Eggs and the Halo Effect: Fun with Easter PowerPoint

Why would you want to use a PowerPoint background that looks like this?

Give yourself the halo effect. Besides its evocatively purple-and-gold Easter egginess, you can glean yet another big benefit from this particular PowerPoint background: the halo effect. When you stand and deliver your presentation, make sure you position your head within the "yolk".

Put yourself in this presentation, and you can make yourself look downright saintly. Perfect for pastors presenting to Easter congregations, nonprofits asking for donations, or salesfolks who need to subliminally reinforce their trustworthy images.

Either that, or the concept is perfect for being perfectly silly!

(Download the full-sized Halo Effect PowerPoint Background.)

Labels: fun, PowerPoint Background

¶ 3/19/2008 04:54:00 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

  What Every Leader Should Know About Nonprofit Practices

"Google the word 'nonprofit' and you'll get over 40 million results," explained Krista Rye, Marketing Coordinator for the Nonprofit Leadership Institute at Grand Valley State University. "For most nonprofit leaders, being overwhelmed with information is not helpful. They want easy access to relevant information from a trustworthy source."

Enter the online Nonprofit Good Practice Guide. Maintained by the experienced staff at the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at GVSU, the Nonprofit Good Practice Guide website is a clear and comprehensive resource for nonprofit professional development. You can find carefully researched and pointedly relevant nonprofit resources organized by topic area. You'll see practices and pitfalls in each area, along with a thorough glossary, as well as access to trusted experts. And while nonprofit leaders will find the site enormously helpful, for-profit entities can learn much from it, as well.

Melvene Tardy is Research Coordinator for the Nonprofit Good Practice Guide.

"Nonprofit leaders use the Good Practice Guide to facilitate their daily work," said Ms. Tardy. "Many nonprofits are notorious for being understaffed; famous for having limited budgets. This doesn't allow for extensive professional development. People don't want to be overwhelmed trying to sift through general search results to get the information they need. It's about quality of information. When you use the guide, you're going to save time. "

And you'll know that you're getting solid information that's been carefully vetted for relevancy and accuracy. As an internet marketer, I'm particularly impressed with the Marketing Good Practices section of the site. I have recommended that my for-profit clients subscribe to the content via the site's RSS feeds. Melvene assures me that she and her team regularly scout and add fresh content to keep the site up-to-date and oh-so relevant.

Before any content is approved for inclusion at the site, it goes through a rigorous inspection. Most items don't make the final cut -- only the best get to go online. And if you have questions in any content area, experts in residence are available to share their knowledge.

My advice? Whether you work for a nonprofit or for-profit entity, go visit the Nonprofit Good Practice Guide and bookmark it. Once you use it, you'll keep going back for more!

Labels: content ideas

¶ 3/19/2008 04:34:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Read a Book Through Email or RSS

Get caught up on your reading! Daily Lit lets you read a book online, one chapter at a time. Here's how it works:

Search the site. Go to Daily Lit, and find a book that you've been meaning to read -- but somehow, you haven't quite found the time. For example, I am bashful to admit that I have yet to read Frankenstein. So I was delighted to find that this classic title is indeed in the Daily Lit database. And further, because Frankenstein is in the public domain, subscribing to this book is free. (Many books not in the public domain are available at DailyLit for a small fee.)

Subscribe to a book. When you subscribe to the book of your choice, you can elect when and how you want to receive your chapters. For example, you can elect to receive one chapter a day via email. For me, I chose to read Frankenstein via RSS feed -- one chapter a day. I'm on day four and loving it!

A novel presentation of a classic. I find it interesting to read a classic novel in a new way: shoulders forward, in a business setting, minutes at a time. Had I read this book 25 years ago (as I should have!), I would have paged through it hours at a time, shoulders back, in an overstuffed chair. And I would have likely finished it in a few days. I still love/prefer reading books this way.

But how will the shoulders-forward, minutes-at-a-time approach affect my enjoyment and comprehension of this timeless novel? What would Mary Shelley make of this approach? ;)

And what do today's teacher's think of this kind of presentation? Thumbs up or down?

Labels: content ideas

¶ 3/02/2008 06:11:00 PM 3 Comments Links to this post