I have not posted an update in a while, mainly because I have been consulting for Philanthropy New York, a regional association of grant makers in New York City and state. They are a great organization the supports the leadership and staff of major foundations, philanthropies and nonprofits, with training and information that is vital.
Philanthropy NY’s need was targeted and specific, keeping their members and website readers informed and current on philanthropy news, member news and topical news impacting the work of foundations, non-profits and others in the charity sector. They developed a branded product NY PhilanthroPost, which is their channel for news content.
Each weekday, I helped curate and format content from a variety of sources, and then categorize and package it for their readers. (For newbies: there are three basic steps of curation: find, annotate and share!)
The method for gathering all this new and rapidly changing information included a variety of channels – blogs, email newsletters, Google News alerts and searches, Twitter and other social channels, as well as a service called Meltwater News, a media monitoring service. The form and variety of information keeps expanding so we all need ways to collect, organize and filter it.
Many Pathways to the Same Destination
Spending months in the trenches of seeking, searching and filtering content to bring the most relevant stories to the audience at the right time, I learned there are many ways to skin a cat, as they say. But the marketplace is seeing a need to support people who are looking for good content and there is an explosion of tools out there. Curata, a curation tool site, put together this “ultimate list” for content marketers. Some I have not explored yet, but plan to check into the most promising ones!
One of my favorite tools is Feedly, a platform to bring together news feeds, saved searches and more. It has expanded its features over time, including the ability to share directly from the platform. Allowing users to organize the data themselves with categories, Feedly makes the process of reviewing high volumes of content very convenient and I highly recommend it.
Stay tuned as I plan to explore more of the tools from the Curata “ultimate” list and let you know how they work and if they’d work for small businesses and non-profits!