This post has no title. Purposely.

Image courtesy of Capture Queen via FlickaCC

And the reason why this post has no title is so that you don’t click on something else when you know what it’s about. So I’ll say it really quickly: DigitalOnlineTools. There! Relatively painless— even though I know your finger is, at this moment poised, ready to make the exit click―so wait! Before you leave, consider these few questions.

Have you ever needed to create a pic for your newsletter? Want to crop, rotate, add a speech bubble easily and quickly and you don’t own Adobe Creative Suite? Or perhaps you need an editor for the new catalogue or a designer for the annual report? … If we've got your attention now, then keep on reading.

Here at M&GNSW, we've been at the Navigating Not-for-Profits in the new world conference. Hosted by Connecting Up, an organisation who specialise in supporting the not-for-profit sector, this year’s conference was about learning to thrive in a digital world.

There were lots of great sessions but one of the main discussion streams was about the abundance of free digital tools. A digital tool is simply one that relies on the internet to exist. The term itself is kind of meaningless (with added ‘yawn’ factor) and so is often broken down into things like online marketing tools, online accounting tools and so on.

Nevertheless, this digital online world of ours is producing some really fun and useful things— the market is a fast growing and highly competitive one and we, the consumers are spoilt for choice as pimply geek coders and software engineers jostle for our customer loyalty. There’s almost nothing that you can’t find online and much of it is open-source and some of it free.

So don’t be daunted— all it takes is a couple of hours to explore and experiment. Have a look at these, they’re some our favourites.

Doodle is a scheduling tool which does what Outlook doesn't do well.

easel.ly lets you create very cool info-graphics.

Freelancer is an online editing and transcription service which works where editors bid on your proposed job.

Pixilr provides creative online photo editing without the need for Photoshop.

Vine is a mobile app that enables it’s users to create and post video clips. Video clips created with Vine have a maximum length of 6 seconds and can be shared or embedded on social networking services such as Twitter.

Join me is an online meeting tool which combines instant screen sharing and powerful meeting tools in an app that anyone can use.

Wrike is an online project management platform similar to Basecamp and Redmine.

Wordle If you are like tag clouds for your website, this is for you.

Camtasia helps you create professional videos – use it to record on-screen activity, customise and edit content and then share your videos with anyone across most devices and platforms.

Slideshare provides links to lots of other sites which specialise in helping you tell your stories.

We’ve also got a long list of the online analytic tools as well, but at risk of exhausting you, we’ll save the next bunch for another day.

Carole