WhatGives!? Do Something Good…

To some that may sound like you’re asking how to catch a virus!  In my house “blog” is a bad and a good word.  At the dinner table, my children filter things because “Dad might blog this.”  Or an interesting conversation becomes “bloggable.”  Blogging has been getting a lot of attention and might seem like a new phenomena in the online world, but in Internet years, it is old news and a gray bearded concept.  Most companies are aware of blogging and many have incorporated a blog into their marketing, communications, customer support, public relations, or even advertising departments.  My point is, this is a tool that is being used as a standard practice in many businesses.  Does your nonprofit or cause have a blog?  If not, don’t worry.  It’s easy to get invited to the party, and it’s never too late to start using a tool that can help you.

First of all, for those who are new to this, Blog is a word first brought to the Internet world as two words: web and log.  It was a journal for technology enthusiasts or an online diary.  It was first written and published in code, but later companies began to make it easy to use.  Blogger, a company started by one of the Twitter founders, and later bought by Google, was one of the applications that surfaced in the early stages.  Blogger is still available today, along with  Typepad, Wordpress.com, Squarespace, and LiveJournal – all of which are examples of hosted solutions.  Hosted solutions allow you to get started almost immediately publishing a blog.  A hosted solution handles your URL and your hosting and provides the software to publish your blog to the Internet.

Choices of software that are “self hosted” – meaning you are in charge of providing your own hosting service or server, and can download the needed software to that server – include: Wordpress.org (different than the above .com), Drupal, Expression Engine, Movable Type, and Joomla!.  Self hosted basically means that you pay for the hosted server and the bandwidth you use.  You are also allowed to use whatever URL you want instead of having Blogger’s “blogspot.com” in the URL, or “wordpress.com” in the URL or “squarespace.com”, etc.  You can use those other services with your own URL as well but that takes some technical knowledge and some back end tweaks to the system.  I’ll also talk later in another post about branding with blogs and why it’s better if you don’t have another company’s brand in your blog’s URL.  Meanwhile, as an example, here’s a graphic that shows some basic differences between WordPress’ hosted and self hosted formats.

For the most part many of these solutions I have named are free to use.  If you want to try out a service that is hosted and see if blogging is for you, those are great places to practice your craft or get started, and then they can be later imported to your own server.  But again, another time another post.  Blogging is a simple way to get published on the Internet.  You can go to any of these sites and in a few clicks be ready to go with your own nonprofit or cause blog.  Do it!