Making the site

On Helpalot you can leave messages on the guestbooks of personal pages, but there wasn’t yet a good place to have a more general centralized discussion. We thought about adding groups and having different types of them (organizations, companies, soon to be non-profits, etc) and we might add those features in the future, but we felt it would change too much of the fundamentals of the site. We first want to learn more about the core of the site, before we want to alter the structure. 

The now the plan is to have a forum somewhat seperate of the rest of the site. Then we will send a newsletter every month or two with some updates on what is happening on the site, trends we spot, and we will ask a question to the community. With idea to drive traffic to the forum and via the forum back to the site.

The idea is that using a newsletter people are more likely to be on the Helpalot site when others are too, making it more relevant for them to ask questions to each other and share their knowledge.

At the moment we have set up a forum, but its not fully integrated with the rest of the site yet (for instance the design and navigation part). So a bit prematurely I’ll give you the link:
http://www.helpalot.org/forum/

Introduce yourself over here:
http://www.helpalot.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8

You don’t need to register to leave a message.

Helpalot is now linked on the social actions site. Thanks Peter!

http://www.socialactions.com/meet-the-platforms

This blog was very slow the last couple of weeks. Our host changed some settings and somehow that made everything slow. I just found out that when I deactivated a plugin I used, the site came back to speed so here we are.

Good to know for nonprofits; what do wealthy donors want from Nonprofits?

To bring one thing up; they like to have control over how much e-mail they get. Give them more options than all or no e-mails.
http://nonprofit.about.com/od/onlinefundraising/a/wealthywired.htm

To give some background information on how we work; we do most online, but we get together every once in a while to discuss. (more…)