Vermont Nonprofit CommunIT

When you talk about citizen media, use it!

Sonny Cloward — 2006-04-13T21:38:45-04:00

Just sat through a lecture by esteemed journalist and blogger champion, Dan Gillmor . Yes...here in Montpelier, VT. Dan went to school here in Vermont, so came by to visit his old stomping grounds I suppose.

I'll keep my blowhard critiques about his PowerPoint presentation to myself. What I will take issue with is how few people were there and how ridiculous the publicity was for this thing. Cathy posted about it earlier today, while her employer, the weekly 7 Days had an article in the issue that came out yesterday. Besides that, a few posters here and there around town. Perhaps there were some buried PR spots in other local newspapers, but I didn't see them.

Regardless, if your going to come all the way to Vermont during the crappiest season of the year (Mud Season) to lecture on Citizen Media, then use it to get the word out. We live in an amazingly progressive and civicly engaged state with a burgeoning blogger community - as far as I can see that community was not tapped to publicize the lecture. With more (hell...any) experienced citizen journalist (i.e. iBrattleboro.com ) present, we could have had a far more engaged conversation about the phenomenon of Democratized Media , rather than debating conspiracy theories.

My apologies for the bad case of the grumps on this one.

Technorati Tags: vermont, 7 Days, dan gillmor, citizen media

Google Calendar has arrived - The On Demand Nonprofit ever closer

Sonny Cloward — 2006-04-13T09:19:56-04:00

Although I've really been digging 30 boxes lately, I'm thoroughly overjoyed and giddy by this AM's news of the Google Calendar launch. Tech Crunch has the skinny.

With Google Calendar I am seeing a clearer actualization of what Steve Wright from the Salesforce.com Foundation has called the On Demand Nonprofit - using integrated web-based services to further a nonprofit's mission by eliminating the expense and complexity of closed and/or client/server systems.

I'm switching CERF over to Gmail for Domains in the very near future (received an account a couple weeks ago) so we can have both POP and webmail access (and they're integrated no less).
I'm using Thumbware.com's Salesforce.com Gmail Integration tools (there's one other one, but I'm not sure if its public yet). Ian...thank you for all your work.
I'm using Writely to collaborate on shared documents, using the document URL in the Project area of Salesforce.com

Too much dependence on Google? Maybe... but no worse than the dependence that we nonprofits have had on Microsoft products for over a decade. The difference is that a service delivery model (as oppossed to software products) breeds competition and keeps inovation sharp and costs down.

Connecting the dot orgs is not all about Google and Salesforce.com. Anyone at NTC can tell you that application integration is all the talk - how to best leverage the strengths of different systems for the benefit of mission driven organizations. The closed system players of Raiser's Edge, Kintera, Convio and the like are scared by the is new business and technology delivery model - precisely because they have not adapted (and no, the summer release of RE online does not count...its still closed).

There's an emerging ecosystem of players out there - and IMHO, they have far more street credibility for serving the nonprofit sector (and the greater good) rather than taking advantage of it:

Democracy in Action
CiviCRM
Flickr
CollectiveX
Skype
There are so many others...please use comments to list yours.

Technorati Tags: Google Calendar, nptech, salesforce.com, web2.0, nonprofit,

Bloggy Defensiveness

Sonny Cloward — 2006-03-17T09:44:00-05:00

I'm finding it really hard - if not impossible - not to come across as a defensive a-hole for being publicaly taken to task on erroneous assumptions and lack of research. I have reactive tendencies; however there's a fine line between being defensive and just being pissed at someone for not doing their homework and getting their stuff wrong (and since its about me, I take it personally).

I'll let you read the blog posting and comments and let you draw your own conclusion: http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/nonprofit-20

Flickr/Salesforce Smashup?

Sonny Cloward — 2006-02-21T07:06:57-05:00

During my chef days, less refined and French-influenced food started becoming fashionable in the high-end culinary world - or at least, being fairly unrefined myself, I became drawn to the movement in American cooking. American chefs began to incorporate local/regional methods and ingredients into traditional cookery - what has become known as American Regionalism. So instead of a smooth, creamy, speck-less (and if done right...not gummy) Mashed Potato side dish next to your Wood-Fired Grilled Chili-Spiced Rubbed Rack of Lamb you'd find a lumpy and skin-laden, yet surprisingly delicious, pile of Smashed Potatoes (hopefully with some Roasted Garlic infused). Throw on a little oven roasted Broccoli Rabe...and I'm there.

Ok...back to things geeky. I don't know if this is a mashup per se, because its not very slick or dynamic, but its cool nonetheless- and more importantly mission driven and useful...so I'm calling it a Smashup instead.

I've created a module (custom object) in Salesforce that embeds a hyperlinked thumbnail of a Flickr photo into a record. This is great for reviewing the artwork and emergency documentation of our beneficiaries. Additionally, it gives us the ability to organize and associate photos with events and people outside of our direct service programs.

I'm a late comer to Flickr; until recently, I just didn't get it. The beautiful thing I discovered about Flickr is that anyone, without much tech-savvy can painlessly upload photos to the service using the Flickr client-side loadr tool. The tool re-sizes large resolution photo for web readiness (800 x 600) and automatically creates a thumbnail.

After uploading a set of pictures to Flickr (which are private for the confidentiality of our beneficiaries), there are two fields in Salesforce to input: The URL of the photo and URL of the thumbnail. After saving the photo record, a custom formula embeds the thumbnail into the record with a hyperlink to a popup full resolution photo (see the attached screen shot). Its not revolutionary, but it incredibly helpful in our application process: If for nothing else, it's enabling our over-extended application committee members to easily scan photos during a post-Katrina period where we are seeing triple the number of applications).

Web apps and web services continue to enable us to do things we never imagined possible only a year or so ago.

nptech salesforce.com flickr mashup web2.0

Nonprofit Technology: If you can't dazzle them with a conference, baffle them with a survey (or book)

Sonny Cloward — 2006-01-25T14:33:53-05:00

I'm feeling kind of jaded at the moment and I need someone to show me the light (and the love). Be forwarned this is a rant and not very analytical.

I came across a Technorati nptech tag in My Bloglines this morning for a project called dotorganize by ScoutSeven. They seem like good folks doing good work and they have some money from from the Surdna Foundation, which funded my previous project. Like many before them, they are gathering information by conducting a survey on how social change organizations use technology and online tools.

Perhaps the technology is changing fast enough to warrant continual surveying; I have to admit though, I have serious survey fatigue...and I live and breathe this stuff (and yes, I still enjoy it despite this riff). Googling "Nonprofit Technology Survey" I came up with a quick list of organizations and businesses that have conducted similar surveys over the last five years (and I know there are oh so many more):

Center for Noprofit Management
Gifts in Kind International
Blackbaud
Aspiration Tech
Groundspring
NTEN
Summit Collabortive
TechSoup
Idealware
Pew
USC Annenberg School of Communciations
Independent Sector
AFP and Telosa Software

Additionally, over the last several months there have been a handful of publications and reports on nonprofit technology (and again, there have been many similar publications before these):

Civil Technologies: The Values of Nonprofit ICT Use
Accidental Techie, The: Supporting, Managing, and Maximizing Your Nonprofit's Technology by Sue Bennett
The Dynamics of Technology for Social Change by Jonathan Peizer

And then of course there are the nptech conferences coming up in the next couple months (both of which I will probably attend):

I am a hypocrite, I have no delusions about it. I dig all this...I get it...I feel it...I am among my people debating strategy and sharing tech toys. Yet, while all this outpouring of vision, value and quantification is well and good, it remains very "inside baseball" and seemingly doesn't touch most organizations nor the many front-line staff people - who, I would contend, are positioned to gain the most from it.

With a lot of talk about Web 2.0, hosted applications, social networking, mashups, and packaging of the like, the effective use of technology - IMHO - has always come down to People, Money and Strategic Alignment (yes i know, I'm grossly over simplfying the issue): Without the "Right People on the Bus" with the necessary resources and leadership support, all our efforts in search for the nptech silver bullet(s) will be for not. Right now, we are simply preaching to the converts.

In an effort to not dig the hole any deeper, here are the lingering questions I'm stuck with:

Where are the impact metrics of the nptech movement (not the tag)?
Are surveys truly telling us something we don't already know?
Where is the coordination between all these efforts?
Why are we still going to conferences under the guises of professional development for networking and sales pitches?
Why are books on nonprofit technology still being published exclusively on paper (buying a chapter from one of the afformentioned books would be valuable to me, the whole book...no)?
Where are the dot.com genesis millionaires that are flipping start ups left and right and could be an incredible source of money and ideas?

Am I in the dark on this? Are there missing pieces of this puzzle I'm not seeing? What are you questions and thoughts?

Technorati Tags: nptech, rant, nonprofit, surveys, conferences

ED Blogging, Impact and the Power of Storytelling

Sonny Cloward — 2006-01-19T11:13:59-05:00

Ok...I'm tooting my own horn here a bit, such is the fate of a blogger.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, CERF's Executive Director, Cornelia Carey, was traveling to hurricane effected areas of the gulf coast and planned to blog about it. She returned a couple days ago after a week in Louisiana and Mississippi, and in that time posted three incredibly powerful blog entries about her experiences. If you are interested, please visit her blog and see her Flickr photo album. (CERF board member and TACA Interim ED, Craig Nutt, traveled with Cornelia on part of her trip and has commented on the blog to beautifully capture the situation there.)

As a metrics guy, I'm interested in what, if any, organizational impact this new communication venue has had and/or will have on CERF. It's too soon to know the long term impact; much depends on if Cornelia continues to blog, as planned, to facilitate a dialogue with the broader community on the role of the arts in rebuilding the gulf coast. Nonetheless here are some interesting statistics in the 7 days since the first posting:

Sent 5100 email alerts announcing the blog. 30% open rate and 50% click through rate of those that opened the email (the highest click through rate we've ever had). At the same time we had the highest rate of unsubscribes that we've ever had.
900 unique page hits
25 direct replies
5 blog comments (I find it interesting that readers are more apt to reply via email than post a public comment)
130 FeedBlitz email subscribers (I'm blown away by this!!!)
2 RSS aggregator subscribers (Did someone say RSS had gone mainstream? Not here!)
Increase in Blog referrals
Increased site hits by 5 fold compared to average daily/weekly statistics.
No online donations can be attributed to traffic generated by the blog

Beyond the numbers, is the effect that Cornelia's presence and willingness to share her experience to the broader public is having on the people she met there. She said that everywhere she went, people told her that they were reading her blog and thanked her for CERF's work. It is my aim to leverage the information and stories that Cornelia has returned with to sharpen our response and have a greater impact on the lives of those we serve in these affected areas. Stay tuned...

Technorati Tags: cerf, flickr, feedblitz, nptech, nonprofit, blogging, executivedirector

Salesforce.com GTD

Sonny Cloward — 2006-01-16T11:33:26-05:00

As an avid user and proselytizer of Salesforce.com for nonprofits and a relative neophyte with the whole GTD concept, I enjoyed reading Ismael Ghalimi's outline of how he uses Salesforce.com to Get Things Done.

His use of the Salesforce calander mystifies me a bit...its the one utility in Salesforce I really can't stand, especially the group views. A good use of GTD nonetheless...gives me much to chew on.

Hat tip to Salesforcewatch.com

Technorati Tags: Salesforce.com, GTD, nonprofit, nptech

GTD Redux

Sonny Cloward — 2006-01-04T12:25:35-05:00

An update on my Toolbox/Workflow posting from a couple months back.

After using Backpack for a couple months, it just wasn't working for me. At this point, I can't even remember why it wasn't working, it was just lacking. The same rang true in using Basecamp for personal task management, while Remember the Milk was fun, but not practical. Then along came vood2do, which more or less is the second coming for personal project/task management and GTD fanatics. Tasks associated with dates? Craziness! Assigning tasks to multiple projects? Who ever heard of such a thing? Creating different views to see how tasks are integrated into different projects. But I liked my myopic view of the world. Email integration to add tasks? Phooey! Complete desktop and deadline management interfaces...how did i ever get anything done before?

Silliness aside...its a truly amazing little piece of web app. Although, Email/SMS reminders and an iCal feed would be nice additions.

Also, I went back to my good friend Bloglines to read news feeds (it was still there waiting for me after all those months of neglect). Newsgator seemed to be buggy and sluggish, the browser subscribe button isn't as good at finding feeds, and the UI functionality just lost its appeal. The result was that I just wasn't reading much anymore. Just like the good old days, Bloglines is helping me once again transcend those moments of procrastination into productive reading jags.

As for calender, I switch over to Calendar Hub to have a web-based calendar. Not ideal, but gets the job done better than anything else I've seen (Google Cal....where are you?).

I'm loving Writely for taking notes and document sharing (especially for sharing docs with clients). Using MS Word only on the rare occasion these days.

As for billing and time tracking my consulting gigs, I'm using Billing Orchard: Simple, clean and provides many different invoicing options depending on your clients' needs (HTML, email, PDF). Some ability to customize one's invoice would be nice, but those invoices are looking far better than the Word docs I use to send out.

Technorati Tags: GTD, voo2do, bloglines, calendarhub, writely, billingorchard

Bootstrap-a-licio.us

Sonny Cloward — 2006-01-04T10:54:56-05:00

Since launching CERF's website back in August, I've been meaning to post about how I'm using several different web services to create dynamic content on our Drupal based site. Now that our Executive Director is about to leave for a a week long trip to the Gulf Coast and plans to blog about it, I'm finding myself needing to use these tools once again and being reminded of how critical these tools are to us.

My aim in using a set of webs services to create content on our website was to give staff the ability to easily manage portions of the site without having to get heavily involved in the Drupal CMS interface (and editing UI). With help from Marnie, I began to understand how I could bootstrap the RSS feeds generated by del.icio.us in order to create dynamic content on an otherwise static website, while giving control and responsibility to the staff to manage their sections of the website (and in the process freeing me up). Here's are the tools we use and how we use them:

I created a del.icio.us account for CERF
I added a firefox extension to staff browsers for simple tagging capabilities (here or here)
I worked with staff to create standard tagging policies so that each webpage (and subsection) would be associated with a standard set of tags
I created an account with Feed Digest to convert RSS feeds generated by del.icio.us into dynamic PHP includes (rather than Javascript, so that content could be indexed by search engines).
I cut and pasted Feed Digest generated codes into the appropriate webpages.

For example, we have an extensive resource directory in the program area of the CERF website for Prevention, Protection and Recovery and Professional Development resources. These two sections each have subcategory listings of resources; the content on all those pages is created by del.icio.us/Feed Digest bootstrapping. In other words, this tag and this tag create the Preparedness and Recovery resource list.

So everytime a program manager comes across a valuable web resource, they simply use the Firefox plugin to add it to del.icio.us, and it is automatically added to the appropriate resource listing on CERF's website.

Now with the ED's blog, I wanted to extend the RSS subscription embedded in Drupal so I could both track RSS subscriptions through Feed Burner as well as give non-RSS savvy folks the ability to subscribe via email with Feed Blitz. Using the Drupal blog module didn't give me this latitude, so I created a static page with the desired subscription options and used Feed Digest to create a "blog-like" content feed (a listing of blog postings with abstracts) all within the same page. In that way, the ED updates her blog, the static page updates with the new posting and I can track all the subscriptions to measure subscription readership.

Happy bootstrapping...

Technorati Tags: drupal, del.icio.us, feeddigest, cerf, feedburner, feedblitz, firefox

Extreme Job Makeover - NPO Style

Sonny Cloward — 2005-12-26T13:20:18-05:00

Its been very quiet around this blog as of late. Not necessarily reflective of a quiet offline life (since all my work is entirely online, off-blog would be more appropriate). Despite my inconsistent blogging habits - and the advice of experts opinions - this has been a particularly dry blogging spell.

So what's been going on? A few highlights:

Katrina/'05 Hurricane Response at CERF (and new homepage look and feel)
Presented at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce Conference
New program development at CERF: Exchange Marketplace (beta)
Board Meeting and Fundraisers at SOFA Chicago
Vacation
And oh yeah...and I'm consulting again: I'm working with a team of consultants through Swift River Consulting to develop and implement Salesforce.com solutions for nonprofits (new website forthcoming).

The going-ons of the last three months have overshadowed the fact that I am well into my second year at CERF. The last year has been incredibly full of benchmark successes: Establishing a stable and secure ICT infrastructure; Implementing Salesforce.com as the organization data management solution; Launching a new website; Responding to the needs of hurricane affected artists with the Katrina Message Boards; Launching the Exchange Marketplace; Using new website and database to shore up e-communication processes. Phew...

I now find myself trying to figure out how to transition my job from ICT and desktop support to program management and strategic partnership development. Honestly, the process has been incredibly difficult for me thus far. Its one thing to hand over your "babies" to someone else to administer and maintain, but its an entirely different to keep your hands in it as the strategist and let someone else be responsible for the nuts and bolts. Perhaps I'm a control freak or maybe I'm comfortable with my autodidact/hands-on processes that are primarily emergent. Regardless, I know the extreme job makeover is necessary on both a professional as well as programmatic level; how to seamlessly and gracefully go about it is still a bit of a mystery to me.

In the spirit of all the changes going on both at CERF and with my independent gigs, it seemed high time to do a blog design makeover as well. It's more simple, cleaner and going back to basics...in part by getting rid of the sidebar lists that no one ever uses because most people read this blog in their RSS Reader/Aggregator. Additionally, I'm using Performancing as a blog editor now (love it!) and because of it, I'm using Technorati tags at long last (and got rid of Typepad categories).

Technorati Tags: cerf, nptech, net2, salesforce.com, consulting, nonprofit

Nonprofit 2.0

Sonny Cloward — 2005-10-13T09:24:30-04:00

I'm not much for re-blogging, but this is just too damn important. From Marnie in response to a teen panel at Web 2.0:

"Basically, Google’s search has replaced any store front loyalty. Their only brand loyalty seemed to be to the things that they carried on their person—phones, cameras for example. They would buy that at the cheapest place possible and use search to find that place. What does this mean to nonprofits who are trying to get people to donate to them? Will contributors use a search mechanism rather than brand loyalty to decide where to give? I think so. I think it means the organization that provides the greatest access to information, organized in way that allows it to be displayed and used in ways that are meaningful to the individual user, will be able to get the greatest amount of attention."

Nonprofits Leveraging Software as Service

Sonny Cloward — 2005-10-04T17:06:10-04:00

Preface: I use Software as Service, Hosted Application, and Web Application inter-changeably here.

For a good decade now, smaller to mid-size organizations have been building their IT infrastructure around the client/server network paradigm. Five to ten years ago, this made total sense; client/server networks allowed for much greater fluidity of information and collaboration than our previous stand alone systems and clunky peer-to-peer networks. As we all know, along with the aspiration to meet these standards came a hefty price tag: Hardware, Software, Peripherals (Firewalls, UPSs, Network Hubs, etc), not to mention the ongoing maintenance and support necessary to keep the buggy crap working.

I recently started doing some tech-consulting for a small consulting firm here in Vermont(consultant to consultants...hmmmm, there's a joke in there somewhere). They have three WinXP workstations and a Windows 2000 Server with Exchange. I did a quick analysis of the system; hardware, hard drive storage usage, traffic, etc. Then I started asking about how they used their network and the estimated costs to run it all (including lost work time when it was down). I have to admit, I was astonished at the value to cost ratio differential (i.e. the value of having a client/server network versus the cost of running it). Essentially they use their network, as I've seen in many nonprofits, simply as a centralized data storage repository and backup system (being reamed by Seagate Backup Exec no less).

No doubt timed with this year's Web 2.0 conference (check out Marnie's tiredless ~~tiredness~~ (more my tiredness) conference blogging), this past week's announced partnership between Google and Sun Microsystems may well be the long overdue turning point in the technological shift away from this costly and inefficient client/server paradigm to fully leveraging the web as a platform.

What chew talkin' about Sonny? Software as Service: That's what I'm talking about...

-For most of us, broadband is prevalent (even in the hinterlands of Vermont). Accessing a file on our local network is sometimes more difficult and slow then accessing information via the web. SPEED, CHECK.

-Did you buy a PC in the last year? Was it difficult to find a PC that came with under 40 GB of hard drive space? Why? Because hard drive space is cheap. That's why Gmail gives me over 2.5 GB of space on their servers. CHEAP ABUNDANT DATA STORAGE, CHECK.

-There's this wacky buzz word out there called AJAX.The technology has existed for sometime, but its becoming more and more the standard in web based user interfaces. It creates a fast, seemless and intuitive (most of the time) user experience that is equal if not better than most desktop applications. And if you don't like it, more often than not you can either customize it or extend the web-app through an API. ENHANCED and CUSTOMIZED USER EXPERIENCE, CHECK.

-While blogging may be driving the democratization of information, Software as Service is about old fashion free-market capitalism; something that has really never existed in the office productivity software market. Competition between hosted services will drive innovation, keep costs down and strive higher to meet customer needs (including us small potato nonprofits). Even though Google may buy up the cream of the crop, the price point to enter the hosted app market is so low (comparatively to traditional software) and there will be always be ample long tail niche markets that visionary creative developers will continue to innovate and put pressure on the larger corps. COMPETITION, INNOVATION, LOWER COSTS, CHECK.

How does this impact nonprofits? Leveraging Software as Service significantly cuts the total cost of ownership for technology; no doubt this will be the force driving us lemmings to the sea. Yet, this evolution not only means we have to start thinking beyond the limited infrastructures and tools we've been hamstrung to, but think differently about how we perceive, engage, utilize, access and share information. Software as service provides us opportunities to connect the dots beyond our firewalls; strategic partnerships, telecommuting (finding the right person for the job), real-time long distance collaboration, integrated data systems....on and on. And the thing is...its almost entirely plug and play...no coding, no developers...just some savvy geeks to set it all up and get out of the way.

As I've said before, some will get it, and many will not (or rather, will get it and be too scared)...and I believe those that do, will thrive and prosper in this new ecosystem...as will those they serve.

Bonus Links:
Writely
Web-based Office Apps
Google Calendar (not yet...but coming)
Zimbra (not a web app, but too cool to pass up)