Free hosting for NPO's

http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-nonprofit.html

I just learned that DreamHost (a really good hosting company) is offering free web hosting to 501(c)(3) organizations. Even more power to the technology stack for non-profits. The stack is currently:

Google Apps: Free enterprise email / document management
Salesforce.com: Free (for the first 10 users) enterprise class CRM
Dreamhost: Free web hosting for the WWW hosting.

Enjoy.

A Good introduction to Google Adwords

Nonprofit 2.0: Accelerating Your Organization to Success

(Originally published at
http://www.convio.com/resources/newsletter/multicenter-federated-organizations.html)

One of my core philosophies for organizational success is that nonprofits should focus 100% on their mission and remove all extraneous noise generated from infrastructure processes or systems that are not core to their mission. The theory behind this accelerative philosophy is that attention and time are finite and valuable. Therefore, capital resources and people should not be used to develop solutions or solve problems that others have already solved.

A good litmus test for the need to partner with a company versus tackle a problem yourself is to ask the question: "Is the management of the system part of our mission or is the use of the service it provides part of our mission?" If the answer is "use of the service," then look for ways to partner with best-of-breed companies that provide services that meet your organizational needs.
Example 1

Let's apply this philosophy to traditional internal email service. Is your organization's mission to provide the best email service to your constituents or is it simply to communicate with your constituents? I suspect it is to communicate. So, if your organization's mission does not include providing hosted email services, then move the management of your organization's email server out-of-house to a Web 2.0 provider such as Google Apps. By doing so, you create a situation where extraneous resources are not spent worrying about backups or installing the latest security patches.
Example 2

Now let's apply this philosophy to the slightly more complicated service of constituent management. It might seem like owning your own constituent management system is key to providing your organization's programs or services. I would argue that the use of the service is most important, not the management of the system. Therefore, the management of the physical constituent management system should be moved out-of-house. A primary benefit: You don't have to worry about creating the next version of the system; your time is spent gaining knowledge about your constituents or providing more services.

Sometimes an argument to keep a system in-house is made because of the perceived need for a specific feature or the need for more control over security or databases. I would respond by doing a true root-concern analysis of the feature and then look for different ways to address the concern. One way is to choose a partner, such as Convio® and their Common Ground™ CRM system built upon the Force.com™ platform, that is flexible enough to support almost any feature or security request.

With the dawn of the Web 2.0 space, this philosophy is even more effective and practical due to partners such as Convio, Amazon®, Google®, NING®, Yahoo!® and salesforce.com® — all of which provide best-of-breed services to nonprofits. Below are a few examples of what's available:

* Google, through the Google Grants program, gives an in-kind grant of approximately $100,000 per year in Ad Words spending to every nonprofit that submits an application, and provides Ad Words expertise to help organizations leverage Ad Words more effectively.
* Google provides free private label email and calendaring services to nonprofits via their Google Apps program.
* NING.com provides private label social networking technology for about $30 per month.
* Yahoo! Small Business provides an industry leading ecommerce platform for about $150 per month.
* Convio provides multi-channel constituent relationship management across an integrated platform that reduces costs and removes the IT hassles associated with traditional legacy systems.
* Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides online file storage for $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month.
* salesforce.com provides 10 free user licenses to nonprofits and then provides additional licenses at a substantial discount.

Nonprofit organizations are maturing into Nonprofit 2.0 organizations, and the landscape is ever changing. For your organization to ensure its stake in the Web 2.0 world, it must maximize time and resources by using partners to solve non-mission problems, leaving you to concentrate on what is most important — the successful execution of your mission.

Convio Aikido Program (aka Convio CRM)

As a member of the Aikido Charter Program, I wanted explore the power/benefits of the Convio CRM (aka Convi Aikido Program) before I discussed it on my blog.

First what is Aikido, one might ask? Well, it is Convio's custom non-profit template built on top of the Force.com (aka Salesforce.com's platform-as-a-service environment). They took the many years of non-profit eCRM knowledge and built a modern, scalable, cost-effective tool for non-profits.

Why is this a good thing? Many reasons: 1) It allows Convio to stay focused on the CRM needs of non-profits and not have to deal with the noise of the large scale infrastructure management (The Force.com platform does that for them.) and it allows the non-profits to stay focused on delivering programmatic value instead of managing a local CRM infrastructure. 2) Because they are not having to deal with the infrastructure management, it allows the smaller non-profits (which are most non-profits) to leverage the full benefit of a CRM without the costs. 3) The force.com platform allows for the rapid (and easy) customization of reports and account settings. 4) The force.com platform has a plethora of 3rd party apps (AppExchange) ranging from marketing (email, offline,events...), Google tools (apps and adwords), eCommerce integration, financial accounting packages, and several non-profit specific tools.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, I suggested a long time ago that Convio partner with Salesforce. Convio's strength is the eCRM front end content management system (CMS) and Force.com's strength is the backend technology. The Aikido CRM program marries the strengths of both Convio and Salesforce.com and creates services that are ideally suited for the non-profit space.

(I wonder if Salesforce should acquire Convio and leverage Convio's CMS across the business world? )

The good news is that there are progressive thinking non-profits out there that understand the power Aikido brings: Susan G. Komen for the Cure is one of them.

Google Launches Non-Profit Portal

http://www.google.com/nonprofits/

Google recently created landing page of Google services for non-profits. Be sure to subscribe to the non-profit Google group.

The services include:
Gmail (apps)
Checkout
Docs,
Calendar
Analytics
Google Grants
YouTube
Blogger
Maps/Earth
Gadgets
Google groups

Google checkout for non-profits = 100% of donations to non-profits

Today Google announced that until the end of 2008 donations to qualified 501c3 organizations processed through the Google checkout system (see my previous post on the Google checkout donate button) will be free. By free, they mean 0% credit card fees (Google is underwriting the credit card fees) and zero per transaction authorization fee.

This is huge news for non-profits.

How about this vendor stack for a kick ass enterprise architecture (for small non-profits with less than 10 employees):

Google Apps for Infrastructure (free)
Google Grants for search engine marketing (free)
Google Checkout for donation processing (free)
Saleforce CRM for back end donor management (free for first 10 licenses)
NING for website and social network. (less than $50 per month)

This is also exciting times for The Acceleration Agency because we are positioned to provide real-time integrations with a soon to be announced integration environment.

Official google checkout donate button

While doing my normal netvibes scanning the headlines this morning, I ran across a mashable.com post talking about YouTube's Free Channels for Non-Profits. What I found really interesting is that there is now an official "donate" button for google checkout for these channels.

Up to this point, the only way to get a donate button within the Google checkout system was to hack the generated HTML form code with your own donate button. Strictly speaking, changing the button to non-Google branded buttons goes against Google checkout policies. Checkout the one.org YouTube channel and their donate button.

I am one, are you

I am reminded how powerful one person can be. Please visit www.one.org.

Kintera Sphere + Facebook = win for charities

As many in the non-profit world know, Kintera has opened their platform up to outside partners via the Kintera Connect platform. At the same time Facebook, the current winner at the for-the-masses-social-networking platform with millions and millions of users, has recently opened their platform up to developers. Also, NING, a social networking platform allow developers full access to source code for white-label/private-label social networks (such as www.myafh.org)

Given these facts, a partner can create a Kintera connector which is a Facebook application or social networking widget that allows their constituents to leverage their social network to raise awareness and money for their causes. With the currently available connectors, Kintera has the potential to own non-profit fundraising and awareness space on Facebook and other social networking platforms such as NING.

In the final stages of development at my acceleration agency, is a Facebook and social networking fundraising widget leveraging the Kintera Connect platform. If any charity out there with software engineering resources wants know how to do this, I will be more than happy to share the architecture. For those that just want the widget/application (customized for your charity), please contact me to discuss the details.

Mal Warwick answers your fundraising questions

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifHave a question about charitable fundraising. Mal Warwick is attempts to answer your questions. Here he answers over 500 questions on fundraising from Direct Mail to online to anonymous recognition.

http://www.malwarwick.com/mals-corner/askmal/q-a.html