Aspiration provides a range of open-licensed resources related to eAdvocacy, online communications and best practices in nonprofit technology. These include reusable templates and downloadable training materials.
Templates
A major component of Aspiration's eAdvocacy Capacity Building Program is a focus on workflow and replicable best practices. Templates are an essential resource in establishing best practice processes.
- Workflow Inventory Template: Too many organizations go astray in technology by skipping the essential step of inventorying the processes, or workflows, that the desired technology solution needs to support. The Workflow Inventory Template is provided as a starting point for organizations to enumerate the universe of business processes that need to be supported before moving to technology selection, development and ultimately deployment.
- RFP Template: Many organizations engage and retain external technology solution providers before they are clear on and document what they want delivered in the form of a Request for Proposal (RFP). Our RFP Template, when used in conjunction with the Workflow Inventory template, helps to define and explicitly articulate exactly what solution an organization is seeking, and codify how service providers should submit proposals to address the same.
- Publishing Matrix Template: Aspiration recommends that nonprofit organizations create a “Publishing Matrix” to help drive online communications process. A publishing matrix enumerates the types of content that the organization publishes along with all of the organization’s online channels, such as web site, mailing list(s), Facebook, Twitter, and blog(s), etc. A publishing matrix then correlates these two inventories, indicating which online channels should be used when publishing a given type of online content.
- eNewsletter HTML template: Aspiration has developed a mature HTML template for our eNewsletter. While the actual design reflects our branding, the general layout of the content can be repurposed to other organization's newsletter and HTML email templates. The benefit of such a template is that it has been tested and verified to display correctly in a range of email clients, from webmail platforms like Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail to desktop apps like Thunderbird and Outlook.
Training Materials
Over the past 6 years, Aspiration has been developing a set of eAdvocacy training materials to help organizations apply sustainable best practices when advocating, organizing and communicating online.
Aspiration distributes all our training materials under a Creative Commons license, and we encourage re-use, modification, and re-distribution in any situation where they may be useful.