Idealware

Social bookmarking: keeping me organized one tag at a time

2009-11-06T10:39:00.004-05:00

I love Delicious. As indicated in my post earlier this week announcing Idealware's Social Media Resource Library, for the past couple of months, I have been conducting an audit on available social media resources for nonprofits. There is a ton of information out there, and many people with great experiences and expertise, so I needed a way to keep everything (myself) organized.

Delicious was an obvious answer, even though I had never used the tool before. It was fairly intuitive to tag resources based on their topic. Since I knew we might be publicizing our bookmarks afterward, I took the time to write up what I thought would be a good tagging scheme. But, the more I dived in, learned more, and began to prioritize different things, my tagging scheme shifted throughout the whole process (for example, to start I had twitter also tagged with microblog, but in the end I decided to put it in with socialnetworking). It still made sense to me, but probably not to very many other people. So, I actually went back and re-tagged everything to make it easier for people (you, hopefully) to search for items of interest.

Lesson learned? Define your tagging scheme up front and stick to it!

Through the research, I found that a lot of people had used Delicious to keep organized. Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li even used it to keep resources and case studies organized by chapter while they were writing Groundswell (according the book). Many sites and people encourage others to tag resources with their name, to help build libraries of resources around a certain subject. We Are Media, (curated by Beth Kanter on behalf of NTEN) asks their community to take 5 minutes to tag interesting resources with wearemedia in Delicious.

One thing I haven’t been able to figure out yet, is if it is possible to track how many people go to Idealware’s Library on Delicious and which tags they are searching for the most. That would be really helpful, and could help us make sure that we had sufficient resources according to people’s needs.

Has your organization used Delicious to keep resources organized? Did you make the bookmarks publically available? Tell us about your experience in the comments.

Introducing Idealware's Social Media Resource Library

2009-11-04T09:18:00.004-05:00

There are a ton of resources on social media for nonprofits, but they are scattered all over the web (though, We Are Media has done an excellent job at compiling a lot of them). With that in mind, and as a first step in our year-long social media research initiative, Idealware has compiled a library of nearly 200 – and growing – resources on social media. And, we’ve incorporated an easy-to-use tagging scheme so that you can find the resources most helpful to you.

The Social Media Resource Library , compiled in Delicious, will help your nonprofit gain valuable insights into how to best use social media for your organization. There are a lot of experts out there (while a majority of the resources tagged are from Beth Kanter and Mashable, there are tagged items from over 50 sources), and we are making it easier for you to find what you are looking for.

So, here are the directions for finding our bookmarks and the tagging scheme which will make it easy for you to find what you are looking for.

Also, I plan to keep the repository updated, so be on the look out for new resources.

I hope this is helpful (I know I learned a lot searching through all of these!). Please let us know if you find it helpful, or how it could be improved, in the comments section.

Directions for accessing Idealware’s Delicious repository

1. Go to www.delicious.com/search (you do not need a Delicious account)
2. In the upper left-hand navigation of the site, use the drop-down for the “People” tab, and click on, “go to user”
3. Where it says, “Type a username,” type in “Idealware”
4. Type in the tag of interest into the field next to the blue-shaded Idealware
5. You can filter by multiple tags

Idealware Delicious Account Tagging Scheme

All resources are tagged with socialmedia.

All resources are tagged with author and/or sponsoring org/company’s name, 1st letter of 1st name and last name (i.e., Beth Kanter’s recent guest post by Michael Hoffman is tagged with both bkanter mhoffman).

All resources are tagged with umbrella tag, as well as specific tools discussed (i.e., an article that discusses both Facebook and Twitter would be tagged with socialnetwork Facebook twitter), Twitter is under the umbrella of socialnetwork.

Tags (other than specific tool, i.e. Facebook or YouTube):

socialmedia
socialnetwork
wiki
blog
video
photo
mobile
podcast
tagging
listening
policy
casestudy
crowdsourcing
research
roi
fundraising
bestpractices
basic
intermediate
advanced
mustread
reference

A couple of things to note about the tags:

Policy refers to organizations’ internal policies regarding social media.
Casestudy does not necessary mean a detailed case study, but indicates examples from specific nonprofits.
Reference means resources that link to multiple other resources (most of which should also be tagged, but I most likely missed a few).
There are a handful of resources tagged with mustread. They are the ones I found particularly helpful.

I hope you find the Social Media Resource Library helpful!

Security and Privacy in a Web 2.0 World

2009-11-02T10:18:00.001-05:00

Yes, we do Twitter requests!

To break down that tweet a bit, @kanter is the well-known Beth Kanter of Beth's blog. @pearlbear is former Idealware blogger and current contributor Michelle Murrain, and Beth asked us, in the referenced blog post, to dive a bit into internet security and how it contrasts with internet privacy concerns. Michelle's response, offers excellent and concise definitions of security and privacy as they apply to the web, and then sums up with a key distinction: security is a set of tools for protecting systems and information. The sensitivity of that data (and need for privacy) is a matter of policy. So the next question is, once you have your security systems and policies in place, what happens when the the policies are breached?

Craft a Policy that Minimizes Violations

Social media is casual media. The Web 2.0 approach is to present a true face to the world, one that interacts with the public and allows for individuals, with individual tastes and opinions, to share organizational information online. So a strict rule book and mandated wording for your talking points are not going to work.

Your online constituents expect your staff to have a shared understanding of your organization's mission and objectives. But they also expect the CEO, the Marketing Assistant and the volunteer Receptionists to have real names (and real pictures on their profiles); their own online voices; and interests they share that go beyond the corporate script. It's not a matter of venturing too far out of the water -- in fact, that could be as much of a problem as staying too close to the prepared scripts. But the tone that works is the one of a human being sharing their commitment and excitement about the work that they (and you) do.

Expect that the message will reflect individual interpretations and biases. Manage the messaging to the key points, and make clear the areas that shouldn't be discussed in public. Monitor the discussion, and proactively mentor (as opposed to chastising) staff who stray in ways that violate the policy, or seem capable of doing so.

The Case for Transparency

Transparency assumes that multiple voices are being heard; that honest opinions are being shared, and that organizations aren't sweeping the negative issues under the virtual rug. Admittedly, it's a scary idea that your staff, your constituents, and your clients should all be free to represent you. The best practice of corporate communications, for many years, was to run all messaging through Marketing/Communications experts and tightly control what was said. I see two big reasons for doing otherwise:

We no longer have a controlled media.

Controlled messaging worked when opening your own TV or Radio Station was prohibitively expensive. Today, YouTube, Yelp and Video Blogs are TV Stations. Twitter and Facebook Status are radio stations. The investment cost to speak your mind to a public audience has just about vanished.

We make more mistakes by under-communicating than we do by over-communicating.

Is the importance of hiding something worth the cost of looking like you have something to hide? At the peak of the dot com boom, I hired someone onto my staff at about $10k more (annually) than current staff in similar roles were making. An HR clerk accidentally sent the offer letter to my entire staff. The fallout was that I had meaningful talks about compensation with each of my staff; made them aware that they were getting market (or better) in a rapidly changing market, and that we were keeping pace on anniversary dates. Prior to the breach, a few of my staff had been wrongly convinced that they were underpaid in their positions. The incident only strengthened the trust between us.

The Good, the Bad, and the Messenger

Your blog should allow comments, and -- short of spam, personal attacks and incivility -- shouldn't be censored. A few years ago, a former employee of my (former) org managed to register the .com extension of our domain name and put up a web site criticizing us. While the site didn't get a lot of hits, he did manage to find other departed staff with axes to grind, and his online forum was about a 50-50 mix of people trashing us and others defending. After about a month, he went in and deleted the 50% of forum messages that spoke up for our organization, leaving the now one-sided, negative conversation intact. And that was the end of his forum; nobody ever posted there again.

There were some interesting lessons here for us. He had a lot of inside knowledge that he shared, with no concern or allegiance to our policy. And he was motivated and well-resourced to use the web to attack us, But, in the end, we didn't see any negative impact on our organization. The truth was, it was easy to separate his bias from his "inside scoops", and hard to paint us in a very negative light, because the skeletons that he let out of our closet were a lot like anybody else's.

What this proves is that message delivery accounts for the messenger. Good and bad tweets and blog posts about your organization will be weighed by the position and credibility of the tweeter or blogger.

Transparency and Constituent Data Breaches

Two years ago, a number of nonprofits were faced with a difficult decision when a popular hosted eCRM service was compromised, and account information for donors was stolen by one or more hackers. Thankfully, this wasn't credit card information, but it included login details, and I'm sure that we all know people who use the same password for their online giving as they do for other web sites, such as, perhaps, their online banking. This was a serious breach, and there was a certain amount of disclosure from the nonprofits to their constituents that was mandated.

Strident voices in the community called for full disclosure, urging affected nonprofits to put a warning on the home page of their web sites. Many of the organizations settled for alerting every donor that was potentially compromised via phone and/or email, determining that their unaffected constituents might not be clear on how the breach happened or what the risks were, and would simply take the home page warning as a suggestion to not donate online.

To frame this as a black and white issue, demanding that it be treated with no discretion, is extreme. The seriousness and threat that resulted from this particular breach was not a simple thing to quantify or explain. So it boils down to a number of factors:

Scope: If all or most of your supporters are at risk, or the number at risk is in the six figure range, it's probably more responsible, in the name of protecting them, to broadcast the alert widely. If, as in the case above, those impacted are the ones donate online, then that's probably not close to the amount that would fully warrant broad disclosure, as even the strident voice pointed out.
Risk: Will your constituents understand that the notice is informational, and not an admission of guilt or irresponsibility in handling their sensitive data? Alternatively, if this becomes public knowledge, would your lack of transparency look like an admission of guilt? You should be comfortable with your decision, and able to explain it.

Consistency: Some nonprofits have more responsibility to model transparency than others. If the Sunlight Foundation was one of the organizations impacted, it's a no-brainer. Salvation Army? Transparency isn't referenced on their "Positions" page.

Courtesy: Some constituencies are more savvy about this type of thing than others. If the affected constituents have all been notified, and they represent a small portion of the donor base, it's questionable whether scaring your supporters in the name of openness is really warranted.

Since alternate exposure, in the press or community, is likely to occur, the priority is to have a consistent policy about how and when you broadcast information about security breaches. Denying that something has had happened in any public forum would be irresponsible and unethical, and most likely come right back at you. Not being able to explain why you chose not to publicize it on your website could also have damaging consequences. Erring on the side of alerting and protecting those impacted by security breaches is the better way to go, but the final choice has to weigh in all of the risks and factors.

Conclusion

All of my examples assume you're doing the right things. You have justifiable reasons for doing things that might be considered provocative. Your overall efforts are mission-focused. And the reasons for privacy regarding certain information are that it needs to be private (client medical records, for example); it supports your mission-based objectives by being private, and/or it respects the privacy of people close to the information.

No matter how well we protect our data, the walls are much thinner than they used to be. Any unfortunate tweet can "go viral". We can't put a lock on our information that will truly secure it. So it's important to manage communications with an understanding that information will be shared. Protect your overall reputation, and don't sweat the minor slips that reveal, mostly, that you're not a paragon of perfection, maybe, but a group of human beings, struggling to make a difference under the usual conditions.

Should You Just Spend the Time Calling Donors Instead?

2009-10-30T22:23:00.001-04:00

For a lot of more traditional fundraisers and nonprofit managers, communicating via the internet is a kind of scary idea. It's hard to believe in the economy of scale that communication technologies can provide and to believe that sending broadcast emails or creating a Facebook page, for instance, can ever be helpful in developing the type of personal connections that nonprofits rely on.

In my line of work though, I just as often run into nonprofit technology staff and consultants who I think have an *over-reliance* on technology. Technology is the hammer for which many things becomes the nail. Want to communicate with donors? Let's do email! Facebook! A blog! We need to use these online tools to start a conversation! Those things absolutely can be useful, but it's important to prioritize them against other things you might do.

For instance, you could spend that time simply calling donors and constituents at random, to thank them, or to ask them a quick set of questions (how did they like the services they used? what do you do well? not so well?). If you've never done this, it can be pretty magical. Often people are amazed that you've called, happy to talk, and have useful insights. It gives you a great sense as to who your constituents actually are and what they care about. And not coincidentally, my experience is that it fosters great new connections. People want to volunteer, wanted to ask you something, and, not coincidentally, donate at considerably higher rates after. Nothing starts a conversation like, well, an actual conversation.

I think this is a really useful bar to measure online communication techniques against. Should I send that email, create that Facebook page, write that blog, or would it be more effective to just spend that time calling donors?

Emails often pass that threshold - for instance, we spend about two hours a month sending out our eNews. It's pretty clear to me that the number of people that we reach and affect (and inspire to help us) by sending out resources beats the number of people we could connect with by phone. But Facebook? The jury's still out for me on that one (though just trying it out is mission related for us - so we have the luxury of investing for other reasons).

And blogs? A tough call, based on the goals you're trying to achieve. A blog can help you reach out to more people, have conversations that you hadn't considered, and show you as an expert to the press and your sector. But it's so time consuming for your staff people (assuming it's actually a staff blog). Would you gain more by spending that couple of hours a week calling donors? Perhaps. It's worth considering.

Drupal 101: Look and Feel

2009-10-26T10:10:00.001-04:00

I'm wrapping up the Drupal 101 series with some talk about Drupal themes, and some additional info on topics that we've already covered. The goal of these posts is to give new Drupal administrators an idea about how Drupal works, and some pointers to the key add-ons and resources in the broad Drupal ecosystem. For reference' sake, we started with an intro, moved on to Modules, and then covered navigation. So, now that we have a functional web site, what does it look like?

Getting Themes

Drupal comes with five or six themes to choose from, and, if you use them, then your site will look very, um, uninspired. This might not be a problem if your goal is not to impress your visitors, but simply provide information or functionality, but, if you're putting up a website for your organization, you want one that stands out from the crowd. So you have two choices: you can find a better, less common theme, or you can customize one of the default themes.

The first place to go is to Drupal Theme Garden. This is where many Drupal theme designers share their work. Here, you can either find a theme to use (or customize for your use), or get a good idea about the types of things you can do with your theme.

Customizing Themes

From the Administration menu, you can modify any theme's main text elements, deciding whether or not to display your site's mission or slogan, name or logo. And you can replace the default "droplet" logo with your own logo (a no-brainer!). Assuming that you've started with a theme that you really like, this might be enough. But, if you want to do more serious customizations, such as moving the logo to the center of your header or changing the site colors, you're going to need basic web 4.0 programming skills and, most likely, some level of comfort with the PHP scripting language.

Most themes consist of one or more style sheets, a number of "tpl" files with PHP/HTML code laying out various page elements, such as blocks, footers and sidebars, and one called page.tpl.php that establishes the overall page layout. The main styles are usually stored in styles.css, and you can make a lot of changes to your site's appearance here, modifying default background colors and images, placing and resizing content.

If that's not enough, most customizations can be done using Wordpress's internal macros and functions, meaning that you won't have to worry about assigning variables or what goes into the foreach loops. Wordpress has simple commands that you can insert into a page to loop through your posts and display them or list your categories in the sidebar. A nice breakdown of the Wordpress functions can be found at WpExplorer.com.

If you do modify the stylesheets and templates, make sure that you are storing your themes in sites/default folder and that you're properly backing up whenever you do an upgrade. If you modify theme files in the main themes folder, and then upgrade to, say, a Drupal security fix, your modifications will be overwritten. In general, themes remain functional from dot release to dot release (e.g., what worked for Drupal 6.1 still works in 6.9), but the Drupal maintainers often make dramatic changes in number versions, so don't assume that your theme in Drupal 6.9 will not be messed up if you upgrade to Drupal 7 (coming soon).

More Installation Options

In the first Drupal 101 post, I mentioned Fantastico, a two-click installer for Drupal available on most hosting services that use the cPanel site management interface. I subsequently ran into this useful article about Elefante and Simplescripts. These are packages that you can use to install a variety of popular open source applications, including Drupal.

In addition to application installers, there are other options for installing Drupal:

Customized Drupal installations like Open Atrium and Acquia come with more modules and functionality.

There's been some development and discussion about Installation Profiles, a Drupal add-on functionality that lets you define additional installation details, such as module defaults and inclusion of additional modules and data for distributing custom Drupal installations.

Conclusion

What I hope this Drupal 101 series has done is to offer some context and guidance for people new to Drupal who are about to give it a try, and some backing to my initial proposition that Drupal's strength is it's flexibility. Along the way, I've received tweets asking "Why Drupal?" and my answer is that Drupal isn't the only CMS out there, or necessarily the best one for your web site. There are a huge variety of commercial and open source options. In fact, my personal website runs on a combination of Frog CMS and Wordpress, because I wanted a simple tool for integrating RSS feeds, which Frog provides, and a powerful blogging platform. On the other hand, last week the White House ditched their commercial CMS for Drupal. So this series might also inspire you to look elsewhere, particularly if a more traditional, tree-structured content management interface will work better for you than Drupal's layout by association model. Whichever way you go, we suffer more from a surfeit of good options than a lack of same.

Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, oh my! How to prioritize?

2009-10-22T08:50:00.006-04:00

We are one month in on our Idealware Facebook experiment. I know I shouldn't succumb to the Ashton Kutcher complex, but I can't help checking the number of fans multiple times a day (which isn't great for my office productivity). We are up to 247 fans. After an initial push at the beginning (as you might recall from my last post about the launch, we got 100 fans in just over 24 hours), for the past month fans have been trickling in. Just this week we "featured" the page in our eNews, and hada quick jump from 218 to 247.

I posed the question to the fans yesterday (by writing on the wall), "Why did you decide to become a fan of Idealware?". I got two answers: one from a personal friend saying he is a fan because Idealware hires great employees (thanks, Bob), and another saying that she became a fan to get additional information to pass along to her own audience.

We asked a similar question in a survey a couple of weeks ago, "In general, How do you decide to be a fan of a page on Facebook?" Most of the answers fell into the same two categories as above, either they personally know the person inviting them or the organization, or, they have high expectations as to the quality of information and resources that would be posted. Someone also wrote for their response, "A better question would be, how do I decide to unfan a page?" (Their answer: "poor signal/noise, high volume").

Survey participants were eligible to win free Idealware seminar (either live or an on-demand recording), and so I want to say congratulations, and thank you, to Bianca Taulman from the University of TX at Austin for winning!

One of the challenges I have been having is trying to balance listen, responding to people, and creating content through our three social media channels (this blog, Facebook, and Twitter) with the other aspects of my job that seem (to me) to be more pressing and a higher priority. I know I am not alone in this. It may boil down to a question that was asked at a recent Social Media Breakfast I was presenting at.

The question goes something like this: My organization has limited resources, yet we know our audience is using multiple social media channels. How do we choose which tool to use?

The organization knows they shouldn't go from zero to multiple channels all at once, especially with the resource constraints and lack of experience. While the standard answer is to consider your audience and your goals and go from there, what does that actually mean? If your audience is using multiple channels (as more and more are), and multiple channels would help you reach our goal...the answer isn't actually so easy.

Of course, that standard answer is what I gave, but I can't help feeling like I took the easy way out.

How did you choose which channels to jump into? Did you go from not having a social media presence to having Twitter, Facebook, and a YouTube channel? Or, did you start with one channel and gradually include more? Please leave thoughts in the comments...

Event and Auction Management Software - for your review

2009-10-21T11:29:00.003-04:00

Here's another blurb we're working on for our Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits - this one on software to manage the LOGISTICS (not just the registration, which is a different topic) of events. We'd love your comments on this, if you have them - we're not sure if we've found all the appropriate software that might apply here. Special thanks to Heather Mason of A Caspian Production for contributing her event management expertise - though any errors are ours, as she hasn't reviewed it!

A large event has a lot of logistics to manage – will you have sponsors? What’s the budget? Where will people sit? What rooms will be used for what? Some Donor Management Systems, Constituent Relationship Management Systems, or member/ association management software can help with these details. If your event involves organizing volunteers, some volunteer management systems can provide useful functionality to manage who will be doing what and when. While it can be useful to have event management functionality integrated with other constituent management functions, the feature set provided by these types of tools is often not as sophisticated as is offered in stand alone packages.

More sophisticated Online Event Registration packages also frequently have event management capabilities – for instance, to assign seats or do some basic management of agendas and rooms. If you’re primarily trying to manage attendee details (for instance, session preferences, seat assignment, or meal preferences), having this functionality combined with the tool you’re using to do online registration makes a lot of sense.

As your events become more complex, keep in mind that no software will actually plan all the details for you – if your logistics become more complicated than what you can easily manage in Excel, it might well make sense to hire an experienced event planner and use whatever software they recommend. However, there are a number of packages - like StarCite and eTouches – that are designed help you to track complex logistics, speakers, rooms and budgets, as well as manage all your attendee registration details for huge events and conferences.

Live and silent auctions tend to have a particularly difficult set of information to track. You’ll need to track the items that you’re selling, their fair market value, the buyer, and the selling price – and be able to generate bills and receipts on site within minutes of the auction itself. Software packages like AuctionPay and ReadySetAuction provide tailored functionality specifically to meet these needs.

Drupal 101: Navigation

2009-10-19T10:05:00.001-04:00

Here's the third in a series of posts on getting started with Drupal, the popular open source content management system. The short intro and discussion on modules are best read first. Today we'll look at site structure, and how menus, blocks and taxonomies can make your site navigable for your visitors.

Menus

Drupal has a simple and flexible tool for creating and managing menus. You can check/uncheck standard functions; assign them to regions (left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer, etc.); and easily create new items.

By default, Drupal offers three menus that you can add to your site:

	Navigation - The main menu is dynamic. It displays items based on the visitor's role and state of authentication. For example, an unauthenticated user might see a "Login" menu item, while an authenticated user would see "logout". An authenticated user who is also a site manager would see the Administer menu. This menu is usually placed in a sidebar, next to the main content

	Primary Links - This is often the menu for the main content areas, e.g. Home, Blog, Calendar, About. Primarily links are usually placed in a site's header.
	Secondary Links can be used for less popular pages, but ones that you want to have available, such as site maps, privacy notices, and contact links.

You can assign a menu item to any particular piece of content, or to a collection of items by content type. Drupal assigns numbers to individual items. The basic content type is called a node, so the default first page of a web site would be at http://your-site.org/node/1. If you create a blog, the first post would be at http://your-site.org/blog/1.

Tip: Be sure that the Path Module is enabled. Path lets you can rename items with friendlier names than, say, site/node/113.

Say you wanted blog/1 to be your front page, but you also wanted something easier to remember to appear in the address bar, you could rename it "home", so that people could browse directly to the site at http://your-site.org/home. They would see, in the center of the home page, that first blog entry. Drupal's general settings allow you to identify your home page; renaming a numeric page simply makes it friendlier for your users.

If, instead, you simply wanted the whole blog to be the home page, then you would skip the numbers, and not bother with a rename, as linking the front page to http://your-site.org/blog would accomplish that.

Drupal's real power comes in when you realize that, with the CCK module, you can make your own content types, and that can be very easy. A press release will have a similar format to a blog item (title, content). So you can create a type called press_release and link a page to it: http://your-site.org/press_release. All new press releases that you post to the site from Create Content/Press Release will appear there.

Blocks

Blocks are boxes that can be placed on one or more pages or associated with one or more content types. They usually appear in the left or right sidebars. Strategically associating blocks with particular content can be a subtler way o offer navigational aids. For example, you might want to have a block with current open positions appear on your "About" page, but not necessarily with your blog. Or you might not want the job listings to appear on pages describing your services, instead featuring a "Donate Now" box. This flexibility allows you to align content in ways that make sense for the different audiences with varying interests that your site will attract.

Taxonomies

All of the above is fine for sites without a lot of content. But, once you have a library of blog entries, press releases and documents to share, you'll want to give your visitors a way to find what they're looking for that doesn't involve inordinate amounts of scrolling. Search is a no-brainer, but even more important is to organize your content with meaningful labels. For this, use the Taxonomy module.

Taxonomies allow you to tag or classify your content using hierarchal terminology. For example, if your NPO serves the homeless, you might have papers on poverty and employment, descriptions of available shelters and programs, job opportunities, and much more. You can break this content down into meaningful categories, then assign sub-terms in each category. Once the taxonomy is in place, you can assign menu items to terms in your taxonomy, thus aggregating all of the relevant content on a single page. You can set up menu blocks for the sub-terms and assign each block to it's category page. The result is a content rich, drill down web site.

That's it for navigation. Next week, we'll talk about Themes and ways you can make your Drupal site distinctive.

The Persistence of Email - Take 2

2009-10-16T05:46:00.002-04:00

I have been thinking about email lately. Email predates the World Wide Web as we know it. In some settings, tackling email issues evokes about as much enthusiasm as planning for shoveling snow in the Northeast winter. Social media and what’s new on the web generally seem the forward place to be for communication. Yet email lives.

I recently helped facilitate Idealware’s debut of a new day-long email fund-raising boot camp training. Third Sector New England hosted this first one, and Idealware hopes to replicate it elsewhere. Toward the end, I suddenly had this flash. A couple dozen communications and development managers in the room, and not one “is email dead?” question all day. We had a great, collaborative spirit throughout the day based on what I see in hindsight as some shared understandings:

Email tools such as Constant Contact and Vertical Response make broadcast emails and e-newsletters easier and more professional than ever.

Email broadcast or newsletter tools are content management for email. They facilitate the same collaborative editing and planning that content management systems bring to the Web. They empower you to track statistics against goals. They bring consistent design templates to email. They enable reliable web links. They bring reliable viewing to different email readers.

Writing and editing email messages resembles other writing in some ways, but has its own professional features—such as brevity.

On the downside, the sea of spam email swims in and other challenges make successfully delivering and getting attention email harder than ever. Email tool bring an easy discipline to the legal requirements for safe email and to maximizing “deliverability” to your lists.

And having a full data strategy—integrating with forms on the web, contact databases and such, segmenting lists—won’t come without serious effort.

Even so, whether my organization’s constituents mainly, primarily or only secondarily look for email news, email remains a critical part of the communications circuit, requires planning and campaign models.

These expectations and understandings vary by generation and community context. (And globally, they also vary by technology infrastructure. Where the Internet infrastructure is weak, mobile text based messaging is stronger.)

Effective Email is one part strategy, one part design and one part data management. You can only learn so much by checking email stats. You need to correlate email campaigns with the full range staff and community advocacy and services that reach your constituency -- and the sub-groups and segments within it.

This was my third email training in the last few months. With each, it has become less of a guilty pleasure again.

Want to preview Idealware’s Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits?

2009-10-14T09:26:00.002-04:00

Idealware is looking for reviewers for our upcoming small reference book, the Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Fundraising, Outreach, and Communications. The Guide will help nonprofits decide what types of software make sense for them based on what they're doing and their technology level.

We have a solid draft of the content, and are hoping to enlist a number of reviewers to make sure our information is sound and on target. Are you willing to pick a few sections of interest to you, read through, and offer comments, prior to October 21st? It shouldn’t take any longer than an hour (unless you want to review additional sections).

Reviewers will be listed as contributors in the Field Guide.

If you are interested, please email me at Kaitlin@idealware.org with a sentence or two about your role and experience in the nonprofit sector (please, no vendors. We’re not able to include anyone who distributes software for a living).

Thanks for your help!

Drupal 101: More on Modules

2009-10-12T10:05:00.001-04:00

Last week, I kicked off this series on setting up a basic web site with Drupal, the popular open source Content Management System. This week we're going to take a closer look at Modules, the Drupal add-ons that can extend your web site's functionality. One of the great things about Drupal is that it is a popular application with a large developer community working with and around it. So there are about a thousand modules that you can use to extend Drupal, covering everything from document management to payment processing. The good news: there's probably one that supports the functionality that you want to add to your web site. Bad news: needle in a haystack?

A potentially easier way to add extra functionality to Drupal is to download a customized version, such as CiviCRM or Open Atrium. We'll discuss those options later in the Drupal 101 series.

Core Modules

Drupal comes with a number of built-in modules that you can optionally enable. Some are obviously useful, others not so much. Here are some notes on the ones that you might not initially know that you need:

Primary content types like blog, forum and book offer different modules for user input. They can be combined, or you can pick one for a simple site. Since the differences between, say , a blog (individual journal that people can comment on) and a forum (topical posts that people can reply to) are less distinct than they are in other CMS's, you might want to pick one or two primary content types and then supplement them with more distinctive ones, such as polls or profiles.

Enabling contact allows your users to send private messages to each other on the site, as well as allowing you to set up site-wide contact forms.

OpenID allows your users more flexibility and control as to how they log into your site. I can't see a good reason not to enable this on a public site. Since more and more people have profiles on social networking sites and Google, tools like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect should be considered as well.

By default, Drupal asks new users for a name and email, but not much else. With the Profiles module, you can create custom fields and allow your users to share information much as they would on a social network.

Taxonomy is also recommended, and I'll talk more about that next week.

Throttle should be used on any high-traffic site to improve performance.

Use Trigger if you want to set up alerting and automation on your site.

Add-on modules, must haves:

CCK (Content Construction Kit)

More than some CMS's, Drupal is a content-centric system. It doesn't simply manage content, but the web interface is structured around the content it manages: content types, content metadata (taxonomies), content sources (RSS feeds). Out of the virtual box, Drupal has content types like blog entries, pages and stories. Each content type has a data entry form associated with it. So, if you create a number of stories, and you want to read them all, then you can browse to the page "story" and they'll all be listed there. CCK helps you create additional content types and use a fairly robust form-builder to customize the screens.

Views

The Views module lets you customize the appearance and functionality of many of Drupal's standard screens, and to add your own. Unlike CCK, which is limited to the default layout of content types, Views lets you seriously customize the interface. One easy reason to install Views is in order to take advantage of the Calendar view, which gives you not only a full page, graphical calendar to add events to and display, but also sidebar calendar widgets and upcoming event lists.

Here's a tip: setting up the calendar view is reasonably tedious. The best write-up explaining it (for Drupal 6) is here: http://drupal.org/node/326061. Drupal's documentation is okay, but this is step-by-step. It does miss one step, though, which is to add the "Event Date - From date" and "Event Date - To date" to the Fields listing (with friendlier titles, like "From" and "To"). Otherwise, calendar items show on the day they were submitted instead of the day that they are occurring.

There's a good case to be made that these two modules should be folded into Drupal's base package, because, in addition to providing very powerful customization features to the core product, there are a whole slew of additional modules that require their presence. If you plan to install a number of modules and/or customize your site, these are pretty much pre-requisites, so just grab and install them.

Contenders:

WYSIWYG Editors

What-You-See-Is-What-You Get, or Rich Text Format (RTE) editors transform Drupal's default data input boxes into flexible editors with Word-like toolbars. The WSYIWYG module lets you install the editor of your choice. I've done well with FCKEditor (recently rebranded CKEditor, thank you!). The WYSIWYG module lets you work with multiple RTE packages and strategically assign them to different fields and content types. Most RTE editors are very configurable, but note that, in addition to installing the modules, you need to install the editors themselves, so follow the instructions carefully.

Organic Groups

If you're building a community site, with hopes of having lots of interactive, social features, Organic Groups gives you the flexibility to not only create all sorts of groups and affiliations on your own, but let your users create their own groups as well, much like Facebook does. For an interactive site, this is essential.

E-Commerce/Donations

Many modules are available for either integrating with Authorize.net or Paypal, or setting up your own e-commerce site. The aptly named e-Commerce module and Ubercart are among the better known and supported options.

Drupal fans: what modules do you recommend? Which do you install first? Leave your recommendations in the comments.

Next week, we'll talk about menus, blocks and taxonomies: Drupal 101: Navigation.

The Persistence of Email

2009-10-11T09:10:00.004-04:00

Email is in the news these days, at least here in Boston and Massachusetts. Twitter, Facebook, and political blogs have elbowed their way in as organizing tools, yet incidents in the lowly world of email have had a huge public impact.

If you don’t live in Massachusetts, our local politics may not interest you and who can blame you. Bear with me a minute.

How long do email posts persist?

Here in Boston, missing emails from the computer of the Mayor’s chief adviser have become one of a handful of widely-discussed fall campaign issues. We have a mayor with a strong reputation for attention to all the details in all the neighborhoods, including perhaps emailing about them. And we have challengers focusing on the need for greater transparency and decentralization of decision-making. These have been somewhat abstract differentiators. Nothing like a chief aide’s apparent penchant for erasing all his email every day to focus the public attention.

What’s fascinating to me is how much public information about technology this incident has brought about.

Infrastructure: The public is learning stuff about the technical infrastructure of backing up emails on a server, also important in the second incident, below. Everyone should know now that it’s the norm for their email to exist in more one place. It’s not just on your desktop. Once it’s out there, a message’s traces may persist for a long time.

In this case, while things were not automatically and consistently kept in multiple places, emails that we’re cc’d or forwarded to others leave their own traces. Multiple computers leave traces. Sender’s outbound email leave traces.

While there has been a lot of discussion recently about what happens to personal details on Facebook and other social media, we all got a big fat reminder about the persistence of email.

Forensics: Second, on the technical side, those that could stand it learned more about computer forensics than you would in a season of 24. Maybe 2 seasons. Are things you erase from a hard drive really erased? Not if someone is willing to spending time and money recovering those electronic wisps and traces of the past. Typically, even if you reformat a hard drive, a lot of stuff is still there. When you are done with a computer, in addition to the environmental concerns about all the hardware, better be pretty sure what is going to happen with that hard drive.

Open Government: Third, given that some of the missing emails may factor in a corruption case involving another politician, if they are truly gone, this may violate the state’s public record laws. This may point to the most important public information side of the incident.

Transparency in government operations means more than just having cameras in hearing rooms. It means that the sum total of data collected and used—including emails—may be of interest to policy advocates and others. Tabular data on services provided and business status may have more direct value. And there may not be much to learn from plowing through tedious emails by the thousands from the desks of policy makers. Yet I can imagine that many people now imagining seeing a “power map” of the social web of who corresponds with who and in what frequency at City Hall and other government offices.

Email shows politics in charter school decision

The second email-ish political incident is playing out at the state level. We have had a look at highly embarassing “private” email correspondence between Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Secretary of Education Paul Reville. We see that a critical decision regarding a new charter school had as much to do with politics as pedagogy. What, politics in charter school decisions? This is like Captain Renault confronting Humphrey Bogart with gambling in “Rick’s Cafe” in Casablanca. Education activists have been trying to make this point for years, and one tiny email exchange blows it wide open for everyone.

Both incidents are lessons in the advocacy potential of Open Government.

The irony about all this is that it also reveals the twin headaches of email in IT or personal computer infrastructure. Email can be one of the hardest things to ensure safe back-up. Whether to tape, disk or off-site cloud storage, you generally need software specifically rated to back up an Outlook mailbox or Exchange server files. And if you have off-site hosted Exchange or use Google Apps webmail, you have even more complicated issues in insuring your organization controls and retains the archives it wants. Blackberries and such add even more complexity to infrastructure and back-up issues.

If the city issue shows that email archives can be harder to maintain than, say, a project document folder, the state issue shows that sometimes a email exchange you thought casual, ad hoc, and private may turn out to have a life of its own. Email copies may exist in many places aside from your own desktop, and they maybe there for a really long time, and they may get forwarded when and where you least expect it.

And both political problems also show that even if you take care in what you write, you can’t control what comes streaming into your Inbox unscreened every day. Things others send you can make trouble even if they’re not malware.

In the continuum of attention to what we write these days, Instant Messages or cell phone SMS texts sit at one end of casualness. A polished, multiply edited and vetted report or proposal lies at the other end. Tweets, blogs, social media participation, along with emails all occupy some middle ground. While quite old in Internet terms, email--whether person-to-person or broadcast out—needs new strategy, care and attention that reflects its continuing persistence.

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/e_phots/

Strategies for Adapting to the Shifting Media Landscape

2009-10-06T12:40:00.002-04:00

One World is putting on an interesting seminar in Washington coming up next week, on Thurs Oct. 15: New Communications Strategies for Nonprofits. A number of great speakers will talk about how your organization can effectively adapt your communications strategies to the challenges and opportunities presented by the shifting media landscape.

Suzanne Turner, President of Turner Strategies, will talk about how the media landscape has shifted and how nonprofits can adapt and position themselves to effectively communicate about their issues.

Colin Delany of Epolitics.com, will talk about tools and tactics organizations can employ over both the short and long terms to leverage the explosion of influential voices online to create action in the real world.

Kira Marchenese, Director of Online Communications at Environmental Defense Fund, will share examples of how EDF is dealing with the challenges of the new media landscape.

This meeting will take place in Washington, DC. It costs $30 for staff OneWorld partner organizations and for others it costs $60 to participate in the meeting. Register at http://bit.ly/2YqVpV

Drupal 101

2009-10-05T10:31:00.002-04:00

I've been doing a lot of work with the open source content management system Drupal lately, and thought I'd share some thoughts on how to get a new site up and running. Drupal, you might recall, got high ratings in Idealware's March '09 report comparing open source content management systems. Despite it's popularity, there are some detractors who make good points, but I find Drupal to be flexible, powerful and customizable enough to meet a lot of my web development needs.

While you can put together a very sophisticated online community and/or website with it, you can also use it for pretty simple things. For example, the nptech aggregator at nptech,info uses Drupal's excellent RSS aggregation functions extensively, and not much else. No blog, no forums. But, having installed and tried standalone RSS aggregators like Gregarius, it became clear that Drupal was just as good an aggregator and, if desired, much, much more. Similarly, when co-workers were looking for a site to share documents with optional commenting (to replace an FTP repository), Drupal was a good choice to support a simple task without locking out growth possibilities.

Installation

Installing Drupal can be a three click process or a unix command line nightmare, depending on your circumstances. These days, there are simple options. If you are using a web host, check to see if your site management console is the popular CPanel, and, if so, if it includes the Fantastico utility. Fantastico offers automated installs for many popular open source CMSes, blogs and utilities.

Absent Fantastico, your host might have something similar, or you can download the Drupal source and follow the instructions. Required skills include the ability to modify text files, change file and folder permissions, and create a MySQL database. At a minimum, FTP access to your server, or a good, web-based file manager, will be required.

If you're installing on your own server, things to be aware of are that you'll need to have PHP, MySQL and a decent web server, such as Apache installed (these are generally installed by default on Linux, but not on Windows). If you use Linux, consumer-focused Linux variants like Ubuntu and Fedora will have current versions of these applications, properly configured. More robust Linux distributions, like Redhat Enterprise, sometimes suffer from their cautious approach by including software versions that are obsolete. I'm a big fan of Centos, the free version of Red Hat Enterprise, but I'm frustrated that it comes with an older, insecure version of PHP and only very annoying ways to remedy that.

Up and Running

Once installed, Drupal advises you to configure and customize your web site. There are some key decisions to be made, and the success of the configuration process will be better assured if you have a solid idea as to what your web site is going to be used for. With that clearly defined, you can configure the functionality, metadata, site structure, and look and feel of your web site.

Install and enable Modules. Which of the core modules (the ones included in the Drupal pacckage) need to be enabled, and what additional modules are required in order to build your site? This is the first place I go.

Define the site Taxonomy. While you can build a site without a taxonomy, you should only do so for a simple site. A well structured taxonomy helps you make your site navigable; enhances searching; and provides a great tool for pyramid-style content management, with broad topics on one level and the ability to refine and dig deeper intuitively built into the site.

Structure your site with Blocks. You can define blocks, assign them to regions on a page (such as the sidebars or header) and restrict them to certain pages. On the theory that a good web site navigates the user through the site intelligently, based on what they click, the ability to dynamically highlight different content on different pages is one of Drupal's real strengths.

Theme your web site. Don't settle for the default themes -- there are hundreds (or thousands) to choose from. Go to Drupal Theme Garden and find one that meets your needs, then tweak it. You can do a lot with a good theme and the built in thee design tools, or, if you're a web developer, you can modify your themes PHP and CSS to create something completely unique. Just be sure that you followed the installation suggestions as to where to store themes and modules so that they won't get overwritten by an upgrade.

This just brushes the surface, so I'll do some deeper dives into Drupal configuration over the next few weeks.

Name Dropping Blues

2009-09-30T19:46:00.005-04:00

For the third time this week, a software vendor salesperson made sure to slip in how one of their fancy clients do things with their software. They don't just come out and say, "Obama endorses our software." Rather, they say, "when the Obama team logs in, they enjoy the following features...". Wow, Obama for real? I guess the software must be great!

Normally I just ignore this stuff like I ignore annoying radio talk show billboards on the highway - you know the ones, where the sleezy male DJ has his arms draped around some swimsuit models. But the last vendor to do this actually dropped a name of one of our clients. And, this client is actually dissatisfied with this product, and has been for almost a year now. Whoa, back up there! I found myself asking lots of questions to the vendor about the tools this client "enjoyed" in the system, and what makes this such a great fit for them.

Donning the hat of a real SPY (Software Private eYe?), I made sure to stay underground, never divulging my connection to the client. As I mined into the questions, I realized the salespeople knew nothing about how the client actually uses the system. As it turns out, the client has never worked with these sales people. The sleezy vendor is just using this client as a billboard to sex up their product, and its all a complete lie.

After ratting them out to my client, I felt a little better, and a little sadder. It left me wondering, how many consultants and vendors name drop with such impunity? I mean, should I just show up at, say, Apple's doorstep and lob a marketing plan at them, then run? They might never know what hit them... I guess FivePaths could claim to have contracts with Comcast and AT&T, and we have received significant praise from major banking institutions telling us how valuable we are to them. Who cares what these contracts are, or whether the praise came in the form of credit card junk mail?

Maybe we should do a term search across the websites of all known consultant and software vendors to see how many of them claim to work with the same big names? Hey, we could aggregate all this in [insert favorite CMS here] and allow comments! Snopes for name droppers. Thats what we need!

Take NTEN's Data Ecosystem Survey

2009-09-30T12:26:00.003-04:00

NTEN is taking a look at how nonprofits' systems work together (if they do at all) with their first Data Ecosystem Survey. They plan to analyze this data and provide a report to help you start to evaluate the systems your organization uses and how they connect.

But they need your help! When you have a spare 10-15 minutes today, please take the survey.

> I have 15 minutes free right now. Take me to the survey!

Everybody who completes it will get a free copy of the final report.

Reflections on Idealware’s Facebook Launch

2009-09-28T14:46:00.002-04:00

As you may know, we at Idealware launched our Facebook fan page on Wednesday, September 16. Now that we have been trying to nurture the page for over a week, I thought you might be interested in what we’ve seen (so far). A disclaimer before you continue: we are tracking results, but don’t really know what they mean yet, it has only been a week after all.

Before I dive into Facebook, let me take a quick second to introduce myself. I (Kaitlin LaCasse) am Idealware’s Communications and Social Media Specialist. At Idealware, I will be researching and writing on social media, and will also be taking the lead on our own social media and communications strategy. Neat facts about me: this is my first ever blog post ever, I did Teach for America in Texas for two years, and I’m excited for a New England winter. Ok, enough about me.

Some Facebook background…

Our target audience for Facebook is nonprofit staff or board members who are looking for help making software decisions. We are hoping to use Facebook as an outreach mechanism, to share resources (both Idealware’s and others), to help people navigate our resources (I would love to see questions like, “Hi Idealware, I’m looking into broadcast email software…do you have any resources on that?” and comments like, “The seminar this afternoon was great, but it would have been helpful to go a little more detail into X.”), to help figure out what resources are still needed (crowd sourcing), to announce new resources or upcoming events (Idealware’s and others), and to use the page as a living case study so that people can learn from our experience.

We have a six month strategic plan in place, and are intending to see that through with only minor adjustments so that we can better analyze what works and doesn’t works at the end. Results can take a while to happen, and understanding the implications takes even longer.

What happened week one?

At the launch of our Facebook, Laura and I invited all of our friends on Facebook to join, we tweeted about it, had a blog post announcing it, and also sent out personal emails to some partners and the board. I know of at least two RTs on Twitter about the launch. It took just over 24 hours to get the necessary 100 fans to receive a /Idealware url. As of Friday, September 25, we had 170 fans. (I know that this isn't a gauge for success, but after pressing refresh for 3 days straight, I was pretty excited).

We have had some interaction (by which I mean either a thumbs up or a comment by someone other than Idealware staff) on the page, which is good. My goal was to have interactions by 10 unique fans, we had 14. People reacted most (and commented back to each other) on a question I posed about thanking for RTs on Twitter (what is the proper etiquette anyway?). We had more response to that on Facebook than on Twitter, which is interesting. Not a big surprise, but the more self-promotional items like upcoming seminars didn’t garner any response.

Initial reflections and questions to ponder…

I suggested to all of my 690 friends on Facebook that they become fans, 50 joined so far and they continue to trickle in. This means that nearly 30% of our fans are also my friends on Facebook. I use Facebook for primarily for personal reasons, and was surprised at the folks that actually accepted the invitation. While some of those who became fans are in a position where they could benefit from Idealware’s services (my friends working for nonprofits), most are not. My 13-year-old cousin is extremely capable, but I’m not sure he is interested in helping nonprofits decide which software to use. In fact, some of my friends who I think really would benefit from our resources haven’t become fans yet, so I’m wondering if a different, more targeted approach might be better in the long run. I love my friends, and appreciate their support, but besides bolstering up our Fan page, will they engage with it? Does it matter? So far three have, but one of those, in the effort of full disclosure, only responded because I asked her to get the ball rolling.

Laura’s Facebook friends are almost entirely professional relationships, and quite a few of her friends also became fans. It will be interesting to see how our different networks interact and engage with the page.

So far, our fans on Facebook tend to be more supporters and partners than people who might use our resources. It will be interesting to see if that changes over time, and I think we will have to further hone our outreach approach to best reach our target audience. And, if we do get those people to be fans, we’ll need to make sure that our Facebook page is speaking to their needs.

Also, my goal of having a certain number of “interactions” is along the right idea, but I would like to tailor that even more. Is a thumbs up really an interaction? What does engagement look like? I’m hoping that with time, a close eye on what is happening, and some experimentation with different strategies will help us answer some of these questions…and more.

I don’t really know what all of this means yet, but I’m hoping that as we continue to track what is working or not on our page, we’ll have a better idea.

What do you think makes a fan a “good” fan – and does it matter? What does engagement on a fan page mean to you?

If you want to be part of our experiment and see how we are rolling out our Facebook strategy on a daily basis, visit us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/idealware.

How and Why RSS is Alive and Well

2009-09-28T10:49:00.001-04:00

Image: SRD

RSS, one of my favorite protocols, has been taking a beating in the blogosphere. Steve Gillmor, in his blog TechcrunchIT, declared it dead in May, and many others have followed suit.

Did Twitter Kill it?

The popular theory is that, with social networks like Twitter and Facebook serving as link referral tools, there's no need to setup and look at feeds in a reader anymore. And I agree that many people will forgo RSS in favor of the links that their friends and mentors tweet and share. But this is kind of like saying that, if more people shop at farmer's markets than supermarkets, we will no longer need trucks. Dave Winer, quite arguably the founder of RSS, and our friends at ReadWriteWeb have leapt to RSS's defense with similar points - Winer puts it best, saying:

"These protocols...are so deeply ingrained in the infrastructure they become part of the fabric of the Internet. They don't die, they don't rest in piece."

My arguments for the defense:

1. RSS is, and always has been about, taking control of the information you peruse. Instead of searching, browsing, and otherwise separating a little wheat from a load of chaff, you use RSS to subscribe to the content that you have vetted as pertinent to your interests and needs. While that might cross-over a bit with what your friends want to share on Facebook, it's you determining the importance, not your friends. For a number of us, who use the internet for research; brand monitoring; or other explicit purposes, a good RSS Reader will still offer the best productivity boost out there.

2. Where do you think your friends get those links? It's highly likely that most of them -- before the retweets and the sharing -- grabbed them from an RSS feed. I post links on Twitter and Facebook, and I get most of them from my Google Reader flow.

3. It's not the water, it's the pipe. The majority of those links referred by Twitter are fed into Twitter via RSS. Twitterfeed, the most popular tool for feeding RSS data to Twitter, boasts about half a million feeds. Facebook, Friendfeed and their ilk all allow importing from RSS sources to profiles.

So, here are some of the ways I use RSS every day:

Basic Aggregation with Drupal

My first big RSS experiment built on the nptech tagging phenomenon. Some background: About five years ago, with the advent of RSS-enabled websites that allowed for storing and tagging information (such as Delicious, Flickr and most blogging platforms), Techsoup CEO Marnie Webb had a bright idea. She started tagging articles, blog posts, and other content pertinent to those working in or with nonprofits and technology with the tag "nptech". She invited her friends to do the same. And she shared with everyone her tips for setting up an RSS newsreader and subscribing to things marked with our tag. Marnie and I had lunch in late 2005 and agreed that the next step was to set up a web site that aggregated all of this information. So I put up the nptech.info site, which continues to pull nptech-tagged blog entries from around the web.

Other Tricks

Recently, I used Twitterfeed to push the nptech aggregated information to the nptechinfo Twitter account. So, if you don't like RSS, you can still get the links via Twitter. But stay aware that they get there via RSS!

I use RSS to track Idealware comments, Idealware mentions on Twitter, and I subscribe to the blog, of course, so I can see what my friends are saying.

I use RSS on my personal website to do some lifestreaming, pulling in Tweets and my Google Reader favorites.

But I'm pretty dull -- what's more exciting is the way that Google Reader let me create a "bundle" of all of the nptech blogs that I follow. You can sample a bunch of great Idealware-sympatico bloggers just by adding it to your reader.

Is RSS dead? Not around here.

Multimedia Editing Software (for your comments!)

2009-09-24T08:01:00.002-04:00

We’re hard at work over here on our Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Marketing, Outreach and Communications – a small reference book that will help nonprofits think through what types of systems would be effective for them based on the processes that they need to support and their current technology level.

We’re taking on 39 different types of software for that, including a few areas that we have little prior research about. As part of our guerrilla research process for this, I thought I’d put some of them up here for your comments. Did we get it right? Are we missing important things? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Many thanks to Mark Sansone at See3 Communications for helping us out with this piece– though any mistakes are our own, as he hasn’t seen this version!

If you want to create videos or podcast with even a basic level of polish, you’ll need editing software. These tools allow you to cut out pieces you don’t want, splice together different sections, and overlay things like titles onto your piece. For a podcast, you may want to edit an interview down for length, cut out “um”s and pauses to add a more professional polish, and then add some music and a voice over introduction to the beginning. For a video, you might cut an interview with a constituent together with scenes of your program participants, and put a title screen at the beginning.

While good editing takes time and some skill, a number of low-cost and straightforward editing tools have put the software within any nonprofit’s reach. If you’re using a Mac, iMovie (which comes free with the computer) is a great editing tool for straightforward movies. The free editing software available for PCs (like Windows Movie Maker and Pinnacle Systems’ VideoSpin) often impose substantial and confusing limitations (like what formats you can import and output, or insistent front-and-center ads), but Adobe Premiere Elements ($15 for nonprofits on TechSoup, or about $140 retail) provides friendly features very similar to iMovie.

Found that you’ve outgrown the low-cost options – for instance, you want to create more robust animations or special effects? On the Mac, Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro provide logical stepping stones; Adobe Premiere is also a widely used on either PC or Mac. These products, all under $1000, are likely to provide all the power that a nonprofit is likely to need before it makes sense to hire a professional video editor.

On the sound editing side, both GarageBand (for the Mac) and Audacity (for the PC) are free and solid tools that provide all the functionality a nonprofit is likely to need for in-house work.

Annoucing the Consumers Guide to Data Visualization Tools

2009-09-21T14:43:00.002-04:00

We're thrilled to release today the Consumers Guide to Data Visualization Tools - this 30-page independent Idealware report provides an overview of the types of graphic formats that might work for you, and then compares eight low-cost tools that can help you create them.

How do you transform your data into charts, graphs, and maps that will help your audience understand the data and move them to take action? This report will help you understand the considerations, and walks through the software that can help - including Excel, Google Docs, DeltaGraph, SmartDraw, ManyEyes, Swivel, Google Maps, Microsoft MapPoint, and more. Read the report now (free registration required)>

The Trouble with (Bad) Metrics

2009-09-18T14:41:00.001-04:00

I'm a metric junkie. If I could spend all day just hitting the refresh button and watching the numbers go up, I'd be happy. And metrics are wonderful things: they can tell us what we're doing right, and when we should stop and try something else.

But metrics are also dangerous things. As the old adage says, you get what you measure. If you don't define meaningful metrics, it's very easy to get wrapped up in a number that's not really tied to anything that matters to your organization. How many site visitors do you get? How many clicks on your emails? How many Facebook friends or Twitter followers? While all of these things can be very useful to make tactical changes, none of them measure the *effectiveness* of your communications. Only measuring actual *outcomes* - actions, changed behavoir, donations - can tell you what's actually effective.

So it won't come as a shock that Seth Godin's recent post about nonprofits really pissed me off (I'm not alone: Beth Kanter has a terrific summary of the responses, which also got a ton of insightful comments). He observed that nonprofits are unwilling to change in order to effectively use social media. Based on? A few conversations, the fact that there are no nonprofits in the top 100 Twitter users, they don't use Squidoo (the obscure social media platform HE OWNS), and that they continue to send those darn old school direct mail fundraising letters.

Are nonprofits more or less effective at using social media than other types of organizations? I don't know. Effective to what end? Maybe; certainly no one would argue that there's room for improvement. But his data sucks.

I will say boldly and proudly: If we at Idealware spend a single dollar or a single minute trying to be one of the top 100 most followed Twitterers, we're wasting the resources that our constituents have entrusted to us. Trying to do massive broadcast communications with millions of people is not our mandate. I don't believe there are that many people in the world on Twitter than are likely to 1) benefit from our services or 2) take any action to help Idealware serve our mission. Like 95% of all nonprofits in the world, we have a niche audience. We shouldn't be trying to reach EVERYONE. We should be trying to reach the people that matter to our mission.

Don't get me wrong: we're using Twitter (and it takes a lot more than a minute a day). And we've in fact found Twitter to be helpful in reaching the people that matter to our mission. But the type of follower is as important as quantity.

And frankly, that's the point of marketing. No marketer worth his/ her salt, whether in the nonprofit or business world, is trying to just broadly reach EVERYONE, and none of them make decisions based on anything other than actual outcomes. You don't just decide which method sounds the coolest. You figure out what works.

Speaking of what works. His point about Squidoo (again, the obscure social media platform HE OWNS) is that although they often give away $10,000, not that many nonprofits try for that. Great. I'm really pleased by that. Nonprofits too often chase money that isn't likely to come through. Let's say it takes you 4-5 hours to create a great Squidoo list to give you a shot at that $10,000. Not even Seth claims that you'll get a good outreach return, so let's focus on the money. Let's say you have a 1% chance of winning the money (I've just pulled that out the air, but it seems like pretty good odds for a public contest). So your expected return if you did lots of these would be $100 each time. But it took 4-5 hours. You could do as well with a bake sale. Could you raise more than $100 in a single hour by picking up the phone and calling your supporters? I bet you could. Maybe a lot more.

Why do nonprofits continue to send those old school fundraising letters? Because they work. If they were measuring based Seth Godin's coolness meter, they would make different decisions. But then they would raise less money and make less real change in the world.

Become an Idealware Fan on Facebook

2009-09-16T13:48:00.001-04:00

As a research organization, here at Idealware we like to think things... sometimes a lot... before we do them. But thanks to our fabulous Communications and Social Media Specialist, Kaitlin LaCasse, we've launched our shiny new Facebook fan page with a bang. Join us on Facebook (http://bit.ly/1eSpum)

In addition to using the site to answer questions, share information, and promote webinars, we are also using it as our very own case study on Facebook strategy. So there will be a lot of information forthcoming from us as to what's working for us, what's not, and the lessons we're learning.

Plus, there are several upcoming opportunities for Fans to win free webinars, so make sure you watch out for those special promotions!

We'd love you to join us, or to help spread the word as we grow our Facebook community.

Join us at the Boston Email Fundraising Bootcamp!

2009-09-15T21:19:00.002-04:00

We're really excited to announce our Boston Email Fundraising Bootcamp, in partnership with Third Sector New England. It's one of our first live events, and a new format for us - a combination of expert-led training with lots of hands-on work on your own strategy, to ensure that you'll leave prepped to setup your own campaign in time for year end. Experts from Idealware, Firefly Partners, and Database Design Associates will not only share their knowledge but work with small groups and individuals to ensure that everyone gets individual advice tailored to their own organization.

At only $125, and with a cap of 45 participants, it'll fill up. If you're in the Northeast, sign up today! Learn more or register>

Succession Planning

2009-09-14T10:20:00.001-04:00

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Idealware's blog is not the best place for me to talk about my kid. There's Facebook and Flickr for that sort of thing. But I want to talk about him anyway, and open a discussion, if possible, about children and the nptech community.

My career is in nonprofit technology (nptech). My plan is to continue working for nonprofits (or, if for profit, a for profit with a mission and a socially beneficial bottom line) until I retire or expire. While my ten year old boy's stated goal is to become a NASA engineer, and that's great, I want him to understand why I chose my path of purposeful work and understand what's involved in it, should he, at age 15 or 25, decide that NASA isn't the only option.

A few year's back, former NTEN CEO and current MobileActive CEO Katrin Verclas suggested adding a program for teenagers at the annual nonprofit technology conference. This is a brilliant idea. We have a great opportunity to educate children in the work we do: advocating for social justice and good; raising funds and resources in order to act effectively and independently; and collaborating in a supportive community to accomplish our varied, but sympathetic goals. Whatever our children end up doing with their lives, we have something worthwhile to teach them.

When I was a teenager, I was active in a youth group called Liberal Religious Youth (LRY). LRY was an independent group affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association, but it was not a particularly religious group. The themes were more along the lines of addressing social concerns and building community. At ages sixteen and seventeen, I was creating flyers, renting facilities, giving presentations, leading sessions, planning menus and taking a leadership role that prepared me far better for my current career than high school actually did.

When I look at our nptech community, I see a similar environment, where our commitment and excitement regarding our work is bolstered by a natural adoption of supportive camaraderie and peer development. We definitely model something of value to our high school age kids who will face career choices and challenges like ours. We can develop a mentoring program that passes on our expertise in resource management, activism, fundraising, community building, nonprofit technology and social media as a social activism tool. This would provide them with an early introduction to the skills that will be needed when we retire to continue the important work that we do. As much as a grant, donation, or volunteer effort, this is an investment in our work and our world that we should be making.

I want my son to develop his skills and community with socially-conscious peers and mentors. I want his generation to be more effective than we are at solving problems like poverty, pollution and social injustice. It's not enough for us to try and save the world. We should be prepping the next generation to keep it protected.

Who's with me?

NTEN's online conference - at a discount!

2009-09-09T10:55:00.001-04:00

If you wanted to go to NTEN's Nonprofit Technology Conference this year, but couldn't make it, they're offering you another shot at it. Their Online Nonprofit Technology Conference is coming up next week. And the nice folks at NTEN are offering a discount to friends of Idealware - use the discount code ONTC25 to receive 25% off registration - $250 for members / $350 for nonmembers.

The two day live online conference, Sep 16th - 17th, will be based on their book, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders. It will be divided up into two tracks of online seminars, interspersed with keynotes and Ask the Expert sessions to give you multiple ways to participate.

And hey, I'm doing an Ask the Expert session! Check me out in the afternoon of Wed, September 16th, taking questions on the all the great types of software that can help you with fundraising, outreach, and marketing.