An Embarrassment of Riches about Nonprofit Collaboration Tools

There’s been a number of great articles on RSS aggregation, social bookmarking, and blogging that have come out of the NetSquared, SSX, and NTC communities just in the last week or two.God knows how I’ll narrow them down to a finite number for the eNewsletter…

• Make your nonprofit more effective with RSS aggregation (Social Signal)
• RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration (Social Signal)
• 10 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Blogs (NetSquared)
• 7 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Podcasts (NetSquared)
• Blog Conversation Mind Maps (FullCircle)
• Ramifications of Web 2.0 for Nonprofits with Participatory Applications (Christine.net)

And this one comes out of the business world, but I'll sneak it in anyway:

An adoption strategy for social software in enterprise (Corante)
A great set of thinking points on how to encourage adoption of social tools like wikis or blogs.

Farewell to Seattle

I have to admit that I’m not feeling at all nostalgic for my ten hour red-eye-with-a-layover flight back from the NTC, but the conference itself was another story. Thanks so much for the outpouring of support for Idealware. It was a tremendous feeling to meet so many people that have contributed to Idealware or helped us out or are fans or who just have followed our work. It makes me appreciate the strength of the Idealware community, and renews my faith that we can actually pull this off.

It was also great to talk to so many people about what they like and don’t like about what we’re doing. There was one request that I heard several times: to blog the news and articles that go into the eNewsletter as I find them. Well, that’s easy enough, so we’ll try that out. Starting tomorrow (hopefully), this blog will get a lot busier as I also post nonprofit software news and resources of interest. And we’ll start with the plethora of great resources that have come out the conference itself!

See You in Seattle!

Just winding up here and getting ready to go to Seattle for N-TEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference. It’s kind of a drag to get from New York to Seattle (strangely, there’s very few direct flights) but I’m looking forward to seeing everyone and to Idealware’s first conference appearance.

If you’ll be there, I’d love to see you. I’ll be pretty easy to find:

• Thanks to a generous offer from Aspiration, Idealware will be exhibiting at the Science Fair at Aspiration’s table. So look for me on Wed between 3-8 at the science fair.
  
• And I’m participating in two sessions: I’ll be at Eric Leland’s session on Managing the Client Relationship Effectively, on Thursday at 1:30, and leading a session on Getting Started with Online Donation tools on Friday at 3:30

I’d love to meet you, hear your thoughts on Idealware, and find out what we can do to help your organization.

Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice, and Membership Databases

Our March articles are out and ready for your perusal, and I think they’re some pretty good ones:

Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org
by Brett Bonfield and Laura S. Quinn
For a while, Microsoft Office was the only office suite in town. But in the last couple of years, a viable open source option has emerged: OpenOffice.org. Should you consider OpenOffice? Will it makes sense for your organization? What are the differences between these two office suites?

A Few Good Databases for Membership Organizations
Membership organizations can have a complex set of database needs, and there’s an equally complex market of tools that have been designed to meet them. We asked seven nonprofit technology professionals what membership databases they would recommend.

As always, our March eNews also rounds up the most interesting nonprofit software articles and news of the past month.

Blog Your Software Selection

I love Steve Anderson’s gokubi blog. At least at the moment, gokubi primarily document’s Steve’s learnings and findings about using Salesforce.com for nonprofit constituent tracking. He posts detailed information about general concepts (Flexilbilty vs Tight User Experience) and particular requirements (for instance, handing households, or converting from eBase to Salesforce).

I have no particular use for this much information about Salesforce. Honestly, it’s far more than I really want to know. But what a resource for anyone considering using Salesforce, or working with it themselves!

Why can’t we all do more of this? There’s so much knowledge about the strength and weaknesses of particular software tools scattered among the hundreds of practitioners in the field, and so much value in trying to get it in writing so we all can learn from it.

Are you in the midst of a software selection? Write up a couple of blog entries about what tools look good for your requirements. Do you have a particular tool that you really love? Let the world know what you love about it and why. If you write up something good, we’ll link to it. Or if you want to remain anonymous, we can post it. Just let me know.

Laura’s Washington DC Doppelganger

According to an interesting article from the Washington Post, it appears that I’m taking part in building a data warehouse of information about Democratic voters. Wait, what? Really?

No, actually, this isn’t me – though it did get me some really confusing emails until I figured out what people were talking about. At least my namesake is doing something I can buy into.

Two Exciting Resources

I fell down the rabbit hole of work, but as I emerged two particularly interesting resources caught my eye:

eNonprofit Benchmarks study
This report uses the all-too-infrequently applied method of solid quantitative analysis to look at nonprofit email, online donation, and online action logs. This research yields enormously useful benchmarks to answer the age old questions: So is this click-through rate good? How many should I expect to donate? How do our numbers compare to others organizations? I’d love to see more of this type of work – perhaps delving down into different types of nonprofits, or even investigating the actual cost/benefit of different types of internet strategies in the sector. Heck, I’d love to do this type of work. I only regret that Idealware didn’t have anything to do with this original study.

Google Page Builder
Google’s released a simple and nifty online website builder. To my mind, it’s more of a hobbyist than a professional tool right now (particularly as websites currently have to reside not only at a Google domain, but one that reveals your Gmail address), but I’m really excited about the possibilities. Hope they will allow people to use their own domain? Well, the Google-owned Blogger already does that, so presumably they can port that feature. Want to create your own custom templates with a great branded graphic design? Again, Blogger allows that already. Wish that you could have some database-driven content (to populate a member directory or event calendar, for instance)? Google Base kind of does that – potentially they could pull that in too. If they could get all of those things going, they’d have everything that 80% of small nonprofits need in a website, all presumably wrapped up in a friendly and easy to use package. Now that’s exciting.<