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Nonprofit Technology Conference
April 29, 2009
Nonprofit Technology Conference
Technology at the Conference
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.
Nonprofit Technology Conference
Charities Need to Track What Is Said About Them Online, Says Nonprofit Official
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 can’t stand us, and there’s really nothing we can do about it,” said Ms. Lewis. “But we still have to pay attention to them. Our influencers are people who we’ve identified that are evangelists about our brand. We want to be able to communicate with those people and point them out.”
To help the Humane Society track all of that information, Ms. Lewis used iGoogle to set up a dashboard that aggregates RSS feeds from a variety of sources — including Google alerts, Filtrbox, Twitter Search, Technorati, Digg, and Forum — that send alerts on the terms the group is monitoring.
She also receives text messages when someone is talking about the organization online.
Said Ms. Lewis: “Brand monitoring is not a 9 to 5 job.”
April 28, 2009
Nonprofit Technology Conference
Tools That Streamline Social-Networking Tasks
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 presentation.
“When I did that, it updated my Facebook page, my Twitter page, my LinkedIn page, my Plurk page, all of it,” she said. “I did not have to log in six different places. It did it all for me.”
Other tools, like Tweet Deck and Event Box, let people follow the activity on all of their social-media accounts in one place.
Says Ms. Dossett: “I’m streamlining and making my life easier.”
Nonprofit Technology Conference
Using Open-Source Software is a Moral Issue, Says Speaker
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 availability, and condemns some people to extinction.”
Knowledge as a commodity also explains why such a small percentage of people worldwide have access to education, said Mr. Moglen.
“How many of the Einsteins that ever existed were allowed to learn physics?” he asked the audience. “One or two, maybe?”
But digital technology, which allows information to be duplicated at no additional cost, calls into question the rationale for the ownership of knowledge, Mr. Moglen argued.
“If we could feed everybody by cooking one breakfast and pressing a button, what would the case be, what would the argument be for charging people more for food than they can afford to pay?” he said. “Of course, we can’t just cook one breakfast and press a button, but we can make one operating system and press a button.”
Using open-source software products, then, that were created collaboratively and can be shared freely chips away at the system that seeks to control knowledge for profit, Mr. Moglen told the audience.
“We are not merely making our own businesses cheaper to run or even more efficient, more pleasant, more simple, more stable, we are also addressing a root issue of injustice,” he said, “because we are reducing the political and economic might of knowledge that can be owned.”
Nonprofit Technology Conference
Next Wave in Online Videos -- Interactivity
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 out his dilemma, the video asks the viewer what he should do:
A — You have no choice. You tell her your phone is broken.
B — Tell her she needs to trust you and give you some space.
C — Move away and work on a horse ranch.
What viewers see next depends on which answer they choose.
Adding this kind of interactivity to online videos increases viewers’ involvement, said Mr. Hoffmann.
“If you think about it, a lot of video is very passive,” he said. “You watch the video. That’s pretty different than a lot of what we’re talking about with social media, which is about commenting and creating and doing.”
Nonprofit Technology Conference
Online Fund Raising in Tough Times
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.
Nonprofit Technology Conference
Microsoft Announces a New Contest
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.
April 27, 2009
Nonprofit Technology Conference
How the Internet Has Changed Advocacy Work
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 first time, we have the ability to put them together. It isn’t just listening to one source at a time. You can also talk back and you can talk sideways.”
What’s more, he said, the Internet absorbing everything that came before it.
“The media is subsuming all previous media as they go digital, which means that not only do we have the many-to-many pattern, but we have the broadcast pattern and the two-way communication pattern existing in the same environment,” said Mr. Shirky.
These changes, he said, have had profound implications for organized group action.
“When we see large-scale organized action in the world, we are used to there being some managed organization behind it, driving it,” said Mr. Shirky. “That is now no longer the case. Organizations no longer have the monopoly on organized activity.”
Institutions in society — nonprofit organizations included — are at the beginning of a long process of reinventing their roles in a radically different media landscape.
“Institutions are the way they are, in part, because of the difficulty of managing information,” said Mr. Shirky. “So any really profound change in the information landscape also changes the way institutions work.”
Nonprofit Technology Conference
New Guide Looks at Low-Cost Fund-Raising Software
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.
Nonprofit Technology Conference
New York Charity Makes Its Software Available to Groups That Provide Mentors to Youngsters
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.”
In addition to allowing staff members to monitor the electronic conversations going on between students and their mentors, the system provides prompts — that help the pairs keep the conversation going and build deeper bonds.
“Very shortly after they first meet, they run out of things to talk about, so it’s very important for the mentors and mentees to have guided communication,” says Ms. Saxon. “Our program is focused on academic, career, and personal growth, so we have writing prompts that are targeting those specific topics.”
Soon after iMentor developed its software system, the organization began to receive requests from other mentor programs that wanted to use the software too.
So in 2007, iMentor began to offer the Web-based software to other charities. The cost to use iMentor Interactive, which groups can tailor to their specific program goals, depends on the size of the organization and the number of people who will be using the system.
Ms. Saxon, who is giving a presentation at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, talked to The Chronicle about the software’s conversation prompts and how they have helped students in iMentor’s program improve their writing skills and develop closer bonds with their mentors.
Copyright © 2009 The Chronicle of Philanthropy