April was Earth Month but extending green habits all year-round not only benefits the planet - it helps your organization too. The April edition of Nonprofits Live looked at environmental policy, sustainable practices, and nonprofit sustainability case studies. NPLive welcomed guest contributors Jon...

It's hard to get companies to stop sending junk mail and catalogs, but it is a colossal waste of paper. Here are some practical things that nonprofits, businesses, and consumers can do about reducing all the junk paper cluttering their offices. Why Opt Out? Getting rid of junk mail is worthwhile...

May’s Online Community Meetup featured Randy Paynter, co-founder of Care2 . Paynter’s talk, "The Five Steps to Growing an Engaged Online Community," examined how to build and sustain online communities by relating some of the lessons he has learned through managing the Care2 community...

What is an all-in-one printer or multifunction printer (MFP)? About.com has this to say, "When you've got a small home office, an all-in-one printer, also known as a multifunction printer, is a great buy. All-in-one printers can print, scan, copy, and sometimes fax." Theses devices tend to be reasonably...

Update: This post was originally published in December 2008, but since it holds lots of useful information for closing your office over a holiday break, we wanted to update it and put it at the top of our list for the 2010 holiday. Enjoy! If your organization is like many others in the U.S., your office...

Software as a service (SaaS) is an undeniably green alternative to traditional computing. It's one form of cloud computing in which people use software applications that are located on the Internet rather than on their own computers or networks. A very common example of it is web-based email. The green...

By following these tips, you should get more hours out of each charge of your laptop battery and save electricity to boot: Close unused applications or software programs. The information to run the programs is stored in memory, which requires energy to keep active. If you're not using it, close it! Turn...

The brightest setting on a monitor consumes twice the power used by the dimmest setting. ( Climate Savers Computing )

Even if you don't want to set your entire computer to sleep, consider turning off your monitor at night and set it to sleep during inactivity (after two to five minutes) during the day. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tested dozens of monitors and found that the average LCD (flat screen) display...

Screen savers often will override your sleep settings and prevent monitors and computers from going into sleep mode. Also, LCD (or flat-screen) monitors will not burn-in, so they do not require a screen saver like the old CRT monitors did. Find more information at the US Department of Energy . Save your...

Most mobile phones and laptop computers use lithium ion rechargeable batteries. Find out where to recycle them at Call2Recycle.org .

This blog post from Addictive Tips demonstrates how to use the track changes feature of Word 2010. The Track Changes feature allows MS Word to keep track of the changes you make in a document. It is also known as redline, or redlining. Its real usage can be seen when, two or more persons need to edit...

More length to your emails means more paper and toner if someone prints your message. Add a brief "Please think before printing" note to your signature but otherwise keep it short. See more tips on reducing printing and paper use here!

Climate Savers Computing reports that laptops typically consume less power than desktops and are usually powerful enough for most users. This is backed up by research performed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . The average desktop consumed 74 watts while on, but idle, where as the average...

Looking for a green way to charge your cell phone? The new nPower® PEG gives you the power to recharge your cell phone, iPod, or other hand-held device when you when you're on the move. Some of the features are: Charges over 3,000 hand-held electronics Charges through kinetic energy generation (it generates...

Find out all about the new Microsoft cloud-based CRM database service for donor management, pledge management, membership management, event management, and case management. Learn more about the event and register today !

Nonprofit Commons in Second Life's environmentally-focused EcoCommons turns a year old this Earth Week! Join us for a special Earth Day EcoCommons event featuring environmental organizations from around the world in Second Life on Friday at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time.

Join Climate Savers Computing and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ENERGY STAR program for a free webinar on how to implement computer power management in your organization. This event is the second in an annual webinar series about IT power management best practices. Date: Monday, April 19,...

If you'd like to advocate for green IT and add your weight to the IT energy conservation movement, join Climate Savers Computing Initiative . It is no cost, and simply entails that you set power management on your computers.

Holiday LED lights use a fraction of the energy than conventional incandescent holiday lights. To be exact, LED lights are 44 times more energy efficient and inexpensive to run. They're lower-cost to buy than ever before and some stores will even offer a discount on purchasing new LEDs if you bring in...

Welcome to TechSoup GreenTech's Unpower Yourself! campaign. For this campaign, we have compiled a variety of information about IT energy reduction on our web pages . Global warming is happening because of a buildup of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, most of them produced by power plants that...

This is part 2 of a four-part series. Part 1 of this series listed the 5 actions we recommend that you take to reduce the power use of your computer. This post (part 2) explains two of those actions in more detail and tells you how to complete these two actions. Parts 3 and 4 offer more detail about...

Part 1 of this series listed the five actions we recommend that you take to reduce the power use of your computer. Part 2 explained in more detail, two cost-saving actions and tells you how to complete those two actions. This post, fills in the details about two more recommendations. Upfront Cost, but...

In these tough economic times, there are a few relatively easy steps you can take to reduce waste in your IT systems. These measures will not only make your systems more efficient; they'll also save money and reduce your impact on the environment. Why is it important to reduce your computer power use...

How do you choose computer hardware? Price? Features? Sales pitch? We urge you to consider using some standards that have been generated to help us understand the environmental impact of computer and tech hardware. You are probably familiar with the EPA's Energy Star program, but do you know about EPEAT...