Technology wasn’t just the subject of conversation of the Nonprofit Technology Conference. It played a role in just about every aspect of the meeting.

People who wanted to pose a question to a plenary speaker had to submit them online. Other participants voted to determine which questions would be asked.

On Monday, the first day of sessions, 400 evaluations were submitted via text message, and participants sent 3,800 conference-related Twitter messages.

The volume of online activity was so high that for a period of time it brought down the hotel’s wireless network.

Monitoring what people are saying online about an organization is critical, Carie Lewis, Internet Marketing Manager at the Humane Society of the United States, in Washington, told participants at a session on social media.

Charities, she said, should be tracking:

• Their organization’s name.
• Any acronyms associated with the group — the Humane Society monitors HSUS.
• The names of prominent employees and spokesmen.
• Any current campaigns or issues associated with the organizations.
• Other organizations that work on the same cause — the “competition.”
• “Detractors” — people who are known to be critical of the organization
• “Influencers” — people who shape he opinions of others.

“Detractors are people who...

Once a nonprofit organization has started using social-networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, maintaining the group’s presence on multiple sites becomes increasingly time consuming, Jordan Dossett, creative director of Antharia, a technology company in Lanham, Md., said in a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

“Basically, you go nuts, and want to jump out a window,” she quipped.

But, fortunately, she said, there are free and low-cost tools that can make updating the sites easier.

Ping.fm, a free service, lets people update all of their social networks at the same time.

Ms. Dossett said that the first thing she did when she arrived for the session is send a “ping” to say she was in the room and it was “T minus 15 minutes” until the start of the...

Using “open source” software rather than proprietary tools is a moral issue that extends beyond technology and affects all of the causes and people that nonprofit organizations serve, Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, argued at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

The idea that knowledge is something that can be owned and therefore controlled is the cause of most human misery, said Mr. Moglen, who is also a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School.

“There are people who will die because the knowledge of the molecule that might help them not to die is owned knowledge,” he said. “Someone has secured for the substantial portion of a human lifetime the exclusive right to deploy that knowledge, which raises its price, decreases its...

New technology tools allow organizations to make their online videos more interactive, Michael Hoffman, chief executive of See3, a Chicago consulting company, told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Among the nonprofit videos he pointed to as examples: That’s Not Cool, a new campaign designed to help teenagers recognize the role that technology can play in unhealthy or abusive relationships. The online campaign was developed by the Advertising Council, in partnership with the Family Violence Prevention Fund.

The campaign uses a light touch to talk about what can be a difficult issue.

In one video, sock puppets portray a teenage couple in which the young man is overwhelmed by the constant text messages he receives from his girlfriend asking where he is and what is he doing. After laying...

The turbulent economy is very much on the minds of nonprofit organizations as they think about their online fund raising.

Nick Allen — chief executive of Donordigital, a consulting company in San Francisco that specializes in online fund raising, and a speaker at the Nonprofit Technology Conference — spoke to The Chronicle about what he has heard from his nonprofit clients.

Microsoft wants to know how its software donations through Tech Soup have helped charities and libraries in the United States and Canada — so it’s holding a contest to find out.

Winners of the Microsoft Impact Story Contest 2009 will be chosen based on their ability to show how the software helped the organizations stabilize and strengthen their technology systems, improve the services they provide, or do their work in new ways.

Contest winners will be announced June 26, and receive $5,000 in cash and Microsoft products worth $25,000.

The Internet is transforming the ways that groups come together and take action, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

“We are living in the middle of the biggest expansion of expressive capability in the history of the human race,” said Mr. Shirky, who is an adjunct professor in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Previous communications revolutions were either good at sending one-way messages to large groups of people, like the printing press or broadcast television, or at getting small groups of individuals to talk to each other, like the telephone, he said.

“The Internet is the first media that brings the many-to-many pattern, two-way group communication into the media landscape,” Mr. Shirky told the audience. “For the...

A new guide to low-cost software systems that help charities manage their donor records was released at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

The report — which was published by the Nonprofit Technology Network and Idealware, a nonprofit group in Portland, Me., that provides information on software designed for charities — reviews 33 fund-raising packages that cost less than $4,250 the first year a charity uses them and compares the features that they offer.

The guide also provides in-depth reviews of 12 of those systems.

Laura S. Quinn, executive director of Idealware, spoke with The Chronicle about the report’s findings and offered advice about the steps charities should take when they are looking for new fund-raising software.

Founded a decade ago, the New York charity iMentor pairs adults and children to meet in person and to intensify their ties through online communications.

High-school students in the New York City nonprofit program meet with their mentors once a month, but weekly online messages that adults and students send to each other are a critical part of helping the relationships grow.

Early in its life, iMentor realized that it needed to build an online system that would allow for safe, guided communication, says Dana Saxon, director of partnerships at iMentor Interactive.

“We needed to know how to track those e-mail messages, and really importantly we wanted to be able to monitor the communication,” she says. “Since the majority of the students are under 18, it’s important for their safety.”