Idealware

Great Deal for the Grassroots Fundraising Journal!

2009-07-02T12:18:00.003-04:00

Do you know about the Grassroots Fundraising Journal? If you fundraise for small organizations, or work with people who do, you really should. It's a great, tactical magazine, full of practical advice on how to raise money without huge budgets or a ton of staff. (by the way, they're not paying or incenting us to say these things - I'm just a big fan personally).

They're in the midst of a big subscription push at the moment, with a great deal available to friends of current subscribers (and to you, by permission): just $20 for a full years' subscription to the Journal, plus an invitation to a free conference call with Kim Klein, grassroots fundraiser extraordinaire, on Thriving On Uncertainty.

Affirmative Action for Open Source Applications

2009-06-30T15:31:00.002-04:00

I love the tenants of open source software. What's not to like about software that's open to customization or modification, and (typically) costs nothing to download? And I fully support anyone's right to advocate for open source - there's certainly plenty of room to provide education and support to nonprofits, and to lobby organizations that publish information (yes, like Idealware) to balance out vendor's lobbying influence.

But these days I seem to be getting more and disappointed and angry emails from open source advocates who feel that Idealware has a systematic bias against open source software - that our reviews don't do justice to open source software. Given that our methodology is to interview representative folks in the field to understand the key factors that are important to them in choosing software, and then round up software based on those factors... wouldn't that mean that many open source tools don't do justice to THEMSELVES?

Customization, ability to exchange data, and price are all critical aspects where open source tools shine, and these areas play a big part in many of our reports and articles. But they aren't the only areas that are important. All too often, open source communities seem to disregard the functionalities that are often critical to small nonprofits - reporting, easy mail merging, and straightforward setup, for instance.

We cover open source software in all of the areas we review. We in fact go out of our way to include the open source software that's qualified, in a kind of "affirmative action" program for open source. I think that's as it should be, given the likely benefits for the sector as a whole if there's solid open source options.

But some open source advocates seem to be asking for a whole different set of qualifications for open source software, as if simply being open source should be enough. Or that every Idealware article should give "equal time" to open source, as if open source vs. proprietary should be the key framing concept for everyone software decision any nonprofit makes, rather than basing decisions around features and needs.

There's huge promise in both the tenants of open source and specific open source applications. But it doesn't serve the nonprofit sector to tell them a piece of software is likely to meet their needs if it won't, or to tell them their needs should be different than what they are. And it doesn't serve the cause of open source software to pretend that there's a different set of market realities for open source software than there is for every other kind.

Useful Tools and Tips

2009-06-23T11:54:00.001-04:00

Interesting things pop up on the web all of the time; here are a few things I think are worth sharing:

Twitter Results in Google

Even if you will never tweet, it's obvious that Twitter is a source of useful information, and, in some cases, a more timely source than traditional search engines and media. If you use Firefox as your main web browser, and have the popular Greasemonkey add-on installed, which serves as a kind of macro language for the web, then the Twitter Google Results script adds some real power. Any Google search you perform will also search Twitter, posting the top five relevant results. Why is this useful? Well, when we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off somewhere near our Bozeman, Montana office, the Twitter results had current info and links that weren't indexed by Google yet

One Stop Web 2.0 Sign-up

Namechk checks for your preferred username on a slew of Web 2.0 sites, from Bebo to Youtube. I found this useful to reserve peterscampbell at a few sites that I want to use but hadn't signed up for, and to learn that some other guy named peterscampbell had already grabbed it at Youtube, where I had used a different loginname... snap!

Make Friend Lists on Facebook

This is a tip, not a tool - if you've been stymied by Facebook's recent changes to how it handles updates, you can make a lot more sense of it by making lists of related friends, and then filtering the updates by group. Click on Friends and the "Create New List" button is at the top of the screen. I have lists for family, nptech, Boston friends, SF Friends, and a special one called "no tweets", which filters out everyone who cross-posts all of their Twitter updates to Facebook (my default view). Keeping up with all of this info is always a challenge, so the ability to filter out the echoes is a must.

Exhibit Your Info

Exhibit is a web site that lets you upload spreadsheets, maps and other data to an information rich, filterable, active web page that can then be shared. If your org works with a particular environmental cause, seeks a cure for a disease, or supports a particular community, you can share data about your cause dynamically and expressively with this amazing site.

Google Voice is on the Horizon

Google revolutionized email with GMail, the first email platform in decades to question the basic assumptions about how email should work (by filing important email into folders). They're about to do the same thing with Voicemail. A year or two ago, they purchased Grandcentral, a service that allowed you to route multiple phone numbers to one shared voicemail box. A few months ago, they opened the revamped Google Voice to existing Grandcentral customers, and, surprise, it looks a bit like GMail.

When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.

Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!

Buying Software Before You'll Use It

2009-06-18T16:00:00.002-04:00

Want to save thousands on your software implementation? A guest blogger who prefers to remain anonymous (let's call him or her the Masked Adviser!) had a great suggestion:

Organizations often go through the process of deciding on software, finally make a decision, and get so excited that they sign contracts immediately. Many, many times, they aren’t able to use it for months while they are transitioning from other systems or don’t have capacity to manage or get trained on the new system. The whole time they are paying for it.

I see many groups paying for expensive systems like Convio or Kintera spending thousands or tens-of-thousands on systems that are laying fallow while they get up to speed. Even if they are migrating, they often don't need services while they're doing discovery and design, and they may not need, for instance, email delivery and fundraising services until right before switch over. I know one organization who paid for nearly 6 months, and could have saved well over 25k had they waited.

Thanks, Masked Adviser!

Smartphone Talk

2009-06-17T10:49:00.001-04:00

The last few weeks saw some big announcements in the smartphone world:

Palm released the phone that they've been promising us for years, the Palm Pre, with it's new WebOS, to reviews that were mostly favorable and summed up as "The iPhone's baby brother".

Apple stole some of Palm's thunder by dominating the press two days later with news of their relatively unexciting new phones and 3.0 software.

In the weeks prior, news came out that about 18 more Android phones should be out in calendar 2009 and that, by early 2010, all of the major carriers will have them.

And Nokia's E71 hit our shores, an incredibly full-featured phone that you can get for just over $300 unlocked, and use the carrier of your choice. While this isn't a touchscreen, and is therefore suspect in terms of it's ease of use, it is an amazingly full-featured product.

Left in the wings were Blackberry, who keep producing phones, including their iPhone competitor, the Storm -- to yawns from the press, and Microsoft, who are talking a lot about Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0, but seem to have really been decimated by the ugliness of their mobile OS when compared to just about anyone else's.

What's clear is that a few things differentiate smartphones these days, and the gap between the ones that get it and the ones that don't are huge. They are:

Responsive Touchscreen Interfaces. The UI's of the iPhone, Android and Palm's WebOS get around the sticky problem that phones were just to small to support anything but simple functionality without requiring an oppressive amount of taps and clicks. This is why Microsoft has fallen down the smartphone food chain so far and fast -- their mobile OS is just like their desktop OS, with no flagship phone that does the touchscreen nearly as well as the new competition.

Desktop-Class Web Browsers. This is where Apple and Google have drawn a huge line, and it looks like Palm might have joined them. All three use browser's based on Webkit, the same technology that fuels Safari and Chrome. On a 3G phone, this makes for a fast and complete experience that puts the Blackberry, Mobile Internet Explorer and the Treo's hideous Blazer. Add Google's voice activation (native on Android and available for iPhone), and their smartphone-optimized results (which don't work on the non-webkit browsers) and the task of finding a Starbucks or hotel on the road takes seconds, instead of the average ten to 15 minutes on the old, lousy browsers, which simply choke on the graphics.

Push Email. If you connect to Exchange servers, the iPhone and Pre have Activesync built in. If your mail is with Google, you're connected to it as soon as you tell an Android phone your login and password. And the Android phone app is the best out there, with Apple's mail running close behind it. What's ironic is that Microsoft targeted their biggest threat with Activesync -- the Blackberry's kludgy, but, at the time, unparalleled email forwarding -- and gave it wings by licensing it to Palm, Apple and others. This is fueling corporate acceptance of the iPhone and Pre, meaning that this Blackberry-beating strategy might have worked, but more likely it did it for Apple and Palm, not Microsoft.

Music. The iPhone is an iPod; everything else isn't, meaning that, if having a high quality phone and music experience on one device is a priority, you're not going to go wrong with the iPhone. I love my G1, but I weigh my value of the real keyboard and awesome, open source OS on T-Mobile over the iPhone's built-in iPod and Activesync on AT&T. As OSes go, Android is only marginally better than Apple, but the Apple hardware is much better than the G1. Newer Android phones are going to show that up.

People make a lot of noise about the apps available for the iPhone (and Windows/Blackberry) as opposed to the newer Android and Pre. I think that's a defining question for the Pre, but it looks like companies are jumping on board. For Android, it's quite arguably a wash. All of the important things are available for Android and, given that it's open source, most of them are free. And with those 18 phones due out by year end on every carrier, the discrepancies will be short-lived.

I have to wonder how long it will take Microsoft to "get" mobile. They have a heavy foot in the market as the commodity OS on the smartphones that can't get any buzz. But the choice to bring the worst things about the Windows Desktop experience to their mobile OS was unfortunate. Should I really get a pop-up that has to be manually dismissed every time I get an email or encounter a wireless network? Do I have to pull out the stylus and click on Start every time I want to do anything? What's even more worrisome is that Windows Mobile is a separate OS from Windows, that merely emulates it, as opposed to sharing a code base. Apple's OS is the same OSX that you get on a MacBook, just stripped down, and Google's OS is already starting to appear on Netbooks and other devices, and will likely fuel full desktops within a year or two -- it is, after all, Linux.

So, the state of the smartphone market is easily broken into the haves and have-nots, meaning that some phones have far more usable and exciting functionality, while most phones don't. There's a whole second post dealing with the choice of carriers and their rankings in the race to offer the most customer disservice, and it does play into your smartphone decision, as Verizon might be a very stable network, but their phone selection is miserable, and AT&T might have the best selection but, well, they're AT&T. I love Android, so, were I looking, I'd hold out until four or five of those new sets are out. But I don't know anyone with an iPhone who's unsatisfied (and I know lots of people with iPhones).

Resource Roundup 6/12

2009-06-12T14:47:00.000-04:00

The Million Dollar Email (Global Health Magazine)
Terrific case study about how Nothing But Nets is using email, their website, blogs, and social media together to raise money.

Introduction to Data (ONE/Northwest)
Great primer on data and databases

My (FREE) iGoogle Brand Monitoring Dashboard (Carie Lewis)
A look at the Humane Societies tools and process for monitoring what others are saying about them

Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What's the Difference? (Mashable)
Great rundown on the difference between pages and groups in Facebook

Enterprise PBX Comparison Guide (Web Buyer's Guide)
Matrix comparing high end PBX software (to support large organizations' phone systems)

URL shorteners: how to stay out of trouble (Beaconfire)
Pros and cons of URL shorteners, like TinyURL

Easy Step by Step Video Training for Non Profits (Charity How To)
Interesting site with videos for sale (for low prices, like $8) to help you navigate basic areas, like how to use photographs online, and mapping

Nonprofit Organizing in 140 Characters or Less (M+R Strategic Services)
Incredibly useful article on how to use Twitter to meet organizational goals

Teens 4 Planet Earth Moves to Ning (Beaconfire Wire)
Tiny case study of why Teens 4 Planet Earth chose Ning for their custom online community, with a list of other tools they considered.

Is Drupal Over-hyped? (CMS Watch)
Useful article looking not so much about Drupal (takeaway: it has strengths and weaknesses like any other CMS), but about how to protect yourself from hype.

Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts for Your Nonprofit (Beth's Blog)
Nice look at tools and process to manage multiple twitter accounts

Opportunities for Nonprofit Publishing

2009-06-11T10:40:00.002-04:00

It's not hard to see how publishing has changed over the last several years. Magazines becoming ezines. Readers becomming ereaders. Monologues, catalogues and travelogues becoming blogs.

A few of the less ubiquitous innovations have peaked my interest. Take Kindle, Amazon's highly popular ereader device + publishers marketplace. Bloggers can syndicate their blog directly to Kindle. Amazon determines a price to sell your blog content, and you get 30% of the revenue. There are a lot of nonprofits that publish really unique and valuable information through their websites for free, and may find it valuable to leverage this as an income opportunity.

Its much easier to publish books these days by simply bypassing the traditional publishing industry layers. Lulu.com helps you self publish all varieties of books (photo books, novels, calendars, etc) - build these directly online and buy/sell as many or as few as you need. There are many others including Blurb and Wordclay.

Magazines can also be created on the cheap, by anyone who can produce pdf files. Magcloud lets you produce a magazine at 20 cents per page plus shipping, and order as few or as many as you want. I see a lot of great 10 page quarterly publications from nonprofits that are produced traditionally using printers with minimum run requirements that may benefit from more flexibility here.

Taking a step back, if you just want to share a nicely formatted pdf document widely, Scribd.com can help. Get a free account and upload your documents - the service makes it very easy to view and share these documents by anyone, to find documents by topic and interest areas, and is a large community of users.

Regular (Expression) Magic

2009-06-09T10:54:00.001-04:00

Let's get a bit geeky. Many Idealware visitors come here for advice on purchasing and deploying data management systems, such as donor databases, constituent relation management systems and content management systems. And, more often than not, are replacing older systems with new ones, meaning that one of the trickiest tasks is data migration. If any of this work has ever fallen to you, then you might have found yourself doing tedious editing and corrections in Excel, pouring over data screens or rows in Access trying to formalize non-formalized data entry, and generally settling for some lost or incorrect data moving from old system to new.

Wouldn't it be great to have a magic wand that can instantly reformat the data to the proper format? Well, I have one for you. But, just as Harry Potter had to go to school before he could effectively wave his wand, mine comes with a lesson or two as well.

The wand in question is a search/replace language called regular expressions. Regular expressions are a set of terms that can be used, in supported software, to perform advanced search and replace functions. They were originally popularized in the Unix Stream Editor (SED), but are now standardly found in text editors, word processors, scripting languages (such as PHP) and other software, usually as an advanced option.

The reason to use them instead of a regular search and replace function is simple: they can search for things that regular search tools can't. For example:

the first three characters at the beginning of each line

the three at the end of each line

one or more spaces

Regular expressions can also do multiple replacements in one phrase, allowing you to either remove the first comma encountered in a sentence, or all commas. Here are the basics:

A regular expression takes the form of /Search Phrase/Replacement/. A simple search to replace all instances of the word "fish" with the word "bird" would look like:

/fish/bird/

But regular expressions only prove their worth when you learn their special characters:

. (any character)

* (one or more characters)

^ (the beginning of a line

$ (the end of a line)

() (parentheses surrounding characters in the search phrase can be recalled in the replacement)

$1, $2 (substitute in the replacement for characters saved by parentheses in the search phrase)

\ (backslashes treat the next character literally, even if it's a Regular expression special character)

[a-z], [0-9], [A-Za-z] (groupings search for all of the characters specified between the brackets, using dashes to identify ranges

Examples:

If you have a text printout of a document that you want to whittle into something more useful, like a CSV file, step one might be to remove any dead space.

/ */ /

will search for one or more spaces (the asterisk means "any number of the preceding character) and replace them with one space.

/^$/d

will remove all blank lines (lines with nothing between the beginning and the end of the line)

If you are moving data from one system to another, you might have to reformat dates for the new system. Say the old system exports dates as MM/DD/YYYY and the SQL database you're importing them to expects YYYY-MM-DD. This Regular Expression will convert all dates to the new format:

/([01][0-9])\/([0-3][0-9])\/([12][0-9][0-9][0-9])/$3-$1-$2/

Let's break this down:

/ - a slash starts the search phrase section.

( - parentheses surround things that we want to remember, so this starts a section we'll remember.

[01][0-9] - a month (MM) will be a number between 1 and 12, so, if your system is exporting dates with leading zeros (if not, you can do this with a series of regular expressions to get around that), then the [01] set will match either a leading zero or a one. The [0-9] set will match any digit following that one or zero.

) - this will be remembered in the replacement as $1, because it's the first thing we remembered.

\/ - since the slash is a regular expression special character (the delimiter), we precede it with a backslash, telling the parser to treat it a a slash, not a delimiter.

([0-3][0-9]) - this will find any pair of numbers between 01 and 39, which we know as the day, and remember it as $2, because it's enclosed in parentheses.

\/ - next slash

([12][0-9][0-9][0-9]) - this catches the year. You see how, right? It is specifying that the year will be in this millennia or the last by limiting the first character to one or two. We use parentheses to remember this as well.

/ - this slash signifies that the search phrase is done, and the replacement will follow.

$3-$1-$2 - this takes our three remembered phrases and reorders them from month, day, year to year ($3), month ($1), day ($2), placing dashes in-between them.

/ - finally, we close the command with a slash.

One of my standard uses is to take a list - which could be an Excel spreadsheet, or a database dump, or a Word table -- clean it up, and then format it into SQL statements that can then be pulled into a database. Most databases can import in CSV files, but Excel, while good at doing some reformatting, can't do the fancy cleanup tasks that my regular expression-enabled editor can. Once my specific clean-up chores are done, if I'm left with a tab-delimited file, I can do the following three simple searches to turn it into a SQL input file that can just be run in my SQL interpreter.

/\t/','/ -- searches for all tabs (\t is a symbol that means "tab") and replaces them with ','

/(.)$/$1');/ - searches for the last character in a line and replaces it with that character followed by a close quote, close parens and semi-colon.

/^(.)/insert into players (name, title, company) values ('$1/ - searches for the first character in any line and prepends the front end of the SQL statement.

If we had an input file with lines like this:

Joe Namath Quarterback Forty-niners

It would become

insert into players (name, title, company) values ('Joe Namath','Quarterback','Forty-niners');

There are plenty of excellent resources for learning about regular expressions on the web, but many of them are targeted at programmers, making them a bit thick to read through. For more friendly introductions, I recommend The regular-expressions.info quickstart. While many text-processing tools, including Microsoft Word, support regular expression search and replace, I recommend using a good text editor over a word processor, because it will likely include supporting functionality, such as block copying/pasting, and they'll handle very large files with far more speed and grace. I've been happy using TextPad and EditPlus on Windows, and TextMate and TextWrangler on the Mac. Wikipedia publishes an incomplete list of applications that include regular expression functionality.

Google Wave: “what might email look like if we invented it today”

2009-06-06T15:05:00.006-04:00

What do you do five years after shaking things up with Google Maps. If you are Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the core developers behind Google Maps, you apply yourself to a different way of thinking about collaboration and communication over the Internet.

Spend an hour and a quarter watching Lars, Jens and their project manager Stephanie Hannon and their crew on Youtube from the June Google I/O conference. Its hard not to start thinking, I could use this thing in my work and when can I try it out.

Background. Email has been around for almost forty years, starting out before the web and the Internet as we know it now. Today, we often have a love/hate relationship with our Inbox. In just the last couple years, whole new realms of team communication, web-base collaboration and social networking sharing have grown up as alternatives to “pure” email.

Problem is, unless you can effectively live on line in one or two of these collaborative cloud worlds, you often still depend on email. And if not email, then other things that push new information out to me to alert me to go back and look. I use Basecamp every day to organize discussion about the projects I’m involved in. I depend on it sending messages by email or feeding reminders into my calendar. If you work with a team using a Google document, a Gliffy process diagram, or a Slideshare presentation, you need to have it send an email to let everyone else know. It's cool that in MS Office 2007 – and now in Open Office 3.1—you can not only “track changes,” but also share comments with other editors. You still have to send the new version out and wait for a response.

Some things get a bit closer to real time collaboration. In a Google doc, you can be on a conference call and all take notes in the same document. Kind of crazy distracting at first, but really useful once you get used to it.

I mentioned dropbox in a recent blog, and now have been playing around with drop.io as well. These give let you share a folder either among your own various computers or else with a team. But you might not notice an update of your team’s collaborative materials unless someone tells you. Email, text, phone, IM, maybe Twitter or private micro blog environments still are needed to complete the communication loop.

Google Wave wants to change that. In the first place, it combines some of the best elements of Gmail, Instant Messaging, and Google Docs. An email becomes a Wave, an organized and organizing conversation. Instead of message and response, you can just respond by editing within the message, so a message becomes a Google Doc. You can discuss points within it by inserting an IM-like discussion at one or another points in the message. Or a poll, or other interactive feature.

So, if four of you want to draw lessons from yesterday’s workshop and blog about it, what can you do? Start a wave with your notes. Others can now edit it real time. And real time will mean seeing everyone’s contributions appear character by character. To broaden the discussion, you don’t forward an email, you just add them to the Wave, and they can use the playback feature to see everyone’s contributions as they came in.

Drag and drop photos from the event and the Wave will automatically have an embedded photo gallery everyone can tag, label or add to. Other one click tools allow you to add links or embed youtube or other external objects.

The line between an email discussion and a collaborative document has gotten a lot narrower. Instead of debate over whether email is dead, Google Wave aims to remake it into what it ought to be today.

Using the Wave API, once your team is far enough along with your summary of yesterday’s event, you can embed it in a blog post or insert into a social media page (much as with a Google map today). As the Wave gets further refined, it will be updated real time on that external page. Extensions based on the API will do simultaneous translation, so if I’m seeing the Wave in English, a team member in Mexico might see it in Spanish. The context sensitive spell checker fixed “icland is an icland” to become: “Iceland is an island.”

Usable versions of this seem months away. Maybe Google figured they would preview so much of it so early because they wanted to get developer attention as early as possible. Other things that will improve options available to collaborative teams also seem in the works. For example, Drupal 7, also due to begin appearing end of this year, also will have some amazing steps forward in collaboration and process integration. Discussion in Drupal circles has already begun, Drupal 7 versus Wave, or Drupal 7 PLUS Wave.

Like other cloud based collaboration initiatives, Wave poses privacy concerns. It will be easy, but will it be as secure as, say, a Drupal 7 collaborative site? One very exciting aspect of the Google Wave model, is that in addition to having the usual rich open environment for developers, the whole project will be Open Source. You will be able to create your own private label Wave site, and presumably ensure the privacy levels appropriate to your work and audience. Now, that seems different for Google.

How important is all this stuff? The collaborative tools we all use today make a huge difference in the creativity, practicality and effectiveness of all kinds of projects today. In its June 15 issue, even as the Business Week cover story bemoaned the slowing down of innovation in the United States, it also highlighted “Cloud Computing’s Big Bang for Business.” Google Wave will be a big part of this by this time next year. Watch the video, then sign up and check it out at http://wave.google.com.

Data Visualization Tools - An Early Preview

2009-06-04T16:48:00.003-04:00

Here at Idealware world headquarters, we're working on a report on Tools to Graphically Depict Data on a Shoestring (I know, the title needs some work). We're still very much doing research and writing, but we've mapped out a pretty decent view of the tools that are available in this space, so I thought I'd share and see if you know of any I'm missing.

Here's what I've got, for tools that will help you display quantitative data in a visual form without a lot of time, money, or specific skills:

Excel: the obvious one. It's quite a flexible and complex tool compared to the others (though those go together -- it's flexibility is so obscure and complicated that many don't know it's there), but it doesn't make it easy to publish graphs online or even in polished printed form.
Google Docs: nice features for both simple and more interactive graphs, and pretty polished graphs, though very little control over the look of them (check out both the Charts and the Widgets features). All can be easily embedded. Free.
ManyEyes: the best known of the online visualization tools, with a lot of great format options, and pretty professional looking (though again, very little control over the look). You must publically publish your data with ManyEyes in order to use the tool. Free.
DabbleDB: lets you create nice, simple graphics from data; simple and easy. Free if you share your data; $8/user/ month otherwise
Swivel, iCharts, WidGenie: all online tools that let you easily create charts from data, and then publish them. We're still researching them, so I don't know as much about them.

Those are ones you don't need a programmer to use; if you've got a programmer, consider FusionCharts or Chart Director as coding language plug-in libraries, or the Google Visualization API, Yahoo Charting API or Open Flash Charts. Or if this is going to be a big part of what you do, consider R or Processing as visualization/ stats specific programming languages. (tip 'o the hat to Chris Mulligan at YouGov for the Yahoo API and Open Flash Chart)

What else is out there? What have I missed?

Does Your Data Have a Bad Reputation?

2009-06-01T10:30:00.001-04:00

Photo by StarbuckGuy

As you probably know, the U.S. Congress has been having a big debate about what went on behind closed door briefings on the treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. At issue is whether House Leader Nancy Pelosi was told about the use of harsh interrogation tactics, which many of us define as torture, in 2002 and 2003 briefings, when the tactics were actually in use. Rep. Pelosi maintains that they weren't discussed; The CIA, responsible for the briefings, maintains that they were, but neither of them has yet provided documentation that might settle the matter. Meanwhile, Rep. Pelosi's Democratic colleague, Rep. Bob Graham, who, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was also to be briefed on such actions, reports that the CIA's assertions are in error. Dates that they claim he was in briefings on the subject are wrong. His his meticulous notes, which he has traditionally been kidded about keeping, establish that only one of four CIA-alleged meetings actually occurred, and, in it, the harsh interrogation tactics weren't discussed.

At this point, you might well be asking why I'm bringing this up on the Idealware blog. And the answer is, because it's about data, or, more to the point, the integrity of data and data keeping systems, and that's a topic close to our hearts here at Idealware. This example was inspired by some great reporting by the frivously-named, but thought-provoking blog BoingBoing, and a post of theirs on May 21st titled "Bob Graham's much-scoffed-at little notebooks are more reliable than the CIA's records". They quote Gary Wolf's post (which I highly recommend reading) about the intriguing fact that the CIA backed off of their record keeping claims rather quickly upon learning that they didn't jibe with Graham's personal notes. Consider this for a minute: Bob Graham's personal note-taking has more authority than the record keeping of the Central Intelligence Agency. The killer line from Wolf's post is:

"Personal data, kept by a dedicated and interested party, even using yesterday's technology, will trump large scale collection systems managed by bureaucrats."

You can find some really excellent advice here at Idealware on what to buy and how to implement the software that will manage the critical information that your organization lives and dies by. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars deploying it. But it, too, might be outclassed by the scribbling of a person who's scribble-keeping habits are far less impeachable (to keep the political allegory going) than the data integrity securing processes that you build around your system.

When you deploy that software, one thing to consider is "who owns this data? Who has the most respect for it?". Distribute the data entry duties in ways that insure that the people who first put that data into the system care about it, and are invested in seeing that it goes in correctly. Then, integrate your systems in ways that eliminate duplicate entry of that data. Set up triggers that push data from the authoritative systems of record (the ones that the people who care enter the data into) to the auxiliary systems, insuring that no donor or client's name is misspelled one place, but correct in another; and that a $50 donation via the web site isn't recorded as a $500 entry in your donor database.

Doing this will insure that your data-keeping systems have the upstanding reputations that your organization depends on.

Bing hits search market

2009-06-01T07:56:00.004-04:00

I tried Bing this morning and it’s not bad. Not bad at all. Bing.com is Microsoft’s new search site, soft-launched in “preview,” full launch June 4.

As I felt about its predecessor Live Search incarnations, I thought I would just say Bing stands for “BING is not Google,” as others have said. Not so fast. Bing surprises. It returns results very quickly, including on Firefox and Opera. It also has a fresh, enticing look and operation. For example, I really like the clickable bar to the right of each search result; roll over it, and a Flash-like popup gives more detail without navigating the full page.

And the results show a lot of smarts to them. I did a few comparison searches on Google and Bing, found them interesting and not entirely the same in a useful way.

I’m sold. Partly. I’m not ready to give up Google as my default search. I’m too used to the way it works, how to bend it toward the kinds of results that suit me. That said, I’m probably going to be likely going forward to supplement an important search with Bing at this point. Yup, keep using delicious and other social networking search sites, and for general search, I expect I will compare Bing and Google. (You can easily add Bing to the search option list in Firefox with a link at top of page.)

If you create an account, Bing will remember your results and also allow you to have a “cashback” account for using recommended Bing vendor partners. Hmm. I don’t know what I think about this from a privacy point of view or a business model point of view. As we all know, however, Google doesn’t provide search results as a community service either.

As far as advanced search syntax, some of it is like Google and for some of it, you need to read the help pages to understand it all. Some of the Bing-specific options seem pretty cool, and I look forward to getting used to them. I did miss being able to search by date, though maybe that’s coming when the site fully launches.

From a policy point of view, I’m glad Bing has launched. We need more competition in software systems, including in something as basic as web search. A year ago, Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Media) argued that the battle for search had ended and everyone should just let Google have it.

A year later, there is more life in search than in a while, including with Twitter emerging as a new meta-search mechanism, and new ideas about how search should work in the future. Today Google has 64% of the search market, Yahoo has 20% and Microsoft (with its older sites) has only 8%. And according to the WSJ , Microsoft’s own research shows 60% of users are happy with their current search tools. That said, given Google and Yahoo’s pervasiveness, and how important search is, 40% not happy is a lot of folks thinking they might do better with something new. 2/3 of online purchases begin on a search page. Given how much revenue this represents, both from the sales themselves and from advertising, the software titans have strong interest in
innovating.

And Google quietly has added some new search features recently. When you get a result page, check out the “show options” link at the top to quickly refine your results. I like that too.

From a developer point of view, yes, I admit there is something appealing about having to worry about fewer development frameworks and APIs. If Bing grows, complexity grows again for web developers. That’s life for folks like us.

Yet, from a small business and nonprofit organization point of view, innovation at the top creates a climate of innovation up and down the software food chain. For example, there has a new wave of consolidation in commercial software for nonprofits lately. This wave appears bringing clearer support and stronger feature sets. Meanwhile, there has been a lot of innovation on the open source side, as Idealware.org’s recent twin reports on open source content management systems for web sites and on low cost donor databases have shown. Think about which of these trends helps more in making good choices or getting good prices and definitely give Bing a try this week.

Full disclosure: Steve often uses Microsoft software, and some of his best friends and family members do as well. He used Bing as well as Google to read news and other comments about bing.com, though "binging" (is that a new 2.0 word?) was not as easy as googling bing.

Project planning and tai chi

2009-05-30T12:46:00.004-04:00

A weekend thought about software and technology. At blogging buddy Heather Gardner-Madras’ suggestion, I’d like to return to a theme I started on earlier -- tai chi and technology planning. Doing tai chi or chi gung (qigong), it is remarkable how many design and software folks you find, part of the “walking wounded” of our high tech era. One thing these practices can help you work on is relaxing the eyes. Nothing like sitting in front of a computer screen for hours to put tension into your eyes.

There is a lot more to it. When we want to solve a problem, don’t we tend to say things like, take a hard look? “Let’s meet next week and take a hard look at our email newsletter now that we have done all that work revamping it.”

And we say, “keep a sharp eye out.” “When you meet on the web project next week, keep a sharp eye out for feature requests that will bust our launch schedule.” We focus in, we “head” in a direction and so on.

Check yourself next week. Do your eyes tense up in meetings and not just when in front of the computer?

By contrast, next time you watch Chinese or Japanese martial arts films (or those influenced by them), do an experiment. When the big fight is about to begin, look at who has the fiercest eyes and use that as a predictor of who is going to lose that round. Think Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu in the restaurant scene in Kill Bill Volume I. Watch their eyes change focus in the run-up to the mayhem. Check it out on youtube. just watched it again, and well, O-Ren Ishii is no slouch either. If the contrast isn’t so clear, check out the next scenes, facing the Crazy 88 (O-Ren’s personal army).

In Tai Chi, you practice softening your eyes as you move in order to take in more, to increase your peripheral vision. Not that I would know, but it makes sense that good peripheral vision helps when you face off with dozens of Crazy 88s at once. You neither focus so hard that you only see what is in front of your nose and ignore the context, nor turn so passive that you just receive information without being part. You learn to relax the eyes into a neutral place, so that you pay attention to everything going in and out in a more complete, holistic way.

I’m not going to compare my project meetings with facing the Crazy 88. Still, there is often a lot going on. If you mainly bring back a mess of details from a planning session, you may not be able make that synthesizing assessment the client expects from you. In software requirements planning and software selection exercises with teams of folks, I have found I do better when I take it in with a soft eye. A couple ideas:

As people contribute, pay attention to the speaker, and also take in everyone else at the table. Look around at everyone, not just in turn, but all at once. Can you take the pulse of the room as the discussion flows?

As documents and details get pulled up on screen, don’t let an entire table of people bear down on each data field or each separate component of a wireframe. You need those details –and tai chi is certainly all about working on the details!—but when you have the whole team there, ask yourself what you need to do to measure the whole effect.

During a break, try very gently massaging the front of the eyes, and let the attention of your mind also relax the back of your eyes. See if that doesn't help you to come back to the planning refreshed and able to take in more of the big picture.

Finally, a comment Steve Connell made in Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules, one of the classic books about software project management. This has always stuck with me, though I can't find the page now. He mentions that in an initial meeting about a big project, as senior architect, he sometimes finds it useful to come with no notebook. He recommends listening and looking, taking it all in, with the goal of summarizing and synthesizing the sense of the entire meeting in just one sentence only. Not a platitude, but one sentence that everyone walks away with feeling the whole strategy of the project has been captured. You cannot do that if you are taking a hard look at every feature request, every contradictory requirement that may come up. Do that over time, make sure the initial planning has the whole picture.

(ps. I study at www.brooklinetaichi.com and with www.energyarts.com)

"Listening" vs. "Asking" to Find Out What People Think

2009-05-28T16:41:00.002-04:00

I'm doing a bit of research of late about using online tools to find out what people think about your organization. It's an interesting area - there's a vast number of tools (many very similar to each other) that can help you monitor and listen to what people have to say online and a big body of useful best practices and case studies about how to use them. (By the way, Beth Kanter's information in this area is even more useful than her usually very useful stuff!)

I have a substantial background in research - traditional ways to find out what people think, like surveys and interviews - and I can't help but notice that there's almost nothing that I can find connecting the "online listening" area to more formal research techniques. There's got to be overlap there, right? There's likely good lessons to be shared between them in both directions.

A couple that jump to mind: I think that often formal research overlooks the idea of listening to what people say on their own without the presence of a researcher (the online world makes this so much easier), which is certainly a useful thing to do. In the other direction, I think there's too little discussion in the writings and posts in the "online listening" world of what it means that people are saying things without being asked. The stuff that they say is certainly worth hearing (and you certainly can't ignore it), but you also need to keep in mind that you're likely not getting the full picture that way. The people talking on their own are going to be the ones with strong opinions, so they're unlikely to be typical of your average constituent... if that's what you want to know.

I think this spectrum of "listening" to "asking" is a pretty useful one to consider. Both are important to find out what people think about you. In fact, add in an "informal" to "formal" axis, and you've got a nifty chart:

(By the way, this is not intended to imply that research is "best" because it sits in the typically best upper right quadrant.... this is simply the order that makes the most conceptual sense, I think)

Beyond Spreadsheets: Give reporting its due in software planning

2009-05-28T06:43:00.007-04:00

Database Designs isn’t just about databases but I still spend a lot of time thinking and strategizing about them. Recently, I have noticed that, with some exaggeration, you could divide up much of the population of database managers into those trying to get data out of spreadsheets and those trying to get data back into them. From dust to dust, from spreadsheets in to spreadsheets out, data collection seems like burdensome toil for many. Maybe those flying closest to the sun, with large budgets and staff, truly escape, but most of us still struggle.

On the one side, no matter how powerful one’s database or CRM, administrators find themselves regularly battling users who keep their real data separately in spreadsheets. Not the official data, yet what counts day to day. At a 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference session on tech planning, a speaker commented that a good technique is to just walk around and see what users are actually using at their desk, regardless of the organization’s prioritized software systems. Yup, that struck a chord.

On the other side, in evaluating systems, its easy to focus on the processing workflow, data collection fields, interactive usability and get to “reporting” last. Under-budgeting for reporting and data exchange is an easy trap to fall into.

Absence enough attention to these things, your staff's data world may remain spreadsheet driven. Here’s some thoughts.

In software planning and selection, tie every feature discussion back to reporting. Reporting today is not just neat formatted lists and labels. It’s also spreadsheets, mailmerge, email list sync, mobile and beyond. One of the reasons I have continued to have affection for Microsoft Access is its powerful reporting system, to which its adherents then layer on additional utility over the years. If you have Office, you have a pretty useful tool at hand, even if your data sits in SQL Server or on the web in MySQL or other databases. It shouldn’t be that hard anywhere.

Salesforce has a great reporting tool once you get used to it. CiviCRM, long dogged by absence of output mechanisms, now is on the verge of addressing this. And it doesn’t have to be in big, complex systems. And definitely check out the truly smart “Smart Lists” component to Mission Research’s GiftWorks software. As a reporting tool builder, I'm envious.

Going further, staff fundamentally do not want to enter the same data twice. If they do, it’s more likely because they can’t make the actual lists they want than that important data collection fields are missing. Even if you have made sure you have the right tools, it is so easy to short time for customizing the reporting features or in training on reporting. Adding another custom field or two to a web page typically takes a lot less time than getting it into appropriate search pages or output templates. You have to consider all of it in planning for reporting. An easy way to protect yourself is to include reporting elements in each phase of a projects implementation, instead of having a giant reports phase at the end.

Third, there is life beyond spreadsheets. Some of the most exciting stuff at the 2009 NTC had to do with using free and low cost tools for visualizing data. Visualizing data can mean any framework that enables the information you want to organize come alive in context. It can be putting it on an interactive map. At the 2009 NTC, Peter Black showed some done for the Environmental Defense Fund (edf.org) such as this not-so-fun exploration of sea level rise: Or , check out Google motion charts and the work it is based on at gapminder.org.

Data visualization is a whole separate topic. I’ll just say that thinking creatively with today’s tools about visualization is also part of how to break out of the dust-to-dust, spreadsheet in to spreadsheet out framework for data , and to perhaps generate greater enthusiasm for and quality of data collection.

Incredible Websites

2009-05-27T12:55:00.003-04:00

When comparison shopping, we have come to expect that companies will make outlandish claims about their stuff. Sometimes it's frustrating, but most of the time, I continue on numb to the distorted claims clinging to the brands all around me. For nonprofits in the business of providing a social benefit, its especially disheartening when I read similarly exaggerated claims about their accomplishments.

I see credible communication as a social benefit. Sandra Stewart, a colleague over at Thinkshift Communications, shared a beta "Credibility Quotient" to help quantify the credibility of initiatives. I found it useful as I thought about building nonprofit websites, and the kinds of messaging and communications strategies that become implicit in the architecture of the sites I build.

Thinkshift identifies several factors in determining credibility, including provable claims, accurate data, attention to challenges, relevance to the audience, consistency with actions and more. These factors and definitions show the different perspectives we can take when considering whether web content is credible, and helps to determine where to focus to fix any problems. For me, the details of the scoring and weighting are less important than the exercise in understanding what credibility factors are most important, and how to read content for these factors.

Meet the Idealware Bloggers Part 5: Michelle Murrain

2009-05-27T11:18:00.002-04:00

The last installment of the Meet the Bloggers series is with Michelle Murrain. Unfortunately we didn't get the chance to sit down together in person at the Nonprofit Technology Conference this year but we plan to remedy that at the next one in Atlanta.

Michelle Murrain

On Connecting Nonprofits & Technology
Michelle's work with nonprofits and technology began in parallel. Her college major was in Biology, but even then she was focused on computers and the tech end of things. At the same time she was also on the board of a Gay/Lesbian organization but didn't do technology for them because it was before nonprofits knew or cared much about the potential of technology. It wasn't until ten years later when Michelle, now a professor, was working with local women's health organization who they decided that they wanted to get on the web that it really came together. This was in the early nineties when things were very (very) expensive and even hosting was out of reach for many nonprofits. A student intern working for with them had the bright idea to set up a Linux box in Michelle's office on campus, which was connected to the internet. They set up a server in the corner of her office that the organization could get to and update their web site via phone modem. So this was the experience for Michelle marrying technology and nonprofits and also her first foray into Open Source with Linux, which at the time she installed from floppies. It was still several years after that before nonprofit technology really got established and became her focus.

On Blogging
Starting with a personal blog in 2003 to vent about Iraq war Michelle was an early adopter. In 2004 she realized that there were things to say about technology and that she had a unique perspective so she began a Typepad blog on tech. After taking a break to go to seminary in 2005-06 she started sharing her thoughts with her current blog Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology (http://www.zenofnptech.org). Then Idealware blog came along and she joined in to share her knowledge with the Idealware community.

The Magic Wand Question
One of the questions I asked in each interview was this: If you had a magic wand that could transform one aspect of nonprofit technology in an instant, what would it be and why?

One thing Michelle feels very strongly about is that Nonprofits need to get out of mindset of purchasing and buying and paying for software themselves. She would change the way they approach this and create greater collaboration on tech purchases and solutions. She feels that by working in concert nonprofits can find things that work for a broader group and at less individual organizational cost.

She offered an example. If 10 shelters got together and spent one tenth of the money they could set up a solution to case management or something and would get the same benefit at a fraction of the cost by sharing purchasing and development.

One of the real world ways funders could encourage this is by directing the nonprofits they help to find efficiencies of scale and promoting those efforts with matching funds.

The Next 5 Years
Looking forward to the next five years, Michelle is most excited by the way people are beginning to understand that things should be open. Open as in operating systems, open data and sharing openly in the social network space. Based on open standards, the idea that the data should move place to place easily is a breakthrough that is beginning to grow in all areas. In the past it has been a huge problem for nonprofits the way data has been held in silos and cut off. But she feels we are at the point now where the barriers to movement are technological not a mindset of vendor lock. There are still a few hold out but in general she see that the trend will only continue and believes that in 5 years everything will be open - source, data and standards.

Personal snapshots
First thing you launch on your computer when you boot/in the morning?
Email first, and second is twitter client

Is there a tech term or acronym that makes you giggle and why
Not really.

Favorite non-technology related thing or best non-techy skill?
Science Fiction writing, which is not yet published.

Which do you want first - Replicator, holodeck, transporter or warp drive?
Warp Drive - I want go into space and see what's out there.

Oldstyle Community Management

2009-05-26T10:31:00.001-04:00

Photo by ferricide

It's been a big month for Online Community Management in my circles. I attended a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference on the subject; then, a few weeks later, ReadWriteWeb released a detailed report on the topic. I haven't read the report, but people I respect who have are speaking highly of it.

Do you run an online community? The definition is pretty sketchy, ranging from a blog with active commenters to, say, America Online. If we define an online community as a place where people share knowledge, support, and/or friendship via communication forums on web sites or via email, there are plenty of web sites, NING groups, mailing lists and AOL chat rooms that meet that criteria.

The current interest is spurred by the notion that this is the required web 2.0/3.0 direction for our organizational web sites. We've made the move to social media (as this recent report suggests); now we need to be the destination for this online interaction. I don't think that's really a given, any more than it's clear that diving into Facebook and Twitter is a good use of every nonprofit's resources. It all depends on who your constituents are and how they prefer to interact with you. But, certainly, engagement of all types (charitable, political, commercial) is expanding on the web, and most of us have an audience of supporters that we can communicate with here.

Buried deep in my techie past is a three year gig as an online community manager. It was a volunteer thing. More honestly, a hobby. In 1988, I set up a Fidonet Bulletin Board System (BBS); linked it to a number of international discussion groups (forums); and built up a healthy base of active participants.

This was before the world wide web was a household term. I ran specific software that allowed people to dial in, via modem, to my computer, and either read and type messages on line or download them into something called a "QWK reader"; read and reply off line, and then synchronize with my system later. There were about 1000 bulletin board systems within the local calling distance in San Francisco at the time. Many of them had specific topics, such as genealogy or cooking; mine was a bit more generally focused, but I appealed to birdwatchers, because I published rare bird alerts, and to people who liked to talk politics. This was during the first gulf war, and many of my friends system's were sporting American Flags (in ASCII Art), while my much more liberal board was the place to be if you were more critical of the war effort.

At the peak of activity, I averaged 200 messages a day in our main forum, and I'm pretty sure that the things that made this work apply just as much to the more sophisticated communities in play today. Those were:

Meeting a Need: There were plenty of people who desired a place to talk politics and share with a community, and there wasn't a lot of competition. The bulk of my success was offering the right thing at the right time. It's much tougher now to hang a shingle and convince people that your community will meet their needs when they have millions to choose from. How successful -- and how useful -- your community might be depends on how much of a unique need it serves.

Maintaining Focus: many of the popular bulletin boards had forums, online gaming, and downloads. My board had forums. The handful of downloads were the QWK readers and supporting software that helped people use the forums. The first time you logged on, you were subjected to a rambling bit of required reading that said, basically, "if birdwatching and chatting about the issues of the day interests you, keep on reading", and I saw numerous people hang up before getting through that, which i considered a very good thing. The ones that made it through tended to be civil and engaged by what they signed on for. By focusing more on what made for a quality discussion, as opposed to trying to attract a large, diverse crowd, my base grew much bigger than I ever imagined it would.

Tolerance and Civility: We had a few conservatives among our active callers, and that kept the conversation lively. But we had excellent manners, never resorting to personal attacks and sending lots of private messages to the contrarians supporting their involvement. We really appreciated them, and they appreciated semi-celebrity status. It was all about the arguments, not about the attitude. Mind you, this was 1989/90 -- I'm not sure if it's possible to have civil public political debates today...

Active moderation: My hobby was a full time job that I did on top of my full time job. I engaged with my callers as if they were sitting in my living room, being gracious and helpful while I participated fully in the main events. There was a little moderation required to keep the tone civil, and making the board safe for all -- particularly the ones with the minority opinions -- required having their trust that I wouldn't let any attacks get through without my response.

I think that the biggest question today is whether you should be building a community on your own, or engaging your community in the ample public places (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that they might already hang out in. In fact, I think that where you engage is a fairly moot point, what's important is that you do engage and provide a forum that helps people cope and learn about the issues that your organization is addressing. Pretty much all of the bulleted advice above will apply to your community, or out in the community.

Government Data Meets Web 2.0

2009-05-25T01:18:00.003-04:00

I stumbled across a neat new data resource at Data.gov. Its a new initiative of the executive branch to make more public data accessible. It has a limited data set at the moment, but has a lot of tools that make the data easy to manipulate for both armchair analysts and serious researchers alike.

The datasets are easily filtered by topic and agency, by file type and/or keyword. Each detail page (such as this one tracking USA river levels) contains a very easy to read description of the data set with source information, a list of all the file types available, data dictionary, etc. There are even links to RSS feeds and embeddable widgets for your website, such as this one with emergency texts from the Centers for Disease Control:

Each dataset allows for ratings on data utility, ease of access and usefulness, as well as for general comments. While it remains to be seen whether this resource will achieve its promise, it's foundation is very appealing.

Resource Roundup 5/21

2009-05-21T11:41:00.003-04:00

Lots of terrific resources released recently...

eNonprofit Benchmarks Study 2009
If you're not familiar with the eNonprofit Benchmarks reports, you should be. They're fabulous, with a ton of useful benchmarks as to what you can expect in terms of email, online fundraising, and other online metrics based on actual research. They've just released the 2009 version, which has a number of new areas of exploration as well as updates on the old.

Online Seminar Series: Client and Service Management Software for Human Service Organizations
NPower Oregon is doing a really interesting series of online seminars about Client/ Service/ Case Management systems. In a five seminar series, one per week starting on June 3rd, the terrific Shawn Michael will help you identify your needs, evaluate software choices, and plan for implementation - including substantial demos of Service Point by Bowman, Client Track by DSI and Social Solutions by ETO.

Should you drop your membership amount?
As always, it depends. But M&R will tell you what it depends on in their new whitepaper.

Social Networks for Nonprofits: Why You Should Grow Your Own
I'm leery of telling nonprofits they should develop their own social netoworks, as in my experience far more build them than succeed with them. But if you're planning on it, this report has some interesting insight and tips.

Meet the Idealware Bloggers Part 4: Eric Leland

2009-05-20T17:40:00.001-04:00

Another in the Meet the Bloggers series, this one from a very fun interview with Eric Leland. As in all of the interviews, time was too short and I look forward to having more time to chat and get to know him in the future.

Eric Leland

On Connecting Nonprofits & Technology
Eric started out as a part time assistant for Amnesty International with just one computer running outreach. A lot of the work was sending out letters to student to participate, so the organization was just getting into email. Based in New York he had to travel down to DC repeatedly to fix the computer handling their email list so he jumped in to figure out why it was having so many problems. Once it was fixed he saw successful emails triple and at the same time student attendance tripled as well. Putting 2 and 2 together, Eric saw that email and online mattered more to the organization than they knew and became inspired about finding out how to work with new technologies. With no formal technology training, he built his knowledge working on the ground finding real world solutions.

On Blogging
Having started a blog years ago that was referenced as a "who to read" by Third Sector New England, Eric realized that he didn't want to pursue the demands of constant blogging and decided not to write anymore. When Laura approached him about writing for Idealware, however, he felt it made more sense to work with a whole community of authors, not for himself but to help create something bigger than any one blogger. It's an opportunity he appreciates and has enjoyed.

The Magic Wand Question
One of the questions I asked in each interview was this: If you had a magic wand that could transform one aspect of nonprofit technology in an instant, what would it be and why?

According to Eric, the NPO sector could use a large dose of pragmatic earned income strategy from for profit world, so that's where he would start. As nonprofits there is not enough emphasis on bottom line or "what's the ROI"? In the nonprofit sector we call results "outcomes" but they aren't always meaningful in practice. When you work with the smarter organizations you see that they will have metrics to help with decisions, but as with everything some are more effective than others. The effective organizations are using a more businesslike approach.

The Next 5 Years
Asked about what he finds to be the most exciting trend in nonprofit technology for the next five years Eric had a lot of enthusiasm for the way the community has started sharing best practices and lessons learned.

Eric sees a bigger trend in and more emphasis on sharing knowledge to become a better expert in their field. Some of this is due to the rise of social networks possibly, but the important thing is that now more informed individuals and organizations are sharing best practices that real people will be able to use. He feels nonprofits can really learn from each other and improve their effectiveness when they share and put things out there things like how-to's, top ten lists and toolkits.

Personal snapshots

First thing you launch on your computer when you boot/in the morning?
Email (Gmail) with Google Calendar a close second.

Is there a tech term or acronym that (still?) makes you giggle and why?
Maybe its not a giggle, but its fun to snark about "the cloud" which is a term that is to start with so amorphous and vague already , and anyway who really wants their technology in a giant ball of water?

Favorite non-technology related thing or best non-techy skill?
Best non-tech skill would be doing pottery and ceramics. Also really loves outdoor activities like surfing, but is (understandably) scared of sharks.

Which do you want first - Replicator, holodeck, transporter or warp drive?
The transporter, for those times that it is about the destination and not the journey, such as red-eye flights to the East Coast!

Getting Good Data from Informal Surveys

2009-05-19T14:05:00.003-04:00

I'll admit it: I'm a research geek. I really care a lot about tings that most people don't, like methods of data analysis and obscure types of bias. But that said, I also think that people should care a lot more about research methodology than they seem to. If you're going to be acting on the results of research, or particularly if you're going to conduct it, there's some basic tenants you need to know.

Take, for instance, informal surveys. There's lots of these coming out every month, and they're easy to do: slap some questions together in SurveyMonky, mail it to a discussion list, and you've got data. But not so fast. Just because you've gathered it doesn't mean it can actually tell you anything.

The main issue to keep in mind for any informal survey is response bias. If you're surveying a specific, limited population (say, only members of an organization, or people who have used your services), carefully craft your survey and approach, ensure you only get one response from each person, and 50-60% of everyone you try to survey responds, you might not have to worry about response rate. Otherwise, it's a huge concern. And yes, that's almost every survey that mere mortals might do.

Response bias means that your data is skewed towards those who chose to answer your survey - typically, those more emotionally invested or interested by your topic. It means that your data doesn't represent any larger population, but only those who choose to answer.

Let's say I want to find out about pizza. I put together a survey, and send it out to few mailing lists with a note "Please take our pizza survey!" A few days later, I tally the data, and amazingly, it turns out that everyone loves pizza as much as I do. 90% of everyone loves pizza! I've discovered a new trend! But no. This is an example of response bias. What I've actually found out is that 90% of people who were motivated to fill out survey about pizza like pizza. A lot less interesting, huh? Those who don't care abut pizza or thought it was inane to do a survey about it or didn't feel like they knew much about pizza didn't respond at all.

Importantly, it doesn't matter how many people I get to fill out the survey. I could get a million people to fill it out and it would be exactly as biased. My 90% figure would still be fatally flawed.

But even though my survey is biased towards those interested in pizza, I could still get some interesting data. I could, for instance, gather some data about toppings - it would be unscientific but interesting to find out that 20% of my respondents enjoy peperoni, while only 10% enjoy mushrooms on their pizza. I wouldn't bet the farm on this data - there's no way to be certain that the lists I posted the survey to aren't somehow skewed towards peperoni lovers, or followed diligently by a peperoni lobbyist who stacked my results - but it's certainly not fatally flawed in the same way.

So what does this all mean? Some tips:

Be suspicious of sweeping demographic conclusions that have been reached based on anything but big, carefully designed studies
Look for the methodology. Any reputable survey should give a sense of who they reached out to, including some ballpark number of people and a sense of the response rate.
Useful surveys are hard to design. Please find someone who can help design a process that will provide reasonable data. Bad data can be more than useless - it can be misleading.

The Road to Shared Outcomes

2009-05-18T10:59:00.001-04:00

At the recent Nonprofit Technology Conference, I attended a somewhat misleadingly titled session called "Cloud Computing: More than just IT plumbing in the sky". The cloud computing issues discussed were nothing like the things we blog about here (see Michelle's and my recent "SaaS Smackdown" posts). Instead, this session was really a dive into the challenges and benefits of publishing aggregated nonprofit metrics. Steve Wright of the Salesforce Foundation led the panel, along with Lucy Bernholz and Lalitha Vaidyanathan. The session was video-recorded; you can watch it here.

Steve, Lucy and Lalithia painted a pretty visionary picture of what it would be like if all nonprofits standardized and aggregated their outcome reporting on the web. Lalithia had a case study that hit on the key levels of engagement: shared measurement systems; comparative performance measurement and a baked in learning process. Steve made it clear that this is an iterative process that changes as it goes -- we learn from each iteration and measure more effectively, or more appropriately for the climate, each time.

I'm blogging about this because I'm with them -- this is an important topic, and one that gets lost amidst all of the social media and web site metrics focus in our nptech community. We're big on measuring donations, engagement, and the effectiveness of our outreach channels, and I think that's largely because there are ample tools and extra-community engagement with these metrics -- every retailer wants to measure the effectiveness of their advertising and their product campaigns as well. Google has a whole suite of analytics available, as do other manufacturers. But outcomes measurement is more particular to our sector, and the tools live primarily in the reporting functionality of our case and client management systems. They aren't nearly as ubiquitous as the web/marketing analysis tools, and they aren't, for the most part, very flexible or sophisticated.

Now, I wholly subscribe to the notion that you will never get anywhere if you can't see where you're going, so I appreciate how Steve and crew articulated that this vision of shared outcomes is more than just a way to report to our funders; it's also a tool that will help us learn and improve our strategies. Instead of seeing how your organization has done, and striving to improve upon your prior year's performance, shared metrics will offer a window into other's tactics, allowing us all to learn from each others' successes and mistakes.

But I have to admit to being a bit overwhelmed by the obstacles standing between us and these goals. They were touched upon in the talk, but not heavily addressed.

Outcome management is a nightmare for many nonprofits, particularly those who rely heavily on government and foundation funding. My brief forays into shared outcome reporting were always welcomed at first, then shot down completely, the minute it became clear that joint reporting would require standardization of systems and compromise on the definitions. Our case management software was robust enough to output whatever we needed, but many of our partners were in Excel or worse. Even if they'd had good systems, they didn't have in-house staff that knew how to program them.

Outcomes are seen by many nonprofit executives as competitive data. If we place ours in direct comparison with the similar NPO down the street, mightn't we just be telling our funders that they're backing the wrong horse?

The technical challenges are huge -- of the NPOs that actually have systems that tally this stuff, the data standards are all over the map, and the in-house skill, as well as time and availability to produce them, is generally thin. You can't share metrics if you don't have the means to produce them.

A particular concern is that all metrics are fairly subjective, as can happen when the metrics produced are determined more by the funding requirements than the NPO's own standards. When I was at SF Goodwill, our funders were primarily concerned with job placements and wages as proof of our effectiveness. But our mission wasn't one of getting people jobs; it was one of changing lives, so the metrics that we spent the most work on gathering were only partially reflective of our success - more outputs than outcomes. Putting those up against the metrics of an org with different funding, different objectives and different reporting tools and resources isn't exactly apples to apples.

The benefits of shared metrics that Steve and crew held up is a worthwhile dream, but, to get there, we're going to have to do more than hold up a beacon saying "This is the way". We're going to have to build and pave the road, working through all of the territorial disputes and diverse data standards in our path. Funders and CEOs are going to have to get together and agree that, in order to benefit from shared reporting, we'll have to overcome the fact that these metrics are used as fodder in the battles for limited funding. Nonprofits and the ecosystem around them are going to have to build tools and support the art of data management required. These aren't trivial challenges.

I walked into the session thinking that we'd be talking about cloud computing; the migration of our internal servers to the internet. Instead, I enjoyed an inspiring conversation that took place, as far as I'm concerned, in the clouds. We have a lot of work to do on the ground before we can get there.

Live Demos of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Plone!

2009-05-12T12:17:00.002-04:00

For anyone who's ever asked how WordPress compares to Joomla, or Joomla to Drupal... we have your answers in demo form. It's the return of the Open Source CMS webinar!

TOMORROW (Wed) at1-2:30 Eastern, Idealware's conducting the online seminar Comparing Open Source CMSs: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone, for a $40 registration fee. View more or register now>

We'll certainly talk through some of the information from our recent report on the same topic, but we'll spend most of our time demoing the systems and answering your questions. Heather Gardner-Madras (who is not only a blogger extraordinaire, but has actually implemented all four of these CMSs) , will show the real differences between the systems. We have a somewhat different structure for demoing than in our old one as we're interested in really honing in on the differences between the systems - she'll focus on the key elements that make up a site in each different system, and how those make a big difference in the flexibility and ease of setup in each system.

Hope to "see" you there

Meet the Idealware Bloggers Part 3: Peter Campbell

2009-05-11T16:19:00.004-04:00

The third interview of the series is with Peter Campbell and I had a good time putting a face with the twitter conversations we've been having in the past year, as well as finding out more about how he came to write for the Idealware blog.

Peter Campbell

On Connecting Nonprofits & Technology
Peter's decision to combine technology with nonprofit work was very deliberate. Well into a career as an IT director for a law firm in San Francisco he had something of an epiphany and wanted to do something more meaningful in the social services sector. It took him 9 months to find just the right job and he landed at Goodwill. In both positions he was able to take advantage of good timing and having the right executive situations to create his own vision and really bring effective change to the organizations. At Goodwill Industries, Peter developed retail management software and introduced e-commerce. Now with Earth Justice, he is also sharing his experience with the broader community.

On Blogging
Although Peter always wanted to incorporate writing as a part of his work and wrote a good bit, the advent of blogs didn't provide a lot of motivation for him because he wanted to be sure to have something worthwhile to say. A firm believer in blogging about what you know, he was intrigued by the opportunity to blog at Idealware since the topics and style were aligned with his knowledge and experience. So while the previous 3 years of blogging had only yielded about 50 entries, this was an opportunity to get on a roll, and if you have been following this blog you know that it has really paid off and provided a lot of great resources already.

The Magic Wand Question
One of the questions I asked in each interview was this: If you had a magic wand that could transform one aspect of nonprofit technology in an instant, what would it be and why?

Peter's answer is simple and echoes a common thread in responses to this question: Change the way nonprofit management understands technology - help them realize the value it offers, the resources needed to get the most out of it, and how to use it.

The Next 5 Years
In response to a question about what he finds to be the most exciting trend in nonprofit technology in the next five years Peter felt there are many of things to be excited about right now.

He feels that transformations in technology are cropping up quickly and nonprofits have a real opportunity to be at the forefront of these changes. The data revolution and rise of cloud computing will liberate nonprofits and turn the things we struggle with now into an affordable solution. Virtualization, as well, will provide new freedom and efficiency. According to Peter, these trends will work together to change the way we manage and invest in technology. In his words - right now its still geeky and complex, but it will get easier.

Personal snapshots
First thing you launch on your computer when you boot/in the morning?
Twitter client, then FireFox with Gmail and Google Reader and 2 blogs open in tabs.

Is there a tech term or acronym that makes you giggle and why?
Not really, but there are some that infuriate me. I am a fan of BPM (Business Process Management) because it describes what you should do - manage your processes and realize that tech is the structure to do it with, not the brain.

Favorite non-technology related thing or best non-techy skill?
Besides technology, I hope my best skill is my writing.

Which do you want first - Replicator, holodeck, transporter or warp drive?
Transporter is the great one, but I don't want to be the beta tester.

See previous posts to learn more about Steve Backman and Laura Quinn.