Vermont Nonprofit CommunIT

Nonprofit Technology: If you can't dazzle them with a conference, baffle them with a survey (or book)

I'm feeling kind of jaded at the moment and I need someone to show me the light (and the love). Be forwarned this is a rant and not very analytical.

I came across a Technorati nptech tag in My Bloglines this morning for a project called dotorganize by ScoutSeven. They seem like good folks doing good work and they have some money from from the Surdna Foundation, which funded my previous project. Like many before them, they are gathering information by conducting a survey  on how social change organizations use technology and online tools.

Perhaps the technology is changing fast enough to warrant continual surveying; I have to admit though, I have serious survey fatigue...and I live and breathe this stuff (and yes, I still enjoy it despite this riff). Googling "Nonprofit Technology Survey" I came up with a quick list of organizations and businesses that have conducted similar surveys over the last five years (and I know there are oh so many more):

•     Center for Noprofit Management 
•     Gifts in Kind International 
•     Blackbaud 
•     Aspiration Tech 
•     Groundspring 
•     NTEN 
•     Summit Collabortive 
•     TechSoup 
•     Idealware 
•     Pew 
•     USC Annenberg School of Communciations 
•     Independent Sector 
•     AFP and Telosa Software

Additionally, over the last several months there have been a handful of publications and reports on nonprofit technology (and again, there have been many similar publications before these):

• Civil Technologies: The Values of Nonprofit ICT Use 
• Accidental Techie, The: Supporting, Managing, and Maximizing Your Nonprofit's Technology by Sue Bennett
  
• The Dynamics of Technology for Social Change by Jonathan Peizer

And then of course there are the nptech conferences coming up in the next couple months (both of which I will probably attend):

•     Nonprofit Technology Conference 
•     Net Squared

I am a hypocrite, I have no delusions about it. I dig all this...I get it...I feel it...I am among my people debating strategy and sharing tech toys.  Yet, while all this outpouring of vision, value and quantification is well and good, it remains very "inside baseball" and seemingly doesn't touch most organizations nor the many front-line staff people - who, I would contend, are positioned to gain the most from it.

With a lot of talk about Web 2.0, hosted applications, social networking, mashups, and packaging of the like, the effective use of technology - IMHO - has always come down to People, Money and Strategic Alignment (yes i know, I'm grossly over simplfying the issue): Without the "Right People on the Bus" with the necessary resources and leadership support, all our efforts in search for the nptech silver bullet(s) will be for not. Right now, we are simply preaching to the converts.

In an effort to not dig the hole any deeper, here are the lingering questions I'm stuck with:

• Where are the impact metrics of the nptech movement (not the tag)? 
• Are surveys truly telling us something we don't already know?
  
• Where is the coordination between all these efforts? 
• Why are we still going to conferences under the guises of professional development for networking and sales pitches? 
• Why are books on nonprofit technology still being published exclusively on paper (buying a chapter from one of the afformentioned books would be valuable to me, the whole book...no)?
• Where are the dot.com genesis millionaires that are flipping start ups left and right and could be an incredible source of money and ideas?

• Am I in the dark on this? Are there missing pieces of this puzzle I'm not seeing? What are you questions and thoughts?

Technorati Tags: nptech, rant, nonprofit, surveys, conferences

ED Blogging, Impact and the Power of Storytelling

Ok...I'm tooting my own horn here a bit, such is the fate of a blogger.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, CERF's Executive Director, Cornelia Carey, was traveling to hurricane effected areas of the gulf coast and planned to blog about it. She returned a couple days ago after a week in Louisiana and Mississippi, and in that time posted three incredibly powerful blog entries about her experiences. If you are interested, please visit her blog and see her Flickr photo album. (CERF board member and TACA Interim ED, Craig Nutt, traveled with Cornelia on part of her trip and has commented on the blog to beautifully capture the situation there.)

As a metrics guy, I'm interested in what, if any, organizational impact this new communication venue has had and/or will have on CERF.  It's too soon to know the long term impact; much depends on if Cornelia continues to blog, as planned, to facilitate a dialogue with the broader community on the role of the arts in rebuilding the gulf coast. Nonetheless here are some interesting statistics in the 7 days since the first posting:

• Sent 5100 email alerts announcing the blog. 30% open rate and 50% click through rate of those that opened the email (the highest click through rate we've ever had). At the same time we had the highest rate of unsubscribes that we've ever had.
  
• 900 unique page hits
• 25 direct replies
• 5 blog comments (I find it interesting that readers are more apt to reply via email than post a public comment)
  
• 130 FeedBlitz email subscribers (I'm blown away by this!!!)
  
• 2 RSS aggregator subscribers (Did someone say RSS had gone mainstream? Not here!)
• Increase in Blog referrals
• Increased site hits by 5 fold compared to average daily/weekly statistics.
• No online donations can be attributed to traffic generated by the blog

Beyond the numbers, is the effect that Cornelia's presence and willingness to share her experience to the broader public is having on the people she met there.  She said that everywhere she went, people told her that they were reading her blog and thanked her for CERF's work.  It is my aim to leverage the information and stories that Cornelia has returned with to sharpen our response and have a greater impact on the lives of those we serve in these affected areas.  Stay tuned...


Technorati Tags: cerf, flickr, feedblitz, nptech, nonprofit, blogging, executivedirector

Salesforce.com GTD

As an avid user and proselytizer of Salesforce.com for nonprofits and a relative neophyte with the whole GTD concept, I enjoyed reading Ismael Ghalimi's outline of how he uses Salesforce.com to Get Things Done.

His use of the Salesforce calander mystifies me a bit...its the one utility in Salesforce I really can't stand, especially the group views. A good use of GTD nonetheless...gives me much to chew on.

Hat tip to Salesforcewatch.com


Technorati Tags: Salesforce.com, GTD, nonprofit, nptech

GTD Redux

An update on my Toolbox/Workflow posting from a couple months back.

After using Backpack for a couple months, it just wasn't working for me.  At this point, I can't even remember why it wasn't working, it was just lacking.  The same rang true in using Basecamp for personal task management, while Remember the Milk was fun, but not practical. Then along came vood2do, which more or less is the second coming for personal project/task management and GTD fanatics.  Tasks associated with dates? Craziness! Assigning tasks to multiple projects? Who ever heard of such a thing? Creating different views to see how tasks are integrated into different projects. But I liked my myopic view of the world. Email integration to add tasks? Phooey! Complete desktop and deadline management interfaces...how did i ever get anything done before?

Silliness aside...its a truly amazing little piece of web app. Although, Email/SMS reminders and an iCal feed would be nice additions.

Also, I went back to my good friend Bloglines to read news feeds (it was still there waiting for me after all those months of neglect).  Newsgator seemed to be buggy and sluggish, the browser subscribe button isn't as good at finding feeds, and the UI functionality just lost its appeal. The result was that I just wasn't reading much anymore. Just like the good old days, Bloglines is helping me once again transcend those moments of procrastination into productive reading jags.

As for calender, I switch over to Calendar Hub to have a web-based calendar. Not ideal, but gets the job done better than anything else I've seen (Google Cal....where are you?).

I'm loving Writely for taking notes and document sharing (especially for sharing docs with clients). Using MS Word only on the rare occasion these days.

As for billing and time tracking my consulting gigs, I'm using Billing Orchard: Simple, clean and provides many different invoicing options depending on your clients' needs (HTML, email, PDF). Some ability to customize one's invoice would be nice, but those invoices are looking far better than the Word docs I use to send out.

Technorati Tags: GTD, voo2do, bloglines, calendarhub, writely, billingorchard

Bootstrap-a-licio.us

Since launching CERF's website back in August, I've been meaning to post about how I'm using several different web services to create dynamic content on our Drupal based site. Now that our Executive Director is about to leave for a a week long trip to the Gulf Coast and plans to blog about it, I'm finding myself needing to use these tools once again and being reminded of how critical these tools are to us.

My aim in using a set of  webs services to create content on our website was to give staff the ability to easily manage portions of the site without having to get heavily involved in the Drupal CMS interface (and editing UI).  With help from Marnie, I began to understand how I could bootstrap the RSS feeds generated by del.icio.us in order to create dynamic content on an otherwise static website, while giving control and responsibility to the staff to manage their sections of the website (and in the process freeing me up).  Here's are the tools we use and how we use them:

• I created a del.icio.us account for CERF
• I added a firefox extension to staff browsers for simple tagging capabilities (here or here)
• I worked with staff to create standard tagging policies so that each webpage (and subsection) would be associated with a standard set of tags
• I created an account with Feed Digest to convert RSS feeds generated by del.icio.us into dynamic PHP includes (rather than Javascript, so that content could be indexed by search engines).
• I cut and pasted Feed Digest generated codes into the appropriate webpages.

For example, we have an extensive resource directory in the program area of the CERF website for Prevention, Protection and Recovery and Professional Development resources. These two sections each have subcategory listings of resources; the content on all those pages is created by del.icio.us/Feed Digest bootstrapping.  In other words, this tag and this tag create the Preparedness and Recovery resource list.

So everytime a program manager comes across a valuable web resource, they simply use the Firefox plugin to add it to del.icio.us, and it is automatically added to the appropriate resource listing on CERF's website.

Now with the ED's blog, I wanted to extend the RSS subscription embedded in Drupal so I could both track RSS subscriptions through Feed Burner as well as give non-RSS savvy folks the ability to subscribe via email with Feed Blitz. Using the Drupal blog module didn't give me this latitude, so I created a static page with the desired subscription options and used Feed Digest to create a "blog-like" content feed (a  listing of blog postings with abstracts) all within the same page.  In that way, the ED updates her blog, the static page updates with the new posting and I can track all the subscriptions to measure subscription readership.

Happy bootstrapping... 

Technorati Tags: drupal, del.icio.us, feeddigest, cerf, feedburner, feedblitz, firefox