Free Tool Friday: Easily create a daily paper on your non profit’s issue

Posted in Tips & Resources on 6:23 am

At Mixtape Communications we’re big fans of curating content that helps non profits. We believe the best curation is done by hand and highly personalized and contextualized. However for today’s Free Tool Friday we’re sharing the one automatic curation tool that we use and love.

Tool: Paper.li

About: If you’re a Twitter user you’ve likely noticed those tweets that go something like, “The Jane Jones daily is out with top stories by @bigbird, @ernie.” These are for Paper.li’s, which are incredibly easy to use and allow you to make pretty darn professional looking ‘newspapers’ on the Web. You can set it up to automatically pulls the top stories from the people you follow on Twitter or better yet, so it pulls from a specific Twitter list. That’s how we use it to create the Puget Sound Nonprofit Daily.  We’ve heard from lots of people in the Seattle area that they love reading our Paper.li as it keeps them up to date on the latest news from local nonprofits.

A couple of newer features of Paper.li are worth noting. First is their ‘Publish It’ browser button which allows you to add content from anywhere on the Web to your paper.  This allows you for more hands-on curation. Second is their Topical Browse feature which helps you find and read Paper.li’s on any topic, like philanthropy.

Truth be told, when we first encountered by Paper.li’s they royally bugged us, but we’ve changed our tune. When used well and thoughtfully it can be a strong curation tool and help position your organization as a thought leader on your issue.

Get it: Go to Paper.li  and sign up. If you really want to dive deeper on Paper.li’s merits we’d suggest reading Why You Should Give Paper.li Another Look and Paper.li – Clever Curation or Spammy Automation? 

 

About Free Tool Friday

Do you like free tools that help you be more effective at your job? Well apparently you aren’t alone. Recently we blogged on our 19 favorite free tools for non profits and it’s become our most popular post to date. We’re keeping it going with Free Tool Friday!  Every Friday we’ll post a new tool that we think will help you communicate better and help your nonprofit’s mission.

Some fine print: Neither Mixtape Communications  or Zan McColloch-Lussier  get a kick back or any financial benefit from this service or tool. We feel like it is a good resource for non profits but we didn’t create it. So please check it out and make sure it is right for your organization. If we recommend a tool or resource on Free Tool Friday and you discover that it is crap, not actually free, or something is funky about it, please let us know.
Image thanks:Flickr:goodwines
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