Do It Yourself: Quick Tech Tips and Fixes to Do in One Day

It’s nearly time for spring cleaning, so get your tech in order and improve your efficiency with some simple do-it-yourself activities that can be done in just a day.

Particularly important for smaller nonprofits and libraries, troubleshooting problems, maintaining your technology, learning new tech skills, and increasing the effectiveness of every day applications can help keep you ahead of the curve and help avoid problems down the road.

Read below for great do-it-yourself resources, tips, and training materials so you can do more with what you've got and grow your organization's capacity each and every day. Be sure to share your DIY tech tips in the comments!

DIY Online Events

Want to set up a quick blog for your nonprofit or library? Join us at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time tomorrow, March 21, for our latest Nonprofits Live event on DIY blogging. The event will include tips on creating a blog and getting it online on day one.
Learn to cultivate donor relationships using Microsoft Dynamics CRM in this free, hour-long webinar on Thursday, March 22 at 11 a.m. Pacific time.
Learn how to run your own webinars or tweet chats to train your staff, volunteers, and board members or spread the word about your cause to supporters.
Do-it-yourself digital storytelling is all the rage, so check out all the resources from our recent digital storytelling event for quick tips on creating short, easy digital stories for your organization.
Visit our on-demand archive of more than 70 free webinars on everything from using Facebook for your nonprofit to picking the right database.
Watch our archive of NPLive interactive online events, covering topics like giving online presentations, fundraising, and storytelling.

DIY Software Learning Resources

Increase your expertise on using every day applications from the Microsoft Office suite with these recent articles on customizing the Ribbon, editing images in Office 2010 apps, new time-saving features in Office 2010, and this series of how-to blog posts for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote.
Get the most out of your accounting tools with this book and CD-ROM-based training, QuickBooks Made Easy for Nonprofits.
See the variety of online courses available from easyLearning to help you DIY on everything from web design to project management.

DIY Office Setup

Get rid of old hardware with these 10 steps for safely donating computers.
Clean that messy desk and make room for a productive spring by quickly opting out of junk mail and phone directories.
Read about innovative DIY infrastructure building from Fab Lab.
Get a whole host of quick tips on making your office more environmentally friendly with blog posts on reducing paper use, collaborating online, setting power management settings, and more from GreenTech.
Spend some time troubleshooting problems with your desktop computers to get them in tip-top shape.

What are some of your favorite do-it-yourself tech projects? Share them in the comments below.

Photo: Anders Illum

Becky Wiegand is the Webinar Program Manager at TechSoup.org
@bajeckabean on Twitter

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