Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I like hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. Mostly, because I get to read blogs by people that aren’t on my list of feeds I read regularly. And I get to highlight the work of some of my favorite bloggers, too.

Joanne Fritz asks the question that is probably on the minds of lots of folks in the nonprofit sector: what are we going to do in facing the current problematic economic climate? She suggests not to panic, and not to change course - keep steady, and keep communicating.

SOX First, which is a new blog to me, and focuses on Sarbanes-Oxely compliance, asks whether nonprofits hold the ethical high ground. Their answer: they may well be losing ground.

James Young, writing on Convio’s newish blog, Connection Cafe, talks about how to find, and create, influencers. What are “influencers?” Read the blog entry. It’s pretty interesting.

Marketing and Fundraising Ideas tells us about how not to ask for a major gift.

There is an interesting case study of the marketing of Tampax and Africa on the Cause Related Marketing Blog.

And Katya tells us why Seth Godin is right about people being lazy and in a hurry, and gives us some tips on how to use that.

And lastly, since I’m hosting, I get to mention my recent post on Twitter and nonprofits.

Next week, the Carnival is being hosted at A Small Change - Fundraising Blog.

As you might have noticed, my blogging has diminished a bit. It’s because, basically, I am about as busy as I’ve been in a very long time. It feels quite good, actually. And I have lots of thoughts about what I’m doing.

I’m spending about 1/2 of my time being Coordinator of NOSI. As you’ve probably seen, we’ve been pretty busy lately. Soon, we’ll be updating the primer, releasing a report on our survey, starting a training and consulting program, doing a webinar series … phew! Lots happening! And, I’m learning a lot about what it’s like to be a leader of a small, struggling nonprofit with big ideas.

The other 1/2 of my time I’m doing consulting work, focusing exclusively on helping organizations without a lot of technical expertise navigate their way through the maze of creating and getting through technology projects. I love this work. I have some great clients, and I feel like I get to be an educator - I spend lots of time educating my clients on the ins and outs of the varied technology issues presented (and what is, and is not a technology issue.) I get to use my expertise in web application development, but not have to do any web application development (which feels to me a lot like having my cake and eating it too.) And, I think I also get to educate the varied vendors and developers I’ve been in contact with. Educate them about the clients needs, and, to some extent, hear about, and share best practices in doing this kind of work. And, I get to be agnostic. Yes, indeed, for some clients, and some situations, there are appropriate proprietary solutions.

And I’ve come to understand what I value about some development shops, and what I don’t value about others. I like proposals that focus more on the project, and show clear understanding of the project. Pretty presentation with no content is useless. I am pretty instantly aware of when the person I’m talking with knows what they are doing. I’m made comfortable by folks who speak what I think of as a good mix of development-speak and normal language. I’m turned off instantly by sales-speak. I appreciate shops that I know are giving back to the community, and that are known quantities in the nptech realm. I hate to be pushed.

I am beginning to get a really solid understanding of what it takes for nonprofits of all sizes to navigate the technology waters. What’s great is that although it’s true that there are sharks in the water, there are also lots of great dolphins to swim with, and I’m happy to be helping organizations find them.

Today, it’s my turn to host the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. It was an open call, so there are a wide variety of posts to talk about.

• On the theme of this week in the US - Thanksgiving day, Elisa, of Nonprofit Congress, is thankful for her work. She’s thankful for both the practical, and more abstract ways her work sustains her. I wholeheartedly agree.
• Michele Martin is thinking a lot about how to sustain online communities, and has some really interesting tidbits to share.
• The Donor Power Blog shows that to give, is to receive.
• I’m a real fan of Craigslist. Katya gives us a “Craigslist” of social marketing principals. Good stuff!
• Beth Kanter digs deep to try and figure out how to pull RSS content into Facebook
• I review Facebook’s new ad platform.
• Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention has some great examples (that I’ll be using really soon!) for writing one-page fact sheets.
• Marketing Deviant has an interesting post about having a color dress code for your business. Maybe it’s time for me to go out and find some blue and yellow clothes.

Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.

There is an interesting discussion happening between Holly Ross, soon to be ED of NTEN, and Allan Benamer, about web statistics, and whether or not nonprofits should be “transparent” and publish their web statistics. Allan’s argument is that because NTEN is in a leadership position in the field, it should lead in showing transparency by publishing its web stats. And, he thinks that NTEN should be responsive to him, as a member, in asking to publish web stats. Holly’s argument is, basically that web stats don’t equal accountability.

The question I want to ask is, what do web stats really mean, anyway? For organizations, web stats are useful indicators of how many people are being reached by their message, the geographical spread of the visitors and whether or not a specific campaign was successful in driving traffic or creating actions (like donations, or letters, etc.) It is an internal assessment tool which helps organizations figure out what parts of their online strategy are working, and what parts might need tweaking.

As some sort of measure of accountability, raw web statistics (this site got x visits and y pageviews in t timeframe) mean zilch. Nothing. Nada. Just because organization 1 gets 45,000 unique visits per month, and organization 2 gets 3,000 means nothing in relationship to the impact that organization has in the world, or in relationship to how it uses its resources. Organization 1 could be spending all of its money on its web presence, and none on its mission, organization 2 could be doing just the opposite. And the mission of the organization matters too. Even for NTEN, which is extremely web-heavy in its mission, raw visit numbers will mean nothing related to how well it is doing its job.

The idea that web stats = some measure of nonprofit accountability is a result of a mindset that suggests that web presence should be the central part of a nonprofit’s communications strategy, and that raw numbers of visits has some relationship to how well a nonprofit works. For some organizations with some limited kinds of missions, this may be the case. But for the vast majority of nonprofits out there, web strategy is a small part of their communications strategy, and the numbers of people that visit their site bears little or no relationship to how well they do their work, or what they do. And, I actually hope that doesn’t change. I don’t think we want homeless shelters, food pantries, mental health organizations, etc., to care a whole lot about how many hits they got in comparison to similar (or different) organizations. I don’t want to start a race to the top of the Nonprofit 25 - where organizations start spending more time worrying about their position on that list, and less time feeding people.

Allan says:

Granted, web site stats will not tell me anything about how many hungry people a nonprofit feeds. How odd is it then to teach Google Analytics to nonprofit techies but then say that site statistics had nothing to do with a nonprofit’s mission? Why bother having a web site at all? Properly used, web sites are more than just a payment solution for credit card bearing donors. They can be used for a nonprofit’s mission and that is why nonprofits should exercise transparency on web site analytics.

How does giving resources to nonprofits to help them understand how to use web stats to do internal assessment of web strategy inconsistent with choosing not to publish raw web stats? Asking NTEN to show leadership by publishing web stats is to suggest that NTEN would think that publishing web stats is a useful measure of nonprofit accountability. Holly doesn’t think so, and I don’t either.

This carnival is a day late, unfortunately. Getting construction work done on your house will make life difficult sometimes. But, finally, here it is…

A couple of the posts this week are things that I’m thinking some about. For instance, I’m reading the book, Made to Stick, and this week’s post by Jeff at Donor Power talks about taglines that organizations use - how they make internal sense, but don’t make sense to people outside. He provides exactly the kind of advice that will help organizations connect with their donors.

I’ve been thinking a lot about different kinds of electronic communications, and what their advantages and disadvantages are. Solidariti has a great discussion and graph of Web 2.0 tools, and the characteristics of them, and how best to leverage one’s effort to the best effect. It’s a wonderful way of looking at these tools.

Some other great tidbits:

• Also in the Web 2.0 realm - Cause Related Marketing has an interesting discussion about a new Instant Messenger campaign.
• Don’t Tell the Donor talks about a dustup between Greenpeace and the Salvation Army.
• Kivi, of Nonprofit Communications tells us why organizations should pay attention to how we want to be listed. It makes sense that can make a difference in how people respond to appeals.
• Nancy Schwartz, of Getting Attention tells us how best to get people to fill out surveys.

Technorati Tags: npcarnival, nptech

As I write this, I’m hurtling through small towns and big cities on the train home. We’ve passed through Baltimore - which reminds me of a project I did once, way back when, to work with a group of mostly small and medium-sized organizations on technology planning. In those days, the buzzwords were “internet connectivity,” “networks,” “websites,” and “email.” This was in the solidly web 1.0 world where many organizations still weren’t even networked, still used dial-up internet connections, and had websites written in the earliest version of Front Page, or were done by the CFO’s nephew.

I’ve emerged from this week’s frenzy of buzzwords like “blogging,” “open API,” “e-advocacy,” “municipal wireless” and “social networking” not surprised at how much things have changed, really, but how much they have stayed exactly the same. From the stories I’ve heard this week, nonprofits of the size that I’m most familiar with (small to medium-sized) still don’t have in-house technology expertise to make evaluations about what directions to go in. They sometimes deal with vendors and developers that don’t really understand their mission, don’t speak their language, and don’t tell them the truth (whether intentionally, or by a lack of self-examination.) They struggle mightily with software, no matter whether it’s free/open source or proprietary, shrink-wrapped or custom-built, on their desktops or web-hosted, which they generally spend extraordinary amounts of time and/or money on. The buzzwords have changed and the technology has gotten more sophisticated - but the problems many nonprofits are facing are exactly the same. So I hate to throw cold water on the whole enterprise - but if the core issues that most nonprofits are facing haven’t changed, and the situation isn’t getting better, how is it that have we helped?

I also saw the conference with some different, post-seminary eyes. I was looking for the deeper purposes behind the implementation of technology. I was looking for the discriminating approach to adopt technology appropriately. I was looking for the big conversation - why are we doing this anyway? Is it still just in the pursuit of “efficiency”? Is it all just TCO arguments? And I also looked at this with post-implementation eyes. I spent 8 years implementing technology “solutions” for nonprofit organizations. I wrote thousands of lines of code and designed more databases than I can count. I think I truly did some good, and I know I made mistakes along the way. Mistakes I hope to learn from, now that I won’t be doing implementation anymore.

Sometimes, the forward march of technology seems like this train I’m riding on - inexorably traveling down the track of capitalist profit while nonprofits are hanging on to those little hand-powered trucks that we, the people who serve them in this realm are working really hard to pump up and down, so we can try and gamely keep up. And while they watch really large organizations zip by them in bigger, better vehicles, looking exactly like they know where they are going. But no one seems to be asking “why are we on this track in the first place?” “Is being on this track going to really help me save the whales/feed people/organize/save the planet?”

And it’s making me think a lot about what I’m going to start calling “Nonprofit Technology Consulting 2.0″ (and yes, I’m subverting the dominant paradigm.) I don’t know yet whether I’ll actually start practicing it, but I’d like to think about it more. What would it be like if we could help nonprofits with the following:

• Asking whether technology implementations in their organization in the past have really facilitated their mission? In what ways have they not?
• Asking whether technology played a beneficiary, damaging or neutral role in internal organizational dynamics and staff morale?
• Asking, before implementing a new technology - what problem is really attempting to be solved? is it a problem that can be solved in any other ways?
• How does increasing use of networking technology, on-line presence, and internet communications facilitate or hinder work that is done face to face?
• Making choices about technology not just based on cost/TCO or feature set - but to bring in issues of the effects on staff, organizational dynamics, and the role of factors such as organizational determination of data destiny, source and ownership of software, and environmental impact.
• Being mediators between vendors and nonprofits - to look at issues that are technological, and issues that are about personality, behavior and organizational structure and dynamics (on both sides)
• Looking at the bigger picture - how does what an organization does with technology affect the larger community, and the planet?

I’m looking for ways that it might be possible to practice nonprofit technology consulting with head and heart, with a view to the bigger picture of our society and our planet, and the precarious place we are in as human beings at this time, and with a view that reflects my emerging belief that increasing human touch and human contact will do more, in the end, than many of our attempts to increase efficiency by using technology.

When I re-started this blog 6 months ago, I named it Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology for a good reason. I want us to pay attention. I want us to pay attention to what we are doing, and how we are doing it. I’m very clear that there are technology implementations that are completely appropriate, mission-facilitating, and even good for the greater community, and good for the planet. I want to make sure that every single technology implementation is like that. My bet is that we might do a lot fewer of them if that were so.

As I keep thinking more about this, I’ll be blogging about it. I welcome any feedback and conversation, either by email, or on comments and trackbacks on this blog.

This Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants has given me a chance to read some blogs I don’t usually get to read, since I’m so often focused in the tech field. All of these articles were interesting and thoughtful. It’s really nice to learn more about what people are talking about.

• Amy Kinkaid, of Fundraising Breakthroughs, has some great advice about asking for money without shame.
• Generative Transformation talks about what leadership is, and means - particularly that it means self-awareness.
• A Girl’s Guide to Managing Projects has a nice post about what Project Managers do all day, anyway.
• Getting Attention talks about boosting blog coverage - it can have good offline benefits for your organization.
• David Maister asks "What do consultants know?"
• Reasoned Audacity has some good tips on how to prepare for a radio or TV appearance.

And in realms more familiar:

• This week’s nptech tag roundup has some great stuff to read about

Next week, the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is hosted here! I’m behind - I was supposed to tell you about this a few days ago! (I have a sort of good excuse.)

I don’t have a theme - please send me your best stuff! You can email them to me. Because I’m delayed, you have through Sunday evening. I’ll be posting the Carnival on Monday afternoon.