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Colin Delaney of ePolitics and I did a workshop focusing on Online Communications on a Shoestring at the Craigslist Nonprofit Boot Camp last weekend. It was a good time, and it seemed to go well. I liked the structure we used, which divided up the world of online communications into three parts:

• Website (as a home base)
• Email Communication (to talk to your friends)
• Online Outreach (to reach new friends)

But how should a nonprofit balance those components? It will of course vary based on an organization's mission and goals, but is it possible to come up with a rule of thumb? Should a nonprofit focus a third of their energy and money per year on each component? While I have no specific evidence, a rule of thirds resonates with me.

A website tends to be a bit more of a front-loaded investment, but thinking about it as a yearly expense can help to prioritize. For instance, if you have $30,000 worth of time and money to spend on all your online communications, investing $10,000 in upgrading and maintaining your website makes sense to me.

And then another $10,000 in crafting a solid email communications strategy and putting out solid communications? That seems right, or even low - if there's one area that should get more focus than the rest, I'd say it's probably here.

And then lastly, online outreach - so everything from search engine optimization to viral movies or petitions to social networking. This gets the vast volume of the buzz from the nonprofit technology community, and there's no question it should be part of the mix, but I don't know whether it should get more than a third of your online communications energy. The size and mission of the organization might come into play here - a larger organization that's targeting internet-savvy audiences might find that it's worthwhile to invest much more energy in this area, while just maintaining a website and email communications status quo. But a smaller organization might get better return on focusing first on creating a strong website and email infrastructure, before investing in finding new online friends (after all, it's a good website and email strategy that will help keep your friends, after you find them).

What do you think?

Free SharePoint Webinar (CMS Watch)
The excellent folks at CMS Watch provide a "high-level critical view of SharePoint, with candid, independent advice for both business and technology leaders" via a FREE online seminar on August 28th.

Microsites and Landing Pages at the Bridge Conference (Beaconfire)
An interesting look at the use of "microsites" - small websites geared towards a particular campaign, and when they might make sense

Recommended Online Video Hosting Services (ONE/Northwest)
Quick but useful guide to some good places to put video online to allow others to see it

Oxfam America's Cross Channel Communication (Chief Marketer)
Brief, interesting look at how Oxfam America integrates their online and offline communication

The Return on NTEN's Blogging Investment (NTEN)
NTEN talks about the amount of time they put into blogging, and the qualitative returns they seem from it

Alfresco as a SharePoint alternative (CMS Watch)
A thumbnail overview (by the always impartial and wise CMS Watch) of how the free and open source Alfresco could work when you're considering Sharepoint

Email Options: Life After Eudora 6.1 (ANR Communication Services)
An overview of the alternatives to Eudora for those considering whether they should continue to renew their license.

Humane Social Marketing (Netsquared)
Carie Lewis, Internet Marketing Manager at the Humane Society, talks about how they raise funds, awareness, and activity through social networks.

Do Your Stakeholders Think You're a Spammer? (Nonprofit Online News)
A nice look at the issues around probably legal but ethically murky ways to build your email list

4 Tools for measuring your website (Forum One Tech Blog)
Thumbnail summaries of four different tools that can help you gauge the success of your website with search engines and RSS readers

Okay, I'm back from vacation and ready to.. blog some stuff! First off, we have a new article up: A Few Good Methods for Processing Credit Cards.

We've done a lot of articles in the world of payment processing, but this one is a broad look at all of the options, from lockboxes and swipe options through to online methods and point of sale systems. There's a huge amount to know in this realm... as I discovered as I struggled with how the heck to structure the article.

There was a great discussion recently on the FUNDSVC discussion list (a list focused on the legal and tactical nuts and bolts of gift tracking) about lockboxes. A lockbox, usually provided by your bank, is a mailing address where donations by check or in the form of credit card transaction slips can go. The staff of the bank then immediately processes the money and sends you an electronic report as to who donated how much, possibly with copies or scans of actual checks or letters.

But, Laura...(you may be saying to yourself)...lockboxes aren't software, and usually you focus in on software with anal laser beam precision. Well, lockboxes are essentially an alternative option to software solutions. And truthfully, I didn't know that much about them, so I thought I'd pass on the great stuff I learned.

There's a number of advantages to lockboxes. The folks on the list mentioned:

• They can save staff time, compared to opening letters, getting checks to the bank, and data entering all the gifts.
• They're considerably better for security. Far fewer people touch the gift, so there's fewer places a gift can get lost or go awry.
• Checks are immediately processed and cashed - great for cash flow.

The advantages are straightforward and pretty compelling. But they have some downsides as well - more subtle but also very important - compared to receiving and processing all the gifts yourself:

• Costs can add up quickly. Many banks include only name and dollar amount in the data file, and you need to pay additional charges for other data or scans.
• You may well have to go back through each payment anyway to verify the legal donor, check to see if was a tribute gift, etc, etc - so you might not save that much staff time after all.
• You're relying on someone else to adequately pass on important information that might be included with the check - notes, letters, or other things. Some mentioned that their bank scans everything that's in the envelope, and they've never had a problem. Others are more skeptical, saying that those that who process the gifts are often evaluated on their speed rather than their accuracy. And it's you the donors will blame if you miss their question or concern.
• Checks are typically immediately cashed without careful proofing. For instance, if you receive checks that are actually intended for your national office, or that the donor has specified should be held before cashing, chances are that they'll be cashed anyway and you'll need to sort it out later.
• It can be challenging to get year end gifts from the bank in time at year end, especially for schools that close over winter break.
• The new address may have implications to donors. This is especially true for local, community based nonprofits. If the gifts are going to an address outside your service area, will donors question how community based you really are?
• It's not as satisfying to get a report as it is to handle the check and letter, which can affect the ability to get buy in from development staff.

Several mentioned that their transition to a lockbox was surprisingly seamless. They updated the address on all correspondence, which donors didn't seem to question, and didn't see any drop in donations.

Twitter: Not Just Chatter But a Channel for Your Cause (NTEN)
Nice look at the benefits, drawbacks, and uses of Twitter for nonprofits

Still a Big Gap Between Reality, Wishes for Web 2.0 (IT Business Edge)
Very useful look at how the social media software available for businesses overlaps (or not) with business needs

Assessing the Marketplace of Digital Asset Management (DOCUMENT Media)
Terrific look at the current state of the Digital Asset Management universe (in an annoyingly nifty viewer)

Web Traffic Spikes: When You Need Attention NOW (NTEN)
Jonathon Colman of the Nature Conservancy talks about using social media sites to draw attention to your cause or resources with a very short lead time.

A New Kind of Society for the American Cancer Society (NTEN)
A short but intriguing case study about an internal social networking site that the American Cancer Society is using to bring staff together across offices and geographical locations.

The twilight of direct mail? (Beaconfire Wire)
A look at Obama's outreach and social networking activities, and how they might apply to nonprofts

Precision Not Found on Facebook (The Buzz Bin)
A reminder of the obvious but too often forgotten: big social networking sites like Facebook make it difficult to segment, and often more niche approaches are called for.

[The always wise and profilic Gavin Clabaugh posted some terrific, detailed thoughts about SharePoint on NTEN's great "NTEN Discuss" discussion list - which he and NTEN were kind enough to let us edit and re-post here. This is the second of two posts - yes, from the same (amazing) discussion list post. You might want to read his overview of SharePoint first. You can read more of Gavin's wisdom at his blog, www.digitaldiner.org]

Here at Mott, we use SharePoint. A lot. It’s an amazing package. But it can be daunting and confusing. To really understand the power and the glory, some information about how SharePoint is structured and how we use it might help.

First off, "lists" are the soul of SharePoint. Lists come in many forms. Document libraries are lists, with documents attached. Calendars are lists of dates, and picture libraries are (you guessed it) lists with pictures attached. In a list, you define many things. You can define metadata or you can just define things like last name, first name, and email address. Lists can have look up fields, multiple choice fields, and calculated fields. I regularly make a field called “Expired” that is calculated – usually it’s a function of the date added plus some arbitrary number like 60. This gives me a date 60 days in the future, and I make things display only as long as [expired] is greater than [today].

If a list is the soul of SharePoint, then "Web Parts" are its heart. Web parts display things – they can display the content of lists; sorted, filtered, and organized the way you want them to look. They can display the same list multiple ways on the same page. Web parts can also be written in .NET for fancy custom things. But you can just as easily create a web part that holds straight HTML, or .ASP for that matter. There are hundreds of web parts – many that come with MOSS/WSS and others that you can download (or buy). You can also hook them straight into lots of free Web Services offerings using SPD. Using Web Services, I have a few that do fancy things: Weather (with graphics), currency rates, stock quotes, etc.

Web parts are, of course, portable. I regularly create one or two at home, and then bring them to work, and drop them on a page where I want them. Any particular page can have multiple web-part zones.

Integration with Office (Office 2007 is best) is terrific – although integration with Outlook calendars is just OK, in my opinion – It depends on what you are looking for. I prefer just embedding my exchange calendars directly on web pages. (it’s a simple web part I built). That way there is no “integration” ... it’s really just a shared exchange calendar on the web page. No muss, no fuss, no kitchen drudgery.

You can also buy web parts and plug-ins. We bought cheap web parts and utilities that will do the following:

• Draw charts and graphs from database sources and/or sharepoint lists
• Allow bulk-import (with metadata) of documents/items stored in fileshares
• Index PDF files (this is free from Adobe but we use one from FoxIt).
• Automate the importation of documents and pictures, adding appropriate metadata (our scanners read a cover page and add metadata about the document that they read from the cover page)

I also recommend a copy or two of SharePoint Designer. This way you can modify the various page templates (I didn’t like the left navigation area and turned it into a web-part zone). Designer also lets you create “Data View Web Parts – these are parts that can connect to back-end databases to display data in nice formats. SPD (SharePoint Designer) sucks, by the way. Crashes all the time. But, it does let you build some terrific stuff – trust me when I say, if you have data in databases, Data View Web Parts are more fun than a bowl of bobotie.

All in all, at Mott we have the following types of things, all built in SharePoint:

• Basic Intranet (with functions that display master calendar, roll-up announcements from departments, HR documents, policies, crap like that)

• Custom pages that display dashboards of our various grantmaking activities, filtered by user or team, including any alerts fired by our grants management software (SQL), and a live feed of any new funding inquiries generated by our web site (filtered by designated program person).

• The weather (got to have the weather).

• The usual collection of HR stuff

• Document repositories that aggregate a wide collection of documents, scanned and created, into a single view that can be filtered and displayed based upon metadata – I have one that gives an ‘all-in-one” view of all documents related to any particular grant, filtered by the grant, the organization, and/or EIN).

• Custom Infopath libraries that store and/or display, for example, all travel (based upon a travel approval Infopath form) – the display is filtered to show only future travel, with people that are out of the office on the current day high-lighted in red. Form data ties back to an Access database that records actual travel expenses.

• Custom information feeds that use RSS to populate a feed of all things about us, or about our programs (we’re vain).

• Custom document libraries that use an automated email news clipping service to first consume the news clips, and then sort and display them by various metadata fields

• Custom “travel information” pages that pull exchange rates from the web using web services, show current airport delays, etc

• Custom hotel information that draws on a backend database of the various hotels we regularly use, provide information on their rates, and any corporate rate we might have. (everything is hot linked with web sites, and email addresses, etc)

• For our investment office.. feeds of everything from Yahoo Finance, to the current market conditions, to our list of this or that stock, complete with charts showing their downward spiral.

We did this all without a consultant, but I have been known to be slightly creative. I sent myself and my staff to school. I have done most of the development myself, or with the assistance of a part-time DBA who has a little Dot Net. Most of it is simply: ponder, point, drag, and click, ponder some more.

I would invite you to take a look at the number of posts I have written on SharePoint, on my blog (http://www.digitaldiner.org/category/sharepoint/). There are a few on building a WSS system on Windows Home Server, there is one on building a “Digital Asset Management” (DAM) system in WSS for holding pictures, and there are two on how to do a quick and dirty “KM” system using SharePoint’s mail-enabled document libraries. We use that to hold all the bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsom we create about how all the computers, and networks, and information systems work here at my humble place of work.

[The always wise and profilic Gavin Clabaugh posted some terrific, detailed thoughts about SharePoint on NTEN's great "NTEN Discuss" discussion list - which he and NTEN were kind enough to let us edit and re-post here. This is the first of two posts - yes, from the same (amazing) discussion list post! You can read more of Gavin's wisdom at his blog, www.digitaldiner.org]

I’m going to talk about Microsoft SharePoint. And, straight off, I’m going to tell you I am biased. SharePoint rocks. We at Mott have used it since version 2001, and are rolling to MOSS as we speak.

It’s solid, and it will do some amazing things. Currently, ours holds some 100,000 documents – mostly PDFs – and we index many, many more. It’s responsive, and with a little creative thought, can be customized to do lots of stuff. For the price, it blows the competition (what little there is), out of the water. And that’s it’s problem. It does too much.

My MAIN critique of SharePoint is this -- it’s too much and too many things. Hence, it is daunting and confusing. It’s a development environment, it’s a document management system, it’s a workflow system, it’s a CMS, it has decent indexing and search; it’s too much. People get confused by its possibilities. The secret: start slow. Start with a simple “Intranet”…and then begin to add things. That, and don’t be confused by the templates and pre-designed “Intranet” sites that come with it. Nothing is sacrosanct: I usually blow away much of the default stuff and set up my own simple structures.

Now, into the meat of the matter. First off, there are three versions. Microsloth, in its strange inability to name things, calls them all SharePoint. All of the versions are pretty damn amazing. The versions are:

Version 1: Windows SharePoint Services – AKA: WSS.
WSS is the heart and soul of SharePoint. It provides the basic development environment, document management and storage, and most of the part of SharePoint that you will use. Other versions of SharePoint are built on WSS. WSS is free – if you have Server 2003, you can download it and run it. WSS includes (out of the box) templates for a “team site”, shared document workspaces, Blogs, WIKI, and meeting workspaces.

Contrary to popular belief, it DOES include search – but it is a search that only works within a single WSS site. That means you can search all docs or pictures, or PDFs, or whatever, within a set of document repositories, but you can’t add other web sites, or fileshares, or other sites into that index. If your needs are modest – or if you design your repositories so that they are all within one site collection, search works just fine.

Version 2: Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (Standard) – AKA: MOSS.
MOSS is the “Portal” version of SharePoint. It adds cross-site searching, and the ability to add anything into your search index (such as fileshares, or other websites, or just about anything you can point an HTTP at. MOSS also adds LOTs of pre-designed templates that will get you up and running in short order. In fact, in my experience, you can have a decent (non-customized) Intranet up in just a few minutes. Figuring out just what you have, and what it will do, can then take some time. Customizing – really customizing – takes some work. But it can be done, once you get the hang of it.

MOSS adds “social networking” components, including a public and private user profile, and personal sites that let your users set up their own Blogs, upload shared pictures, etc etc.

MOSS also adds RSS (to any list or document library), audience targeting (you can filter the display of just about anything based on membership in an audience), Mobile device support (automatically creates WAP versions of just about any standard page or library).

Finally, the MOSS versions directly integrate with Active Directory, automating profile import from AD, and directly tie into Exchange, updating the GAL for things like mail-enabled document libraries (these are very neat things).

Version 3: Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (Enterprise) – Also AKA: MOSS.
Move to “Enterprise” and you get a couple of really neat things: Excel Services, InfoPath forms server, Single-Sign-On, and the Business Data Catalog. These are hard to explain. Excel services lets you publish live spreadsheets on a web page (including charts and graphs). It’s a quick way to build a dashboard, for example. The excel sheet can be connected to a back-end database, and update in real-time. InfoPath forms lets you serve InfoPath as a web form. InfoPath is the cat’s PJ’s anyway.

Finally, the Business Data Catalog is amazing. You can take ANY database (including MySQL, for example) and make MOSS treat it like a “List” in SharePoint. Once connected up, it becomes sharepoint data, that can be filtered, structured, and connected to other things. It can be set so you can edit it too. If you want to report or display dynamic data from any database within SharePoint, you can. Easily (one you get the hang of writing a BDC connection XML thing).

We have two new articles up, in two of the areas that people ask the most about...

First off, Anthony Pisapia and Brett Bonfield bring us a detailed look into four organization's implementation of Constituent Relationship Management systems in Managing Constituent Relationships: Four Case Studies. This is always a thorny area - the software is really only a small of the story - so I'm excited to have a look inside at the actual process and issues behind implementation.

And then we have a look at desktop sharing and webinar tools in our A Few Good Online Conferencing Tools article. The question I get asked the most - by a lot - is which online seminar software we're using... so hopefully this will lay out what the options are for those of you wondering. And as we wanted to look at the packages in detail to find what would make the most sense for our own needs, this article is even more thoroughly researched than usual!

Google Analytics Help: Questions, Answers, Tips, Ideas, Suggestions (Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik)
Avinash Kauskik, by way of NTEN, answers a whole slew of great questions from NTEN members about Google Analytics.

Planning Education Projects in Rural Ethiopia Using GIS (ArcGIS)
Useful case study on the IRC's use of GIS tools to plan school sites in Ethiopia (tip of the hat to Allan Benamer).

Blackbaud to Integrate Raisers Edge and Sphere (Non-Profit Tech Blog)
Blackbaud announces that they intend to integrate Raisers Edge and Kintera Sphere before the end of 2008.

Google Trends Reveals Which Tech Trends Are Hot Or Not (Small Business Computing)
Google Trends allows you to compare the number of searches for commonly used keywords - interesting for judging the popularity of concepts or particular terminology.

New Firefox Version: Nice New Features (Beaconfire Wire)
A nice overview of what's new (and what's missing) from the new version of Firefox.

You’ve Got a Friend in Barack Obama: Integrating Social Networking Tools into Political Campaigns (ePolitics)
An interesting case study as to how the Barak Obama campaign is using social networking, with some lessons extracted for the rest of us.

Tips for Standardizing Your IT Infrastructure (TechSoup)
A nice overview of how and when to standardize your hardware and software across your organization.

The MaintainIT Project (TechSoup)
A resource rich site that provides information about technology for libraries.

Linux desktops? (Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology)
Some very useful thoughts from Michelle Murrain on when it makes sense to use Linux operating systems - and when it doesn't.

Looking for records as to how each member of Congress voted on a particular bill in a useful format? In another great conversation on the ProgressiveExchange discussion list (have I mentioned recently how much I love that list?), the community talked about the available sources. Daniel Atwood of Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America was kind enough to post a summary of the responses, in the form a huge number of sources of this data. I've cribbed from and adapted his summary below...

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/
A votes database going back to 1991 that lets you sort by everything including astrological sign

http://www.govtrack.us/
An independent site that brings together information on the status of all federal legislation, voting records, and other congressional data, with available email updates and RSS/Atom feeds

http://www.opencongress.org/
See how lawmakers voted on any bill in the 110th Congress

http://www.votesmart.org/index.htm
Project Vote Smart collects data on key votes, along with stated positions of politicians on key issues

http://progressivepunch.org
Votes on progressive issues broken down by issue area

http://maplight.org/
Get more info on the connection between money and votes

http://clerk.house.gov/
The official data provided by the government for the US House. The vote records are XML files, and so can be easily opened using Excel 2003 or later, or viewed by writing your own XML stylesheets

http://voteview.com
For those looking for actual raw data

http://vis.org/
Vote data available in a parse-able format for a small fee.

VoIPowering Your Office: Do I Really Need this VoIP Stuff? (Small Business Computing)
A quick look at some of the considerations when thinking about Voice Over IP phone lines.

And the Walls Start to Tumble Down, Open Platform/API/Source Free For All! (NonprofitTechBlog)
There's been an promising amount of movement and buzz towards open platforms, with announcements by Convio, Kintera, and MPower. Alan Benamer looks at these announcements in detail.

Ways to Follow Your Friends on the Web (Wall Street Journal)
The Wall Street Journal looks at sites that can help you consolidate your social networking profiles

UNICEF Uses Web 2.0 to Double Video Views (About.com)
Quick but useful case study about how Unicef used a number of different video sharing sites to drive traffic to their site.

In the Cloud: Storage Meets Collaboration (Small Business Computing)
An introduction to the idea of cloud services- distributed file storage solutions that can be useful for backup or online collaboration.

CSS support in email clients (Campaign Monitor)
A fabulous, although technical, guide summarizing how different email browsers interpret the CSS code to format your eNewsletter or solicitation email.

NTEN Mobile-apaloza (NTEN)
NTEN's June eNewsletter is chock full of Useful information, advice and case studies on how nonprofits can effectively reach constituents through mobile phones

Should Your Nonprofit Embrace Social Media? (NTEN)
As the first installment in NTEN's and Beth Kanter's We Are Media Project, this collection of resource provides a useful first step in understanding and considering social media

Megan asks: We're considering one of those online/virtual phone systems. Regular phone systems are so pricey and if there's a VOIP option for multiple lines, voicemail, etc that's reliable, easy to setup and use, that would be great. Are these systems worth considering for a small organization? If so, what systems would you recommend?



Ron Zucker, with 2020 Vision, responds:

Are any nonprofits using VOIP phone systems? Yes, certainly. Some love them and swear by them. The availability of advanced phone services, including voice mail and "Find Me" phone routing at a very reasonable price, is certainly attractive. Does VOIP make sense for smaller nonprofits? That's harder.

One of the key considerations for VOIP is the reliability of the internet connection that you're using. If your internet connection goes down, so does your phones. If it blips out just for a second - which you wouldn't typically notice if you're just surfing the web - your VOIP phone call will be disconnected. For most home VOIP users, this is fine. If your phone is down for a couple of hours, or it disconnects, they'll call you back. If it's someone you really care about, they have your cell phone. But for business, that's typically not acceptable; you don't KNOW in advance who needs to find you (what if your phone's down on the day your big grant proposal is due?), and an unstable phone system is just plain unprofessional.

If that kind of reliability is important to you, to use VOIP you really need an internet connection with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of at least 99.9% uptime (i.e. down less than two working hours per year -- 52 weeks/year minus 10 federal holidays times 40 hours/week = 2000 work hours/year). And most cable and affordable DSL internet services aren't willing to give you any SLA at all, let alone a 99.9% uptime commitment, or any arrangements for you if they fail. (Note: Some business DSL services will give you an SLA. You'll need to check it with your provider.)

So that would imply you likely need to have a T1 internet connection. A T1 comes with uptime guarantees and failover solutions - but at a cost, often between $350 to $650 per month.

On the other hand, a Plain Old Telephone Service (commonly abbreviated POTS) tends to be very reliable. And they're really not very expensive. At 2020 Vision, we spend $17/month for 2 lines that are local plus charged long distance, and $39 for two that are unlimited long distance. Incoming calls are routed to local lines first to keep the outgoing calls on the lines that include free long distance. Can you REALLY beat that by enough to justify the lower uptime of a VOIP line? Especially when you consider that you typically need to buy new physical phones when you switch to a VOIP line?

VOIP phone service is certainly worth investigating if you have a T1 connection already, or one makes sense for other reasons. Or if the reliability of your phone service is not a critical concern. But for a typical small organization, Plain Old Telephone Service is likely to be pretty hard to beat.

The Ask Idealware posts take on some of the questions that you send us at ask@idealware.org. Have other great options? Disagree with our answer? Help us out by entering your own answer as a comment below.

There was a great thread recently on the ProgressiveExchange discussion list, about the challenges and options for working with voter files. I didn't know much about this area, so I found the conversation really useful.

The basic problem is that voter files are big. Really big. A statewide voter file - summarizing the registered voters for a particular state - can have millions of entries. The general consensus was that these files are too big to try to read via common office software, like Access or Excel. Excel has a cap on the actual number of rows you can have (the number depends on the version, but it's only around a million even for the most up-to-date versions), and Access is likely to be extremely slow and undependable - and at risk for catastrophic failure and data loss.

So what should you do instead? A number of people suggested outsourcing the data management process - there are folks who specialize in voter files, such as Astro or VAN (Voter Action Network). These services aren't cheap, but they provide a number of benefits. They deal with all the data, and let you just pull the reports, walk sheets, call sheets, etc that you want. They also can be accessed over the internet - a big plus for organizations working with organizers in multiple offices or locations.

It can also be useful to look for other organizations using voter files for the same geographic area - you might be able to share their file infrastructure, or go in together on one of the outsourced services.

If you do want to store the data in-house, the consensus was that you'll want a SQL database back end, optimized by a professional, and likely a specific database server - probably a several thousand dollar investment at a minimum.

The Progressive Technology Project has more info - as well a lot of great resources about technology useful in organizing in their Voter Tech Kit.

We're just winding down now from our work on the Consumers Guide to Grants Management Systems - a project that we worked on for more than six months. It was the biggest, most research intensive report we've ever done as Idealware, and I learned a lot from the process. Here's some of my take-aways, as I reflect on the project overall.

Surveys aren't a great fit for gathering information about software
Surveys often seem like a great idea, like a straightforward way to gather a lot of information about what people think about packages. But it's in fact very difficult to get results that tell you much. Distribution is challenging. Getting a representative sample of anyone is infeasible on a limited budget (this would require defining a specific group of people and then trying to get a 50-60% response rate from them - classically, you do this through monetary incentives, follow-up calls, etc), so you need to default to more informal distribution methods.

But it's difficult to ensure that these informal methods gather information from a useful cross-section of people, and they're quite prone to being distorted by a few individuals. You don't have to have evil intent to distort an informal survey - if one enthusiastic user forwards the survey request onto the user group for their favorite package, then your usage numbers are suddenly way off.

And it's hard to interpret the data you've gathered. You need to be very limited and specific in your questions in order to get useful results. For my money, individual interviews - or even focus groups - are a better bang for the buck.

If I had it to do again, I wouldn't have spent nearly as much time on our grants management survey as we did. However, it was very useful for a particular purpose: it helped us to finalize the vendor list. By listing tools and including an "other" category, we heard about all the tools that were in use by the people who answered the survey, and it prompted vendors who weren't listed to contact us.

It's hard to define an evaluation framework before you've reviewed tools
I like defined processes, and my tidy brain really wants to interview a bunch of folks about the features they find useful in a software package, translate that into a framework for evaluating tools, and then evaluate tools using that framework. Only one problem: that doesn't work. You can (and we did) translate the interview data into a set of questions to ask, but it's really impossible to determine the key aspects that will be important in comparing software until you've done a number of reviews.

For instance, Document Management was a major theme in interviews, and we asked vendors a number of questions about their features in this area. But for 90% of the features, not a single product had them. While we certainly need to highlight this gap, it's pointless to have a whole evaluation category just to show that every products score poorly.

So in practice, you need to define the questions to ask vendors, do at least four or five reviews, and then come back around to define the evaluation framework. This seems weird and inefficient - for instance, you need to first write up your demo notes so you'll remember what you saw (products blend together mighty fast when you demo 5-10 products in a week or two) and then come back later and translate those notes into your review format. It's way faster to just go straight from notes to review - but if you don't have the evaluation framework completed, you'll need to go back through those reviews later to make them consistent in language and what's evaluated. Which is what we did on this project. It's inefficient, and so tedious but difficult that I worry that it can't be done accurately... without the superhuman diligence of Katie Guernsey, research assistant extraordinaire (thanks, Katie!).

Reporting features are hard to evaluate
I'm not entirely happy with our coverage of the reporting features - our comparison is valid, but the vast majority of products were "Advanced" by our scoring system. Are most grants management systems really advanced in reporting? I don't know. Most had quite flexible ad-hoc reporting systems, where you could actually do a lot of slicing and dicing on almost any data element. The real differences, it felt to me, were around ease of use - are the canned reports useful? Can you actually use the ad-hoc tools? This stuff was very difficult to evaluate without specific scenarios - useful for what? To who?

Quick summary reviews work well in tandem with detailed reviews
For this report, we spent two to three hours demoing and reviewing each of nine tools, but we also did quick half-hour demos of another eight. These quick looks were more useful than I thought they'd be. While we weren't able to do the same kind of detailed comparison of these packages, we got a good sense of strengths and weaknesses of each, enough to put them in context in the report. I think that doing a number of detailed reviews *first* really helped, though - it gave us a lot of knowledge about what to look for and ask about for the summary reviews.

...But they're really hard to proof
We asked each vendors to review their reviews and summaries for errors of fact, and interestingly, it took as long or longer to deal with the comments for the products that had only a little paragraph summary blurbs as with the products that had five-six page detailed reviews. The detailed reviews deal mostly with facts, so often there was no arguing them. On the other hand, the summary reviews generalize - i.e. X product is strong in this area, but is weak in another - and vendors found many things to argue with there. We obviously don't need to get the vendor to agree that they're weak in a certain area, but we wanted to make sure we hadn't gotten any important facts wrong, which was much harder for these summary blurbs.


All in all, I'm really happy with how the report came out. Those of you who have taken a look, what do you think? Are there things you think came out particularly well, or not so well, in the report?

Interested in learning about online advocacy, outreach, list building, website best practices, emailing techniques, viral videos, or more? Colin Delaney of ePolitics has updated his Online Politics 101 handbook. It's a terrific - and funny - introduction to the world of online advocacy, with both broad coverage and practical advice.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet: TechSoup Talks Twitter (TechSoup)
TechSoup's online event about Twitter (a social media tool that allows you - or anyone - to send short posts to a group of friends via web or phone) resulted in some good information about whether and how to use the tool. Not familiar with Twitter? Marnie Webb provides a great overview of Twitter resources.

The CIA's Use of Wikis (Enterprise 2.0 Conference)
From the Enterprise 2.0 conference, an intriguing case study showing how the CIA is using a wiki to create an internal “Intellipedia” (Tip of the hat to Marc Baizman of Nonprofit CRM)

Routing around potholes in the DAM road (CMS Watch)
Useful look at the current gaps and challenges in the Digital Asset Management Space.

The Utility of CRM (Gokubi.com)
Thoughtful, high level look at the purpose and advantages of a Constituent Relationship Management system.

The realm of blast emailing tools has been a pretty complicated one. Prices were complicated, features varied, and you really had to think through what you wanted in order to be able to effectively compare.

But with the announcement that VerticalResponse now offers 501(c)(3) nonprofits up to 10,000 emails per month for free, does that change? I think it might. VerticalResponse has been on our list of recommended tools for awhile - it's well designed, feature-rich, has strong deliverability, and integrates well with other tools (especially Salesforce). Even without nonprofit discounts, it's a very interesting option. At 10,000 emails for free, well, that might make it the obvious choice for most smaller nonprofits.

I've been taking a much closer look at VerticalResponse than I have before, to try to be able to answer the obvious question: when is it not the best choice?

There's two clear reasons why you'd want to look beyond. First, if you're sending considerably more than 10,000 emails a month - say, 20,000 or more - it's worth comparing prices with other packages. 10,000 emails free is a pretty darn big head start, but VR is considerably more expensive than some packages for higher volumes. Network for Good EmailNow (a stripped down package that's by far the cheapest mass email tool we've found if you're sending high volumes), is cheaper than VerticalResponse when you hit only about 15,000 emails per month.

Second, are you interested in a tool that will track all your constituents, take online payments, etc, in addition to emailing? If so, VerticalResponse is not that, so it makes sense to look instead to the world of integrated online packages.

Beyond that, there's not a lot of clear downsides of VerticalResponse. The features are quite comparatively rich and easy to use. I asked Patrick Shaw, who's been recommending VerticalResponse to the organizations they work with at NPower Seattle for some time, what downsides he sees, and here's the key issues he sees:

• Selling credits that can “belong” to an organization, rather than to an individual login. You have to buy or apply your credits via your user name and password. Not big enough of a hassle for us to not like the tool – but a bit no fun – it may mean that users have to share a user name and password, or buy/apply credits so that I might have $500 of credits and my co-worker might, too – and we’d both draw down.

• Subscription management. You're required to have a global opt out for all lists in every email, which is both the law and harsh! We’re planning on building a widget for Plone and maybe for PHP that will include the newsletter categories from Salesforce or another database that we can direct people to, so that they have both – the global opt out at the bottom AND the “manage my subscription” at the top.

It's striking to me how detailed he needed to get to find issues with the tool.

The first is a pain for workflow, but not the type of thing that seems like a deal breaker for most smaller nonprofits. The second seems like a bigger deal to me - there's no built in ability to let folks manage their own list preferences (to for instance opt-out out of your Alerts list while staying on your News list), but you're required to allow them to globally opt out of all lists. Allowing users to management their own subscription is certainly a more advanced feature, but findable - that might be a reason to look elsewhere. I'd add to the list the comment that the templates aren't very polished - there's certainly tools that provide more compelling templates out of the box.

And there is always the risk that VerticalResponse reconsiders this donation program when they get a lot of response. I don't have any reason to think this is going to happen, but it is a program that's based on the company's continued generosity, so I think it certainly makes sense to wait a few months before we crown it the new default option.

But if VerticalResponse continues to offer these free emails, I think that's going to shift the market dynamic for nonprofits. It becomes more like the web analytics marketplace, where Google Analytics is the obvious default choice. Like that space, there certainly *are* other packages, and there are valid reasons to use them, but for most organizations it will make sense to start by looking at VerticalResponse and look beyond only if it won't work for them.

We've fully verified and updated our Few Good Web Hosting Providers article - it's been one of those mainstay articles that isn't flashy but folks consistently mention as useful. The original version was from July 2006, so it was time for an update... but in fact, the world of hosting has changed surprisingly little since then. A few providers are becoming more or less reliable, and there's a couple new options in types of hosting, but largely the considerations remain the same.

Over the last few days, there’s been a detailed exchange on the Progressive Exchange discussion list about the lack of gender balance in technology conference speakers – in particular, the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns East DC conference earlier this week. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought of late, and I’m really not comfortable with the implicit assumption that this issue comes down to the fact that there's a bunch of sexist jerks running conferences. This post comes from a post I made to the list, after a lot of consideration.

I think this is a complicated issue, and one that's not going to be resolved just by telling conference organizers they need more women. I can say from my own experience that it's actually darn difficult to find women with expertise in many different technology areas. I've been actively trying to increase the diversity of the Idealware contributor and facilitator pool, and it's not at all easy. In some areas - like online collaboration, or social networking - there are a lot of obvious female experts in the nonprofit sphere. In many others - like CRM, file sharing, accounting packages - I can come up with a dozen guys off the top of my head, but only a few women or none at all.

There's a bunch of reasons for this - many of them centered around the fact that women are less self-promotional, and thus harder to find. Women are less likely to hang out a shingle and be consultants (and there's a slew of reasons for that). Women with the same level of expertise are considerably less likely to consider themselves an expert and post to lists or write articles. They're less likely to be compelled to spend time on things like speaking or contributing to articles to enhance their own profile. If you're organizing a conference, you also have the issue that women are more likely to feel a responsibility to be home with their family rather than traveling. And let's face the facts: there in fact are a lot less women than men doing hardcore IT and technology work (I don't have any hard research, but I'd be really surprised if more than 25% of IT directors are female, even in the nonprofit space. I don't know the area, but I'd be shocked if the same weren't true of execs at Web 2.0 start-ups).

I'm not saying that we're doing all that we can, and the gender imbalance is the way of the world. I am saying that this isn't a simple problem, and it's not going to have a simple solution.

There’s a wiki of female speakers who are interested in conferences, which is a terrific start, and promoting it widely to conference organizers is very useful. Right now the wiki doesn't include many women who focus on nonprofits or work beyond the realm of social media, but if there were, Idealware would certainly use it to try to recruit contributors for our work and events - it would be a huge help to us. I'd also love to see more hard core tech women include themselves, so as to not send the message that women do social media work while men take on the IT and hard core stuff.

I think it's important for women who feel that they'd like to see a better gender balance to list themselves on the wiki - to overcome the feeling (that women are much more likely to have than men, according to research) that they're not qualified enough, and offer the experience that they have. It's on my own list to add myself to the wiki - it's not trivial to list yourself, but worth the effort! And women who want a better gender balance should grow their own experience and reputation by looking to speak more, publish more, etc. Everyone can encourage women technologies to promote themselves more, and mentor women around them to grow more women technologies.

If it's easy to find tons of great, qualified women technologists, then it's much easier to encourage change among conferences. Heck, it's *hard* to find good speakers - of any gender - for conferences, and if there was a ready pool of great women, most organizers would reach out to them just because it was easier.

But right now it's not easy, at all. In my mind, it's not right to put the sole burden on conference organizers to do a bunch of extra work, without those who'd like to see a better gender balance taking some of the burden on themselves to make women in technology easier to find.

2008 CMS Satisfaction Survey (NTEN)
A report for NTEN summarizing the results of an informal investigating what content management systems nonprofits are using, and how happy with them they are.

Donation page optimization boosts Amnesty fundraising (DonorDigital)
Useful, research based look at how some small tweaks to Amnesty's fundraising landing page effected donations.

Open Source CRMs: How Do They Stack Up? (NTEN)
Great article from Michelle Murrain comparing open source Constituent Relationship Management systems like SugarCRM, CiviCRM, Organizer's Collaborative, and MPower

Top Four Essentials of eCampaigning (FairSay)
Nice overview of the elements of online advocacy.

A Guide to Successful Website Communication (Spin Project)
This isn't new, but it's new to me. It's a very useful guide to getting started with websites, including a look at the different types of website you might want.

The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with Your Middle and Major Donors (Convio)
Very useful research report talking about how "the wired wealthy" hope to interact with organizations online.

Benchmarking With A Warped Stick (Nonprofit Times)
I'm often troubled by how people use benchmarks - for instance, to measure their website and fundraising success. This article has a lot of the reasons why.

When is a good time to start a CRM project? (NonprofitCRM)
Interesting analysis of the appropriateness of CRM to organizations in different lifecycle stages.

Building a Base with Pledges (Convio)
Short but interesting summary of the tactic of asking constituents to pledge to do something as an engagement (and listbuilding?) technique.

Obama Looks Ahead to Oregon Primary in E-mail Push (TechPresident)
A look at how Clinton and Obama are (or were, in Clinton's case) using email in their campaigns.

Planning an Online Viral Marketing Campaign (Oddcast)
Some useful tips (from the business world, but appropriate to nonprofits) about planning an online campaign that you hope will go viral