Learning from political organizations

On Monday, I represented Idealware at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, which focused on the use of technology in the political realm. There were a lot of interesting topics and speakers - and great to attend a conference in my home city, rather than flying cross country for once.

I'm not that familiar the use of technology in politics - one of my primary reasons for going. What struck me most was that the political sector, in general, is way ahead of the nonprofit sector in effective technology use. Participant questions weren't on whether or not they should start a blog, or how to go about fundraising online, but details of implementation - what email text has proved to work best? How can you best get your organization to contribute to your blog? Almost everyone there seemed to be at a similar technology level as the largest and most savvy nonprofits. This is a lot of knowledge about issues very similar to those nonprofits face - we could learn a lot from the folks in this realm.

I also met my Washington DC doppelganger, Laura Quinn from Copernicus Analytics and the DNC Data Warehouse. She's doing really interesting work that applies data mining and regression analysis techniques to fundraising and issues of attracting supports. Something else we ought to be doing more of in the nonprofit sector.