Do you know about the Grassroots Fundraising Journal? If you fundraise for small organizations, or work with people who do, you really should. It's a great, tactical magazine, full of practical advice on how to raise money without huge budgets or a ton of staff. (by the way, they're not paying or incenting us to say these things - I'm just a big fan personally).
They're in the midst of a big subscription push at the moment, with a great deal available to friends of current subscribers (and to you, by permission): just $20 for a full years' subscription to the Journal, plus an invitation to a free conference call with Kim Klein, grassroots fundraiser extraordinaire, on Thriving On Uncertainty.
I love the tenants of open source software. What's not to like about software that's open to customization or modification, and (typically) costs nothing to download? And I fully support anyone's right to advocate for open source - there's certainly plenty of room to provide education and support to nonprofits, and to lobby organizations that publish information (yes, like Idealware) to balance out vendor's lobbying influence.
But these days I seem to be getting more and disappointed and angry emails from open source advocates who feel that Idealware has a systematic bias against open source software - that our reviews don't do justice to open source software. Given that our methodology is to interview representative folks in the field to understand the key factors that are important to them in choosing software, and then round up software based on those factors... wouldn't that mean that many open source tools don't do justice to THEMSELVES?
Customization, ability to exchange data, and price are all critical aspects where open source tools shine, and these areas play a big part in many of our reports and articles. But they aren't the only areas that are important. All too often, open source communities seem to disregard the functionalities that are often critical to small nonprofits - reporting, easy mail merging, and straightforward setup, for instance.
We cover open source software in all of the areas we review. We in fact go out of our way to include the open source software that's qualified, in a kind of "affirmative action" program for open source. I think that's as it should be, given the likely benefits for the sector as a whole if there's solid open source options.
But some open source advocates seem to be asking for a whole different set of qualifications for open source software, as if simply being open source should be enough. Or that every Idealware article should give "equal time" to open source, as if open source vs. proprietary should be the key framing concept for everyone software decision any nonprofit makes, rather than basing decisions around features and needs.
There's huge promise in both the tenants of open source and specific open source applications. But it doesn't serve the nonprofit sector to tell them a piece of software is likely to meet their needs if it won't, or to tell them their needs should be different than what they are. And it doesn't serve the cause of open source software to pretend that there's a different set of market realities for open source software than there is for every other kind.
Even if you will never tweet, it's obvious that Twitter is a source of useful information, and, in some cases, a more timely source than traditional search engines and media. If you use Firefox as your main web browser, and have the popular Greasemonkey add-on installed, which serves as a kind of macro language for the web, then the Twitter Google Results script adds some real power. Any Google search you perform will also search Twitter, posting the top five relevant results. Why is this useful? Well, when we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off somewhere near our Bozeman, Montana office, the Twitter results had current info and links that weren't indexed by Google yet
Namechk checks for your preferred username on a slew of Web 2.0 sites, from Bebo to Youtube. I found this useful to reserve peterscampbell at a few sites that I want to use but hadn't signed up for, and to learn that some other guy named peterscampbell had already grabbed it at Youtube, where I had used a different loginname... snap!
This is a tip, not a tool - if you've been stymied by Facebook's recent changes to how it handles updates, you can make a lot more sense of it by making lists of related friends, and then filtering the updates by group. Click on Friends and the "Create New List" button is at the top of the screen. I have lists for family, nptech, Boston friends, SF Friends, and a special one called "no tweets", which filters out everyone who cross-posts all of their Twitter updates to Facebook (my default view). Keeping up with all of this info is always a challenge, so the ability to filter out the echoes is a must.
Exhibit is a web site that lets you upload spreadsheets, maps and other data to an information rich, filterable, active web page that can then be shared. If your org works with a particular environmental cause, seeks a cure for a disease, or supports a particular community, you can share data about your cause dynamically and expressively with this amazing site.
Google revolutionized email with GMail, the first email platform in decades to question the basic assumptions about how email should work (by filing important email into folders). They're about to do the same thing with Voicemail. A year or two ago, they purchased Grandcentral, a service that allowed you to route multiple phone numbers to one shared voicemail box. A few months ago, they opened the revamped Google Voice to existing Grandcentral customers, and, surprise, it looks a bit like GMail.
When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.
Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!
Want to save thousands on your software implementation? A guest blogger who prefers to remain anonymous (let's call him or her the Masked Adviser!) had a great suggestion:
Organizations often go through the process of deciding on software, finally make a decision, and get so excited that they sign contracts immediately. Many, many times, they aren’t able to use it for months while they are transitioning from other systems or don’t have capacity to manage or get trained on the new system. The whole time they are paying for it.
I see many groups paying for expensive systems like Convio or Kintera spending thousands or tens-of-thousands on systems that are laying fallow while they get up to speed. Even if they are migrating, they often don't need services while they're doing discovery and design, and they may not need, for instance, email delivery and fundraising services until right before switch over. I know one organization who paid for nearly 6 months, and could have saved well over 25k had they waited.
The last few weeks saw some big announcements in the smartphone world:
Palm released the phone that they've been promising us for years, the Palm Pre, with it's new WebOS, to reviews that were mostly favorable and summed up as "The iPhone's baby brother".
And Nokia's E71 hit our shores, an incredibly full-featured phone that you can get for just over $300 unlocked, and use the carrier of your choice. While this isn't a touchscreen, and is therefore suspect in terms of it's ease of use, it is an amazingly full-featured product.
Left in the wings were Blackberry, who keep producing phones, including their iPhone competitor, the Storm -- to yawns from the press, and Microsoft, who are talking a lot about Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0, but seem to have really been decimated by the ugliness of their mobile OS when compared to just about anyone else's.
What's clear is that a few things differentiate smartphones these days, and the gap between the ones that get it and the ones that don't are huge. They are:
Responsive Touchscreen Interfaces. The UI's of the iPhone, Android and Palm's WebOS get around the sticky problem that phones were just to small to support anything but simple functionality without requiring an oppressive amount of taps and clicks. This is why Microsoft has fallen down the smartphone food chain so far and fast -- their mobile OS is just like their desktop OS, with no flagship phone that does the touchscreen nearly as well as the new competition.
Desktop-Class Web Browsers. This is where Apple and Google have drawn a huge line, and it looks like Palm might have joined them. All three use browser's based on Webkit, the same technology that fuels Safari and Chrome. On a 3G phone, this makes for a fast and complete experience that puts the Blackberry, Mobile Internet Explorer and the Treo's hideous Blazer. Add Google's voice activation (native on Android and available for iPhone), and their smartphone-optimized results (which don't work on the non-webkit browsers) and the task of finding a Starbucks or hotel on the road takes seconds, instead of the average ten to 15 minutes on the old, lousy browsers, which simply choke on the graphics.
Push Email. If you connect to Exchange servers, the iPhone and Pre have Activesync built in. If your mail is with Google, you're connected to it as soon as you tell an Android phone your login and password. And the Android phone app is the best out there, with Apple's mail running close behind it. What's ironic is that Microsoft targeted their biggest threat with Activesync -- the Blackberry's kludgy, but, at the time, unparalleled email forwarding -- and gave it wings by licensing it to Palm, Apple and others. This is fueling corporate acceptance of the iPhone and Pre, meaning that this Blackberry-beating strategy might have worked, but more likely it did it for Apple and Palm, not Microsoft.
Music. The iPhone is an iPod; everything else isn't, meaning that, if having a high quality phone and music experience on one device is a priority, you're not going to go wrong with the iPhone. I love my G1, but I weigh my value of the real keyboard and awesome, open source OS on T-Mobile over the iPhone's built-in iPod and Activesync on AT&T. As OSes go, Android is only marginally better than Apple, but the Apple hardware is much better than the G1. Newer Android phones are going to show that up.
People make a lot of noise about the apps available for the iPhone (and Windows/Blackberry) as opposed to the newer Android and Pre. I think that's a defining question for the Pre, but it looks like companies are jumping on board. For Android, it's quite arguably a wash. All of the important things are available for Android and, given that it's open source, most of them are free. And with those 18 phones due out by year end on every carrier, the discrepancies will be short-lived.
I have to wonder how long it will take Microsoft to "get" mobile. They have a heavy foot in the market as the commodity OS on the smartphones that can't get any buzz. But the choice to bring the worst things about the Windows Desktop experience to their mobile OS was unfortunate. Should I really get a pop-up that has to be manually dismissed every time I get an email or encounter a wireless network? Do I have to pull out the stylus and click on Start every time I want to do anything? What's even more worrisome is that Windows Mobile is a separate OS from Windows, that merely emulates it, as opposed to sharing a code base. Apple's OS is the same OSX that you get on a MacBook, just stripped down, and Google's OS is already starting to appear on Netbooks and other devices, and will likely fuel full desktops within a year or two -- it is, after all, Linux.
So, the state of the smartphone market is easily broken into the haves and have-nots, meaning that some phones have far more usable and exciting functionality, while most phones don't. There's a whole second post dealing with the choice of carriers and their rankings in the race to offer the most customer disservice, and it does play into your smartphone decision, as Verizon might be a very stable network, but their phone selection is miserable, and AT&T might have the best selection but, well, they're AT&T. I love Android, so, were I looking, I'd hold out until four or five of those new sets are out. But I don't know anyone with an iPhone who's unsatisfied (and I know lots of people with iPhones).
The Million Dollar Email (Global Health Magazine) Terrific case study about how Nothing But Nets is using email, their website, blogs, and social media together to raise money.
Easy Step by Step Video Training for Non Profits (Charity How To) Interesting site with videos for sale (for low prices, like $8) to help you navigate basic areas, like how to use photographs online, and mapping
Teens 4 Planet Earth Moves to Ning (Beaconfire Wire) Tiny case study of why Teens 4 Planet Earth chose Ning for their custom online community, with a list of other tools they considered.
Is Drupal Over-hyped? (CMS Watch) Useful article looking not so much about Drupal (takeaway: it has strengths and weaknesses like any other CMS), but about how to protect yourself from hype.
It's not hard to see how publishing has changed over the last several years. Magazines becoming ezines. Readers becomming ereaders. Monologues, catalogues and travelogues becoming blogs.
A few of the less ubiquitous innovations have peaked my interest. Take Kindle, Amazon's highly popular ereader device + publishers marketplace. Bloggers can syndicate their blog directly to Kindle. Amazon determines a price to sell your blog content, and you get 30% of the revenue. There are a lot of nonprofits that publish really unique and valuable information through their websites for free, and may find it valuable to leverage this as an income opportunity.
Its much easier to publish books these days by simply bypassing the traditional publishing industry layers. Lulu.com helps you self publish all varieties of books (photo books, novels, calendars, etc) - build these directly online and buy/sell as many or as few as you need. There are many others including Blurb and Wordclay.
Magazines can also be created on the cheap, by anyone who can produce pdf files. Magcloud lets you produce a magazine at 20 cents per page plus shipping, and order as few or as many as you want. I see a lot of great 10 page quarterly publications from nonprofits that are produced traditionally using printers with minimum run requirements that may benefit from more flexibility here.
Taking a step back, if you just want to share a nicely formatted pdf document widely, Scribd.com can help. Get a free account and upload your documents - the service makes it very easy to view and share these documents by anyone, to find documents by topic and interest areas, and is a large community of users.
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