Idealware

Virtual Office Toolkit

noreply@blogger.com (Johanna Bates) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:15:00 +0000

Since my brick-and-mortar nonprofit org closed its doors, I have been working exclusively virtually, mostly with people who live on the opposite coast. I have a home office in a house I recently moved in to. It's got "vintage" 1975 five-color shag wall-to-wall carpeting (really—see pic to left; that's one of my co-workers, Sadie). But even before my org decided to close, we decided that if we got enough funding to keep our programs alive, we'd become a virtual office to save money, building on a fairly flexible office culture that had been evolving for years.

We were a small organization and most of us were parents. Our workplace culture was one in which we trusted each other to get our work done, even if it wasn't always between 9 and 5. The org made lots of space for people to take care of themselves during the work day—to go to doctor appointments or a kid's event—as long as we got our work done somehow. I telecommuted from time to time, sometimes for a couple months at a time, especially in the early days of parenting. It was a kind of informal flex time, which NPR reports is an increasing trend in some sectors and can allow for a better work-life balance. For me, working flexibly and virtually in this way has definitely improved my quality of life.

Since I work in tech—obviously a type of work conducive to the virtual/flex office—I am aware of more and more virtual orgs and companies as broadband becomes more ubiquitous, and as more people use telecommuting and flex time for various reasons. Some pros and cons...

Pros:

No commuting required. Ahh, so nice.
If you do advocacy work, or promote/cover events, you can use a virtual office setup to work and live blog/Tweet from the field. When appropriate, this can be a great way to promote your cause and engage constituents.
You can work in your pajamas, outside, in front of the fire, in your favorite cafe, or while you're waiting on the bench at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
My favorite pro: you can take breaks to exercise, walk, see a friend or your partner or child, take photographs, or make something. This requires some self-discipline, but the payoff is worth it.
You can work anytime of the day or night, not just 9 to 5.

Cons:

You can work anytime of the day or night, not just 9 to 5. Work and life boundaries can be hard to maintain if you're not really disciplined about it (I am not yet there, myself).
No face time and no spontaneous hall chats that lead to brilliant work-related insights (and fill the need we all have for socializing).

Here's my toolkit:

Laptop, smart phone, and broadband, obviously. I live in a rural area, so I don't take those last two for granted. The town next to mine has no broadband and no cell phone coverage, and a lot of people who work virtually in cafes and libraries as a result.
Telephone & web conference/meeting software: GoToMeeting or ReadyTalk are the two main ways that I have work meetings with my co-workers.
Jing and SnagIt for screen casting and screen shots, respectively. These helps me communicate in certain situations when I would otherwise call a co-worker or client over to look at my computer screen.
Collaboration Software: Basecamp, GoogleDocs, GoogleGroups, CentralDesktop (an alternative to Basecamp), Redmine (open-source ticketing and wiki collaboration software), Groupsite (fancier Ning; hosted social networking, document sharing and collaboration software). These are absolutely key for sharing files and communicating about and managing projects with a group of people.
Instant one-on-one or group communication: Twitter, IM, Yammer and Google Buzz for instant private group convos. Yammer is my new favorite; you can set up a private Twitter-like group, share documents and images, and communicate socially and about work, almost like a virtual watercooler. For me, IM, Yammer and Twitter can help replicate that missing co-worker hall-chat epiphany experience (and some of the socializing).

Are there other virtual office workers or telecommuters out there? If so, what are the best tools in your toolkit?

Gov 2.0 and the Social Sector

sbackman@dbdes.com (steve backman) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:33:00 +0000

“Change” may not be coming to Washington as fast as we expected a year ago. Yet at the grass roots level, in the technology realm, something is definitely happening, and its going to help the policy reform process. The same kind of democratizing, collaborative, open source/open content trend that has swept through nonprofit technology now is gathering momentum in local, state and even national government. That was my overall takeaway from taking part in the March 6 New England Gov 2.0 “Unconference” at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Even if you didn't attend, you can find a lot of notes and material here: http://gov20ne.pbworks.com/ or look for Twitter archives at #gov20ne.

About 250 of us gathered in Cambridge as part of a series of Gov 2.0 summits and informal conferences around the country initiated last year by O’Reilly (the publisher) and other partners. While I have followed these to some degree, this was my first outing. Read more about the national efforts here: http://www.gov2summit.com/. On the related blog, you can sign-up to be part of the nonprofit/public sector connection.

Feeling that my own work straddles the fence between nonprofit and public sectors, I wasn’t sure how I would feel or where I would fit in that day. Right at home: we had an energized mix of public officials, government technology policy staff, nonprofit policy advocates, community activists, software developers, and academic researchers and students. Judging by the conversations at this conference, those working in human services, policy advocacy and political activism need to pay close attention to what is happening here. The public and nonprofit sectors have a lot to learn from each other, they serve common goals, and progress around effective use of data and the web will be mutually reinforcing.

“Data” was likely the biggest buzz word at the conference—open data, sharing data, collaborative data, mapping and visualizing data and so on. This being an unconference, it aimed to self-organized by interest and we started by everyone giving a three words introduction of their background and interest. (Mine way, “share data now.”) Looking at the wordle (word cloud) of those introductions, you can see that data and open information drew many to the conference. (Creative Commons credit to http://www.wordle.net/ for the "Gov 2.0 Camp New England ")

Federal, State and Local Government agencies sit on enormous repositories of data that traditionally gets collected as a matter of course for regulatory reasons. We have business, economic, environmental and other data that advocacy groups need to be more effective. It’s often there but hard to get one’s hands on.

We also have mounds of data extracted from nonprofit social services and educational organizations at tremendous cost of time and infrastructure. Busy staff collect data to satisfy public grants as much or more than private foundation grants. From my point of view, this data may start as your data, yet once it passes to the government, it becomes public data. It makes sense that this data—in aggregated, depersonalized, privacy-protected form—be available back as well for communities to learn from, make their own assessments and evaluations of success and effectiveness.

In the public sector, making public data public serves the general good. Elected officials can commission and use (or ignore, as they see fit) qualitative assessments for policy making. The Gov 2.0 trend represents a desire for transparency around that government policy research.

Meanwhile, social sector advocates and activists have learned a lot about mining data to assess trends, correlate results with demographic and other community factors, and press for results and changes. We are all collectors of data and measurers of outcomes. This experience outside the government is an accelerant that will drive change inside the government. Organizational staff and consultants may gripe about grant requirements, yet we are also increasingly using the experiences to improve our own strategies and organizational management.

Toward a policy of "Data Impact Statements"

What should we look for, expect and advocate for in these realms?

First, the public wants more, easier, fuller access to government data. Yet government agencies have old systems, have legitimate boundaries around confidentiality and privacy, and have tight budgets and overwhelmed staff these days with little room to build elaborate data reporting systems. How do we strike a balance?

Where government agencies collect data, and most do, we should expect increasing transparency about what will be collected, at what cost in agency staffing and in compliance time and cost for those required to submit the data, with what quality, with what expected use internal to the government agency, and with what return back to the public. A few years ago, when incoming Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick asked for testimony to his Transition Teams, I proposed the concept of a standard “Data Impact Statement.” Like an environmental impact statement, government agencies would need to file a statement in a standard, readable format on any new initiative that collected data—individual filings or anything else. The statement would list what was being collected; what privacy, confidentiality, or security concerns there were about it; a pre-emptive judgment of the likely quality of the data; and what provisions the agency planned to make to put the data in the public domain.

In the not so distant future, we should aim that reactive freedom of information lawsuits will fade in favor of proactive Data Impact Statements throughout government. By having Data Impact Statements, at least advocacy organizations and human services agencies would be able to review, comment on, and press for change on what was going to happen with data their communities would provide and what of use they would get back. Over time, we can move toward uniform expectations—and funding to back it up.

Second, we should press that the release of data follow emerging technical standards. Web sites with pages of information, even if searchable, are not the same as reusable, transferable data format. The data evolutionary trajectory goes from text on the web, to tabular data on web pages, to downloadable text or Excel, to XML and now to the emerging concept of RDFa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa and http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/. This year’s new Drupal release, for example, will embrace RDFa as a standard for web services and data exchange. I suspect that other modern data and community oriented software will as well.

Helping people ask, "How would this look on a map?"

Third, where the average person might reasonably ask, “how would this data look on a map,” public data should be presented with geographic information right there for use. The Gov 2.0 conference gave interesting attention to opening up data for spatial analysis, using geographical based information in crises such as Haiti and Chile, and innovative light-weight open source software like Ushahidi for social mobilization and response.

Fourth, even in the midst of glaring global policy issues from health care to the economy to the wars, we should give some attention to reinforcing national leadership coming in the tech sphere. The Obama administration has taken a strong stand on the democratizing of public data. The http://www.data.gov/ web site is both a growing repository of data anyone can use in the policy making process as well as a sounding board for developing technical and policy standards. It is a welcome initiative and I part of the framework that makes the Gov 2.0 conferences so timely.

Let data inform the educational policy debates

Fifth, if data is flooding in to government and beginning to steam out, we need keep a steady eye on privacy and confidentiality issues. Protect privacy yet don't let it derail opening things up.

A good example is in the realms of education policy. Policy advocates want to be able to do their own refactoring of data on mandatory testing, the record of charter schools, programs to reduce educational inequality, and other elements of No Child Left Behind and its local equivalents. Often this data usage gets lost or delayed because of how long it takes to resolve legal issues around protecting individual student and teacher performance data. In this day and age, we should be able to keep individual data confidential and make aggregated data public. We should also be able to let public school systems and community-based youth jobs and enrichment programs securely exchange individual level student data where both sides agree, have signed appropriate agreements, and have family sign-offs as well. This is probably the single most recurring technology related demand from staff I work with on youth and alternative education programs.

Mobile and Social Media And the Gov 2.0 Trend

Sixth, there is better access to existing data and there is creating new data. In particular, an additional important trend is the use Web 2.0 and social media technologies to inform, energize and empower the public. At the conference, probably the most frequently mentioned example of local tech initiative was the local transit authority’s initiative to put realtime tracking of buses and other transit in the hands of the public. Yes, others may have started on this long before Massachusetts. Yet it has been remarkable how quickly local developers rushed to create mobile apps and all kinds of technology ideas have surfaced around the transit data. At one level, having this information helps busy people know whether they can grab that extra cup of coffee and therefore promote local business at a time when the state really needs it. At another level, it will also help transit and environmental activists really focus in on questions about which areas of the city get what kind of service.

As we learned at the conference, many local communities are experimenting with mobile phone-based systems that enable people and organizations to report problems, oversee responses, and work collaborative to improve services.

All these trends and more will also aid business planning and development. For the moment, the main learning and drive in the Gov 2.0 trend is collaboration and sharing among nonprofit and public sector technologists and policy makers. If you aren’t yet following this trend, you need to.

Why Use Widgets Anyhow?

noreply@blogger.com (heather gardner-madras) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:03:00 +0000

I'd like to thank new Idealware blogger Debra Askanase for the inspiration for this post, which actually take from her idea for a post around fundraising and advocacy widgets, and which she graciously let me run with due to my slight obsession with widgets. I look forward to her thoughts on the big picture around this web trend and hope she will post a follow up and others will share their insights in the comments below.

There are many great resources and experts out there on viral strategies that apply to using widgets and I won't try to cover all that here. I'll just attempt to provide a brief overview about what some organizations are doing and what they are using to implement their outreach.

In addition to checking back in on what nonprofits are doing now that Sprout Builder is moving to an enterprise level application only, I started thinking about some of the possible uses and options for viral or "moveable" widgets that nonprofits are likely to see as helpful.

Why use widgets anyhow? Well, widgets are basically movable, sharable mini-applications that can be used to raise donations, take action on a cause or spread information and awareness about your mission. The fact that your message and actions can be placed and seen "where the people" greatly increases your exposure to new potential supporters. Let's take a look as some possible uses and options for each purpose.

Fundraising
Widgets or "badges" have been around for a while to promote and measure online fundraising drives. There are quite a few options if you are just looking to have a basic charity badge that allows donors to give and supporters to set a goal and place their progress on their web sites and social networks.

These types of badges are not usually very interactive and only allow for a logo and/or photo, short description of the cause, link to a video or more information, possibly some sort of progress indicator and of course a donate now button.

Network for Good was a forerunner in this space and has built several different styles of their Charity Badges including the celebrity based SixDegrees.org

Other community or peer to peer fundraising sites like Changing the Present have incorporated sharable widgets as part of each personal fundraising campaign.

Some paid custom types of "make your own" donation widgets provide more flexibilty for both the organization administrator and end user such as Giving Impact. Also check with your donation vendor as they might even offer these tools. I am aware that at least Click and Pledge and Convio do.

Some examples:
Kevin Bacon's 6 degrees badge
ASPCA donation widgets (Convio)

Direct Advocacy
This week Change.org announced its sparkly new petition widgets (powered by DIA) that allow any change.org petition to be embedded and shared and even signed by supporters right on your site as well as customized and shared.

Also a new service called Call2Action provides multiple tab widgets offering both advocacy and donations using video as the engagement hook.

Some examples:
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund has a whole array of advocacy widget options for supporters including mobile campaigns that are worth checking out. They are built on the Clearspring sharing platform*.

And first noted in 2007 by Beth Kanter, the 18seconds.org widget based campaign is still going strong built on Yahoo widget maker.

Awareness Raising & Mission Based Information
This is a pretty broad category and its impossible to cover all the possible ways a widget can be used to get your message out or to distribute meaningful data to your supporters.

News and Blog feeds to supporters
Widgetbox.com seems to have a fairly active nonprofit following that use their widgets in this way including IFAW and the National Wildlife Federation .

Kaboom offers members the opportunity to post progress update widgets for their playground building campaigns which seems to be built on KickApps and shared via Gigya.

Search and Display relevant information
Here are just a few of the widgets I found that provide supporters or the public with pertinent actionable search results wherever they find the widget online.

Kaboom's playspace finder Built on KickApps
Americorps' volunteer opportunities finder Built on Widgetbox
NRDC's What's Fresh local produce finder Originally built on iWidget (now Transpond ) and made shareable with Clearspring*. (full disclosure, I worked on this widget)
FoundationCenter.org's charity IRS form 990 finder Built on Widgetbox

Some other popular awareness raising tools used in widgets are maps, slideshows, videos, polls, quizzes or other interactive content. And of course many organizations also want to offer forms that collect all kinds of data like event registrations and the like as well. For more complex applications you'll want to check out what's possible with KickApps, Widgetbox and Yahoo Widgets already mentioned and the options below.

And some more widget tools for whatever you can dream up.

Simple Stuff
Display RSS feeds of nearly anything - Grazr
Simple & multi-tab flash banners - BannerSnack

Flexible Flash "mini-site" producers
WIX
Produle
Ahead.com (but I couldn't get their site to load)

Custom application options and intense Facebook integration
Transpond ($2,400 You build. $4,000 We build)
Involver (Facebook applications - some free)
Get Social Apps

And Open Source fans will want to keep an eye on the variety of options that Peter Dietz at Social Actions has collected on his list of Action apps.

And finally a short Sprout Builder update

Via various Facebook comments on Beth Kanter's fan page I found this:

Beth Kanter "Here's what we learned - they're going to continue to serve existing nonprofit clients - reach out to Trudy Marquardt "

Other nonprofit staff have reached out to Sprout Builder and been told that the discount is good for one year only at half off ($1500 paid up front) the regular fee $3000. There is no official word from Sprout Inc yet, so there is no way to tell if this applies to everyone or how long the offer stands. I still strongly recommend Sprout using nonprofits contact them right away to see what can be worked out for your organization.

* And in other widget making news, ClearSpring is now transitioning to AddThis platform for sharing & distribution - so their previous platform is going away. (hat tip Andrew Watson's interesting take on all this) If you build your own widget in HTML or flash and just need the sharing ability it looks like this is still free.

Also, several options I listed in previous posts are now offline including poplfly, iWidgets and Blist. Dapper has split into a paid advertising site and an open source community for data mapping widgets now at http://www.dapper.net/open/

Hopefully all the turbulence these services are experiencing will settle down. If you take a look all the things nonprofits are doing with sharable content and engagement you realize how many more possibilities there are. And its looking like movable apps and widgets are a core constituent in the distributed world of Web 2.0. So if you want to start sharing through widget you'll need to be careful selecting your service partner, keep assets backed up and have a fall back plan. Which of course also applies to pretty much everything.

So have fun widget building and as always, please Share your widgets, strategies and vendor experiences in the comments and help build on this post for your colleagues - after all, its all about the shared content - thanks!

Building Websites for a Mobile Phone

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:08:00 +0000

As more and more people use mobile phones, how do you ensure they can see your website on it?

Well, there's nothing magical about it. Most mobile phones can view sites using the same HTML that you would use for regular websites So it's very likely that people currently can see your website on their phone. However, mobile phones tend to intepret HTML standards much more harshly than other browsers, and mobile screens are tiny compared to a computer screen. So what your site looks like or whether anyone can actually use it on a phone is another story.

There's two possible ways to go to create a better mobile experience. You can optimize your current site so that it's more viewable by folks on a mobile phone. This would mean making sure your code is compliant with XHTML standards and moving key content and navigation to the upper left -- so it's more likely to appear without a lot of scrolling. Highlighting the text that's currently selected is also very important for mobile phones, as it's often hard on these devices to tell exactly where your cursor is.

If people on mobile phones are a key part of your website audience, you'll be able to support them much better by making a mobile specific website. This would be a separate website, designed specifically for smaller screens, with less images and text, and to allow people to get the information they're likely to be looking for faster. You could either have a separate URL for your mobile site (like mobile.idealware.org), or you can try to detect that a user is accessing your site through a mobile device, and show them the mobile optimized site accordingly.

Want more information? Here's some good links:

How to Design a Mobile Website

7 usability guidelines for websites on mobile devices

Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox: Mobile Usability

Others have tips or links to share?

New report: Using Social Media to Meet Nonprofit Goals

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:56:00 +0000

A couple of months back, we conducted a survey of nonprofit staff members who were already using social media for their organization. We wanted to know what tools they were using, but more, we wanted to know what they thought was working. Specifically, we asked about seven tools or types of tools: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, video-sharing sites, photo-sharing sites and blogs.

The analysis and results are finally here. Download the report Using Social Media to Meet Nonprofit Goals: The Results of a Survey (free registration required)

A few quick highlights to whet your interest:

Generally, respondents felt social media channels were effective for enhancing relations with an existing audience and reaching out to new supporters, but considerably less so for raising money.
Twitter was in the top three channels for every goal, and was considered the most-effective channel for reaching potential new supporters.
Although Facebook was the most widely used tool by a considerable margin, and the one that those not yet using were most likely to start, it was seen as the most-effective only in terms of raising money-and then, only by a small margin.
MySpace was not widely used, and ranked lowest for each of the three goals. LinkedIn was considered comparatively effective for fundraising, but lagged behind everything but MySpace for the other goals.

The analysis and report were made possible with the generous support of Firefly Partners, Balance Interactive, and Beaconfire.

View all the results and analysis online at www.idealware.org/sm_survey/

New Faces, Blog Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Campbell) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:49:00 +0000

Laura let everyone know last week that Idealware's web site is up for a major upgrade, coming soon. The Idealware blog won't be left behind -- we're happy to announce new bloggers and some other important changes that coincide with the Web Site update. Here's what you'll want (and need) to know:

New Bloggers!

We're growing the blog roster, with an eye towards landing at ten bloggers posting about twice a month, for a healthy and diverse amount of content focused on helping nonprofits use software and technology to serve their missions. Joining Heather Gardner-Madras, Steven Backman, Eric Leland, Laura Quinn and myself are:

Johanna Bates has a strong background in technology management, with special knowledge of the web and online communications.

Debra Askanase brings her background of 20 years of community organizing with a focus and expertise in how nonprofits use social media to the blog.

Andrea Berry, who currently serves as Idealware's Director of development, brings her expertise in fundraising and donor management systems to the blog.

Marc Baizman brings a broad range of tech skills to the blog, with a background as both a nonprofit technology director and consultant in the sector.

New RSS Address!

Take note that, if you're one of the hundreds of people who subscribe to this blog in an RSS Reader, we will be moving to a new RSS address. You can change your settings now, and that's recommended, as the old feed will stop updating once we're on the new site. The address is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/idealwareblog

(Just click on that link to subscribe)

It's All About You

As we make changes and improvements to the blog, we're eager to hear from you. What do you look to get from the Idealware blog? What works? What doesn't? What would you like to see more of? What burning topics are we failing to address? With a bigger group of bloggers and a renewed focus, we want to write about the things that you'd like to know more about. Feel free to offer your suggestions any time, either in the comments, or to Idealware at our Twitter feed or Facebook page.

Three Great Nonprofit Resource Opportunities

noreply@blogger.com (Debra) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:39:00 +0000

Do you tell your nonprofit's stories online? Do you leverage your online community to raise funds? Do you have a great group of enthusiastic online supporters? If so, there are a three timely opportunities for you to enter to win cash, rewards, and recognition for your organization. Interested?

1. Conduit Gives 2010
Conduit will donate money to 100 selected nonprofits
However, it's more than a simple donation; Conduit will donate money for every click on the "click to give" button of a custom Conduit toolbar. If selected, Conduit will help your nonprofit create a custom toolbar (called a "custom conduit") that you can distribute to your online stakeholders. The toolbar can be customized in many ways that benefit your organization, but it will also contain an exclusive "click to give" button on the toolbar. Selected organizations can offer this toolbar to community members, and each time someone clicks on the button, conduit donates to the organization.

To apply, check out their FAQ page and application here.
This contest, offered by Conduit Gives 2010, ends March 1, 2010.

The catch:
Do you have an active Ning, Facebook, MySpace, or private label community? If you don't have one already, does your organization have existing assets that it can leverage to easily create one (such as an active, large, email list, alumni list, etc.)? According to the Conduit Gives 2010 FAQ: "Non-profits will be selected based on their expressed need and their plan/commitment to promoting the program to their community." To me, this means that organizations that already have a vibrant online community have a much better opportunity of being selected by Conduit for participation. Think about it: Conduit is also interested in exposing users to its Conduit platform, in giving away funds (if they don't give away much money, then that would be bad for PR), and in helping organizations raise funds. One other important note: I cannot find any reference in the online literature as to how much money Conduit will donate for each click.

Here's a screen shot of the custom toolbar that was created for The Staley Foundation:

2. Getty Images' Grants for Good
Getty Images is offering two Grants for Good to facilitate nonprofit storytelling

Getty Images wants to work with photographers or videographers that want to tell nonprofit stories. According to the website, "our Grants for Good provide two grants of $15,000 annually, to cover photographer, filmmaker and agency costs as they create compelling new imagery for the nonprofit of their choice." They want to help nonprofits develop imagery that "furthers the
strategic communication objectives and mission of a nonprofit organization."

The good news for nonprofits outside the United States, is the communications professional or agency can choose any nonprofit to work with, anywhere in the world, as long as the nonprofit is officially registered in its own country.

To apply, check out the Grants for Good page with downloadable FAQs, application, and judging information.
This contest, offered by Getty Images, ends March 1, 2010.

The catch (actually, there are several):
A professional photographer (or filmmaker) and a communications agency together must apply for the grant. Advertising and communications agencies are "seen as essential partners to the 2010 Grants for Good program." In addition, the applicant must select a nonprofit that it will work with on an image project prior to the application process. The application cannot be submitted by a nonprofit; it must be submitted by the image maker or the agency. The $15,000 grant will be split by the photographer and the communications agency.

The biggest criteria for selection, as far as I can tell are how the images will be used, and the strength of the image professional's portfolio. This is emphasized in the application process PDF document. If you are a nonprofit that has a clear idea of what story you need to tell to further your mission, how telling that story visually will help you to do that, and you know of a professional filmmaker or photographer that you want to work with, apply!

3. Fourth Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards
Win up to $10,000 in grants (plus awards! plus publicity!) with your nonprofit's video

YouTube and See3, along with sponsoring organizations The Case Foundation, the Nonprofit Technology Network, and Flip Video have teamed up for the Fourth Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards. If you are a registered nonprofit in the US, the UK, Canada, or Australia, and your are part of YouTube's nonprofit program, then submit any video (or videos) that you made in 2009. Sixteen final videos will be selected on the basis of message, use of video, quality of video, and creativity. Top prize winners will be selected from among the sixteen finalist through a community voting process.

To apply, go to YouTube's Nonprofit Video Awards page for application and voting details.
Application deadline is March 16, 2010

The catch:
While the best sixteen videos (top four in each awards category) are selected by the judges, the public will choose the top winners in each category. Other limitations have been previously stated above.

So - submit your best video of 2009 and let the stories be viewed!
It's all explained clearly in this short video:

Will you be entering any of these contests? Look forward to hearing about your entries!

What is Customer Service?

sbackman@dbdes.com (steve backman) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:28:00 +0000

It’s as hard or harder evaluating customer service for software you might adopt than evaluating the software itself. Mainstream computing magazines tend to drown us in all the new features without making the time or resources to evaluate how long choices will last.

By contrast, last year’s Idealware.org assessment of open source content management systems advised, in part, that what you select in the end may have a lot to do with confidence in who will be your line of support. While evaluating service from consultants is different from generally anonymous commercial enterprises, there is a lot to be said to looking at standards, positive and negative, set by those with the most resources.

At home we are coming to the end, I hope, of a protracted process of updating our cable access subscription. Last fall, when we added Internet and phone service to our Comcast TV account, we took for granted that since the physical pipe out to the Internet would be the same, service would remain the same or even get better. As it happened, there were some kinks in the upgrade process. Even so, despite the need for several service visits to our house, I come out of this with nothing but admiration for Comcast customer service. And it made me think hard about customer service standards that we and colleagues might have.

Thinking back, I can tick off some lessons and for the most part admired in the response. And before that, let me add, this does not mean I’m necessarily endorsing Comcast products over other options. Please: that's a different article! And the service standards may vary nationally. I did see some at least regional service standards that I found admirable.

1. If you have a customer service response line, monitor it. I’m sure many of us have experienced the routine follow up survey after service on a car or such thing. Usually pro-forma and you don’t really expect much back if you had issues. In this case, after the initial upgrade, before even calling back, I posted honest comments about where we stood on a generic Comcast customer satisfaction form. Definitely not irate, but not entirely happy.

Quite surprised, within a day I got a phone call from a regional office quality assurance manager. She identified herself by name, gave us a direct phone line to her desk, let me know her hours of availability, and said she would stick with us until our issues were resolved. Latoya patiently listened to everything and got the wheels moving. Since then, she has responded to all our inquiries and followed the case through. Very impressive. Thanks, Latoya!

2. Don’t blame the customer. My wife Linda and I had direct contact with a bunch of different field and office staff. At no point did they blame us for being stupid, not following instructions, exaggerating problems, not “reading the manual,” not being able to isolate incidents or any such thing. It was quite refreshing. When they came on site, they questioned us carefully, and then went about their work. Every time they tried something new, they explained what they were doing, showed us the monitoring tools they used yet didn’t expect us to grasp the intricacies.

3. Don’t ignore the customer’s expertise. This precept balances the previous one. I’m sure most everyone has had the computer company phone support calls experience, where they completely ignore your technical level of expertise, make you go through painful diagnosis steps even when you are pretty sure you know what the problem is. “Are sure, really sure, really really sure you have paper in that printer? I’ll wait while you check.” Doctors and hospitals can be like this too, for sure. Well, at least with technology, if you have skills, you often want to participate, both to get to the solution faster and to advance your own knowledge. The Comcast folks wanted to hear what we had tried on our own, note our subjective impressions on the issues, take it all seriously and incorporate it into their own diagnostics. This is the other side of the previous point, and we appreciated both.

4. Be prepared to support what you offer. We used our neighborhood association email list to see who else might be having problems. We overlaid this “grass roots” information over incident research Comcast did. It turned out some that cabling further away from where we live needed replacement. I’m imagining that as more people took the promotions to upgrade, demand grew and aging switching equipment faced greater stresses. (Kind of ATT’s mobile broadband woes writ small.) Suddenly cables and switches around the neighborhood had to be checked and upgraded. You wish it had been happening before all the past year’s upgrade promotion offers and not after more folks started upgrading, yet once Comcast saw the problems, they escalated the field response to “plant” to deal with it. Manholes opened up and new cables put in.

5. If the customer has made a mistake, discuss it matter of factly without recrimination. As the field response escalated, a senior “plant” level engineer came on site. While not saying we did anything wrong technically, the engineer was not pleased that when we continued to have problems, we didn’t call him back directly. He had also given us a direct line cell phone number. I had misplaced it, and figured since we already had a “friend” in the Central Office, I should just stick with her. That turned out to be not the best, since it led to different field people coming out, the “plant” team losing sight of our situation. It muddied their diagnosis. I could tell the guy was irked both because he had lost time and information on fixing the problem, and also just maybe because the Central Office had expressed impatience. Yet he never blamed us or said we had made things worse. I appreciated that. We listened and learned and after that, made calls to both, and the response closed in on solutions faster.

6. Especially if they are not all “yours,” be sure of your entire chain of service delivery. Comcast is a unionized workforce, with senior service engineers with impressive experience. They also use contractors. The initial crew who came out to do the upgrade were contractors. We were impressed with their initiative in making improvements to our wiring and so on. Yet much later on, Comcast field staff took a closer look at the cable modem and some of the new wiring. The cable modem was both late model and refurbished. Nothing necessarily wrong with that since it’s theirs and they are supporting it. But it took a long time after we had started having problems before anyone thought of just swapping it out. Ditto for the VOIP phone wire they put in. I have no idea whether the contractor work orders ever went from their home office back to Comcast, and it was a missing piece of information for quite a while.

7. Stick with the customer. At one point, we gave Latoya the option to just give us up, cut their losses, and move on. I bet we have all at one point or another been in a project that, hmm, hadn’t gone as smoothly as everyone hoped. What we both most appreciated was Comcast’s commitment to making us whole. Latoya said plain and simple Comcast doesn’t walk away from their customers. We in the nonprofit sector may expect that kind of ethic as well, and it’s much harder for a small consulting practice than for giant Comcast. Yet it’s not the kind of commitment that one necessarily expects to see from the big impersonal guys out there. Given that it will probably take five years or more of billings to us before Comcast balances out the cost of all the service calls, I’m especially impressed. For what its worth, here is the "Comcast Credo."

Now should we measure our sense of Toyota’s responses to its current crisis against these kinds of criteria? I personally don’t know enough about Toyota to comment. Commentators are wondering what they knew and when they knew it and say it will take a long time for Toyota to fully recover its previous reputation.

And the experience made me reflect back on an experience we had a year or so ago. We were consulting with a client on what to do about commercial software they had previously licensed from a national nonprofit vendor. They felt they were not getting the service they deserved given their annual costs. The organizational staff dealing with the software publisher definitely had above average internal technical ability. Yet open tickets lingered for weeks and months. We asked the client to give the vendor another chance and let us look into things. When we called and said among other things we were evaluating whether the relationship was a good one, all of a sudden, things started to fall into place. We had calls directly from a senior corporate officer. We got technical information we could translate into action and relay to the client. Service has improved and the organization is still using the software. But the whole process left me with an uncomfortable taste and came back to me as I wrote this post.

Despite our problems with Comcast, I come away prepared to recommend them again because of these elements of their response, and in fact just have to a co-worker making the same switch. I wrote this without researching what’s out there for customer service guidelines, , and I’m sure they exist and maybe readers will post them. And I haven't checked whether my experience was typical and so on. Its just based on what I observed here. I liked what I saw.

Coming Soon: A Brand New Idealware Website

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:43:00 +0000

I admit it: we're like the shoemaker's kids over here. Our current website is sadly lacking in a number of areas, like, say, the ability to find an article, or the ability to easily post anything.

But all that's about to change! Within the next month, we'll have a shiny new site, way better organized, friendlier, and easier to use. In particular, it will be primarily organized around "Topic" pages, to be able to see everything we've got in one place. Interested in software for fundraising? The Fundraising topic page will lead you to all our relevant articles, reports, seminars, and blog posts all in one place.

Corresponding with the website, we're also taking a look at our blog approach. Peter Campbell, always an Idealware blogger extraordinaire (and a new Idealware board member-- hooray!), is now taking the healm of the blog. There won't be any alarming changes, but under his guidance, you'll see some new bloggers and an increase in posts. More from Peter on that soon.

But I can't post about the new website without thanking all the people who helped out with it. We've done the entire website with volunteered and bartered services. It's not always been a smooth road, but we're arriving at a great place, with the help of:

Jeff Herron, Beaconfire -- Project Management
Sam Reynolds and Michael Weiss, Imagistic -- Information Architecture
David Guilhufe -- Drupal configuration and dev site hosting
Liza Pagano -- Graphic Design
Ben DiMaggio and Victoria Merriman, Digital Loom -- Drupal configuration and theming
Carl Diesing, DNL OmniMedia -- Democracy in Action Salsa adviser
Peter Campbell -- Article migration and blog configuration

Sprout Builder cancelling its subscription services - now what?

noreply@blogger.com (heather gardner-madras) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:09:00 +0000

Just about a year ago I posted about Sprout Builder (an online do-it-yourself flash widget maker) changing from free service to a paid subscription model and the implications for nonprofits wanting a low cost entrée into the world of flash widgets for social networks and slide shows etc. Yesterday Sprout Builder announced their plan to shut down the lower levels of service, focusing instead on enterprise ($3000/year or $250/month) level services. It seems they didn't amass enough smaller subscribers to keep the service going at lower levels. While this is understandable, especially in light of the recession, what matters to nonprofits using the service is - what does this mean for us?

First, if you currently use Sprouts and want to know the details, you'll want to check out the Sprout Builder FAQ on timing. While administrative access will cease at the end of March it looks like your Sprouts will be viewable through the middle of May, so there is a bit of time to come up with alternative solutions for presenting your content.

Here is the original post about Sprout Builder alternatives. It sums up my exploration of what options existed last year with similar functionality. I haven't had time to look around and see what's changed yet - what's better now, what else has gone away and what's new.

Since posting the announcement on my personal blog yesterday I have seen a good deal of frustration and panic in the response to losing their Sprouts, especially from those that ponied up for the paid service which, while generous for nonprofits, was still a significant budget item for some. I am trying to go with the "every crisis is an opportunity" model myself and am wondering how we can utilize this unexpected change to our advantage.

Maybe its time to reevaluate that content being served up in widget form - is it still the best way to get your organizations message across? Many things have changed in the past year so maybe another avenue that wasn't such a great option last year is now a stronger option. Or that the cost and effort of doing "viral" outreach might be better spent improving your email campaigns or other web 1.0 technologies. Or it might lead to the discovery of an even cooler widget possibility, a mash up you wanted to do but that Sprout didn't support.

In any case its a good reminder to always evaluate free and low cost third party services in terms of their longevity and your access to your content and data. As Michelle Murrain pointed out at this time last year "Web2.0 won't be free for much longer" and it pays to have a back up plan and backups.

But Sprout Builder was such a cool inexpensive way to produce some really great flash widgets that it will be sorely missed by the smaller nonprofits who can't afford to hire a flash developer to replace them. So please use the comments to let us know what you think about the similar services, other ways to create simple interactive widgets and what your plan is to replace your existing Sprouts. A lot of people are now in a tight spot due to this announcement and under a deadline to recreate their outreach materials and the hope is we can help each other out.

One newcomer I have seen suggested is Ahead (http://ahead.com), but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet and would love to hear about folk's experience with this or the other alternatives.

Supported Open Source

noreply@blogger.com (Johanna Bates) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:04:00 +0000

I’m at an interesting intersection in my career path. I just concluded eight years at a small, statewide health care reform nonprofit in Massachusetts called Community Partners. I was Technology & Strategy Director there. Like so many orgs around us, we went under a month ago due to the bad economy. Though I am sad to lose my wonderful co-workers, it was coming for a long time, so I was somewhat prepared. A long time ago, other organizations and foundations started asking me lots of technology questions. This has naturally parlayed into consulting.

At this juncture where I have a sense of what it's like to work in a small org and am also looking at and helping larger orgs and foundations to make decisions about tech and use it in smart ways, I’m thinking a lot about something I call "supported open source."

"How do I choose a CMS?" is one of the most frequent questions I get. "Should I go with a closed but well-supported system or should I venture out into the Badlands of Open Source?" There is another way! That is supported open source.

The perception is often that if you choose open source—even if you hire additional expertise to initially build your site—you have to have skills in-house to keep it going after launch. I think the perception that you're on your own with open source is one of the barriers to its adoption for many businesses and nonprofits. But there are companies and consultants that will stick around, long after your site is launched, to give you the help and support you need. And there are different ways of doing this based on your org's budget.

At Community Partners, we ran things on a shoestring. I build web sites, but I don't write custom PHP code. When we wanted to use a profile module to collect contact information from users on our Drupal site and sync it with our Access mailing list database (yes, I know... Old Skool...), I found the module. It didn't work right. This functionality was a priority for us, though. Luckily, we maintained a contractual relationship with a Drupal consultant who would help us out with our site when our budget allowed. We only paid him to help us when something was broken, or when we wanted a new feature we couldn't implement ourselves and we had the funds to do it.

Having someone you can pay to give you support only when you need it is clearly cheapest way to go. If you're rolling in money, however, having a company on-call 24-7 to support you with anything you need is the other end of the spectrum. And everything in between exists. I want to disclose here that at present, I have a paid relationship with a consulting firm called OpenIssue LLC, which offers a spectrum of services for open source CMS platforms. I am working with them because I am becoming increasingly convinced that supported open source is has some serious advantages for our sector.

I am dogmatic about not being dogmatic, and the needs and mission of an org should always determine what technology they choose, not the other way around. You're never married to a piece of software and you should change platforms if and whenever it serves you. But particularly during this time of economic uncertainty, there is something comforting to me about software that's being developed by a worldwide brain trust. Open source software can't be yanked out from under you if funds (temporarily) disappear, or if a contract expires, because we all own it.

Though this community code base can be messy, open source development specialists know how to clean it up for you. So you get that worldwide scope of innovation, plus the focused attention on your org's particular needs. For orgs that want to stay innovative but don't always have cash flow, this can be a great solution. Ongoing support can be stopped and re-started as needed when there are budget troubles.

I know of a few companies out there that explicitly offer ongoing support for open source platforms. My fave among these is PICnet. Non-Profit Soapbox is designed to be an affordable, fully hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) way for nonprofits to build sites quickly and easily in the Joomla! CMS. PICnet has been around for a long time, and honestly I don't know why more companies aren't offering open source SaaS for nonprofits. Seems like a great idea to me. Here are a couple more companies that offer ongoing support:

Community IT Innovators (CITI)
Jazkarta

I predict more of these companies will emerge in the coming year, and I think it will be a great leap forward for our sector. Do you know of a company or a consultant that offers ongoing support for open source software platforms? If so, I'd love to know about them. Please add them in the comments.

Scott Berkun on Public Speaking

sbackman@dbdes.com (steve backman) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:44:00 +0000

People who read and write about technology often find themselves giving talks about it as well. If you find yourself in that situation, you owe it to yourself to pick up Scott Berkun's Confessions of a Public Speaker (O'Reilly, 2009). The book takes a practical, engaging, fun, personal—at times painfully personal--look at public speaking. Berkun offers the vantage point of someone who has begun to speak professionally—earning a living giving paid keynotes and other lectures for a fee. I suspect that readers of this blog who occasionally speak at conferences, regularly do formal trainings, or take part in team project presentations will find it fun and useful.

The lessons of Confessions for technologists are more implicit than explicit. Snap-shot-sized chapters walk you through stage fright, “bad rooms,” hostile crowds, tiresome questioners and more. Much of it common sense reminders probably not dissimilar from those of my high school public speaking teacher, Mrs Buckwald. Here, they are usefully updated for the latest in conference speaking environments.

While Berkun keeps his observations, he comes from a tech background. He first caught my eye with The Art of Project Management (O'Reilly, 2005). We wrote this after exiting Microsoft having worked as a Microsoft program manager for Internet Explorer versions 1 through 5.

Reading the book from the tech vantage point made me wonder, does speaking or writing about technology have the same challenges as speaking or writing about anything else? While geek knowledge has a certain unavoidable vogue these days, I suspect most of us would say that tech oriented presenting, popularizing, planning has special obstacles and opportunities. And so after breezing through Berkun's short book, I went back through it looking for implicit lessons. I suspectyou will as well, and they are there. I'll leave you with one:

Berkun spends a bunch of time on speaker and workshop evaluation forms. He opens by sharing what seems like a pretty good score for himself at some speaking engagement. He then dissects its false objectivity. His discussion of typical formulaic evaluation forms rang true.

What interested me is that he then drops in three sets of questions that might give more useful feedback to and about a speaker. The first two seem general enough to apply to any speaker on any topic, including wonderfully transparent questions like, “Was this a good use of your time?” and “Are you considering doing anything different as a result of this talk?” (p122).

He later on suggests a third set of questions (p 136) as something a speaker might send out by email a few days after the event. I liked these best (paraphrased a bit here) because they homed in what matters most in a tech presentation:

Do [you] have any new questions now that [you're] back at work?
Did [you] use anything [the speaker] said? What happened?
Is there a topic that now, since [you are] back at work, [you] wish [the speaker] had covered?
Can you suggest ways to make the experience … more active, engaging, or interesting?

Tech workshop presenters often imagine that the real value of the talk will only when participants return home and try to do something. These questions came alive for me, and I'll probably try to adapt them.

Talking or writing about technology (including in this blog) risks just making up for deficiencies in technical documentation. There wouldn't be the catchy O'Reilly “Missing Manual” series name if this didn't strike a chord. Yet gathering 20, 30, 100 people in a room to hear and see how the basics work on something is neither that efficient or environmental. At the other extreme, tech talks can become so trendy abstract that a day later when you try to explain them to someone else, they seem to be intentional or unintentional marketing pitches for things at best in beta. Or maybe they’d be better suited for science fiction conferences (though nothing wrong with that).

Drawing my own conclusions, seems useful to think in terms of striking three balances in presenting technology to busy people trying organize projects, make intelligent software choices for this year or otherwise work on:

Instructing on a mix of some key basic things to help beginners get started (the Missing Manual) while also giving intermediate to advanced users a few joyous ah ha moments to also go home and try.
Providing a manageable set of new information directly while also offering a resources and options for further learning.
Speaking or writing to the here and now while also providing transformative insights that motivate commitment and excitement for the long haul. (See Berkun's chapter on "The Clutch is Your Friend").

Check out the book and Scott’s blog at http://www.scottberkun.com. I think you’ll appreciate it. And if you want to get a taste of him speaking, check out this or other videos out there.

The Buzz Factor

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Campbell) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:36:00 +0000

Long time readers of my ramblings here are aware that I drink the Google kool-aid. And they also know that I've been caught tweeting, on occasion. And, despite my disappointment in Google's last big thing (Wave), I am so appreciative of other work of theirs -- GMail, Android, Picasa -- that I couldn't pass up a go with their answer to Facebook and Twitter, Buzz.

Google, perhaps because their revenue model is based on giving people ad-displaying products, as opposed to selling applications, takes more design risks than their software-developing competitors. Freed of legacy design concepts like "the computer is a file cabinet" or "A phone needs a "start" menu", they often come up with superior information management and communication tools.

What is Buzz?

Buzz, like Twitter and Facebook, and very much like the lesser used Friendfeed, lets you tell people what you're up to; share links, photos and other content; and respond to other people's posts and comments. Like Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter (if you use a third party service like Twitterfeed), you can import streams from other services, like Google Reader, Flicker, and Twitter itself, into your Buzz timeline.

Unlike Twitter, there is no character limit on your posts. And the comment threading works more like Facebook, so it's easy to keep track of conversations.

How is Buzz Different?

The big distinguishing factor is that Buzz is not an independent service, but an adjunct of GMail. You don't need a GMail account to use it, but, if you have one, Buzz shows up right below your inbox in the folder list, and, when a comment is posted on a Buzz that you either started or contributed to, the entire Buzz shows up in your inbox with the reply text box included, so that continuing the conversation is almost exactly like replying to an email.

The Gmail integration also feeds into your network on Buzz. Instead of actively seeking out people to follow, Buzz loads you up from day one with people who you communicate regularly with via GMail.

Privacy Concerns

Buzz's release on Tuesday spawned a Facebook-like privacy invasion meme the day that it was released -- valid concerns were raised about the list of these contacts showing up on Buzz-enabled Google Profile pages. A good "get rid of Buzz" tutorial is linked here. To Google's credit, they responded quickly, with security updates being rolled out two days later. I'm giving Google more of a pass on this than some of my associates, because, while it was a little sloppy, I don't think it compares to the Facebook "Beacon" scandal. Google didn't think through the consequences, or the likely reaction to what looked like a worse privacy violation than it actually was (contact lists were only public on your profiles if you had marked your profile "public", and there was a link to turn the lists off, it just wasn't prominently placed or obvious that it was necessary). Beacon, in comparison, started telling the world about every purchase you made (whether it was a surprise gift for your significant other or a naughty magazine) and there was no option for the user to turn it off. And it took Facebook two years to start saying "mea culpa", not two days.

Social Media Interactions for Grownups

Twitter's "gimmick" -- the 140 character limit -- defines its personality, and those of us who enjoy Twitter also enjoy the challenge of making that meaningful comment, with links, hashtags, and @ replies, in small, 140 character bursts. It's understood now that continuing a tweet is cheating.

Facebook doesn't have such stringent limits, but you wouldn't necessarily know that to glance at it. It hasn't shaken it's dorm room roots; it's still burdened by all of the childish quizzes and applications; and, maybe more to the point, cursed by a superficiality imposed by everyone having an audience composed of high school buds that they haven't seen for a decade or two, and who might now be on the other side of the political fence.

But Buzz can sustain a real conversation -- I've seen this in my day and a half of use. Partially because it doesn't have Twitters self-imposed limit or Facebooks playful distractions; and largely because you reply in your email, a milieu where actual conversation is the norm. This is significant for NPOs that want to know what's being said about them in public on the web. I noted from a Twitter post this week that the Tactical Philosophy blog had a few entries discussing the pros and cons of Idealists' handling of a funding crisis. But Twitter wasn't a good vehicle for a nuanced conversation on that, and I can't see that type of dialogue setting in on Facebook. Buzz would be ideal for it.

The Best is Yet to Come

This week, Google rolled out Buzz to GMail. Down the road, they'll add it to Google Apps for Domains. The day that happens, we'll see something even more powerful. Enterprise microblogging isn't a new idea -- apps like Yammer and Socialcast have had a lot of success with it. I'm actually a big fan of Socialcast, which has a lot in common with Buzz, but I was stumped as to how I could introduce a new application at my workplace that I believe would be insanely useful, but most of the staff can't envision a need for at all. What would have sold it, I have no doubt, is the level of email integration that Buzz sports. By making social conversations so seamlessly entwined with the direct communication, Google sells the concept. How many of you are trying hard to explain to your co-workers that Twitter isn't a meaningless fad, and that there's business value in casual communication? Buzz will put it in their faces, and, daunting as it might be at first, I think it will win them over.

Little Things Can Mean A Lot: Email Signatures

noreply@blogger.com (heather gardner-madras) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:38:00 +0000

Easily Overlooked Opportunities to Polish your Brand Online

This is the second of a handful of small ways to extend your organization's brand through out your online presence.

As I was trying to come up with a good handful of easy wins I thought immediately of the email signatures. I have seen some great ones on various mailing lists and some that make me cringe. Plus no list like this would be complete without a mention of this free way to improve your branding on a daily basis. So I started with Google, as I always do, to see what the prevailing wisdom is on these - sure enough I found out that I am not alone in my thinking and I found two great articles right away.

After reading through the brief summary below, I highly encourage you to check out Nancy Schwartz's definitive article and Jon Stahl's fantastic real world case study from at Groundwire (formerly One NW).

Make the most of your last word
When you talk about email and nonprofits E-newsletters and donation appeals come to mind immediately, but in this case I'm talking about the last lines in regular day-to-day emails that staff send to each other and those outside the organization. Internally having a set (or set of) on mission and on brand signatures can reinforce professionalism and a sense of unity. And when you communicate with the outside world, the value of these snippets becomes even more apparent in solidifying your identity and purpose in the readers mind.

What should your organization's email signature include?
Obviously you'll want to have your name, position and contact information.

You should keep this under control though and if you find that your signature is regularly longer than the email itself, it's probably too long.

What else?
Add your branding, tagline, website or maybe a tagline and link for your current campaign - action or fundraising.

Think long and hard about adding a logo graphic though - simple and consistent more important than flashy. Think of this as subtle reminder not a billboard because by the 3rd time they get an email from you it can start to annoy people if its too large. Also as you can see in Jon's article its not as easy to implement as text only.

I think developing a set or some really clear guidelines could be a potent tool to allow for personalization while staying on message. If you can offer two or three acceptable styles (short, medium and long or official, colleague and more personal) and make them easy to get into the emails staff will be able to match the signature to the message.

See Nancy's article for a more thorough list of ideas.

Check out what some organizations are doing:

Ask for donations:

Support our efforts for 2010
http://www.1sky.org/donate

Love us? Support us!
Make a tax-deductible donation to the Office of Letters and Light today.
http://store.lettersandlight.org

--
Engage activists:

Sign up to become part of Audubon's E-Activist community
http://www.audubonaction.org/audubon

--
Give a description of your organization and the official tag line:

Visit our website: www.policylink.org

PolicyLink is a national research and action institute advancing economic and social equity by Lifting Up What Works.®

--
Reinforce your mission:

Several nature and environmental organizations include the line -

"Please consider the environment before printing this email"

--
And while those funny quotes that used to be so common probably aren't a great idea for an official organization sign off, I love the use of humor in this one:

http://www.issuelab.org/subscribe/public/index.php
We've got issues. Read all about it in IssueLab eNews!

More tips and ideas on how to do it

From Microsoft - all about using your Outlook signature

A few good thoughts on how to sign off

Thanks for reading,
heather gardner-madras
------------------------------------
gardner-madras | strategic creative
http://www.heathergm.com
[e] hgm@heathergm.com
[p] 541-933-1942
[c] 541-579-6665

Donate to Idealware's Research Fund!
http://www.idealware.org/research_fund

Why Idealist.org needs your help

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:09:00 +0000

Idealist.org needs your help to survive. Do you need more reasons to go donate now? Here's one.

Five years ago, I was a website consultant to nonprofits. I had an idea -- hey, someone should do reviews and information about nonprofit software that all organizations can benefit from! -- and I talked to a bunch of people to see if the idea had legs.

One of the people I spoke with was Ami Dar, the Executive Director of Idealist. I don't even know how I connected with him -- did I cold call him? He's exactly the type of person who's genuinely nice enough and helpful enough to take a call from a miscellaneous person with questions.

He had a lot of useful thoughts and insights about the idea that was to become Idealware, but he said one thing in particular that I've never forgotten, and has proven true over and over. He said (and I'm paraphrasing here): "The more you try to support all nonprofits, everywhere, the less likely you are to get funding."

It's completely counter-intuitive, but true. I think it's the same phenomenon as the Bystander Effect -- the idea that someone is less likely to help someone in trouble if there's a bunch of people also there. Nonprofits like Idealist help so many people that it never seems to a donor as specific or pressing a thing to support as other causes. It's easy to understand -- for instance, your local job fair clinic in Boston is right there, and you know it doesn't have a big pool of donors. If you live in Kentucky, it's easy to see why you should support a site targeted to help people in rural areas find jobs.

But this reasoning is faulty when it comes to critical organizations like Idealist. They provide job fair clinics in Boston... and dozens of other locations. They help people in rural area find jobs... along with hundreds of thousands of others. They're one of the pieces of infrastructure by which the nonprofit sector works, and just like any organization, if they can't get support, they go under.

Which is in danger of happening now. One of their principle income sources was from job listings, and job listings, as you can imagine, are not what they used to be.

Do you want Idealist to survive? Would you be bummed if they were gone? Then don't wait for other people to support them. Go donate yourself.

Introducing the Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:14:00 +0000

We're excited to announce the launch of our very first book -- the Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Fundraising, Communications, and Outreach. I'm really proud of it -- it's 84 pages summarizing what we've learned about software over the last four years, as a quick reference as to what software exists and what might make sense for you based on your needs and level of tech savvy. And then it gives a quick summary of what you might pay, what you can get, and some of the key vendors for each of 34 types of software.

Basically, it's like a neutron star of nonprofit software information. Concise but incredibly packed with info. I've had a printed copy on my desk for almost a month now, and let me tell you: I refer to it almost every day to look up something... and I co-wrote the thing.

It's a real paperbook book. Buy it from Lulu for $19.95 and it will be shipped to your door.

Four ways to send a SMS (a mobile text)

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:42:00 +0000

We're hard at work on a lot of work in regard to mobile texting and and mobile apps (funded in part by the Research Fund... and all of you who donated to it! Thanks you!). I've learned a lot, but among them: the world of SMS (meaning "Short Message Service", the official name for a text message) is a darn complicated one.

As we at Idealware like to break things down, we've broken down the ways to send a text into four categories.

SMS as email. It's usually possible to send people a text message simply by emailing it to an email address consisting of their phone number and then their provider's domain (i.e. 6463523431@att.net). This is not actually officially supported, and can lead to problems when doing it in quantity, but can be an easy method for a few quick (or internal) texts. You also have the problem of collecting providers and provider domains, which is a kind of unusual thing to ask supporters for. But it's free.

Connecting your phone to your computer. There are software packages -- like Frontline SMS or Microsoft SMS -- which allow you to literally hook your cell phone to your computer and send a bunch of messages out through your own cell phone. This is more common (for reasons we're still investigating) in third world countries than in the US. The software is inexpensive.

SMS via programmatic services. If you have a programmer, you can use services like Click-a-Tell that allow you to send messages by communicating via API. For instance, Click-a-Tell is often used in conjunction with Drupal for either one way broadcast texting, or more sophisticated processes like letting people sign up via texting, or providing dynamic info (like the weather). Click-a-Tell is priced by the message, averaging about $0.04/ message. There's also open source software like Kannel and Gammu which we think falls into this category.

SMS in a box. Finally, there are vendors like Mobile Commons and Distributive Networks who provide you a nice packaged service, and an interface, very much like a broadcast email interface, that lets non-technical people easily set up texting streams -- to let people signup via text, broadcast texts, setup complex two-way interactions, or donate. We're investigating pricing, but they're not cheap. Perhaps starting at $200- $500/month?

So as you can tell, we've still got a ways to go on our research -- would love to hear your thoughts (either via comment below, or via email) if you can fill in any of our blanks or if you think we've gotten this wrong.

NPO Evaluation, IE6, Still Waters for Wave

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Campbell) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:43:00 +0000

Here are a few updates topics I've posted on in the last few months:

Nonprofit Assessment

The announcement that GuideStar, Charity Navigator and others would be moving away from the 990 form as their primary source for assessing nonprofit performance raised a lot of interesting questions, such as "How will assessments of outcomes be standardized in a way that is not too subjective?" and "What will be required of nonprofits in order to make those assessments?" We'll have a chance to get some preliminary answers to those questions on February 4th, when NTEN will sponsor a phone-in panel discussion with representatives of GuideStar and Charity Navigator, as well as members of the nonprofit community. The panel will be hosted by Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and will include:

Bob Ottenhoff of Guidestar

Ken Berger of Charity Navigator

Lucy Bernholtz of Blueprint R & D

Christine Egger of Social Actions

David Geilhufe of NetSuite

and host Holly Ross of NTEN.

I'll be participating as well. You can learn more and register for the free event with NTEN.

The Half-Life of Internet Explorer 6

It's been quite a few weeks as far as headlines go, with a humanitarian crisis in haiti; a dramatic election in Massachusetts; A trial to determine if California gay marriage-banning proposition is, in fact, discriminatory; high profile shakeups in late night television and word of the Snuggie, version 2 all competing for our attention. An additional, fascinating story is unfolding with Google's announcement that they might pull their business out of China in light of a massive cybercrime against critics of the Chinese regime that, from all appearances, was either performed or sanctioned by the Chinese government. There's been a lot of speculation about Google's motives for such a dramatic move, and I fall in the camp that says, whatever their motives, it's refreshing to see a gigantic U.S. corporation factor ethics into a business decision, even if it's unclear exactly what the complete motivations are.

As my colleague Steve Backman fully explains here, here's been some fallout from this story for Microsoft. First, like Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft operates a search engine in China and submits to the Chinese governments censoring filters. They've kept mum on their feelings about the cyber-attack. Google's analysis of that attack reveals that GMail accounts were hacked and other breaches occurred via security holes in Internet Explorer, versions six and up, that allow a hacker to upload programs and take control of a user's PC. As this information came to light, France and Germany both issued advisories to their citizens that switching to a browser other than Internet Explorer would be prudent. In response, Microsoft has issued a statement recommending that everyone upgrade from Internet Explorer version 6 to version 8, the current release. What Microsoft doesn't mention is that the security flaw exists in versions seven and eight as well as six, so upgrading won't protect you from the threat, although they just released a patch that hopefully will.

So, while their reasoning is suspect, it's nice to see that Microsoft has finally joined the campaign to remove this old, insecure and incompatible with web standards browser.

Google Wave: Still Waters

I have kept Google Wave open in a tab in my browser since the day my account was opened, subscribed to about 15 waves, some of them quite well populated. I haven't seen an update to any of these waves since January 12th, and it was really only one wave that's gotten any updates at all in the past month. I can't give away the invites I have to offer. The conclusion I'm drawing is that, if Google doesn't do something to make the Wave experience more compelling, it's going to go the way of a Simply Red B-Side and fade from memory. As I've said, there is real potential here for something that puts telecommunication, document creation and data mining on a converged platform, and that would be new. But, in it's current state, it's a difficult to use substitute for a sophisticated Wiki. And, while Google was hyping this, Confluence released a new version of their excellent (free for nonprofits) enterprise Wiki that can incorporate (like Wave) Google gadgets. That makes me want to pack up my surfboard.

Browser Security and Choices

sbackman@dbdes.com (steve backman) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:23:00 +0000

Browsers have been in the news again lately.

The open conflict between China and Google has brought front page/national news attention to Internet privacy and censorship lately. Google announced that Chinese cyber spies had hacked into Gmail accounts in order to identify human rights activists in China. It turns out that it was not just Google. Other popular web service providers had suffered similar attacks. And now it has become a diplomatic incident, with Sec of State Clinton and Pres Obama now forced to intervene even while presumably engaged by Haiti, growing mess in Afghanistan and more.

Google--somewhat belatedly for many--retaliated by threatening to stop self-censoring searches of its Chinese edition. Web freedom activists have long felt this accommodation to Chinese law violated Google’s philosophy http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html. Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco and others feel pressure to follow suit.

Browser Security Holes the Point of Attack

So what does this have to do with browsers? Turns out that the cyber warfare story behind the story has to do with Chinese teams exploiting yet another point of failure in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft has now patched that problem, and web users should get it. According to the BBC and others, Microsoft knew about the vulnerability since September and planned to patch it. Soon. February. For the government of Germany, enough was enough. In the middle of the cyber crisis, they urged web users in their country to stop using IE altogether, as part of their version of domestic homeland security.

To give Microsoft credit, Internet Explorer 8 overall offers more security protection than 7 or 6. (And it looks good, just as Microsoft's bing search site looks good.) You really should have it: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/worldwide-sites.aspx

Yet, statistics show many users still on IE 6, presumably many because users have older computers and just don’t know what they have. Partly also, some corporate software apparently displays better on IE6. Presumably German authorities felt that an announcement, "please upgrade to IE8 and set your computer to download all your security patches weekly" really would have required way more public information that is practical. Makes sense to me.

And of course, the preference for IE6 has a bitter irony for web developers worldwide. As software moves to richer browser experiences, through Javascript, Flex, JQuery and the rest, it has become harder and harder to ensure cross-browser compatibility when those compatibility tests have to include IE6. We don't do it any more unless this is specifically part of the requirements--say, in school environments with a lot of older computers.

We keep an eye out for who continues to support IE6 compatibility and who does not. Paychex just announced it would end IE6 support as of March 2010 for its payroll software. 37Signals announced way back in the fall of 2008 that it would phase out support for IE6 in Basecamp and its other web services. "Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress." Good for you, Paychex, 37Signals, web developers no doubt said to themselves. Microsoft itself will pull the plug on IE6 in July 2010.

Of course, the bigger story is that more and more web users have moved away from Internet Explorer altogether, much as in the German announcement. Too confusing and just can't wait. Many folks used to worry that websites developed with Microsoft tools would fall apart outside of Internet Explorer. Not true! In fact, some .Net web pages that test fine in competing browsers need tweaking for IE.

Firefox now has just under a quarter of all web users. With plans underway for it, I suspect Firefox will continue to grow. (For example, soon each Firefox tab will run in its own memory space. This means that if one page causes a problem, it won't freeze other tabs. This also helps with speed. Chrome works this way now.)

What is most intriguing to me is the continuing march forward of Google’s Chrome. In early January 2010, statistics showed it had inched by Safari to become the third most popular browser. It has become my preferred browser. Why? It’s quite fast and has that now familiar clean look of other Google products.

Personal esthetics aside, two things account for Chrome’s surge

Beta Release for Mac and Linux. I have been using the Linux version on my Ubuntu netbook, and it has been fantastic. It may be beta, but like other Google betas, it seems ready to go. In my personal experience, it’s much faster than either Opera or Firefox running on my small Ubuntu notebook. Other reports support this.

On XP, both it and Safari seem significantly faster than either IE or Firefox. The forthcoming release schedule for Firefox includes a lot of focus on performance, so who knows where things will line up.

The other big news in the Chrome department has been growing support for browser extensions. There’s still nothing like the Firefox library. Yet my most essential extensions installed really easily and work just fine—Delicious bookmarks, Lastpass password protection, bitly url shortener, Gmail integrator, and Evernote note and page clipper. Small bonus: unlike Firefox, you don’t have to restart the browser when you install or update the those extensions.

For many folks, all the yak about extensions must seem so nerdy. Yet browser extensions are to web experience what apps are to mobile: we spend so much time in the browser while using our computers, why not make the effort to personalize and enrich our experience? Though this may drive standards-minded IT departments crazy, it seems part of life on the ‘net today.

Why choose one over the other? Security, Speed, Customization, and User Experience

As I mentioned, number one reason for me in crossing over to Chrome on my 1 GB netbook has been speed. It is faster with Gmail and all the Google stuff, yet not just. It’s hard to truly compare “fast.” In my case, it means being able to have a lot of tabs open at once and for a long time with limited memory. Apple has steered clear of supporting Linux (no Ubuntu browser, iTunes or anything) so I can’t compare, yet the Windows version is quite fast as well.

I have all of Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera on my older Windows XP notebook. I switched from Firefox toChrome there as well my first choice browser. All the browsers now emphasize a modern spare look, which is great, with Safari and Chrome the most refreshing in this regard.

The contradictory thing about Chrome’s speed is that part of the netbook attraction is that it runs well with low memory. On the other hand, on XP at least, its speed seems to come at the price of insatiable memory. I posted some tips about this Chrome issue here.

Why NOT to choose one over the other?

The browser makers compete over the four categories mentioned above. This is good and worth paying attention to. They also compete over internal features, some of which is good and some not. Two features I would recommend steering clear of are bookmark synchronization and password protection.

Each of the browsers now emphasize their features for these everyday requirements. They even have grown in ability to sync across multiple computers. I don’t look anymore and I don’t care. I use delicious to hang on to my bookmarks (supplemented by evernote page grabber). And I use lastpasss for keeping track of passwords. I’m not going to review those products here. I’ve commented on them in earlier posts, and I recognize there are other options in each category.

The point here in a review of browser choices is that those choices seem to be blowing wide open in a product category that a few years ago seemed “solved.” There’s more choices on the desktop and more on mobile phones as well. (My Nokia phone also has, yes, three separate browsers I cycle among.) By storing your critical web experience information independently, you can switch from one browser to another as well as from one computer to another.

I can save a site log-in to my lastpass account from browsing with Windows desktop in Firefox and then the next day, open that same site from Chrome on my Linux netbook—or find the same password from my lastpass app on my cell phone. Likewise with my delicious bookmarks.

By contrast, the syncing each browser offers emphasizes keeping you locked in to that one browser. Browser lock-in does not feel like a good thing for the year ahead for me, and I hope you don’t either.

Dealing With Domains Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Campbell) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Last week, we talked about domain registrar services and what to look for. In today's followup, we'll focus on how to transfer a domain and the accompanying security concerns, then talk a bit about registrars vis a vis hosting services.

Domain Transfers

Transferring domains is a somewhat complex process that has been designed to minimize the risk of domain hijacking. In order to insure that transfers are performed by the actual owner of the domain, a few important measures are in place:

Every domain has an authorization (a.k.a. EPP) code associated with it. Transfers can not occur without this code being submitted. If you don’t have this information, your current registrar does. Some registrars have automated functions that will deliver that information to the domain contact; others require that you ask for them via email to the registrar or their support ticket application. Registrars are required to provide you with these codes within five calendar days of your request. If they don’t, your best recourse is to determine who they get their domain authority from (there are only a handful of companies that resell registration services) and appeal to them for assistance.

Communication is strictly through the registered “whois” email address of the domain owner. You can determine what that is by doing a whois lookup on your domain.

Tip: While most domains can be looked up at http://whois.net. However, whois.net has some trouble with .org domains, so the alternative http://www.pir.org/whois is a more reliable source for most non-profit domains.

If the address that your domain is registered with is either non-functional or owned by someone other than you, then you need to update it, via your current registrar’s web interface, before you can successfully transfer the domain.

Domains can (and should) be locked to prohibit transfers before and after you switch registrars. Locking and unlocking your domains is usually done by you, from your registrar’s web site. If you don’t have options to do that when you log on to the web site, your registrar should do it for you upon request.

Transfer Procedures

To initiate the transfer, go to the web site of the registrar that you want to switch to and follow their instructions. They will have you submit a request and, upon receipt of your domain fees, issue an email to the email address associated with the domain containing a link to a form where you can confirm the request. That form will also ask for the authorization code. Subsequently - and this can take up to seven days - you’ll receive an email from your current registrar asking you to confirm the transfer request. Once that is submitted, the transfer should go through.
Detailed rules about how domains are transferred, as well as what the responsibilities of the registrars are in handling the transfers, are listed at http://www.icann.org/en/transfers/policy-en.htm.

Choosing Registrars

Registrars charge anywhere from $5.00 to $50 dollars for a year’s domain service. The two best known registrars are Network Solutions and GoDaddy. Many people go with Network Solutions because they're the longest standing of the registrars (for many years, they were the only registrar). GoDaddy has become very popular by dramatically undercutting the cost. Note, though, that both of these registrars have been accused of questionable business practices:

Network Solutions has engaged in "Front Running", a questionable practice of locking domains that a potential customer might search for in order to block competitors from making the sale. They will also use subdomains of your domain to advertise, a practice called subdomain hijacking. A decent registrar will not seek to make profits based on your intellectual property.

GoDaddy famously suspends accounts based on corporate requests. In 2007, they suspended seclists.org, a website that archives internet security mailing lists, per the request of MySpace, with no court order or valid complaint. MySpace was upset that content posted to one of the lists that Seclists archived was inappropriate. But, instead of contacting Seclists to deal with the content in question, GoDaddy closed the site and wouldn't respond to desperate emails or phone calls regarding the sudden closure. Worse, after the fiasco was resolved, they were unrepentant, and reserve the right to shut down any site for any spurious reason. If your NPO does work that is in the least bit controversial, keep this in mind when considering GoDaddy.

Web Hosting and Registrars

Many registrars supplement their business by providing web hosting services as well. Some will even offered discounted or free domain registration with a hosting plan. While this simplifies things, it can also be a bit risky in the “eggs in one basket” sense. Having a separate registrar and control over your DNS service allows you to be more flexible with switching hosts, should your current host prove themselves unreliable or go out of business. And the web hosting industry is pretty volatile, with companies coming and going pretty quickly. I would suggest a best practice is to keep your host and registrar separate.

The Joy of Google Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:46:00 +0000

Not enough people are taking advantage of Google Ads, in my opinion. They're a really useful tool -- affordable enough for most nonprofits, and in fact free to qualified ones.

How do they work? You create a short text ad, choose the keywords and geographic area you’d like to reach, and Google posts your ad next to searches for them. So for instance, I could choose to show my ad if people from Virginia search with a phrase that includes "food pantry". The cost depends on the popularity of the keywords you choose, but often starts at just a few cents per each user who clicks through to your site—and you can cap the amount you spend per day. Google provides easy-to-use tools to track your results and optimize campaigns, making it straightforward to manage. There's lots more information on their website.

Nonprofits who use Google Ads often get substantial results, making them a high bang-for-the-buck way to reach new constituents. Even better, qualifying nonprofits can get up to $10,000 per month in free Google AdWords advertising through the Google Grants program. The majority of nonprofits are approved (though it appears that those that are religiously or politically affiliated are less likely to be approved). And the application is easy, less than an hour to complete even including getting up to speed on how to write an ad (the application includes a sample of the type ad you would run). So it's worthwhile for almost every nonprofit to apply. The Google Grants site has all the information you'll need.

Dealing With Domains - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Campbell) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:57:00 +0000

au biz cc com de edu firm gov info int mil mobi net nz org sa store

created at TagCrowd.com

Domain Name Management: not a very sexy topic. This will be a rare post for me that won't mention popular search engines, the latest "superphone", content management or rumored tablets. But I hope I can provide a good glossary on a geeky subject that anyone with a web site sporting their organization's name has to deal with.

You have a web site and you have a domain, and as long as the web site is up and running, everything is fine. But what happens if your domain is hijacked? What if you need to make changes to your domain registration, or register a new one, and your registrar is simply disinterested? What if they go out of business? Your domain name is a valuable property, and you should keep it in pro-active and trustworthy hands.

How Domain Registration Works

Domain registrars provide the service of keeping your domain name mapped with current information so that it can be found on the web. Domain names are meaningful aliases for numeric IP addresses, and aren’t technically required in order to host a web site. But, the internet would be hard to navigate if we could only find things by their numeric addresses.

The primary thing that a registrar does is to keep your contact (whois) data maintained; point your domain to the appropriate name servers; and allow you to move your domain to another registrar if you choose to.

Domain Services

In addition to domain registration, most registrars offer additional services, such as:

DNS Management (address mapping) for subdomains (which allows you to host your main domain on one server, but, perhaps, an online store called “store.yourdomain.com” on another server),

Aliasing of Addresses (so that both http://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com go to the same place),

Backup Mail Handling, so, should your primary mail server go down, messages sent to you will be stored until they come back around;

Web Forwarding, so you can, say, register yourdomain.org, yourdomain,.com and yourdomain.net, but forward all visitors to the .com and .net sites to your website at yourdomain.org.

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificates, to encrypt sensitive data, like online donation forms.

Things to Look For in a New Registrar

Are they accredited? ICANN, the organization that oversees domain management , accredits registrars. If they aren’t on ICANN’s list, they aren’t trustworthy.

Do they add a year to the existing expiration date, or charge you for a full year as of engagement? They should do the former.

Do they offer automated access to all functions (via web forms), including locking/unlocking domains, retrieval of authorization (EPP) codes, and modification of all whois records? (Some registrars prefer to list themselves as the technical contact. It should be up to you whether they can have an official name on your domain, not them).

Do they list a telephone number, and is it promptly answered during business hours?

Do they respond promptly to emails and support requests? The ability to communicate with your registrar is rarely needed, but, when it is, it’s critical - you don’t want them out of the loop if your domain is subject to an attempted hijack.

Do they offer the ability to manage DNS for mail servers and subdomains? While this is an added feature, it’s common enough to be worth expecting.

Do they have any additional services (examples above)? While these supplemental services are far from critical, they are convenient. More to the point, a company that is engaging in a robust suite of services is more likely to be focused on their business. The truth is that anyone can be a domain registrar, if they make the proper investment, but whether it’s a going concern or a neglected piece of extra income for them is a question you’ll want to ask.

Next week: Safely transferring domains and a word on web hosting completes the topic.

Avoiding Technology Ice Dunes

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:28:00 +0000

This may be a metaphor that doesn't mean a lot to you southern and California people, but Idealware's based in Portland, Maine, and up here we give a fair amount of thought to snow. I was shoveling out the driveway from our first big snow of the season (maybe 6") yesterday, and while I did it, I was giving a fair amount of thought between the overlap in shoveling and technology planning. Bear with me here.

While you're shoveling out your driveway, you plan how much room you'll leave for the cars. Maybe you're feeling lazy, and you shovel out a passageway with just an inch or two to spare. Or maybe it's an easy shoveling job, and you shovel out generous room to turn in from both sides of the street.

It doesn't feel like a decision of much importance, until you've lived somewhere where it's below freezing most of the winter. Here, you build some serious snow dunes with what you've removed from the driveway. And soon those dunes thaw a little, freeze a little, and there's a little rain, and a little more snow on top of them... and within a few days your casually shoveled banks of snow become impenetrable blocks of ice. Which may well be with you until spring, unless you have an unseasonable thaw or invest a lot of backbreaking labor.

Okay, so here's where the metaphor comes in. There's a lot of technology decisions that we as nonprofits approach just as casually. But just as often, our decisions can be with us for much longer than we thought they would. You decide to just throw up a temporary website without a lot of thought to the structure... but then between one thing and another, you're still using it two years later. You decide to use a particular piece of software mostly because you need something in a hurry, but then your staff is used to it, knows how to use it, and doesn't want to change.

Change is hard, whether it's chipping through the ice to widen your driveway, or trying to move off something you've been using for a while. It's worth giving a little extra thought when you're making those "temporary" decisions, to consider whether they're likely to make your life a misery if you need to try to maneuver though between the barricades they've imposed for much longer than you planned.

Help put us over the top for the Research Fund!

noreply@blogger.com (Laura S. Quinn) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:37:00 +0000

We're getting really, really close! As of 1:45 this afternoon, we have $14,380 towards our goal of $15,000 for the Idealware Research Fund!

Only $620 to hit the goal. Can you help us hit $15,000?

Any amount can help us transform nonprofits' work --allowing shelters to help more people, advocacy and arts organizations to reach a wider audience, and environmental groups to make more of a difference.

Can you donate now?

We can't say thanks enough to all our donors, but especially the consulting firms who made this possible with their generous donations. A huge thank you to Phase 2 Technologies, who came through with a thrilling last minute $1000 donation. And we wouldn't be anywhere near this close without the help of the firms that donated at the $500 level: Beaconfire Consulting, Exponent Partners, Database Designs Associates, and Rad Campaign.

Thanks to them and all of you guys, we're so close I can taste it!

Making the Best of Data Conversion

sbackman@dbdes.com (steve backman) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Ask most any developer what's the worst part of a software project and mostly likely you'll hear, “data conversion.” And what's most magical when working a project spec? “We're going to start fresh with new data.”

Reflecting back on the year gone by, clean or messy data migration definitely has a huge impact project success as a whole.

What makes the data migration part of a project so hard?

You look at old data on screen, in reports, or with tech specs. That's often all you get to look at before starting, and that's not enough to judge its true quality. You can't fully judge how well its going to work until you do real trials into the new system. And you can't really do that until you have that new system ready.

So here are painfully accumulated tips about data conversion. I'm writing this from the point of view of the “joint planning team”--lessons to both client and consultant/developer. And I'm not going to say which ones I have the most success sticking to. I'm doing this partly as therapy and partly as New Year's resolution. I promise to reread this myself on every new 2010 project.

Data conversion and the project plan

Do as much clean up as possible in the old system. The data will look familiar there, and staff who have to do it will be faster on the old.
Don't wait until the end. Put time in the schedule to for clean-up straight through the planning and configuration of the new. Reflect each decision about the new back to the old. Understand how you will get there and when the route can be opened.
It's often hard to reserve enough time for clean-up. Explore whether you can effectively use volunteers, interns, or temp staff to do routine clean up work instead of taking consultant project time to do it or burdening organizational staff beyond what is reasonable or essential for each side to do.

Data conversion and the budget

Here's a tough one: See if you take data conversion outside of the rest of the project estimate and work it as time and materials. That protects the consultant and focuses program manager attention on only doing as much as is necessary.
The fall-back choice is to allocate a specific, reasonable number of hours, say as a percent of the whole project, and agree that the consultant will do much and as best they can within that block of time, and no more.

Data conversion and "letting go"

A corollary to the last: Consider converting the essential top level stuff—the primary contact lists—and not all the historical details (all donation or membership history, services rendered, etc). The top level lists are often cleaner, easier to check, more essential, and less encumbered with old-to-new data structure changes.
For historical data you really do need, consider adding special new fields to summarize the old. For example, instead of importing an entire “trainings” history, can you live with aggregating “total workshops attended” for each contact? And remembering preferred training topics, how about just tagging the contact with “attended series A workshops” or “workshop B series”? You might be surprised how much headache this saves where the old data turns out not as clean as it now appears on screen.

Data conversion in stages

It frequently makes sense to plan on a data migration way station--a temporary clean-up and check-me database. It could be Excel, Access or something else that has strong query and reporting tools. Maybe all the status categories need to be remapped, or collected from three different current places. Maybe the notes field holds way more than notes and needs analysis
On the other hand, the new system may have fantastic clean up tools available, such as address correction and verification, or deduping. Maybe it specifically has importers for the old donor database you are moving form. Check them on sample data and use them where you can.
What about all the rest of the details of the old? If keeping the old system around does not incur licensing or hosting costs, why not just leave it up, frozen as an archive for historical data. Again, only convert what is really needed.

Data conversion and testing

Count on doing at least one trial conversion for staff to test before the day you go live. Once you have worked that into the plan, it makes sense to do it as soon as a trial version of the new software is up. Let folks test the new software with some real, existing data. It improves the testing and improves the data migration. And make sure you have put time on the calendar for that checking. Discovering gaps six months into a new system, say when quarterly or annual reports first have to run for real, really will mess things up.
Do have a series of benchmark queries to run on old and new system to quickly check results. For example, maybe the count of contacts by status group has to match exactly. Maybe the total dollar value of donations by year will not match 100% for this, that and the other reason. Make an agreement in advance, the new system will vary by as much as 3% earlier than the last two years.
Conversely, agree on a couple representative accounts you will use as a standard base line for checking the conversion. I remember one large scale donor management system with a huge master contact list mostly sparsely populated and just a handful with tons of details. Running overall lists just wouldn't cut it. Every step in the development process had to be run against one particular wealthy donor with a 28-page single spaced personal profile. Each new iteration of the software had to pass muster on him or it was back to the cubicles for us.

Data conversion documentation

Data conversions usually involve a lot of steps. List them out in a shared document and explain what each does. When you have a series of scripts that have to run, number them in order, like “step100_clear main contact table,” “step 200_import from spreadsheet xyz,” “step310_relink contacts table to database X_manual step,” step 315 _import from database x,” “step 400_run dedup query,” “step510_extract priority A people to excel and give to ED to check personally.” By putting that first step in there, you have already set things up for running the conversion process as a whole more than once. Get every step, manual or automated, in there. Consider counting by 10s at least so you insert more steps as you fine tune the overall process.
Use a shared Google doc or some other collaboratively editable document to hold the conversion steps. Even if your steps lean toward the technical, take the time to go through them collaboratively, understand what they mean, and sign off that this is the plan.

Data conversion therapy

Accept that data conversion has a therapeutic component. You can count on the staff person who is most impatient with the old system to miss data and procedures that don't show up exactly the same in the new. Hmm. My Tai Chi sensibility says maybe the framework is more meditation than therapy: it's all about grasping the essence firmly, remaining calm to find the path from the old to the new, and letting go of what you can.
And through it all, be reasonable and patient with each other. This means the organizational lead needs to look at the raw underbelly of the data and appreciate whatever is giving he consultant the most trouble. The consultant needs to sit with users and understand the consequences, workarounds, new ways of doing things if new data doesn't 100% line up with the old.

Data conversion sounds like such a mine field that you might ask, why would anyone ever agree to do it? Well, you often have to, to get the project at all. In addition, I have to say, data conversion does have a creative appeal. Its almost always unique. Unlocking old data is like unraveling a mystery. It requires real detective work. It requires knowledge of multiple systems, which takes time and experience to accumulate. If both sides agree to a reasonable plan, it is possible for all to find satisfaction and joy when the new reports line up with the old.

And speaking of the therapeutic and the meditative, just writing this has been both therapeutic and meditative for me. hope it helps you as well, and best wishes for the New Year.