Discuss RSS for Nonprofits

I've posted a new article on TechSoup, RSS for Nonprofits.

What do you think RSS can do for the nonprofit sector? When is the technology appropriate? When is it not?

And what's your favorite RSS reader?

I think RSS can work great for nonprofits when they have chunks of useful or helpful-to-share public information that is written up from time to time. I think many nonprofits have this kind of information that they can productively share.

The biggest limitations to rss for nonprofits are a) that i don't think it's possible to make rss feeds secure, so you have to be ok with the information being fully public. (Marnie or anyone==please chime in if you know of secure methods for publishing rss). b) your information is scheduled and organized to flow in streams -- regular, frequently flowing information lends itself to rss, but if you publish information infrequently, or only large & complex publications, rss will be less useful--though you can still publicize your docs this way.

I look forward to many creative, innovative and useful rss feeds from nonprofits. there's a ton of potential i think, once you figure out how the model can work with your organization's communication processes.

my fav rss reader is http://bloglines.com

I think RSS is very cool technology, and certainly could be a help to any organization that wants to keep people informed about the organization.

My browser home page is My Yahoo, and I use the RSS browsing feature of My Yahoo to subscribe to several RSS feeds.

Thanks to the folks on the TechSoup mailling list, I'm also using an RSS feed from Yahoo to post news about nonprofits on a website I recently developed -- writingfornonprofits.org. To display the feed, I'm using the Magpie PHP RSS Parser (http://magpierss.sourceforge.net). With this package, it took me less than a half hour to implement this RSS feed.

Dan Romanchik
Freelance Web Developer

WebBoard 7, available through TechSoup, offers RSS as one of its options. AEGiS uses it to disseminate its HIV/AIDS Daily News Update.

The direct URL is http://webboard.aegis.org/WB/default.asp?action=10&fid=9

and the RSS feed can be found at http://webboard.aegis.org/WB/rss/?a=2&b=9

We've found RSS to a great solution to our needs.

-----------------------

In the search for a cure for AIDS, failure is not an option.

aegis1938, your first link w/ WebBoard didn't work. Also I wanted to provide the link to the product on TechSoup Stock. Here is the link to the product from Akiva.

HTH,

Susan

ps- What do you all think of SharpReader. That's the RSS feed that I use, but it has a few drawbacks.

One of the big undersung uses of RSS, in my opinion, is the ability to subscribe to keywords.

Increasingly, I'm finding that I set up watch lists on Technorati, PubSub, and Feedster. I look for uses of CompuMentor's domains (CompuMentor, TechSoup, and ConsultantCommons). I also use it to make myself seem like I know what I'm talking about: I subscribe to keywords relating to our work or partners and I find myself with a steady stream of information in those topic areas. Using it, I've found conferences, articles and people. It's rapidly replacing subscribing to individual feeds as the way I get my information.

-webb

FeedDemon is my aggregator of choice. I have a big love for the ease of Bloglines but my commute now includes a long off-line section and so I want to be able to access my feeds in a stand alone application.

It gives me hives to have RSS integrated with my email. The first time I opened Outlook to find a gazillion unread messages, I wanted to empty a staple gun into my head. Not, you know, that I'm dramatic or anything...

If you're interested in getting started with RSS but don't know where to look let me offer a plug to the feed that colleague Sonny Cloward set up. I wrote a short tutorial on how to use it, Using the Bloglines OPML file.

-webb

Phil,

Well, an RSS file can have the normal protections that any webpages has (log in so that it is limited to a certain set of views) but once it's out of that it's easy to forward, republish and share. For an organization, that may mean that there needs to more policy around privacy.

Maybe we can get Peter Campbell to chime in on this thread. I know that he uses RSS on his intranet but I don't if the uses just access a web page or use a reader to get the info.

-webb

Thanks Marnie. Security around a group of users would be useful in some cases, but for my cases, I'd want individually customized rss feeds. There may be a way to deliver this, but I'm concerned it would require a login (outside of the feed interface) each time the feed gets pulled, which seems cumbersome.

Hi, all!

I'm a big advocate of RSS as a web publishing tool, because I think it's the best internet information management tool to come around since, well, Google. The thing to consider is that, from a user's perspective, RSS offers a clean, spam-free way to pull information from the internet. From a web developer's perspective, it also offers a simple way to republish information from site to site. So, when I look at the web publishing needs of my organization, I say that we need an Internet site, an Intranet, various extranets, and, ideally, different views of our web site with information displayed according to the reader's orientation. At Goodwill, we have numerous constituents -- clients, customers, employers who hire our clients, donors, board members, etc. Why not offer visitors a choice of views for our information? Clients could see a program-centric view, whereas customers could start from the retail information (store promotions, locations), and, since the variable data would be the RSS information the site is pulling, this wouldn't require complex programming on the part of the web designer. Site visitors could subscribe to all sorts of updated content streams, from class schedules to store sales to open jobs.

The security question doesn't really revolve around RSS - certainly, if you make a feed publishable from a public web page, then there is no security for that information. But there's no reason why you can't publish some feeds inside your firewall (to an Intranet). You have a choice with RSS as to whether you're going to provide complete articles, or just pieces of them that link back to your site, so it is a great tool to drive traffic to your site, as opposed to giving it away.

I think we've only seen the first wave of RSS as a news headline and blogging tool. Why not put all job listings in RSS feeds? Auction items (craigslist has already figured this out -- I'm waiting on EBay). While we do have proprietary information in house, both our open positions and our available clients (their resumes) are great fodder for RSS feeds and easy distribution to other web sites.

Marnie - while I'm using RSS (via my CMS, Drupal) on our Intranet, I've been indiscreet and haven't secured it. The bulk of our Intranet is inaccessible from outside without authorization. We're sharing the CMS content with a number of outside entitities, so I decided to keep it simple. Given this thread, that might be a bad idea...

In general, I'm wondering how people are using RSS. Are they using an aggregator? Do these use My Yahoo and so read it on a website? Are folks searching RSS feeds at all?

So far I've been using RSS strictly for reason #1 in Marnie's article: to collect the type of content I want from my favorite sites. I haven't had the chance yet to explore other uses of RSS, but they do seem interesting.

I use an excellent RSS reader called Pluck.


Yann

I'm very interested in different aspects of RSS -- and there are many, many aspects that sort of get lumped together when folks get together to discuss this area.

For example, some seem to lump "aggregator" together with "reader:" if I properly understand the nuances, you might use a reader to access the results of an aggregator (who provides a convenient source for you to find, share, and subscribe to a variety of RSS feeds).

I'm experimenting with Bloglines, NewsGator, and what is now my favorite, Tristana. My Tristana reader is a "branded" reader: Tristana clients have it pre-loaded with approapriate feeds and it carries their "sponsorship." In my case, I'm using a version that was sponsored by Southern University.

From a non-profit's view point, RSS has several different sets of opportunities/issues, I think. Let's take the case of using RSS feeds as an alternative to personalized eNewsletters. Some are considering this alternative because they are finding that more and more constituents are refusing to give their email addresses and other details about themselves.

The more the non-profit fundraiser, for example, knows about the the potential giver, the more they can taylor a personalized message to that potential giver (and hopefully, receive a bigger gift for their efforts). RSS does not seem to give you that capability. Well, if you can still get the details without the email address, you still can personalize an RSS feed, but for the most part, they are anonymous -- in the sense of knowing exactly who has subscribed.

But some smart marketing companies are still measuring click-throughs and other metrics from personalized RSS feeds and non-profits should probably learn more about those commercial applications and apply them to their efforts.

Ward Bell