Developing a World through Creativity

Imagine a world of darkness, the 21 century is upon us and yet in our organization, there remains no color, no flair, and no sense of the magic of the world of creativity beyond our doors. We are trapped in the world of black and white. We are the non-profit agency of the 20th century with few of the benefits of the new world. Color has not entered our doors or our agency.Suddenly, a new organization appears. Too good to believe? Perhaps? We have heard of these organizations before, but should we chance it? Will it cost us anything? We have little knowledge of the community of the great big internet world but we know we must venture out of our own zone of comfort and investigate the new challenges that can only become possibilities. Websites, Internet, new computers, computer upgrades, software, hardware, so many questions and where to turn. TechSoup arrives into our inbox. What is this new and wonderful world? Free membership? Discounted prices on the newest of software? Our radar flashes, “beware, beware, beware.” Nothing is true free or discounted, somehow we will face the reality of the bills in other ways?Cautiously, we register with TechSoup. We receive user names and passwords, our entry into the secret society. Color is let into our world. We are invited into the secret society of the non-profit agencies. We cautiously join the 21st century as we placed our first order with TechSoup and order Microsoft Office 2007. The world became filled with color. The wonders of the new world opened up for our organization.The wonders of a website and reaching out to a whole new world became a reality. www.jewishedmonton.org became our site of information to communicate with others. We began to use Microsoft publisher templates for flyers and newsletters, banners, brochures, invitations, gift certificates and more. There were so many uses for execl and word that we never knew about. Microsoft Power point was user friendly, even the challenged became capable of so many wonderful creations. We added color and music to the darkness. Who knew that non-profits could afford color printers when they saved so much on important and necessary software? Our organization became noticed by others. Others asked for our help and we gladly shared our resources with them. We begin with the development of our own website. Using the new technology, we create a database of members of our community. We enter them into our website so that we can send mass email messages to our community for funerals and other important notices. We can send weekly updates and messages. We begin to get creative and download photos and posters to the home page of upcoming events. We create a calendar of events so that our community can see what is happening. We add events and reach out to others. We are able to advertise for other community organizations. Our staff began training with a national agency to work to make our website more professional so that we can do more each week. Other departments began playing with the new software. The new publisher program was the next program we experimented with. The publisher upgrades allowed us to create new and innovative designs for our flyers, brochures and posters. We had a whole new array of choices we could choose from. We were not limited in our designs. We even had instructions that took us through each process to create new and wonderful examples of the types of brochures or flyers we could make. For those of us who are “computer challenged,” a whole new creative world opened up. What was once a challenging and time consuming task was now not something to dread, but a process that was easier to cope with. It was a process that no longer took a full day to create a flyer but an hour. The new software made the creation of wonderful new promotional material so much easier. New designs, fonts, colors, insert photos, remove photos, download photos, the world became filled with opportunities we had not had the challenges and know how to utilize before. We could make the simple and the plain; it was informative and sometimes pretty, but magical and creative, were not words to describe our work.Through the generosity of Techsoup and Microsoft, we have changed our world. We are able to move forward in creating and uniting our community. We are the social, educational, cultural and financial center of our community. We are the umbrella organization that brings together all of the agencies in our community and unites them for a common goal.Thank you for helping us to bring those goals together.