Online Nonprofit Technology Conference: Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission

Photo: Judith Sol-DyessIt's a tough time for nonprofit techies: You're supposed to deliver more value to your organizations while your budgets are being slashed.

Of course, things have never been exactly easy for you. In fact, managing technology at a nonprofit organization has been anything but easy. Not only do you need to understand the myriad ways IT can be used to further your organization's mission, you've got to have the leadership skills it takes to communicate your goals effectively and succeed in your plans.

That's why we wrote "Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission". And it's why we're very pleased to bring you an online event to explore the issues further.

The Online Nonprofit Technology Conference: Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission is a partnership with Jossey-Bass and Learning Times. This 2-day online conference that will be divided up into 2 tracks -- Leadership Skills and IT Performance -- interspersed with Meet the CIO/Tech Leader sessions to give attendees multiple opportunities to engage and learn.

Mark your calendar for September 16 and 17 and be sure to join us then!

Four Reasons Innovation Matters Now More Than Ever

Flickr Photo: _heather_r_My mother-in-law is famous in our family for one phrase: "Get Over It." I've adopted it pretty broadly; it's handy when your husband or child is whining. But it also has useful business applications. Though I rarely say it out loud, I think it a lot, then try to find slightly more tactful versions, like "Maybe there's another solution to this problem?"

I do a lot of public speaking on social media, the cloud, business intelligence, and other emergent trends in nonprofit technology. No matter what the topic is, I'm asked some variation on, "I'm a nonprofit. I don't have any money. I can't afford to be innovative. How can I be expected to think about these changes?"

I've been asked this question so many times, I should probably say what I really mean about embracing innovation. Here are a few reasons I think you should get over it, and what to do about it:

1. You haven't thought about revising your business model in a decade.

More organizations are doing program evaluation than before, and that's fantastic. We need to think about whether or not our programs are actually delivering value. If they're not, we need to do something about it.

Often, examining failure leads to some amazing stuff. But evaluation only addresses the past while suggesting a future path. We've seen plenty of evidence that predicting the future based on the past is helpful, but not always the best place to put all one's eggs. What worked yesterday won't necessarily work tomorrow. Evaluation is part of innovation, but not all of it.

We have to start betting on our future. We need combine evaluation with prognostication to imagine what the future will look like, then design programs and services that will meet the needs of our future. We can do it in ways that allow us to mitigate the risk -- try one new thing at a time, or several small ideas -- but we have to re-imagine our programs, not just revise them.

Another way of thinking of this: ask yourself, "What Are We NOT Doing?"

2. You owe if to your clients/activists/volunteers.

On any given day, I'm lucky to have 2 hours of unscheduled time. That's the time I use to go to the gym, read a book, watch So You Think You Can Dance, garden, or whatever. It's a luxury to have that much time, I know, but it never feels like enough. I'm a busy girl, so time is the last thing I feel I can give to any cause.

If you're going to ask me for my time, you'd better have a plan to use it wisely.

If I were a client at a social service agency, this conundrum would be even more acute. Your clients don't always have the luxury of driving to work; they take the bus. Many of them work multiple jobs. They have kids they can't afford to put into daycare. You may be providing a valuable service, but you owe it to them to provide it in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Same old, same old may have been the only way to get your program or service to your clients, activists, and volunteers 5 years ago. But technology is changing so fast, there must be a better way now. What would your case workers be able to do better if they had cellular modems in the field? What if clients could make same day drop-in appointments at your clinic via text message instead of waiting in line all day? What if I could phone bank for you from my laptop?

Aligning technology with your mission is the key to making this work.

3. You owe it to your donors.

Every time I turn around, there's a new nonprofit out there. In fact, the sector grew by 36% between 1996 and 2006. With so many nonprofits out there working toward a common good, it's more vital than ever that you give your donors the biggest thank-you gift there is: a job well done. The first step is to make sure that what you're currently doing has value. But you also owe it to your donors to think about the future now, to use their money as an investment in the future.

4. Crisis is an opportunity and all those platitudes.

Yes, it's a crazy time. You're probably expected to support the same level of IT at your organization with half the budget this year.

That doesn't mean you should be circling the wagons and simply protecting what you've got. This is your time to start thinking about how you can get that job done faster so that you can do other things instead.

This is a challenge. Rise to the occasion. Now that you're budget's been slashed, you know it's going to be a while before you get it back.

I don't want say that you need to innovate or die. I do want to point out that you can't afford NOT to innovate.

As my mother-in-law would say, "Get over it."

Three Lessons in Social Media Fundraising

Now that the warm days of summer have finally graced us with their presence, January seems like a distant memory. But for those of you who participated in the Case Foundation Giving Challenge, it probably feels like yesterday. We hate to bring up all those sleepless nights and the constant campaigning, but now we've got a great write up about the Challenge from Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

A total of nearly 2 million dollars raised from nearly 75,000 people means there were a few lessons learned. Many align nicely with some of the principles of We Are Media. Here are a few tidbits I found particularly compelling:

1. The Big Guys Don't Always Win. It's the Right Culture that Prevails.

When it comes to fundraising in the nonprofit sector, it's most often the case that bigger is better. Bigger organizations have bigger lists and bigger staff to cultivate those lists, amounting in bigger fundraising. In this case, smaller orgs had a much better showing than anticipated:

"Indeed, larger organizations with slower-moving hierarchies and professional development staffs were less successful in this fast-paced effort." (Page 12)

The key here is another point from the report: Social media tends to work best for organizations in an "Action-reflection-revision-action" model (page 15). That model requires that decision making happen quickly and iteratively. That happens best in organizations with a culture that values both learning and entrepreneurialism.

Those values aren't just for small orgs, though. They can be embraced and implemented in any size organization.

2. There's No Such Thing as Social Media Fundraising

I get a lot of speaking requests, and most of those have to do with social media and fundraising. What the Case Foundation experiment makes clear is that social media is a great mechanism for collecting donations for a variety of reasons. But, to borrow a cliche, social media doesn't raise money, people raise money.

In fact, the most successful tactic for raising money in the Challenge was not Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media outlet. No, the most effective technique cited in the report is House Parties (page 16). You remember those, right? Where real people get together face-to-face in someone's living room? They're the original "social media".

This underscores a very important point: social media is just another channel. The other channels aren't going away any time soon. Make them work together.

3. New Media Can Mean New Donors

When the report authors interviewed the people who led the efforts for their organizations, they reported that the majority of donors to their causes were new donors (page 18). That's good stuff, right? But the question remains, will those donors stick around? Only time will tell.

Did you participate in the Challenge? What did you learn?

10 Disruptive Technologies You Need to Think About

Every Wednesday, Gartner does a free webinar on a variety of topics. This week, they presented "Technology Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore." I tweeted my way through the one hour call, but here are some notes with a little more clarity and reflection.

Disruptive Technology #1: Virtualization.

There are lots of benefits to virtualization, chief among them, the power savings. According to Gartner, the average server uses 65% of its power just sitting idle. Virtualization helps reduce the number of servers used, decreasing power consumption. If you're a small nonprofit, you won't see a ton of cost savings, but it will add up for larger organizations. AND, it's the green thing to do. Make Al Gore proud!

The real fun begins with desktop virtualization. When all your desktop users are working in a virtualized environment, supporting your staff becomes a whole different ballgame. Now, patches, upgrades, and other tweaks happen in one place. And no more downloading terrible software and kludging up your machines. Network administration and help desk tasks are going to be a LOT easier. Gartner noted that client virtualization is still pretty new, though, and there are kinks to work out.

(Warning: there's a lot of server talk here, which I don't consider disruptive. But there are still some fantastically great points. I encourage you to forge ahead.)

Disruptive Technology #2: Data Deluge

You know how I feel about data. If you ask me, it's THE most important thing we should be thinking about in the sector. Data, when handled properly, becomes intelligence -- and intelligence makes us better at our jobs, which makes the world a better place!

Gartner agrees. They see the same big black cloud headed our way: too much of a good thing! According to Gartner, the amount of data produced around the world will grow by 650% over the next few years, and 80% of it will be unstructured. Making sense of it all is going to be a challenge, to say the least.

IT managers will have to respond to this in a couple of ways. First, they need to focus on data storage. We're going to need more server space, and databases that can handle more of that data. IT managers will also have to figure out data de-duplication. By that, I don't mean cleaner data in your databases. Rather, we're talking about those places where data redundancies happen: the five people that have emailed the large spreadsheet to each other, or are saving it all on their desktops.

Disruptive Technology #3: Energy & Green IT

The EU is currently coming up with regulations for tech and power consumption. The US may not be far behind. This isn't likely to trickle down to the little guys, but it could impact larger organizations.

Disruptive Technology #4: Consumerization & Social Software

We've talked ad infinitum about how social media is changing the way nonprofits do their work, but it's also changing the way your staff are embracing technology. As technology moves from the realm of the geek programmer into the hands of laymen, your staff are going to want to do more and more with it. Your staff will increasingly demand the technology solutions they want from you. The upside is that they will be more eager and capable adopters of the technology you give them.

Outside of the actual tech, you will also need to pay closer attention to policies. As the line between personal and professional use of technology tools like Facebook blurs, your organization needs to know how it will respond and set clear guidelines and policies for staff.

You should also be thinking about what this means for your stakeholders. As IT manager at your organization, you need to think about how your organization can best use technology to meet your mission. If every one of your clients will have a smart phone in the next 2 years, what can your organization do to take advantage?

Disruptive Technology #5: Unified Communications

I'll confess, this took me a minute to get. But think about how you personally send and receive communications every day. It used to be that all we had to deal with was the phone and fax. Then came email. Then Instant Messenger. And now there's VOIP, SMS, Twitter, and more. These services don't integrate right now, which makes managing them difficult -- and makes dealing with them a big waste of time for your staff.

Fortunately, more and more communications vendors get it. We're moving to a place where a phone call can become an email and an IM can become a phone call. Unifying communications so that users can route communications to their preferred device -- and change that device preference whenever they need to -- is going to save us all a lot of time and headaches. You need to start talking to your vendors now to see what they are doing and explore some of the options.

Disruptive Technology #6: Mobile

It's not a phone anymore, it's a little computer. It may be tiny, but it's getting more powerful! You're probably already busy trying to support email and calendaring on these devices, but you're going to have to start thinking about creating and deploying applications that allow your staff to use their phone as a mobile office. What data and applications can and should you give them access to via their phones?

That's a tall order for most nonprofits. Most of us couldn't consider the kind of custom programming required to create mobile apps (especially if the apps are going to work on more than one kind of phone). But there are plenty of apps out there we can repurpose for our needs. And, if you consider another disruptive trend -- cloud computing -- the possibilities get bigger: many cloud-based applications have mobile versions for a variety of phone types already.

Disruptive Technology #7: Complex Resource Tracking

As we're forced to decrease energy consumption and increase access to data and critical applications, we will have to manage our networks more efficiently. This means creating more automated systems for managing network resources. Of course, this isn't going to apply to many nonprofits, but again, the big guys should be doing some thinking here.

Disruptive Technology #8: System Density

As we use servers for an increasing array of things -- storage, memory, I/O - -we're going to need more of them. That's going to increase power and cooling requirements, even as the price of the hardware continues to drop.

Disruptive Technology #9: Mashups and Enterprise Portals

In other words, data sharing. You're going to be in the business of putting data into the hands of your staff so that they can mix it up with partners or web services and make cool new things. That means you're going to have to be well versed in data sharing in two ways: the geek stuff and the lawyer stuff.

On the geek side, you're going to work on systems that make it easy to push and pull data from your various data silos. (I think I'm giving up the word database this year and calling a spade a spade.) On the lawyer side, you're going to need to develop policies that protect the various KINDS of data your staff are working with. Is it OK to put client home address information into a public mapping website? The questions are big.

You will also increasingly be looking at putting the data into the hands of our stakeholders. The same rules apply. Opportunities for greatness multiply at the same rate that the opportunity for foul play does.

Disruptive Technology #10: Cloud Computing. 

Cloud-based software is not going away. Making the switch can certainly save you a lot of time and money, but the change is really hard for organizations switching from desktop software to the cloud. It will cost a lot of time to make the change happen. You also have to really know your vendors, your service level agreements with those vendors, and explore the privacy and security questions.

That's Gartner's take on the most important IT trends of today. What are you seeing?

We Can't Make Summer Last Forever, But We Can Make Membership Last Longer

It's summertime, for real now: I've been having breakfast with Wimbledon, the mosquitoes are biting, and I can't walk down the street in the evening without smelling someone cooking out on a grill.

Here at NTEN, another tell-tale sign of summer is our Summer Membership Offer: Become a member of NTEN (or renew your membership) this summer, and get member benefits from now until the end of 2010!

> Learn more and join us

That means all the connecting, learning, and saving that comes with membership lasts an extra 6 months.

If you're new to NTEN or have been meaning to return as a member, check out the benefits of membership and then take advantage of this limited time opportunity.

Thanks for being part of this community!

All About NTEN in 5 Minutes

Last week, I was fortunate enough to present a session on social media with Marnie Webb of TechSoup Global, Laura Norvig of ETR Associates, Matt Sharp from the Packard Foundation, and Matt Dunne at Google. I think it's fair to say that we rocked!

While there, I was interviewed for the live stream of the event, which was run by Business Boomer:

I want to note that the setup for the live stream was wicked simple: a decent camera with wired mics, all plugged into a laptop sitting on a folding chair. The most complicated thing about it was the scheduling.

Consider this a reminder that you, too, can be your own media outlet. It doesn't take much.

NTEN Member Buzz Round-Up: June 29th

From the interwebs this week, I've heard about these NTEN members doing their nptechie-thing:

Amy Sample Ward reports on the new opportunity on YouTube to connect nonprofits with video volunteers, with the help of allforgood.org. Nonprofits can submit needs; video-savvy volunteers can connect with a cause.

Natural Resources Defense Council's Apollo Gonzales is interviewed by Eric Kuhn of the Huffington Post about NRDC's Social Media strategy. (BTW, NRDC was recently listed as a top Green Org to Follow on Twitter, so they must know what they're talking about ;)

Missoula Tech Club is on Facebook, thanks to the organizing of Jeanette Russell.

Speaking of Tech Club organizers, our Austin Tech Club rock star, David Neff, went homeless for 48 hours with the Austin Mobile Loaves and Fishes guide. The only tech he took with him was his flip camera to document.

Looks like members FreeCause and Charity Dynamics have teamed up to combine fundraising and web 2.0 solutions for nonprofit orgs.

As Brett mentioned earlier, Nancy Schwartz is ready to hear your nonprofit's tagline. Submit by July 31st to be considered for the 2nd Annual Nonprofit Tagline Awards!

And last, but not least, the Bayer Center for Nonprofits transformed their summer tech camp messaging into a song and shared it via video. Apparently their marketing manager didn't like it. What do y'all think?

Documenting the Digital Divide

Flickr: ThomasBrandtFrom the number of "out of office" replies I get anytime I send an email to the NTEN community, it looks like we're well into vacation season. If you're one of the lucky ones taking some vacation time to get out and about this summer, the folks at iwith.org have an assignment for you:

Take your camera and shoot some pics that demonstrate the digital divide.

It's the third season for this Barcelona and Switzerland-based organization's digital divide photo contest, and you're invited to participate. They'll be accepting submissions all summer -- through September 20th -- and they'll publish the selected photos on their site starting September 27th.

Read full contest details here, and you can see the 2008 photos here.

Things We Like (June 2009)

A monthly roundup of our favorite nonprofit tech resources. Read more posts on our blog.

1. Clay Shirky thinks the Iranian election protests are "the big one" for social media.
2. Notice how we used quotation marks to, you know, quote somebody? That's what they're for. Everything else ends up on the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.
3. Someday soon, you'll be able to type ON your hand, not just with it. And figure out if a brand of toilet paper matches your green ideals -- by pointing at it. The folks at MIT are up to some crazy stuff.
4. What the heck is this thing? It looks like a giant face with feet. Sure is cute, though.
5. Ever wonder what the Cloud everybody keeps talking about actually looks like? Turns out it's really heavy -- and consumes more electricity than Sweden.
6. Michelle Murrain's up to something interesting: she defriended all of her nptech acquaintences on Facebook. She doesn't mention whether she installed Whopper Sacrifice first.
7. The underground comedy movement on Amazon.com. Check this out. No, not the shirt (though it is quite splendid): the reviews of the shirt. They're hilarious. Then, go to the "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" section to follow the writers to other products. One guy wrote a complete parody of Poe's "The Raven" to review a gallon of milk!
8. Speaking of putting your excess free time to "good" use [Ed. note: Don't provoke me...], here's the Google Analytics interface laid out in wireframe on a single page, with links to descriptions of each report.
9. Network for Good just came out with a new guide, "7 Steps to Better Email Fundraising and Communications". And Wired has the "Top 10 Ways to Provoke a Geek Argument". Bonus points to the first person to combine those memes. (Bonus points may be redeemed for one of our free webinars.)
10. Two animal-themed links in one month? You lucky readers! There was just no way we could not link to video of apes laughing. If you don't feel good after watching that, you may be a curmudgeon.

Towards a New Kind of Nonprofit Website, Part II