Marissa Goldsmith, Beaconfire Consulting

Organizations love their dashboard reports. I've spent hours creating Excel spreadsheets for monthly, quarterly, and annual reports. I've filled them with all different kinds of stats, from pageviews to visits to most-printed pages.

These reports may result in kudos for an increase in pageviews, or grimaces for the decrease in returning visitors, but the only action that I have to look forward to is spending several more hours creating the same spreadsheet next month/quarter/year.

And so I became a dashboard report hater. But eventually, I realized that it wasn't the dashboard report I hated, it was the culture that the dashboard report fed into -- the culture that values the existence of a report over what the report itself is telling you.

Since that epiphany, I have worked to actively change the nature of the reports themselves. Here are a few ways how:

Yesterday, on the NTEN channel, we started a discussion on the future of privacy for nonprofits with Stowe Boyd, known for his speaking and writing on the social revolution on the web. Stowe painted the backdrop of the formation of what he refers to as "publicy" -- the idea that the social web is inherently open with little privacy for users.

The question that Stowe suggested nonprofits ask of the third-party services is, "What is their social contract and how stable is it?" Hello, Facebook??

Listen to Stowe's presentation on Publicy and the Erosion of Privacy: