Byte of the Week

It’s been a while – but here’s my kind of annual Thanksgiving quiz. Have a fantastic break!
Thanks! Ann

Thanksgiving Quiz

How fast can wild turkeys fly?
• They can’t
• 15 mph
• 35 mph
• 55 mph

About how many feathers does a mature turkey have?
• 1, 500
• 3,500
• 5,500
• 7,500

Which state produces the most turkeys annually?
• Minnesota
• Wisconsin
• Iowa
• Illinois

What great American lobbied to make the turkey the national symbol?
• Thomas Edison
• Benjamin Franklin
• Abraham Lincoln
• Tom T Turkey

How long did the Pilgrims’ voyage to the ‘New World’ last?
• 33 days
• 66 days
• 99 day
• 111 days

What Native American tribe celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the colonists?
• Wampanoag
• Lakota
• Ojibwe
• Sioux

Which country first adopted Thanksgiving as a national holiday?
• Canada
• US
• Mexico
• UK

Which song was originally written for a Thanksgiving program?
• Jingle Bells
• Greensleeves
• Let it Snow
• The Turkey Trot

What oven temperature is the best to roast a turkey to perfection?
• 225
• 325
• 425
• 525

Which state produces nearly half of the annual U.S cranberry crop?
• New York
• Massachusetts
• New Hampshire
• Maine

Thanksgiving Quiz Answers

How fast can wild turkeys fly?
• 55 mph

About how many feathers does a mature turkey have?
• 3,500

Which state produces the most turkeys annually?
• Minnesota

What great American lobbied to make the turkey the national symbol?
• Benjamin Franklin

How long did the Pilgrims’ voyage to the ‘New World’ last?
• 66 days

What Native American tribe celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the colonists?
• Wampanoag

Which country first adopted Thanksgiving as a national holiday?
• Canada

Which song was originally written for a Thanksgiving program?
• Jingle Bells

What oven temperature is the best to roast a turkey to perfection?
• 325

Which state produces nearly half of the annual U.S cranberry crop?
• Massachusetts

This week I met with nonprofit executive directors in Grand Rapids, MN. We started talking about Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) – and while I don’t usually promote tools you have to pay for here I thought I’d recap the conversation a bit for anyone else who has been thinking about starting or moving an email list. (The service starts at $15 per month – for lists of up to 500 people, I think.)

Why Sent Email?

First email is a great way to reach people. If I had to choose one tool to use online, email would be it. (Unless my target market was young – then I might go with Twitter or another tool to reach folks via text messaging.) It’s one of the few tools you can use to reach out to people rather than creating a message they find.

What is an email tool?

It will save the email addresses of all of your email subscribers. Then you can send emails through their online tool that will go to everyone on your list.

Why use an Email Tool?

Sending individual emails works if you only have a handful of customers. Sending email to too many recipients at a time (more than 10) will get your message caught in a recipient’s spam filter. (Here’s more info on that: http://byteoftheweek.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/email-tips/).  

An email tool maintains the list of addresses for you. If an email quits working, it deletes it. You will need to manually update the list if someone changes their address – but you only need to do it in one place

You can segment your list into categories. So if you’re a nonprofit, you might have one list for volunteers, one for people you serve, one for media and one for funders.

You can get statistics on success of email campaigns. You can find out how many people received the message, opened the message, click on a linked, forwarded it to a friend and more.

With many tools (such as Constant Contact) you can create an email it html if you want or if you don’t know html, you can use their wizards and templates to create an attractive message including images and links. (They even have a bunch of stock images you can use.)

A couple of weeks ago I talked about how to create a cheap and easy web site. Today I’m talking about taking it one step forward. Mostly, I found a newish feature in Go Daddy that makes it easier than ever for someone who doesn’t know html to update a web site.

Go Daddy is a web host. It’s cheap. I’ve always been happy with them. They have a “site builder” option, which I don’t think it great but for plain old web hosting it’s great. It’s a good option if you want to build a site in html and upload it somewhere or if you want to have someone build it for you.

Once the site is built it is not too hard to make text changes or change a picture using software such as Dreamweaver Contribute, but Contribute is getting more expensive. I just noticed that Go Daddy now lets you log into your web site through a backend administrative tool. So without having any special software you can now get into the site to make changes.

I’ll add some screenshots on making change to the blog (if you want to see). The good news is that it’s very easy change the site – the bad news is that it’s very easy to change the site – so you might end up making changes that are more dramatic than you want. But if you are careful I think this would be a good way to maintain a site with text changes – maybe calling in an expert when you need something more.