Ali Levine, NTEN Fellow for Special Projects

Working "on the bleeding edge" is exhilarating, but it can be nerve wracking too. Staff time and money are in perpetually short supply and ensuring the most efficient and effective use of resources is one of the most important tasks a nonprofit manager must undertake. Deciding to put those scarce resources into a new idea or tool can be a tough call. New ideas are, by their nature, largely unproven, and there is usually little data to go on.

Even when data does exist, it rarely tells you what you want to know. Most available data is captured by a single organization and tends to stay within that organization, where it's useful but doesn't offer a big picture look at the trends. And just because several organizations are using the same tool doesn't mean that they have the same goal.

I know first hand how frustrating it can be to try to find data about the efficacy of new technological tools. In addition to being your NTEN Special Projects Fellow, I’m researching how online interaction affects online fundraising for my Master’s degree. The tools I will likely be looking at have been around long enough to have fallen off the bleeding edge – blogs, polls, and online advocacy – but are the building blocks of two-way communications.

The fit between these tools and fundraising feels natural to me. Having worked in development, I know how important it is to engage donors in the mission of an organization, and until recently that was largely the domain of major gifts fundraising. It had just been too expensive to have conversations with $10 donors in the hopes of retaining them, or upgrading them to $15 dollar gifts. But online tools seem to offer the economy of scale that’s been missing, allowing us to reach past major donors to talk to more supporters and give them the chance to talk back.

I’ve found some tantalizing glimpses to support my gut feeling. A 2006 study by M+R Strategic Services and the Advocacy Institute found that organizations that engaged in online activism raised, on average, three times more money online than organizations without online advocacy programs. An earlier study by Adrian Sargeant and Elaine Jay on British nonprofits found that simply offering people the chance to sign up for future updates led to higher online fundraising totals.

My experience has clearly shown me how difficult it can be to find meaningful data on nonprofit technology, even technology that has been around for a little while. One of the most important things we can do is to address the current lack of data, which will help open the way for more investment in and experimentation on the bleeding edge. And, of course, make the decision to try something new a little easier.

If you are working on the bleeding edge, let us know what you are up to! Post a comment here or in the emerging technologies affinity group. We can all benefit from hearing about your successes and challenges. Perhaps we can even spot some trends that offer the opportunity for further research.