Asking the Wrong Questions

Michael Gilbert has contributed an interesting article to N-TEN’s new newsletter: Asking the Wrong Questions. It’s hard to argue with Michael’s basic premise – that technology planning should be based on mission and goals rather than be centered around the technology itself. But I worry about the examples he uses. He’s critical of the two major examples we have of resources for small nonprofits trying to plan for themselves – TechAtlas and Compumentor’s tech planning guide.

A tool like TechAtlas certainly isn’t perfect. It’s not nearly as good as having a skilled expert who would delve into an organization’s mission and operations to recommend just the right technology solutions. But TechAtlas is more practical for a lot of organizations – which means that many will use it that otherwise wouldn’t plan at all. TechAtlas’s main goal, as I see it, is to suggest best practices to organizations that don’t have much idea of what they should be doing technology-wise. It would be great if they had a better sense of what they were doing, or hired someone who did. But there are a lot of nonprofits out there who simply can’t afford to do this, and a lot more who won’t devote the funds even if we think they should. Providing these folks with a means to less-than-horrible technology decisions is a worthwhile and even honorable goal.

Perhaps there’s some technology planning method or tools that would allow small nonprofits to do a more effective job planning on their own. I’m all for that. But in looking at the possibilities, we need to be sure account for the nonprofits who can’t afford to hire us.

The Launch of the Article Series - two great new articles

Today we’re launching our article series and eNewsletter, which I’m really proud of. We’ve posted two great new articles:

Retooling the eNonprofit: Expanding the Options for Integrated Online Software
Internet strategist Michael Stein was kind enough to contribute his expertise. He describes what’s available in the integrated online software tool market, with some guidelines on features, considerations, and price.

A Few Good Tools: Low Cost Constituent Databases
This is the first in a series of articles summarizing a “few good tools” that have worked well for nonprofit technology professionals in the Idealware community (this one is about low cost ways to manage constituent data). I’m really excited about this format – it’s a way to sum up the substantial software knowledge that the community has, and make it available to a much wider audience. While many consultants don’t want to go on record recommending one tool over another, most are happy to contribute to a summary like this, making it good for everyone. And we got a great response from the Idealware tech professional community – I sent out 14 requests for thoughts and recommendations, and got 13 thoughtful and useful responses. You can’t beat that response rate.

The eNewsletter also includes a round-up of what we’ve found to be the most useful articles from around the web this past month. You’ll have to sign-up for the eNewsletter to see the round-up, you RSS lurkers. Okay, okay, the eNewsletter is also available online: www.idealware.org/articles/enews_0601.html

Evaluate the Online Donation Tool report

Did you take a look at our “Donate Now: Selecting an Online Donation Tool” report? If so, could you take a few minutes to evaluate this report, so that we can improve how we go about this? This survey should take less than five minutes to complete.

Take the survey here:

http://tinyurl.com/b57cg

Was the report helpful? Help us receive funding for future efforts by letting us know! Was it not what you hoped for? Let us know what we can improve.

Idealware Methodology

For any methodology connoisseurs out there, I’ve posted a draft of Idealware’s software review methodology (in PDF version):

http://www.idealware.org/documents/IW_Review_Methodology.pdf

Comments welcome.

We Exist!

In considering some kind of end of the year/ beginning of the year post (which I decided to spare us all from) I realized that I never logged two important events in Idealware’s life. We’re now officially a nonprofit (technically, a nonprofit corporation). And we’re now able to fundraise, thanks to the generous fiscal sponsorship of Aspiration.

There’s some setup fun left to go (the 501(C)(3) process, insurance, bank accounts, etc) but so far the process hasn’t been too hard. We were lucky to be able to take advantage of the stellar services of the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. They hooked Idealware up with a pro-bono lawyer who helped us through the process. I’ve no doubt that it would all have been much harder otherwise.