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Category Archives: Technology
October 3, 2012, 5:51 pm
Foundation Grants Aim to Boost Civic Engagement
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation on Tuesday announced $1.3-million in grants to technology projects aimed at getting people more involved in improving their communities and issued a report designed to encourage more money and attention for such efforts.
The four grants announced were:
• $590,000 to Change by Us, a project of CEOs for Cities, that gives citizens an easy place to suggest ideas to make their hometowns more livable. The grant money will help expand the site so it can accept donations, integrate with Facebook, and make the application available for other cities to adopt. The site already has versions for New York, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.
• $250,000 to Good360, an online product-donation site, to create a marketplace where nonprofits can post their needs, find products, and communicate with individual and corporate donors.
• $236,000 to
September 20, 2012, 3:49 pm
Are Online Philanthropy Contests Worth the Effort?
After this year’s Chase Community Giving contest closed after a troubled start, some nonprofit leaders debated the costs and benefits of participating in these type of vote-driven corporate philanthropy contests in The Chronicle’s LinkedIn group.
Some nonprofit leaders say they have had success with the contests, while others are skeptical of whether the campaigns benefit nonprofits or the corporate donor.
Here are some highlights from the debate:
“My nonprofit won a $25,000 grant via the spring 2011 Chase Community Giving contest… We are interested in a contest if there are good odds and no daily voting requirements, among other things. We did three contests spread through 2011, winning three grants, but we’ve done none this year.” —Anne Bowhay, director of foundation relations at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless
“As development professionals, we need to remember…
September 19, 2012, 6:27 pm
Nonprofits Are Excited—and Confused—About Cloud Computing
A survey of nonprofits around the world finds both great interest and significant confusion about the potential of cloud computing.
Representatives of more than 10,500 charities from 88 countries answered questions about how their organizations use software located on the Internet rather than from a hard drive or local computer network. The survey was conducted by TechSoup Global, a nonprofit technology group.
The study found that most nonprofits already have some experience with cloud computing. Ninety percent of charities reported using at least one online application.
The cloud-based services named most frequently by survey participants were e-mail (55 percent), social networks (47 percent), file storage and sharing (26 percent), Web conferencing (24 percent), and office productivity (23 percent).
But some respondents seemed unaware of which services are cloud-based….
September 5, 2012, 3:06 pm
Tweaking E-Mail for the Mobile Age
Ever since e-mail programs gave users the option of blocking images, many organizations have added short notes to the top of their messages—variations on “Trouble viewing this e-mail? Click here”—to direct recipients to online versions of the e-mails, images and all.
But while the notes make sense for people who read their e-mail on desktop computers, they can reduce the number of people who open the message when checking e-mail on mobile devices, says Holly Ross, executive director of the Nonprofit Technology Network.
She says that if someone is checking e-mail in a preview pane on a computer, they’ll usually be able to see enough of the message to know what it’s about.
“But on a mobile device, often all you see is a name, some part of the subject line, and then you see, ‘E-mail not displaying correctly?’ and that’s about it,” says Ms. Ross. “It doesn’t give…
July 19, 2012, 10:58 am
YouTube Adds Tool to Hide Identities in Sensitive Videos
YouTube has released a new feature to help nonprofits and activists protect the identities of people who appear in their videos with the push of a button.
The new tool allows people posting a video to blur all of the faces appearing in their work, making it much more difficult to identify people.
In a blog post Wednesday, YouTube cautioned that the technology is still new and may have trouble detecting the faces that are supposed to be blurred, particularly if they are partially covered or at certain angles. It also warned that the system could miss a frame, which would make it possible for viewers to figure out who was in the blurred image.
You can learn more about the new tool on YouTube’s blog.
Is this a useful feature for your organization?
Send an e-mail to Cody Switzer.
June 15, 2012, 10:45 am
Facebook Fans Increase by 70 Percent at Some Nonprofits
A new report delves into the Facebook activity of 37 large and medium-size nonprofits, including Earthjustice, Easter Seals, and Oxfam America. The organizations in the study had a median of 31,473 Facebook fans, which represented 103 fan-page users for every 1,000 people on their e-mail lists.
The report, which is a follow-up to the 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, was published by M+R Strategic Services, a fundraising consulting company, and the Nonprofit Technology Network.
In 2011, the number of Facebook fans at the charities grew by a median rate of 70 percent from 2010. Growth was highest for wildlife and animal-welfare groups, which had a median growth rate of 129 percent. And only 0.5 percent of fans opted out of receiving the organizations’ messages—either by “unliking” the groups’ pages or by choosing to hide the groups’ posts in their news feed.
The…
April 5, 2012, 11:27 am
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.
In a recent survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 10 percent of cellphone owners said that their phone was their primary means of getting online. For certain demographic groups, such as young people and low-income workers, the percentage was even higher.
The first thing nonprofits should think about, Ms. Quinn said, is how their current Web site appears on cellphones. She recommended visiting the Web site mobilephoneemulator.com to see how an organization’s site looks on different mobile-phone operating systems….
April 5, 2012, 9:08 am
Greenpeace Experiments With Technology Team Structure
Greenpeace has never acted much like other nonprofits. As Michael Silberman, a global director with the environmental protection group, put it in a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference on Wednesday, “Greenpeace is a big institution but not as staid as other big institutions.”
Mr. Silberman leads an effort at Greenpeace called Mobilization Lab. His small team—three to four full-time staff members by the end of the year, including a data analyst—has two goals: to educate employees on the smartest ways to use multimedia to get supporters involved and to create a culture of experimentation and testing.
That approach to innovation differs from the common practice of hiring a social-media manager or online expert to handle communications on the Internet. The problem with those roles, Jason Mogus, chief executive of the consulting firm Communicopia, told the conference is…
April 4, 2012, 11:20 am
Balancing ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Technology Costs
When making purchasing decisions on, profit technology managers need to think about both “hard costs,” such as the price of a new software program, and ”soft costs,” the most important of which is staff time, Richard Wollenberger, director of information technology at the Parents as Teachers National Center, told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, in San Francisco.
For example, when his organization recently bought a system that allows the technology department to push out updates to software programs across its network, he took into consideration the staff time that would be saved by eliminating the need to go to each employee’s desk to update the software individually.
“You figure by the time you can get people away from their computer and can go install their updates, you’re probably talking about a half an hour per computer per week,” said Mr….
March 22, 2012, 4:40 pm
A ‘Social Revolución’ Gives Attention to Latino Causes
Armando Rayo, a vice president at the communications firm Cultural Strategies, is a veteran of the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. In recent years, though, he’s noticed that all the discussions about using technology to promote the social good have been missing a key element.
“There’s always kind of this sense of, ‘Where are the Latinos and the Latino sessions?’” Mr. Rayo said. “It’s kind of hard to find.”
That wasn’t the case this year. Mr. Rayo worked with the conference organizers, Univision News, and others to present the Social Revolución Latino Lounge and the Revolucionario Awards to call attention to Latino efforts to help others.
“Revolucionarios” are important in Latino culture, says Mr. Rayo.
“It could be that you’re a cancer survivor and you want to raise awareness, maybe it’s social-justice issues or education, or you want…
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