Telling your story with FREE tools from Microsoft

Our friends at Microsoft Community Affairs put on a webinar yesterday to talk about the free tools in the Windows Live suite. The premise of the webinar was to help nonprofits understand what tools are available (did I mention these tools are free?!) and how they can be used to help tell and share stories. With virtually everyone engaged in social media (individuals, businesses, and nonprofits), it is harder than ever to rise above the noise and get new people engaged with your cause. Case in point: the staggering statistics that YouTube put out yesterday – over 48 hours of video are uploaded to the site every second! Lucky for us, Microsoft has some great tools to help you to create videos, blog posts, and photo galleries, share them easily with your constituents, and stay competitive in the new social landscape.

The tools that were demoed included:

Live Writer: Live Writer is an application that makes blog publishing super-easy. It’s an offline blogging platform, which means that you can write your post and fully edit it (add photos and video, etc) without an internet connection. Once you’re able to connect to the web, the posts can be published. Now your ED can’t use a plane ride as an excuse to skip that blog post she promised to write!

“But, Mandi, we already have a blog set up through another platform.” No problem – Live Writer ties into several other blogging platforms including Wordpress, Blogger, and Live Journal, so it can be utilized with your existing set-up!

Windows Live Photo Gallery: This tool kind of blew my mind. It includes all of the elements of a photo management system like Flickr or Picasa, allowing you to tag individuals and organize photos however you like. But the thing that I found amazing was the built-in facial recognition technology. Once you tell the application who a person is, it will automatically find that person in other photos in your library and tag them, thereby allowing you to run searches by name. It’s also easy to create photo slideshows with transitions and music and upload them to the web for sharing.

Windows Live Movie Maker: This application makes it really simple to create professional looking movies, even if you’re just using a FlipCam. It’s simple to edit footage, add captions and graphics, and overlay music. The video they used as an example also included still photos, but the animation and captions that were added gave it a more dynamic feel.

They also talked about using the SkyDrive for file storage. Storing your stuff online can mean leaving your flash drive or laptop at home and access your files via the web from any computer. You can even use the Mesh application to sync your data to different devices, including your smartphone.

Let me say this one more time: it’s all free! Go to www.download.live.com, download the tools, and give it a shot. Thanks, Microsoft!

- Mandi Moshay