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Tools That Streamline Social-Networking Tasks

April 29, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute

Once a nonprofit organization has started using social-networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, maintaining the group’s presence on multiple sites becomes increasingly time consuming, Jordan Dossett, creative director of Antharia, a technology company in Lanham, Md., said in a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

“Basically, you go nuts, and want to jump out a window,” she quipped.

But, fortunately, she said, there are free and low-cost tools that can make updating the sites easier.

Ping.fm, a free service, lets people update all of their social networks at the same time.

Ms. Dossett said that the first thing she did when she arrived for the session is send a “ping” to say she was in the room and it was “T minus 15 minutes” until the start of the presentation.


“When I did that, it updated my Facebook page, my Twitter page, my LinkedIn page, my Plurk page, all of it,” she said. “I did not have to log in six different places. It did it all for me.”

Other tools, like Tweet Deck and Event Box, let people follow the activity on all of their social-media accounts in one place.

Says Ms. Dossett: “I’m streamlining and making my life easier.”

About the Author

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.