N-TEN
The latest dispatches from your nonprofit tech community
Updated: 17 min 13 sec ago
It's Already September? (Or: Two Thirds of a Year's Worth of Fundraising Resources)
Flickr: visit~ fingerlakesWhere I come from, there's a lake, and every year on the Saturday before Labor day when the sun goes down, everyone who lives on that lake turns off their house lights, lines their waterfront with lit red flares, and builds a bonfire. This is how we mark the end of summer (high tourist season) and the beginning of a new year. For the past few years, I've been in Portland, OR, far away from this tradition -- which may explain why it feels a bit like September has smacked us over the head, as it walked unannounced into our summer party. Regardless of how it got ...
Effective Uses of Social Media for Fundraising
Philip King, Artez Interactive There may come a day when your Facebook fan page has more traffic than your actual website. Hard to believe? Just talk to the people at Coca-Cola. A recent Advertising Age article notes that Coke has one of the largest brand pages on Facebook with 10.7 million fans (placing them in second, after Starbucks' 12.7 million fans). Consider this in comparison to their own website, where U.S. unique visitors in July fell to 242,000, down more than 40% compared to a year ago. With trends like these, it's important to consider your own approach to social ...
Where to Go When You Need to Know (If Your Site Works): Web Analytics Extravaganza
Based on the response to a couple of how-to articles about Google Analytics I've posted to the NTEN blog recently, we know there's a hunger for more information about how to understand what's going on with your organization's web site. See, the average time on page for these articles is nearly 4:00, much higher than our blog's average of 2:35, so I know folks are (probably) actually reading them. And judging by the referring sites, they're coming from all over. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Web analytics can tell you a lot of things -- what your visitors are engaging ...
How to Use Causes for Your Year-End Fundraising Appeal
Susan Gordon, Causes Planning for the year-end giving season is in full swing throughout the nonprofit sector. In 2009, giving in December alone brought in about 1/3 of the fundraising dollars to nonprofits. And in 2010, online giving is expected to bring in more donations than ever, after having seen a 46% increase in online revenue between 2008 and 2009. At Causes, the application on Facebook, we’re releasing huge improvements to our fundraising and communications tools just in time for the year-end giving season. Nonprofits have already raised over $26 million using Causes -- ...
Lunch Is on Me and My Cell Phone
Flickr photo: shareskiHow much cash do you have in your wallet right now? As I sat in the Grand Junction Colorado airport -- which is charming -- I had a conundrum: the contents of my wallet came to a grand total of 72 cents.* This is a common situation for me, a situation that means if I need a Diet Coke later (inevitable), I will likely also be forced to buy some chips or something so that I can put the charge on my ATM card. (Those chips clearly have nothing to do with my lack of will power.) But I digress. My point is that real currency, the silver and green stuff we lug around, is ...
Brandraising: Using Technology to Grow Nonprofit Peaches
Sarah Durham, Big Duck We're all nerds when it comes to new media. No matter how many studies tell us that that the gadgets we're hooked on aren't good for us, most of us technology nerds still can't get enough. In part, it's because the technology is now so fast, easy and cheap to use that simply investing our time to figure it out seems like a pleasure. After all, I was that kid who stayed up late playing video games. (Ah, Joust... how I miss thee.) Now I'm that grown up who stays up late building communities for my obscure personal interests on Ning, and aimlessly chatting with my ...
Changes to the NTEN Connect Newsletter
Until this month, we've used our monthly e-newsletter, NTEN Connect, to debut new content, typically publishing the 5-7 articles we've solicited all at once. While that gives us a nice traffic spike, it's a lot to drop on y'all in one day.So, in the spirit of Holly's call for innovation, we're going to try something new. Each weekday, for the first couple of weeks of each month, we're going to post a guest article related to our monthly theme. This month, it's fundraising; next month, Tech Trends. At the end of the month, the articles you, the NTEN community, like the most -- as determined ...
Fundraising When Money Is Tight
Mal Warwick, Mal Warwick Associates Our economy is still in bad shape, and a growing number of economists is telling us that it may well get worse. So what can we fundraisers do to minimize the impact of this difficult period on our organizations, and at the same time maximize our income? I suggest a cautious and balanced nine-step approach: 1. Reassess the whole ball of wax: fundraising, marketing, communications Now’s the time to take advantage of the opportunity to put in place an intensive evaluation process that will allow your fundraising, marketing, and ...
Donald Trump Thinks You're Boring (and Other Lessons on Innovation)
Flickr photo: Gilberto ViciedoIn her book "Zilch", Nancy Lublin recounts the time she was seated next to "The Donald" at a play. They had a little chit chat, which included Mr. Trump asking her, "Oh. So you're in the not-for-profit sector. You don't find that boring?" I can now say from experience that Nancy Lublin is neither bored nor boring. (Seriously. When I met her, she was wearing a necklace made of plastic hula girls, and she WORKED it.) From what I know about you, you aren't either. As Nancy points out in the book, it's hard to be bored when ...
Things We Like (August 2010)
A monthly roundup of our favorite nonprofit tech resources. Read more posts on our blog. HBR's Dan Pallotta thinks it's unethical that your organization doesn't spend more time and money on fundraising. Them's fightin' words to a lot of commenters. We think it's unethical that this crazy yo-yo guy hasn't been worked into a fundraising campaign. He will seriously blow your mind. But we have to wonder what his parents think. Somebody find him a spokespinner job, quick! A friend posted that yo-yo link to Facebook. Adina Levin thinks Facebook's not the best place for community organizers -- but ...
How-to: Improve Your Site's Bounce Rate (Intro to Google Analytics Advanced Filtering)
If you're in charge of your organization's web analytics, you undoubtedly know about bounce rate -- the measure of visitors who enter your site, say "Enh" (or something ruder), and immediately leave, without viewing any more of your carefully crafted pages. Yeah, those people annoy me, too. But unless you're a consultant working with several nonprofit clients, you're probably working in a vacuum: you know your own site's bounce rate, but you don't know how good it is compared to other sites.I recently had the opportunity to see anayltics for more than a few other sites, including ...
Collecting Data in Low Resource Areas: How to Get Started
William (Bill) Lester, NPOKI It’s an old problem, made worse by the tantalizing potential that technology provides: how do you collect and aggregate quality data when you work in low resource areas? Imagine this scenario: You’re an NGO working in an African country to advocate for clean water. You accomplish this by educating the people of that country on all aspects of safe water, and you lead projects that help to improve the quality of the water supply. You are funded to do this by a US foundation. As proof of your success, you need to gather data from each and every encounter ...
"Google Was Our First Office": Managing a Worldwide Staff
Efrat Ben-Dor Erez, NPTech Israel Imagine a Jewish girl, selling Challah bread on a college campus in America to help support black Muslims in Darfur. This amazing project, initiated by Eli Winkelman, came to life with the help of PresenTense. PresenTense is an international nonprofit organization founded in 2006, which uses technology effectively to sustain its activities, functioning as a "start up incubator for social entrepreneurs". Their mission is to engage and inspire the most creative minds, investing their ideas and energy to revitalize the Jewish community and the ...
The Math Is Starting to Add Up: The Promise of Mobile
Matt Berg, Millenium Villages I’ve been working or interested in the space of ICT for Development (ICT4D) for about a decade now. During this time, I’ve seen a lot of exciting changes, but nothing has been exciting or frankly paradigm shifting as the wide spread growth of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks and emergence of applications that leverage the now ubiquitous mobile phone to deliver services by leveraging their ability to deliver and collect data. Achieving limited scale, chasing sustainability Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester, and one of ...
"Press 2 for Chickens": Innovating African Radio Stations
Melissa Ulbricht, MobileActive.org Two years ago, Bev Clark, the co-founder of Kubatana.net, was awarded a large grant in the Knight News Challenge for Freedom Fone, an open-source software platform for distributing news and information through interactive voice response (IVR) technology. Freedom Fone leverages audio as a mobile function using IVR, a technology that allows a system to detect voice and keyboard input. IVR allows a user to call, enter or say specific numbers, and listen to or contribute audio content. (You’ve likely encountered it when you call a customer service ...
Creating Public Transparency: Bringing GuideStar to Israel
Debra Askanase, Community Organizer 2.0 In early August, NPTech launched Guidestar Israel. It took almost five years to make GuideStar Israel a reality, and it is an incredible resource for Israeli nonprofit organizations. The GuideStar project was established as an unique cooperative venture by the Ministry of Justice, JDC-Israel, and Yad Hanadiv with the objective of developing civil society in Israel. NPTech (established by JDC-Israel and Yad Hanadiv) is the operating organization behind GuideStar Israel. It provides services and activities designed to help social ...
Hey Women Who Tech! Get Your Tech On!
As you know, we're just about done collecting your great session ideas for the 11NTC right now (deadline: August 27). After that comes the hard part: figuring out what to put on the final agenda. It's a balancing act -- literally. We're always looking to balance sessions across tracks, open source v. proprietary, sessions for small orgs and sessions for large orgs. Oh, and women vs. men presenters.We don't always succeed at that. Since we're an organization that's also run by a woman, we're very glad to partner every year with with the Women Who Tech Telesummit. The Telesummit was formed ...
11NTC Session Proposals: We Don't Want to Rush You (But Hurry!)
Submit your session idea today!Okay, we hear you. 11NTC is almost a whole month earlier this year (March 17 - 19), which means it's wedged in the middle of SXSW Interactive and AFP -- but we swear we picked the date three years ago when we had no idea. We also understand that because of this, everything we ask from you, our fabulous community, has to happen a whole month earlier than normal too. (Trust us, we know: you should see how much maté Anna's drinking already...) This includes submitting your session proposals by this Friday, August 27th.We know August is generally a ...
Where to Start with Interactive E-Reports
Flickr: Jeff_WernerOver in the Nonprofit Webmasters affinity group, Melissa Barry from the Parkinson's Disease Foundation started a great conversation. She asked for some help in identifying interactive e-book resources that she could then use to create an annual report, referencing the 2009 annual report from VolunteerMatch as an example of what she was looking for. The discussion took a turn, not only answering Melissa's question, but really dissecting when to use an interactive e-book format and when regular old PDF or paper copy works just as well if not better. The important ...
NTEN Member Buzz Round-Up: August 20
(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharing their nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.) Allyson Kapin offers some good reminders/tips for engaging your supporters. (Hint: it's not just about action alert emails or reminders to sign a petition.)Speaking of online engagement, Amy Sample Ward is planning to integrate "conversation starter" posts into her blog, and this week she's starting off with an article fellow ...
