Thank you to Maddie Grant for alerting me to the YouTube DooGooder Nonprofit Awards! To enter, organizations must be a member of YouTube’s Nonprofit Program, and the prizes are definitely pretty noteworthy.

You could win $2500, have your video featured on YouTube’s homepage and a free registration to NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference. Other prizes aside, you’d get insane traffic from being featured on YouTube.com alone!

There are awards for small, medium and large nonprofit organization videos, which we think is completely awesome for those small staffs out there whose budgets may not be as large as other nonprofit organizations. Check out the Frequently Asked Questions here, and think about submitting your video if you’re eligible! This is a great opportunity to bring even more awareness to your cause and show off your video-making skills.

Last week, I featured a Mashable article about cloud computing in the Friday Top Five. Basically, it said that most of us will be working primarily in the “cloud” by 2020 – “the cloud” referring to storing data and information on the Internet rather than our computers’ hard drives.

Well, Google has recently rolled out a slew of new collaborative features for Google Docs, as well as a new interface, making it easier than ever to share and collaborate in documents stored in the cloud.

I discovered the new chatting features on Monday, when my roommate and I were trying to figure out how much we owe each other for bills. (Let’s just say math gives me a migraine.) It was so much easier to chat within our Google Spreadsheet instead of switching back and forth between the spreadsheet and Gmail for chatting.

Here’s a short video from Google about the new changes:

These new features could be invaluable to small organizations, especially those with virtual offices. Rather than e-mailing important documents and spreadsheets, Google stores them for free and allows users to share and edit documents among themselves. So many association professionals at small staff organizations fill the roles of multiple departments, and storing documents in the cloud can keep you more organized and keep the entire staff (and volunteers, if you’d like!) up-to-date on what’s going on.

Additionally, if you travel a lot, Google Docs could be invaluable for keeping up with what’s going on in the office without having to send tons of e-mails with editing attachments and notes.

If you’ve used Google Docs in the past for documents and been frustrated with its lack of features (such as the inability to change the margins and difficulty adding images), I definitely recommend taking a look at the new changes. It looks much more like another word processor we’re all familiar with (Microsoft Word), but it updates changes to documents in real-time and multiple people can edit them at the same time.

Does your organization use Google Docs or another form of cloud computing for storing documents? What are some of the benefits and pitfalls you’ve encountered?

Is your to-do list out of control?

Professional development. Workplace growth. Time management. New responsibilities. Stress. Presentation skills.

Every day, we take another step forward in our careers. But though we may have learned practical skills in academia in school, the business world is an entirely different animal. Business enhancement, communication and project management all become complex issues when you work in a membership-driven organization.

I recently found out about the free webinars offered by the American Management Organization, so I wanted to share some links with everyone. There are a few each month, and they cover topics as diverse as communication, administration, leadership and management skills. Each one offers practical advice you can really use — and they’re also available on-demand, so you don’t have to watch them live!

Here are a few upcoming ones that may interest association professionals at small-staff organizations:

- How to be a Successful Manager as an Introvert (April 8 – today!)

- Managing Your Workload: How to Prioritize When Everything is Important (April 20)

- How to be a Communication Problem Solver (April 29)

- From Chaos to Control: How to be Resilient to Workplace Stress (May 4)

- How to Turn Your Marginal Performers into Productive Contributors (May 13) 

Sometimes, one useful tip can make all the difference when trying to get a handle on your to-list or de-stress a bit. Consider these the next time you’re stressing out or feeling like you can’t handle everything on your plate. (And remember, it’s almost the weekend!)

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Wednesday, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion for ASAE’s Component Relations Virtual Lunch webinar. I was in great company with Higher Logic’s Andy Steggles, Mariner Management and Marketing’s Peggy Hoffman and American College of Healthcare Executives’ Kim Mosley, as well as Delcor’s KiKi L’Italien as moderator.

There were lots of great questions posed, and I was psyched that the attendees weren’t afraid to jump in with questions of their own!

Our conversation ranged from how to keep people from sending their (unsolicited) resumes via LinkedIn to how to decide which outposts to use to how to fit social media into organizations and chapters.

Kim had a great story about ACHE’s use social media. With a staff of 100 and 37,000 members, ACHE first touched base with other associations to learn from their mistakes and see what tools they were using, as well to find out how resource-intensive implementing a social media strategy can be. Then, they gave a survey to their members to find out which social media outposts were commonly used.

ACHE has one full-time person responsible for keeping track of its social media activity. However, social media is not the only thing this person is responsible for — her role is within the marketing and communications department. Kim said this staffer probably spends two to three hours each day looking through the sites and gathering information.

Time and resources are both important considerations when getting started in social media – especially for small-staffs. However, I think ACHE serves as a great case study. If keeping track of social media activity takes 10 to 15 hours at such a large organization, can we assume it would take less time for smaller organizations?

Of course, every organization is different, but it’s important to remember that social media doesn’t require a full-time position. Social media tools are just additional ways to communicate with members, staffers, board members and volunteers. Monitoring tools such as TweetDeck or HootSuite can do a lot of the work for you! (There are plenty of monitoring systems you can pay for, but the free ones are pretty effective!)

For smaller organizations looking to get involved in social media, it’s crucial to find your members who are already starting conversations. Embrace it. Let them run with it, but give them some guidelines to go by.

Are you listening to online conversations or blocking them out?

(Peggy shared a great story during yesterday’s call: Coca-Cola didn’t create its own Facebook page. Two random fans of Coke did. When Coke found out, they gave them a few guidelines but pretty much just told them to run with it. How’s that for embracing your social media superstars?)

I know it’s scary to let these conversations happen online and feel like you have no control. But it’s a good thing — I promise! There’s no way to control what people say about the organization, but there is a way to support the conversations in a welcome environment.

Remember the key word in “social media” — MEDIA! Your organization’s media efforts can include all types: marketing, public relations, print and yes, social.

For some more information about how organizations have incorporated social media departmentally, check out Maddie Grant’s SocMed Managers Series. She interviewed nine people who do social media for their association or AMC and the responses really are fascinating. (And I’m not just saying that because I was interviewed! )

If you’re curious about monitoring and social media tools, feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment! Or share your own organization’s social media story so others can learn!

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Today is the day! We’re so excited to announce the winners of our Great Small-Staff iPad Giveaway.

Each entry was extremely thoughtful, and we really believe these four will provide excellent case studies on the potential impact of the iPad in the small-staff association community.

The winners represent a variety of organization sizes, both in membership and staff.

The National Urban League Young Professionals is a volunteer auxiliary of the National Urban League with 7,000 members. President Barton J. Taylor wrote in great detail that the iPad will help “track meeting attendance, volunteer hours and fundraising amounts in real time and correct record errors,” as well as “manage member benefits and potentially acquire new benefits by demonstrating to potential vendors how we interface with our members through MemberClicks.”

Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology is a nonprofit organization with more than 500 members. “We have no full-time employees, and only two of us who are part-time consultants for the organization,” President Gwen Acton wrote.  Her entry explained how the iPad would “save time and change our registration process at our monthly events,” and “could also be a powerful recruiting tool.”

The Association of Test Publishers is a member-run trade association that represents more than 125 providers of tests and assessment tools and is run on a staff of two. Lauren Scheib’s entry included how the organization is “looking forward to continuing to streamline our member communications, our conference planning, our public relations efforts, our board communications — all through the use of enhanced technology.”

The Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association is a small-staff professional organization with more than 1,200 members.  Ashley Crist’s entry included, “we’d like to be able to conduct a MemberClicks training session during which an iPad would be passed among the attendees.” Additionally, “shifting from paper to electronic registration check-in (at our annual conference) would be less confusing and time-consuming.”

This is just the beginning, though. The winners will be regularly featured on the Splash blog. Groups all over the world will be able to learn about the winners’ ongoing iPad experiences and how they can implement the device into their own operations.

All runners-up in MemberClicks’ Great Small-Staff iPad Giveaway will receive an Amazon gift card.

Congratulations to all the winners, and thank you to everyone who entered.