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.

Flare :: data visualization for the web (in flash)

"Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel.

This latest release is a major update with numerous improvements to simplify the process of creating rich, interactive visualizations."

And to top it off, the library is one of the best written (from a pure coding stand point)

Check it out. http://flare.prefuse.org/

Project Diabetes

Is a project that I have been working on for the past several months. Use the website, widget, voice app, and iPhone version to record your blood glucose, insulin, activity, and carbs for free.

The real interesting piece, is the voice application. Use your cell phone, anywhere, to record your diabetes information.

www.projectdiabetes.com

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.

Mobility Vision Integration Process awarded IDEA Silver and Bronze

Mobility VIP, a project that I worked on with a friend has been recognized with two 2008 IDEA awards:
Silver in the category of Interactive Product Experiences
Bronze in the category of Ecodesign

What is the Mobility Vision Integration Process?
The Mobility Vision Integration Process is a research project being undertaken by Art Center’s Advanced Mobility Research and Graduate Industrial Design Programs. Mobility VIP investigates ways that expert designers can support and accelerate the dialogue about the future of sustainable mobility.
The outcome of mVIP is to enable teams of creative people, charged with designing viable, future mobility solutions to deal with wide-ranging, unpredictable and disparate issues that we usually have no control over and to spot otherwise unforeseen opportunities.

What are Mobility VIP cards?
The mobility VIP cards are an experimental tool piloted in 2007 and now in public beta. The cards support rapid future scenario development on the topic of sustainable mobility so that groups and individuals can quickly enter a dialog and brainstorm about possible outcomes, solutions and strategies.

The mVIP cards are an actual deck of cards to be used in workshop settings. The deck contains 109 cards in 11 categories. The deck is also available for review on this site as a Flash application.

Want to learn more...

iPhone 2.0 == expensive brick (update)

After many hours without a phone, I finely got past the iTunes Authentication point (I guess patience does payoff) and my phone is now recognized as something other than a brick. This was very annoying. For anyone out there with this type of problem, I would recommend trying every 10 to 15 minutes.

I really like apple's products and services but they should planned for this. I wonder which part of the system broke down today: iPhone -> iTunes (local) -> iTunes validation (Apple server) -> AT&T service configuration?

On a side note: Does anyone know if the new me.com supports IMAP? Right now, I don't think they do. I am hoping that Google will figure out a way to push my emails/contacts/calendar to my iPhone very quickly.