In This Edition:

• Charities Hope Banner Ads Catch Up To Donors
• 10 Steps To Saving Your Computer
• 3 Ways To Protect Your Donor’s Confidentiality

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Charities Hope Banner Ads Catch Up To Donors

By Michele Donohue

“We live in a first-look society -- you need to get the point across quicker,” said Wendy MacGregor, chief marketing officer at the Chicago-based Feeding America, which until this past September was called America’s Second Harvest.

The 30-year old organization spent two years evaluating why its had low brand awareness – finally deciding on the new name Feeding America to convey the organization’s mission.

To read the complete article click here...

10 Steps To Saving Your Computer

Times are tough. Nonprofits need to stretch every piece of equipment to the end of its useful life.

For both protecting the environment and getting maximum use of equipment, extending the life of computer system is becoming very popular.

At the recent AICPA Not-For-Profit Financial Executives Forum held in Anaheim, Randy Johnson, executive vice president of Network management Group, Inc. offered tips on recycling and prolonging computer life.

His top 10 steps to extending the life of your desktop are:

• Back up files no longer needed and delete them locally.
• Remove programs no longer needed and make sure to remove program file folders not removed by uninstall.
• Convert drive to NTFS if not already; this increases the size of read/write blocks and significantly improves speed.
• Defrag the drive (twice!).
• Install the latest SP release for Windows and Office if applicable.
• Determine that you are not running multiple spyware/virus software.
• Run MSCONFIG and remove auto start programs you do not need.
• Keep the Tray lean and mean; remove programs you do not run regularly, like Hot Sync for Treo and others.
• For Microsoft Vista, remove gadgets like the weather, stock quotes and CPU activity. This is critical if you are running on a single CPU system/older system upgraded to Vista.
• Upgrading memory to two or three Gigabytes is the only additional out-of-pocket item but will significantly improve performance.

 3 Ways To Protect Your Donor’s Confidentiality

When donors make the commitment to support a charity, they are not only giving their money or time, but also entrusting the charity with the safe keeping of their personal data.  With identity theft on the rise, it is a considerable responsibility for the charity to protect donors’ financial data as well as personal information.

According to Robin Fisk, a senior executive at Alexandria, Va.-based Advanced Solutions International, here are some ways you can best protect sensitive information without restricting your ability to use a database efficiently.

• Use data encryption
  It scrambles data as it is stored in the databases for anyone without the decryption “key.” The key is a unique series of characters, like a secure wireless network key, but much longer. Without the key you’ll see only the scrambled version of this data. This can be selective so that, for example, all but the last four digits of a credit card number would be scrambled, while name and address information might not be.
• Protect Internet-based access
  Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for your virtual private network (VPN), which prevents anyone eavesdropping on the information being transmitted and eliminates third party access.
• Purge your data
  If you are not using the credit card information there is no reason to have it stored in your database. This eliminates the risk of your donor’s information being exposed accidentally.

Thinking of donor security this way helps you understand that it is stewardship of data, not simply the storage of information on a database that is important. These measures can help ensure you manage your supporters’ data responsibly.

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