archives
Text to Give: It's Ready for Prime Time
Here's a riddle for you: what's plastic, in your pocket right now, and ruins bar trivia nights around the country? A mobile phone!
Your mobile can help you do all kinds of interesting things, from finding directions, to finding trivia answers (aka cheating), to finding potential new friends.
One thing you couldn't do -- until today -- was easily give to the charity of your choice.
Exciting news nonprofiteers: mGive now allows you to collect $5 or $10 donations via text message.
Sausages, Software, and the Future of Emailing Congress
Net Effect I logged on late to the live-streamed event, Internet Advocacy Roundtable: The Future of Emailing Congress - New Solutions Offered and Old Myths Busted, hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
I caught up on 40Brown's Live Blog where Daniel Bennett, co-author of the Net Effect and consultant for elected representatives and non-profit organizations, started off by quoting,
Software and laws are like sausages- they're good, but you shouldn't see them being made!
(Personally, I like to know what my sausage is made of.)
Daniel cleared up some misunderstandings and myths in Internet Communications between Congress and constituents.
Nonprofit IT Leadership Redux
The blog post Holly wrote recently on the leadership gap in Nonprofit IT departments has been gaining traction -- along with quite a few comments. It seems she's touched a nerve, and that's a good thing. As she says, "More nonprofit EDs need to understand technology's strategic importance."
Nonprofit technology leadership is one of the issues we care about the most here at NTEN. For the sector to work as efficiently as possible, Executive Directors and other nonprofit leaders need to feel comfortable making technology decisions without formal technology training. Equally as important, IT Staff need leadership skills to bring technology out of the back office and into the strategies of their nonprofit organizations.
We're doing what we can to address the issue with our Technology Leadership Series of webinars.
Win a Free Registration to the 2008 Bridge Conference!
2008 Bridge ConferenceWe just heard about an online scavenger hunt for the 2008 Bridge Conference, hosted by AFP and DMAW:
Play the Find the Clues to Your Success Game and win a Free Registration to the 2008 Bridge Conference!
Play the Find the Clues to Your Success contest by searching the Bridge Conference education tracks on the 2008 Bridge Conference website and identifying the 6 gold highlighted words that make up the clues to your success. Put the words together in the correct order to create the Secret Phrase and email the phrase to mystery@bridgeconf.org. The first entry submitted with the correct phrase will win a free, fully transferable registration to the 2008 Bridge Conference.
If you don't win the contest, don't worry: if you're a member of NTEN, you get to register at the lowest rate for the conference! Contact me to find out how to register with your NTEN rate.
Measuring What Matters: Web Analytics Edition
Flickr Photo: joiseyshowaaI am slightly metrics obsessed. One of the first things I do each morning is skim through our database and check on open rates, registration rates, etc. I have been known to spend entire Wednesday evenings down the rabbit hole of Google Analytics (or at least until Top Chef comes on).
One thing I know from my obsessive stints is that it's easy to lose the forest for the trees -- to forget which metrics matter, in which contexts. It's easy to obsess over our overall bounce rate, when in fact, some pages probably should bounce, but we should REALLY worry about the bounce rate on certain pages.
The fact is, your site serves many goals, and you should frame your analysis of web metrics that way, too. Worry less about overall numbers, and more about what each section or page of your site is supposed to accomplish, and what metrics will help you measure that.
Tech Resource Roundup
Flickr Photo: Michelle BreaA couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some new strategies I'm using to keep track of the nineteen million things I'm either supposed to know or do something about. It's been working really well for me, but I realized that my netvibes page was missing hard tech news.
At the same time, we've been thinking about starting a book club here at NTEN and I wondered what good old fashioned books folks were reading about social media.
I asked for recommendations for both on Twitter yesterday and got a great list of ideas that several people asked me to compile. Here it is:
More 08NTC (Now with More Podcasts!)
You've been asking about recordings of NTC sessions. Now, we finally have some! You can thank Corey Pudhorodsky, of 501c3cast, for his work in creating podcasts of the following popular NTC sessions:
- Website Usability: Simple Steps for Making Your Site Perform Better, Mark Rovner, Sea Change Strategies
- Intro to Google AdWords, Frederick Vallaeys, Google
501c3cast is a podcast for the nonprofit sector. You can check out some of their other shows and resources here.
Nonprofit Leadership Gap: IT Edition
Flickr Photo: RobjtakThe leadership gap: wherever I go in the nonprofit world these days, the leadership gap comes up in conversation. Lots of research by lots of smart people points in one direction -- nonprofit leaders are leaving the sector at an increasing rate, and their staff don't feel ready or aren't interested in replacing them. (Get the specifics from Bridgespan's "Leadership Deficit" report and "Ready to Lead" from the Meyer Foundation, Idealist and Compasspoint.)
At the same time, I've heard rumbling in the NTEN universe from those of you who play another role in your organizations: technology leadership. CIOs and CTOs -- and those who do the work without the official title -- are all talking about a vacuum of technology leadership at their organizations. But if you go, who will follow?
If that's how you've been feeling, you're not imagining things.
GIS Put to Use in Myanmar
It had been awhile since I'd played with Google Earth, but Jim Prosser at Direct Relief International gave me a good reason this morning: DRI has used GE to map the official health clinics and hospitals in Myanmar.
When you first access their KML overlay, it looks like Myanmar is stuffed with health clinics, but zoom in a bit, particularly on the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta region, and you'll get some small idea of the miles and miles an injured person might have to traverse to find adequate medical attention.
Direct Relief International's COO,
Use the Force (for Good): Groundswell, Social Media, and Forrester Research
I attended a free webinar last week on the new book, Groundswell: Winning in World Transformed by Technologies, presented by its authors, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester Research.
The book is geared toward the for-profit sector, but the strategies can be adopted by nonprofits in terms of building community, engaging activists, and even raising financial support around a cause or organization online.
I want to provide some of those applications and takeaways from the session: