There was a great thread recently on the ProgressiveExchange discussion list, about the challenges and options for working with voter files. I didn't know much about this area, so I found the conversation really useful.
The basic problem is that voter files are big. Really big. A statewide voter file - summarizing the registered voters for a particular state - can have millions of entries. The general consensus was that these files are too big to try to read via common office software, like Access or Excel. Excel has a cap on the actual number of rows you can have (the number depends on the version, but it's only around a million even for the most up-to-date versions), and Access is likely to be extremely slow and undependable - and at risk for catastrophic failure and data loss.
So what should you do instead? A number of people suggested outsourcing the data management process - there are folks who specialize in voter files, such as Astro or VAN (Voter Action Network). These services aren't cheap, but they provide a number of benefits. They deal with all the data, and let you just pull the reports, walk sheets, call sheets, etc that you want. They also can be accessed over the internet - a big plus for organizations working with organizers in multiple offices or locations.
It can also be useful to look for other organizations using voter files for the same geographic area - you might be able to share their file infrastructure, or go in together on one of the outsourced services.
If you do want to store the data in-house, the consensus was that you'll want a SQL database back end, optimized by a professional, and likely a specific database server - probably a several thousand dollar investment at a minimum.
The Progressive Technology Project has more info - as well a lot of great resources about technology useful in organizing in their Voter Tech Kit.
We're just winding down now from our work on the Consumers Guide to Grants Management Systems - a project that we worked on for more than six months. It was the biggest, most research intensive report we've ever done as Idealware, and I learned a lot from the process. Here's some of my take-aways, as I reflect on the project overall.
Surveys aren't a great fit for gathering information about software Surveys often seem like a great idea, like a straightforward way to gather a lot of information about what people think about packages. But it's in fact very difficult to get results that tell you much. Distribution is challenging. Getting a representative sample of anyone is infeasible on a limited budget (this would require defining a specific group of people and then trying to get a 50-60% response rate from them - classically, you do this through monetary incentives, follow-up calls, etc), so you need to default to more informal distribution methods.
But it's difficult to ensure that these informal methods gather information from a useful cross-section of people, and they're quite prone to being distorted by a few individuals. You don't have to have evil intent to distort an informal survey - if one enthusiastic user forwards the survey request onto the user group for their favorite package, then your usage numbers are suddenly way off.
And it's hard to interpret the data you've gathered. You need to be very limited and specific in your questions in order to get useful results. For my money, individual interviews - or even focus groups - are a better bang for the buck.
If I had it to do again, I wouldn't have spent nearly as much time on our grants management survey as we did. However, it was very useful for a particular purpose: it helped us to finalize the vendor list. By listing tools and including an "other" category, we heard about all the tools that were in use by the people who answered the survey, and it prompted vendors who weren't listed to contact us.
It's hard to define an evaluation framework before you've reviewed tools I like defined processes, and my tidy brain really wants to interview a bunch of folks about the features they find useful in a software package, translate that into a framework for evaluating tools, and then evaluate tools using that framework. Only one problem: that doesn't work. You can (and we did) translate the interview data into a set of questions to ask, but it's really impossible to determine the key aspects that will be important in comparing software until you've done a number of reviews.
For instance, Document Management was a major theme in interviews, and we asked vendors a number of questions about their features in this area. But for 90% of the features, not a single product had them. While we certainly need to highlight this gap, it's pointless to have a whole evaluation category just to show that every products score poorly.
So in practice, you need to define the questions to ask vendors, do at least four or five reviews, and then come back around to define the evaluation framework. This seems weird and inefficient - for instance, you need to first write up your demo notes so you'll remember what you saw (products blend together mighty fast when you demo 5-10 products in a week or two) and then come back later and translate those notes into your review format. It's way faster to just go straight from notes to review - but if you don't have the evaluation framework completed, you'll need to go back through those reviews later to make them consistent in language and what's evaluated. Which is what we did on this project. It's inefficient, and so tedious but difficult that I worry that it can't be done accurately... without the superhuman diligence of Katie Guernsey, research assistant extraordinaire (thanks, Katie!).
Reporting features are hard to evaluate I'm not entirely happy with our coverage of the reporting features - our comparison is valid, but the vast majority of products were "Advanced" by our scoring system. Are most grants management systems really advanced in reporting? I don't know. Most had quite flexible ad-hoc reporting systems, where you could actually do a lot of slicing and dicing on almost any data element. The real differences, it felt to me, were around ease of use - are the canned reports useful? Can you actually use the ad-hoc tools? This stuff was very difficult to evaluate without specific scenarios - useful for what? To who?
Quick summary reviews work well in tandem with detailed reviews For this report, we spent two to three hours demoing and reviewing each of nine tools, but we also did quick half-hour demos of another eight. These quick looks were more useful than I thought they'd be. While we weren't able to do the same kind of detailed comparison of these packages, we got a good sense of strengths and weaknesses of each, enough to put them in context in the report. I think that doing a number of detailed reviews *first* really helped, though - it gave us a lot of knowledge about what to look for and ask about for the summary reviews.
...But they're really hard to proof We asked each vendors to review their reviews and summaries for errors of fact, and interestingly, it took as long or longer to deal with the comments for the products that had only a little paragraph summary blurbs as with the products that had five-six page detailed reviews. The detailed reviews deal mostly with facts, so often there was no arguing them. On the other hand, the summary reviews generalize - i.e. X product is strong in this area, but is weak in another - and vendors found many things to argue with there. We obviously don't need to get the vendor to agree that they're weak in a certain area, but we wanted to make sure we hadn't gotten any important facts wrong, which was much harder for these summary blurbs.
All in all, I'm really happy with how the report came out. Those of you who have taken a look, what do you think? Are there things you think came out particularly well, or not so well, in the report?
Interested in learning about online advocacy, outreach, list building, website best practices, emailing techniques, viral videos, or more? Colin Delaney of ePolitics has updated his Online Politics 101 handbook. It's a terrific - and funny - introduction to the world of online advocacy, with both broad coverage and practical advice.
To Tweet or Not to Tweet: TechSoup Talks Twitter (TechSoup) TechSoup's online event about Twitter (a social media tool that allows you - or anyone - to send short posts to a group of friends via web or phone) resulted in some good information about whether and how to use the tool. Not familiar with Twitter? Marnie Webb provides a great overview of Twitter resources.
The CIA's Use of Wikis (Enterprise 2.0 Conference) From the Enterprise 2.0 conference, an intriguing case study showing how the CIA is using a wiki to create an internal “Intellipedia” (Tip of the hat to Marc Baizman of Nonprofit CRM)
The realm of blast emailing tools has been a pretty complicated one. Prices were complicated, features varied, and you really had to think through what you wanted in order to be able to effectively compare.
But with the announcement that VerticalResponse now offers 501(c)(3) nonprofits up to 10,000 emails per month for free, does that change? I think it might. VerticalResponse has been on our list of recommended tools for awhile - it's well designed, feature-rich, has strong deliverability, and integrates well with other tools (especially Salesforce). Even without nonprofit discounts, it's a very interesting option. At 10,000 emails for free, well, that might make it the obvious choice for most smaller nonprofits.
I've been taking a much closer look at VerticalResponse than I have before, to try to be able to answer the obvious question: when is it not the best choice?
There's two clear reasons why you'd want to look beyond. First, if you're sending considerably more than 10,000 emails a month - say, 20,000 or more - it's worth comparing prices with other packages. 10,000 emails free is a pretty darn big head start, but VR is considerably more expensive than some packages for higher volumes. Network for Good EmailNow (a stripped down package that's by far the cheapest mass email tool we've found if you're sending high volumes), is cheaper than VerticalResponse when you hit only about 15,000 emails per month.
Second, are you interested in a tool that will track all your constituents, take online payments, etc, in addition to emailing? If so, VerticalResponse is not that, so it makes sense to look instead to the world of integrated online packages.
Beyond that, there's not a lot of clear downsides of VerticalResponse. The features are quite comparatively rich and easy to use. I asked Patrick Shaw, who's been recommending VerticalResponse to the organizations they work with at NPower Seattle for some time, what downsides he sees, and here's the key issues he sees:
Selling credits that can “belong” to an organization, rather than to an individual login. You have to buy or apply your credits via your user name and password. Not big enough of a hassle for us to not like the tool – but a bit no fun – it may mean that users have to share a user name and password, or buy/apply credits so that I might have $500 of credits and my co-worker might, too – and we’d both draw down.
Subscription management. You're required to have a global opt out for all lists in every email, which is both the law and harsh! We’re planning on building a widget for Plone and maybe for PHP that will include the newsletter categories from Salesforce or another database that we can direct people to, so that they have both – the global opt out at the bottom AND the “manage my subscription” at the top.
It's striking to me how detailed he needed to get to find issues with the tool.
The first is a pain for workflow, but not the type of thing that seems like a deal breaker for most smaller nonprofits. The second seems like a bigger deal to me - there's no built in ability to let folks manage their own list preferences (to for instance opt-out out of your Alerts list while staying on your News list), but you're required to allow them to globally opt out of all lists. Allowing users to management their own subscription is certainly a more advanced feature, but findable - that might be a reason to look elsewhere. I'd add to the list the comment that the templates aren't very polished - there's certainly tools that provide more compelling templates out of the box.
And there is always the risk that VerticalResponse reconsiders this donation program when they get a lot of response. I don't have any reason to think this is going to happen, but it is a program that's based on the company's continued generosity, so I think it certainly makes sense to wait a few months before we crown it the new default option.
But if VerticalResponse continues to offer these free emails, I think that's going to shift the market dynamic for nonprofits. It becomes more like the web analytics marketplace, where Google Analytics is the obvious default choice. Like that space, there certainly *are* other packages, and there are valid reasons to use them, but for most organizations it will make sense to start by looking at VerticalResponse and look beyond only if it won't work for them.
We've fully verified and updated our Few Good Web Hosting Providers article - it's been one of those mainstay articles that isn't flashy but folks consistently mention as useful. The original version was from July 2006, so it was time for an update... but in fact, the world of hosting has changed surprisingly little since then. A few providers are becoming more or less reliable, and there's a couple new options in types of hosting, but largely the considerations remain the same.
Over the last few days, there’s been a detailed exchange on the Progressive Exchange discussion list about the lack of gender balance in technology conference speakers – in particular, the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns East DC conference earlier this week.I’ve been giving this a lot of thought of late, and I’m really not comfortable with the implicit assumption that this issue comes down to the fact that there's a bunch of sexist jerks running conferences.This post comes from a post I made to the list, after a lot of consideration.
I think this is a complicated issue, and one that's not going to be resolved just by telling conference organizers they need more women. I can say from my own experience that it's actually darn difficult to find women with expertise in many different technology areas. I've been actively trying to increase the diversity of the Idealware contributor and facilitator pool, and it's not at all easy. In some areas - like online collaboration, or social networking - there are a lot of obvious female experts in the nonprofit sphere. In many others - like CRM, file sharing, accounting packages - I can come up with a dozen guys off the top of my head, but only a few women or none at all.
There's a bunch of reasons for this - many of them centered around the fact that women are less self-promotional, and thus harder to find. Women are less likely to hang out a shingle and be consultants (and there's a slew of reasons for that). Women with the same level of expertise are considerably less likely to consider themselves an expert and post to lists or write articles. They're less likely to be compelled to spend time on things like speaking or contributing to articles to enhance their own profile. If you're organizing a conference, you also have the issue that women are more likely to feel a responsibility to be home with their family rather than traveling. And let's face the facts: there in fact are a lot less women than men doing hardcore IT and technology work (I don't have any hard research, but I'd be really surprised if more than 25% of IT directors are female, even in the nonprofit space. I don't know the area, but I'd be shocked if the same weren't true of execs at Web 2.0 start-ups).
I'm not saying that we're doing all that we can, and the gender imbalance is the way of the world. I am saying that this isn't a simple problem, and it's not going to have a simple solution.
There’s a wiki of female speakers who are interested in conferences, which is a terrific start, and promoting it widely to conference organizers is very useful. Right now the wiki doesn't include many women who focus on nonprofits or work beyond the realm of social media, but if there were, Idealware would certainly use it to try to recruit contributors for our work and events - it would be a huge help to us. I'd also love to see more hard core tech women include themselves, so as to not send the message that women do social media work while men take on the IT and hard core stuff.
I think it's important for women who feel that they'd like to see a better gender balance to list themselves on the wiki - to overcome the feeling (that women are much more likely to have than men, according to research) that they're not qualified enough, and offer the experience that they have. It's on my own list to add myself to the wiki - it's not trivial to list yourself, but worth the effort! And women who want a better gender balance should grow their own experience and reputation by looking to speak more, publish more, etc. Everyone can encourage women technologies to promote themselves more, and mentor women around them to grow more women technologies.
If it's easy to find tons of great, qualified women technologists, then it's much easier to encourage change among conferences. Heck, it's *hard* to find good speakers - of any gender - for conferences, and if there was a ready pool of great women, most organizers would reach out to them just because it was easier.
But right now it's not easy, at all. In my mind, it's not right to put the sole burden on conference organizers to do a bunch of extra work, without those who'd like to see a better gender balance taking some of the burden on themselves to make women in technology easier to find.
2008 CMS Satisfaction Survey (NTEN) A report for NTEN summarizing the results of an informal investigating what content management systems nonprofits are using, and how happy with them they are.
Open Source CRMs: How Do They Stack Up? (NTEN) Great article from Michelle Murrain comparing open source Constituent Relationship Management systems like SugarCRM, CiviCRM, Organizer's Collaborative, and MPower
A Guide to Successful Website Communication (Spin Project) This isn't new, but it's new to me. It's a very useful guide to getting started with websites, including a look at the different types of website you might want.
Benchmarking With A Warped Stick (Nonprofit Times) I'm often troubled by how people use benchmarks - for instance, to measure their website and fundraising success. This article has a lot of the reasons why.
Building a Base with Pledges (Convio) Short but interesting summary of the tactic of asking constituents to pledge to do something as an engagement (and listbuilding?) technique.
Planning an Online Viral Marketing Campaign (Oddcast) Some useful tips (from the business world, but appropriate to nonprofits) about planning an online campaign that you hope will go viral
What the heck have we been up to, since it so clearly hasn't been blogging?
We're thrilled to announce the launch of the "Consumers Guide to Grants Management Systems." The product of more than eight months of research, this 89-page report summarizes the common features and eighteen different systems used by grantmakers to track outgoing funds. We also provide detailed reviews of nine of the most widely used packages, with prices and a comparison chart. Register and download the free report on our partner Solpath's site.
This independent Idealware report, funded by a coalition of organizations including Solpath, is geared specifically to help grantmakers understand and compare the available software packages and pick the one that will work best for them.
Not enought grants management systems for you? More interested in the dynamics of the market? The partner report "Grants Mangagement Software: A View of the Marketplace" looks at the organizational and vendor dynamics that affect the space, how the market is evolving, and gaps in the existing software. And we've also posted the analysis reports from both our interviews and our survey research. Register and download any of this stuff, all at that same link at http://www.solpath.org/reports
Do you know others who might be interested in any of these reports? Please, spread the word! They're report free to anyone. Feel free to repost and pass on these links.
Melanie asks: I'm working with a group of public radio station fundraisers who want a way to communicate regularly online to share tips and tests they have done in conjunction with project we are working on together to increase the number of donors to public radio nation-wide. The consensus of this group is they would like to do this via listserv. I really dislike listservs and would like to find a different option. Especially so we can easily archive and tag the posts. The vast majority of this group tells me they will be most likely to participate if something comes to their email inbox, not if they have to go to a blog to read and make comments. Is there a blog/listserv hybrid solution, perhaps using rss or something like that?
If I hear you right, there are a number of things you want to support in this interaction:
Q&A and sharing of tips within the group via email
Archiving and organizing the tips so they can be found later, especially via tags
You intend to use the offerings as is without synthesis or editing (or not?)
Here are a couple of ideas that come to mind. They offer a bit of variation - so it depends which of the above activities are most important. The real challenge is most discussion tools haven't yet integrated tagging even in web interfaces, and I have not seen any that enable tagging via email. So instead of having people tag as they post, it has to be done post-posting. That adds work. But it probably increases the consistency of tagging. Getting a group unfamiliar with tagging to institute a consistent tagging practice is not so quick nor easy. ;-)
Combine an email list, tagging tool, and wiki. Use an email list with a web repository that offers a permalink to each post, then use an external tagging tool like del.icio.us to tag them. Aggregate those tags automatically into something like a wiki. For example, with Wikispaces you can automatically feed del.icio.us tags into a page. So you can either make a page for each tag, or if there aren't too many tags, aggregate them on one page. If you do this, I suggest that you have an overall tag (like nancycrazyforchocolate) and then a tag that addresses the specific content of the post. This requires somebunny/bunnies to do the tagging. Maybe ask people to take turns doing this and have an initial conversation about shared tagging practices.
Curate the Q&As. The KM4Dev community functions in the day to day via a DGroups email list with a web repository. They pair this with a wiki (using Mediawiki) on their server where they collect "community knowledge" The community practice is whomever asks the question, collects the answers then summarizes them on a wiki page. A template helps organize those who feel a bit intimidated by the practice. Again, DOING this takes time to develop as a community practice. It is finally pretty well adopted by the KM4Dev community, but after 2 years of bugging by yours truly, now known as the wiki pest from the west.
Use a blog but set up email subscriptions. I'm not sure - and this would be good to ask one of our community's blog experts, if there is blog software that not only delivers blog posts by email, but allows posting of comments by email. Here the key practices would be requiring the initiator of the question to actually post it on the blog and tag it initially. And remind people of the power of search.
Finally, I have to ask the hard question. Will people go back and use the archived and tagged material, or will they follow the age old pattern of just asking again? Will they wade through multiple messages or is synthesis going to really add significant value? We find in KM4Dev that community members tend to re-ask, but other, non members, seem to be hitting the wiki, suggesting that the artifacts we've produced are of value beyond the community. But in community, we seem to love that personal response that comes at the moment of asking and answering.
The Ask Idealware posts take on some of the questions that you send us at ask@idealware.org. Have other great options? Disagree with our answer? Help us out by entering your own answer as a comment below.
We've just put up another great article by Peter Campbell, this one summarizing the world of Document Management Systems: Better Organization through Document Management Systems. If you're looking to improve your organization's ability to find, version, and effectively use documents, a DMS can help you out - but too few organizations know anything at all about this area. I know I learned a lot from the article!
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