Join in the spirit of GivingTuesday 2020

This Tuesday, December 1, 2020 is GivingTuesday. Started in 2012, GivingTuesday has grown to become a global day encouraging generosity. That can include anything from going out of your way say hi to a neighbor to making financial contributions to nonprofit organizations helping out in your community.

It is especially poignant this year when so many are in need due to the coronavirus pandemic. If you are looking for individuals or organizations in your community that could use either volunteer or monetary donations, a good place to start is by searching for #GivingTuesday. Most will have some social media posts in the next few days asking for your help.

Ways to participate in GivingTuesday

• Volunteer your time to assist a local organization either on site or remotely. It’s likely you have a skill set that could be useful, even if it’s not directly on the front lines.
• Amplify the message of a nonprofit whose values you share. Add a link to their homepage, retweet their latest post, or shout them out in an Instagram story.
• Donate needed items. That could be canned goods for a food drive, knitting scarves for a clothing drive, or fulfilling an Amazon wish list.
• Make a monetary donation. Just about every nonprofit is hurting this year from a lack of fundraising events and opportunities. Making a one-time or recurring donation can help them keep their mission alive.
• Spread kindness. Perform random acts of kindness for friends, family, or complete strangers. You never know how your simple act could transform the day for the recipient.

To learn more about this global day of selflessness or to find a local or issue-based participant, visit the official Giving Tuesday website.

LastPass Unveils updated Security Dashboard

LastPass, one of the top password management providers, has given their Security Dashboard a face lift! With this handy tool, you can prioritize maintenance of your passwords and eliminate weak, old, or repeated passwords. The new Security Dashboard is available from a link in the left-hand navigation of your LastPass Vault. It integrates much better into the vault than the previous password checker.

Security score

First, you’ll see an overview of your Security Score from 0-100%. To receive a perfect score:

• Enable Multifactor Authentication
• Disable offline access
• Restrict devices
• 50 passwords with no old, repeated, or weak

Click on “View passwords” to see an individual evaluation for each. They are grouped into categories requiring attention. You can then filter to focus on Weak, Missing, Reused, or Old. Many larger, popular sites will have an option to auto-update your password. No effort for you! Others may require you to navigate to the site and manually go through their password update process.

Dark web monitoring

Another great feature available is dark web monitoring. Sounds spooky and cybernetic. Really, it just means that any of the email addresses associated with your accounts are added to a monitored list. Any high profile breaches or leaked data will be checked to see if you have been impacted. Most of the time, encrypted data ensures your plain text password remains safe. However, even hashed passwords can sometimes be reverse engineered if they are common or weak. With dark web monitoring, you can change the potentially compromised password immediately (and upgrade it if needed).

Give the new LastPass Security Dashboard a spin. If you haven’t implemented any password management in your life, maybe this is a good time to try their product absolutely free. You’ll see all the benefits a well organized and managed password list can bring!

Yoast Readability Score

The Yoast WordPress Plugin is most known as the most popular SEO tool. But don’t overlook the Readability Score tool included with it. It will make your content easier to read, and could thus indirectly improve the SEO by increasing the number of shares or the time each visitor spends on your site consuming that content.

Readability aspects Yoast checks

• Subheading distribution. See above. I sectioned off my list of checks with a subheading. That helps you key in faster on the info you want.
• Flesch Reading Ease. This is a score between 0 and 100 that predicts how easy your content is to read. It looks at both sentence length and also how many polysyllabic words you use. (Using that word is going to hurt my score.)
• Passive voice. This one is the hardest for me and makes the biggest improvement in my writing when I pay attention to it. “Limiting passive voice can make an improvement in your writing,” sounds better if you say, “Limiting passive voice improves your writing.”
• Sentence length. Chopping up long, complicated sentences makes consumption faster and easier. If you are targeting a global audience, it is also generally better Global English and makes machine translation more accurate.
• Paragraph length. Same as dividing up your sentences, giant monolithic blobs of text are hard on the eyes. A few line breaks can help people skim your content and find what they’re looking for more easily.
• Transition words. I get docked for this one often because I’m not writing narratives. I am often listing technical aspects and don’t use a lot of flourishes like “therefore,” “hence,” or “thus.” Sometimes I ignore this suggestion.
• Consecutive sentences. If I write like this. If I use repetition. If I don’t vary my sentence structure. If I flagrantly violate the rules. Then you can see why consecutive sentences is a check.

Yoast Readability Score Screenshot

As you type, your readability score will automatically update. You may notice that as you correct one issue, another pops up. Perhaps when you divided that sentence into two, you used passive voice without a transition.

The first time I paid attention to my readability score, I thought it wasn’t helpful. How can automated rules improve my writing. But over time, I’ve come to find it a handy tool. The end result of my articles are often much improved from the first draft just by improving my readability score. Check out the Yoast SEO Plugin if you haven’t before and start taking advantage of the Readability Scores on your website!

Volunteer Management System Features

Almost every nonprofit charity lives and dies by its volunteers. As your organization grows, eventually you are going to need to find a way to manage those volunteers. If you find yourself overwhelmed with the task, that’s a great problem to have! Online volunteer management systems, like Volgistics or BetterImpact, come with a host of features to make the life of a coordinator easier.

Reasons to have a volunteer management system

1. Maintain a single source of truth for volunteer contact information and availability that users can update themselves as needed
2. Use a centralized communication platform. Your message arrives in print, email, or text format at the preferred recipient address.
3. Empower volunteers to self-schedule. They can view available time slots, assign or remove themselves, and free you from the task
4. Recognize, reward, and celebrate milestones in volunteering

After you’ve implemented a volunteer management system, it frees you up for more important tasks. Let volunteers manage their own data and scheduling. You can set up a sign-in kiosk or just auto-crediting hours to individuals. Then you can gamify things like adding badges to name tags or sending out birthday or hour-milestone emails automatically. The benefits of an online, secure, self-service portal definitely justify the cost, so take a look at some options today!