish through a web based admin console or through scripts.  Map this out in advance to keep the administration console as clean as possible
  • Installation and Configuring of software clients (Outlook, LiveMeeting Outlook Connector, and Office Communicator)
  • Mobile phones setup
  • SharePoint Sites, Permissions, and Site configuration (this is a topic on it own, however a simple site can be created to get users started)
  • Training to end users

Scenario 2: 5 year old, 100 Person Company with Active
Directory and Exchange

In this scenario, maintaining consistent mail flow and employee productivity during the migration is key.  The deployment of the services becomes a little more involved, however with advance planning and a methodical approach can be relatively painless.

Below are some of the key work items that should be completed to transition from Exchange to Exchange Online (SharePoint exclude due to potential complexity)

  • Environment analysis
  • Internet Bandwidth Testing and Needs Assessment
  • Setup and Installation of Migration Tools
  • Understand Mobility Requirements
  • Active Directory Preparation
  • DirSync Setup and Operations
  • Coexistence configuration
  • Client Computer Setup
  • End-user Communications
  • Migration Groups (recommend a test group, and subsequent group(s), the number is based on business requirements)
  • Activate users
  • Mailbox Migrations
  • Post-Migration Services Test (Make sure Mailbox, Calendar, and Contact Info is complete)
  • MX Record Switch
  • Configure 3rd Party Applications

Scenario 3: 5 year old, 100 Person Company with Active Directory and Exchange.  They just recently acquired a 25 employee company that uses a POP3 email service. All employees download their emails to their client and do not keep copies on the server.

The activities are the same as scenario 2 with the addition of …Import Email from PSTs (option for POP3 users)

For complete deployment resources check out Microsoft’s Deployment Website http://bit.ly/h529bP 

I hope that you found value in this post, please feel free to ping me here or on LinkedIn() or Twitter (@dianemgallagher)