Resources to help with getting yourself, your organisation and the conservation profession out there.

There are hundreds of web based platforms which are free, and can make your life easier by reducing admin loads. Learning how to use them helps develop useful skillsets, which can add value to you and your organisation.

Firstly, there are many free blog platforms, with easy to use templates and zero fees. This is one of them and took me less than a minute to set up.  Just click this link and it will take you to the google blogger pagewhere you can set up a blog of your own. You can actually set up multiple blogs and manage them all from the same dashboard. If you can make a word document, you can make a blog!

Learn to embed widgets into your blog so that updates automatically feed into Facebook and Linked In and Twitter. When people comment on posts on Facebook with links, it increases the search engine optimisation.

HINT: If you are cutting and pasting into your blog from other documents, remove your formatting first as bits of code you cant see can make spacing and layouts do strange things.

Click here to go to a great article on free domain names and blogs.

For making surveys and questionnaires painless, use Survey Monkey.  They have easy templates, responses are automatically collected and you can analyse and download results in graphs and pie charts.

Mailchimp is a fabulous outgoing mail server, you upload your contacts and use their templates - which are easy to customise. Recipients can unsubscribe easily. The great thing about this sort of system is measurability, you can see how many people actually open the emails and click through to the embedded links - this is a great way of managing email databases and generating statistics as tools for decision making.

Vistaprint is a great place to get free and very cheap printed collateral, from business cards to brochures, banners even T shirts and mugs. If you sign up, they will send you spam, but often this spam has very good free offers.

Prezi is a fabulous online tool for making and sharing dynamic presentations, they also have solid hints and tips on how to make an engaging public presentation.

Issuu is an excellent online publishing tool. All you have to do is upload a PDF! You can also embed ISSUU publications into your blog. All you have to do is embed the code in the HTML editor, like this...