April 2012

Thoughts on NTC 2012

By Chris Bernard, April 30, 2012

The 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference is well in our rearview mirror now, and we’re already hard at work on a number of exciting projects over the next few months. But each of us wanted to take a few moments to share some of what we observed and learned at the conference, and how it will influence our work moving forward. 

I wrote a bit about my impressions of the conference while I was still there, where I spent a fair amount of time manning the Idealware display table with Kyle Andrei, our research analyst, and a rotating coterie of board members and friends of Idealware. For me, as editorial and communications director, it was great to meet the people we work with—our network is enormous and growing, and it was nice to have a face-to-face chance to speak to so many of the people who lead the sector and who make use of our resources.

“We’re accustomed to the usual sorts of explanations about our work (“Yes, we’re a nonprofit. No, we’re not consultants. No, we’re not a vendor. Yes, we really are a nonprofit.”), but I was amazed at how little we actually had to explain ourselves,” Kyle said. “People are really starting to learn who we are, and remember at least a little about what we do.”
 
Laura Quinn, our executive director, had similar thoughts. 
 
“This was my eighth NTC in a row. My first was the Philadelphia conference, before I founded Idealware. I made one of my very first conference presentations that year—Websites on a Shoestring, I believe, and I remember being incredibly nervous. Fast forward to today. The conference and Idealware have both grown to the point where they're completely different beasts. Over the years, Idealware has moved from being a small, niche player in the nonprofit tech space to one some people had heard of, to being known by a good number of the type of folks who attend NTC. Last year, a lot of people had heard of us, but I feel like this was the first year that people were seeking us out in substantial numbers—for us, the conference was not so much about getting the word out about what we do as much as meeting the people we work with, the experts we rely on, and all the people whose important work makes what we do worthwhile.”
 
In some ways, the conference is a microcosm of the field of nonprofit technology in general. I asked Laura about the topics she felt were generating a lot of buzz this year.
 
“’Mobile’ seemed to be the theme that most struck me,” she said. “Email for mobile devices, mobile websites, using mobile texting in compelling ways for program delivery... More than 80 percent of all adults in the U.S. have cell phones, and some large percent of all emails are checked on a phone. At Idealware, we've dedicated a lot of thought to using mobile devices for program delivery, but perhaps not as much as we should have to basic marketing and communications topics—like how to adapt websites or emails for phones. We'll be looking into that for future articles and reports.”
 
Andrea Berry, our director of partnerships and learning, noticed another topic getting a lot of attention.
 
“Social media policy is the next big thing—or, I guess, the current big thing based on how fast we handed out our new Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook at the conference,” she said. “There seems to be a progression in the maturity of how organizations think about social media, moving from the concept that it is “cool” and “the thing we need to be doing” to a more nuanced perspective that “social media is great if done right and within the appropriate boundaries.
 
“That transformation was abundantly clear based on the content of sessions (including our own Creating a Social Media Policy, and many others) and the substance of conversations at NTC—I talked about the intersection of personal and professional social media activity with almost everyone I met. And let me tell you, all this is really exciting to a social media buff like myself, who gets to move from the constant conversation about whether an organization needs a Facebook page at all to conversations about how to use the page more smartly and effectively. In my opinion, the sector as a whole is certainly moving in the right direction.” 
 
Were you at NTC this year? What topics struck you, and what do you think we'll be talking about next year? 
 
 --Chris

 

Idealware is Hiring Researchers!

By Laura Quinn, April 26, 2012

It's crazy over here at Idealware world headquarters -- the projects just keeping coming in.  As everyone tells me, that's a great problem to have, but our current team alone can't do it all.  Want to join the Idealware team?  We're hiring!  I may be a bit biased, but I think it's a great place to work -- really smart people, the ability to really dig in and understand software, the opportunity to talk to tons of smart nonprofit people all over the country, and the ability to hang out with Jelly, the office dog. And, as of ;ast month, unlimited amounts of free coffee -- yes, we finally bought a real coffee maker.

The Intern position is located here in Portland, MAINE, but we're open to remote candidates for the others.  But hey, Portland is a terrific city -- it's currently about 65 and sunny, and I was thinking of hopping out to the beach after work.  Or maybe to go to one of our strangely numerous James Beard award winning restaurants.  So I'd say living in Portland is a big perk of the job!

Senior Nonprofit Software Researcher
The Senior Researcher will help to design research projects, do detailed and in-depth research into software choices in the nonprofit sector through interviews and software demos, manage projects and client relationships, and work with the Idealware team to create easy-to-understand reports, articles, and training based on the research.  In this position, you’ll have an opportunity to become a nationally recognized expert in particular software research areas, talk with some of the smartest and most cutting edge minds in nonprofit technology nationwide, and be part of the planning process for a small but quickly growing nonprofit.  Read the full job description at http://www.idealware.org/about/staff/senior-researcher 

Research Intern
The Idealware Research Intern, a full-time job with a term of approximately two to three months over the summer, will help to research software choices in the nonprofit sector, create training materials, and provide overall communication and administrative support for the organization. Idealware will pay a $1000 stipend at the completion of the internship.  Read the full job description at http://www.idealware.org/about/staff/internship

Contract Researcher
We're on the hunt for people to do specific software research projects, which generally include interviews with nonprofits as to their needs, detailed software demos, and analysis to make recommendations.  We're looking for people with experience with nonprofits, software selection, and interview/ qualitative research -- or at least two of the three. We generally pay for projects on a flat fee basis, based on a rate of $40-$60/hr, depending on experience.  Interested?  Send a cover letter and resume to kyle@idealware.org (please include in the subject line that you're interested in contract researcher possibilities)

Social Media and "Jock Talk"

By Kyle Andrei, April 25, 2012

I think it's safe to say that Twitter, and sometimes Facebook, is pretty similar to a radio station for your organization, in that you're broadcasting your message wildly in all directions (over the Internet), with many people listening but only a handful of requests -- I'd say that's a pretty fair comparison. And it's an analogy I feel comfortable with, because I came to Idealware from the world of broadcasting.

I know what you're thinking -- how could I turn away from that glamorous life of late nights, low pay and greasy pizza? It was tough, believe me. Thankfully, I've kept a few lessons I learned at the radio station. And all this time spent on Facebook and Twitter, seeing the tweets and statuses from all these organizations, reminds me of one lesson in particular.

In radio, there's the idea of "jocks," or disc jockeys, and personalities. Watch any TV show or movie -- like American Graffiti -- you know what a disc jockey sounds like. Stylized, "cool," always speaking to a group. That's "jock talk." Personalities, on the other hand, are more human, less like an act. Instead of speaking to "y'all," they speak to you. Between the songs, they're sitting down to chat with each individual listener, like they're close friends.

Which brings us back to social media. When you post to Twitter, are you speaking to "you" or "y'all?" Both have their advantages. When we write our fundraising emails, we speak to "you," highlighting the importance of the individual and fostering a personal relationship. But on social media, more often the goal is to build a community. In that case, speaking in plurals can be just as powerful.

I guess in the end, it all comes down to your brand. So what are you? A "jock" or a personality?

 

Disclaimer: this is the most I've ever used the word "y'all" in a single setting.

We're All Snowflakes: Knowing When To Be Unique

By Andrea Berry, April 19, 2012

As fundraisers, executive directors, marketers and general staff at nonprofits, it has been ingrained in our heads that our organizations are unique. “No one does what we do.” That is the message we tell our constituents, from donors to clients to members--everyone. And while that singularity is essential for fundraising and marketing, this conditioning around the pure uniqueness of our organization can hurt us when it comes to technology.

Software selection and use can often feel completely overwhelming for an organization. What do we choose? How do we start? In many cases, this bewilderment is due to the uniqueness conditioning--organizations feel like nothing out there could possibly meet their specific and unique needs. “No one does what we do in this exact way, so we’ll need to come up with everything on our own.” 

The reality, however, is that most nonprofits overlap in technology needs to a surprising extent. This means that a selection process, and certainly implementation, may be simpler than previously thought. 

Uniqueness, while a value on the outward-facing side of our organizations, makes life much harder internally when it comes to supporting technology and the infrastructure processes in which it functions. If organizations could set aside that constant desire to identify differentiating characteristics when thinking internally and spend a little time looking at similarities, software selection and implementation would be so much easier. 

Pull off that veil of uniqueness and realize that people have been there and done that, and that--at least in this regard--that's a good thing.  

Reliability of Resources: The 2012 Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits

By Chris Bernard, April 18, 2012

The other day, I drove circles around a cement plant outside San Antonio, Texas, looking for a Google-recommended barbecue joint that just did not exist. That got me thinking about where I get my information, and how much I trust it--or how much I should trust it. 

Where do you turn for your information? For most people, the answer today is probably very different from the one we might have given in the past. My first job out of college was a few years before Google became a search engine--and longer still before it became a verb synonymous with looking things up--and back then, looking things up meant going to the library, or a bookstore, or finding someone with a different experience than my own and asking questions.

Now, looking things up means typing a keyword or two into a little box. The rainiest place on earth is the village of Mawsynram, in northeastern India, with an annual rainfall of 467 inches. The T-Rex probably weighed about nine tons. You can rent Johnny Depp's private yacht, Vajoliroja, for $130,000 a week. It took me 11 seconds to learn those three facts on Google, something that might have taken a few hours and a trip downtown before the advent of the search engine. 

Sometimes, though, Google--like all search engines--can lead you astray. It also told me that Cherrapunji, India, is the rainiest place on earth with 498 inches each year, that a T-Rex probably weighed from five to seven tons , and that Johnny Depp's yacht is spelled as the more phonetic Vaholiroha.

In each of these cases, Google was not necessarily wrong--the world is full of conflicting opinions, interpretations, and from time to time even disputable facts. Google is merely a tool that presents information, and it's up to us to use our judgment to determine which information is the most accurate and most reliable. But what if the information you're looking for is mission-critical? Or what if you don't know enough about it to determine which source is the most reliable, or the most accurate? That's a challenge each of us faces at one time or another, and when it comes to keeping up with all the software tools regularly hitting the market, it's one we face on an ongoing basis. 

At Idealware, we work hard to be the source that provides the most accurate and reliable information. I met a lot of people at the Nonprofit Technology Conference a couple weeks ago who were familiar with our work because we're often the first result to pop up when they Google software types that are useful to nonprofits. That's a goal of ours, and we take it seriously. Being impartial is so important to us that it's in our mission statement. 

Today we're proud to release the 2012 update to our Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits, our third annual edition. It covers nearly 70 types of software, from association management to wikis and everything in between. We tell you what’s available, what it can do for you, how you might use it, who the most common vendors are, and what you can expect to pay. Learn more about it, or pick up your copy, here.

It's a handy reference to keep on your desk that will get you started learning about all the different types of software that can help your organization.

Once you're ready to research them further, learn more, or start choosing the best one for your needs, our website is full of free resources just waiting for you to explore them. Visit us directly at www.idealware.org... or find us through Google. Either way, unlike that Texas barbecue joint, we'll be here. We value your trust, and want to continue to earn it.

 

 

AskIdealware: What If Someone Says Something Bad About Me On Social Media?

By Kyle Andrei, April 16, 2012

Someone writes a mean post on your Facebook page - what do you do? Should you take it down, or leave it up? Andrea Berry has the answer.

 

Got a question to ask Idealware? Send us an email...

Software to Curate Resources

By Laura Quinn, April 13, 2012

 Here at Idealware, we follow a whole lot of different resources -- nonprofit focused blogs, technology news, new research, major news publications, and more-- to understand what's going on in the technology world that might be of interest to nonprofits, and to bring the best of what we find to Idealware readers through Twitter, our Best of the Web roundup, and (soon!) this blog.

 
For us, that involves a process where all staff members follow specific blogs and publications and flag relevant articles.  A point person (usually me) actually reads, or at least skims, all the resources that anyone flagged, and mark particularly good ones for Twitter.  And from there, we winnow down what we publish on Twitter, Facebook, the blog and other sources.
 
Although I suspect that a number of organizations are doing or would benefit from doing something similar to follow a lot of news sources on their own focus area, this process is suprisingly hard to support with low-cost software.  
 
We're currently doing most of it through a somewhat strange use of Instapaper -- a free tool designed to allow individuals to flag things for themselves to read later through a quick bookmarklet tool.  Everyone at Idealware uses the same Instapaper acccount to flag articles in their browser.  All these articles then appear in a single "Read Later" list in Instapaper.  Instapaper makes it easy to print all these articles or -- as I typically do -- automatically send yourself a digest to read on your mobile device of choice.  
 
So I typically read the articles offline (or skim them online, in busy times) and simply archive those that I don't think are very useful or particularly related to choosing software (our mission).  If they do seem useful, I move them into a "For Twitter" folder within Instapaper, and add a short description.  Andrea then uses that folder of articles as part of her Twitter and Facebook strategies, to combine with other posts and re-tweets.  When she's posted something, she currently just archives it, but we've been thinking about trying to group them by category to be able to post resource roundups on the blog by topic, which seems like it would work well.
 
The Instapaper route is working okay for us, but it seems like a really roundabout strategy for collecting and curating resources -- which you would think would be a common thing to want to do.  But we haven't been able to find a lot of other options.  Strangely, many of the services which say they're about curating content-- like paper.ly-- don't let you do any moderatation by hand. They only aggregate things from particular feeds or keywords.  Which could be useful to someone, but is basically worthless to us, as we're literally following dozens (maybe hundreds) of feeds in order to filter down to maybe about six resources a day.
 
Google Reader will allow some substantial portion of what we need to do, but it's somewhat awkward for lots of people to flag resources into a single place (unless they're all always using Reader themselves, which isn't the case for us), and the features to allow you to read offline aren't as useful as Instapaper.  It does, however, let you create your own annotated feed of resources, and do some sorting of resources.
 
Scoop.it is another interesting option in this realm.  Scoop.it does let people (including the general public) flag articles into a pool, and then provides functionality for one or multiple people to choose articles from that pool to publish into an online magazine type of format, with your own descriptions.  It's pretty compelling if your end goal is to publish a nice looking online roundup of resources, but internally, we're not sure about having a whole other public channel to pay attention to, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to limit who can see your "magazine."
 
What are you using to do content curation?  Any great tools that we've overlooked?  We'd love to find a better way!

Moving Forward from NTC 2012

By Chris Bernard, April 9, 2012

NTEN's 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference is in our rearview mirror, but we filled our tank with all sorts of new information that will move us forward in the coming months. As we begin to process what we learned, and to firm up the new relationships we made, we wanted to thank all the people who attended our sessions and helped make them so successful. All five of Idealware's sessions got a great response, and we wanted to share some of that with you.

To start with, here's a cartoon drawn by Rob Cottingham, whose "Noise to Signal" blog chronicles his artistic take on the social web, online living and all that goes with it. Rob sat in on the social media policy session led by Andrea Berry and Lisa Colton of Darim Online, and turned his notes into a comic. You can find scores of other worthwhile cartoons on his site. 

The line outside Laura Quinn's standing-room-only mobile devices presentation, "More Than Apps: Affordable Program Delivery Through Mobile Phones," looked like San Francisco's hottest nightclub, minus the bouncers. Nicole Wallace fought her way to a seat, and then wrote a piece about it for the Chronicle of Philanthropy called "Nonprofits Need to Think More About Mobile." 

"The growing number of people using their cellphones to go online is a compelling reason for nonprofits to think more about how they make mobile technology a key part of spreading their messages and operating their programs, Laura Quinn, executive director of Idealware, told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference here."

Read the full post here. 

Nicole Steinberg wrote about the same session for The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage blog, and shares a couple of photos from the presentation. And Kaitlyn Trigger, one of the fine folks from Rally, the online fundraising tool, was kind enough to post to her org's blog, where she shares the poster created during Laura's session. The poster was on display for the remainder of NTC, and is well worth studying for a shorthand version of what Laura had to say.

We've got more to share in coming days, but wanted to begin disseminating content immediately while we get caught up on our notes--and our coffee--after a busy week on the road. Plans for next year's NTC, in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, are already under way. Maybe we'll see you there?

Thanks for reading,

cb 

 

Idealware's Traveling Road Show Winding Down

By Chris Bernard, April 5, 2012

Andrea's currently presenting a session on social media policy with Idealware's good friend Lisa Colton from Darim Online in the final scheduled session slot of 2012 NTC. Policy's been a hot topic at this conference, and we've been handing out copies of our new workbook all week--in fact, we ran out, but you can still download one for free on our website.

Laura just wrapped up her session on cloud security with Michael Enos, Chief Technology Officer for Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. Notice the nifty hand-drawn graphics on the slides done by Idealware's own illustrator, Joe Rosshirt. (We have an illustrator--how cool is that?)

We'll soon be folding up the tent and packing the boxes and bags and hopping a cab to the airport to depart this welcoming city. Tomorrow's a well-earned day of rest, especially for the team members taking the red-eye back to Idealware Global Headquarters in Maine, but Monday we'll begin sharing some of what we learned this week.

We'd also love to hear from you. Were you here? What did you think? If you weren't able to make it, what would you like to hear about? 

 

 

Idealware's Traveling Road Show

By Chris Bernard, April 4, 2012

Day two of the NTEN 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference here in San Francisco, and we've been busy sharing resources with the community--and learning lots of new things ourselves. We're releasing the 2012 update to our Idealware Field Guide to Nonprofit Software here, as well as our Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook, but you don't need to be here in person to get your own copies. We'll be releasing both through our web site--you'll be able to download a copy of the policy workbook for free in the next day or two, and we'll begin selling the Field Guide next week.

 

Earlier today, Laura led a session about our recent report, Unleashing Innovation: Using Everyday Technology to Improve Nonprofit Services, with Cary Walski from MAP for Nonprofits, our partners on the project. Here she is emerging from the shadow to talk about emerging technologies.

The session included an exercise in which participants were asked to identify gaps in their own organizations and then address them by connecting those needs with technology. Here's a photo of our research analyst Kyle Andrei, who worked on the report, talking with Cary during the group worksession.

The exercise was pretty straightforward, but it can lead to some interesting and inspiring ideas, as it did during today's session. In the report, we lay out a framework by which you can the same thing at your organization, only for real. If you haven't downloaded your free copy yet, now's as good a time as any.

We've been meeting a lot of people looking to learn more about nonprofit technology, and people with a lot to share. If you're here at NTC, stop by and introduce yourself. If you're not, you can follow along at home through the NTC website. If there's something in particular you'd like to know more about, drop us an email or leave a comment, and we'll find the right person and see if we can get them on video answering it for you.

I'm off to a session, but will post more later.