Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

This article on the CIO challenge, by Shawn Banerji for baselinemag.com, is a few months old, but still very relevant to the challenge CIOs and other technology managers face this year. Some key points from the article:

• “Aligning technology resources with business goals” remains a “top technology priority for information officers.”

• IT leaders face “a mandate to reduce information technology expenditures while simultaneously increasing productivity and operating efficiency”

• Budget cuts and scrutiny for 2010 are still expected to be tight, though not quite as severe as most of 2009

• “Building effective third-party partnerships,” strategic sourcing, and effective vendor management are becoming higher priorities as information officers gain visibility and come under more scrutiny

The bottom line? Even if you don’t have an “information officer” or “CIO” at your organization, effectively aligning your IT with your organization’s broader goals and forming a trusted relationship with technology experts and leaders outside your organization can improve your budget efficiency and impact.

For more on what a CIO does and how you can more effectively align your technology with your mission by taking a big picture approach, join us for the next CITIzens Forum on Wednesday, February 3rd at 5:30.

Not that recent, but if you haven’t seen these, they’re worth your time:

Playing by the (Wrong) Rules over at Mark Rovner’s Sea Change Strategies blog talks about how some fundraising conventional wisdom misses the larger point.

More bad news over at the NetSquared blog: Nonprofit Marketing Report: Organizations Failing to Connect. It’s interesting in this case that their data is self-reported. This isn’t an assessment from the messagee standpoint that things aren’t clear — the organizations are diagnosing this problem themselves. Which I guess means this isn’t news at all — you already knew.

Finally, here’s a link to the audio of Care2’s webinar Connecting Advocacy to Fundraising. They start off showing some statistical evidence that donations are more likely after advocacy actions. Great food for though and action for all of you out there trying to connect with people on both of those levels.

Are technology projects a source of frustration, confusion, or excessive cost within your organization? Are you curious about whether you’re following best practices and selecting the best tools as you apply technology in your programs and operations? Would you like to meet others solving similar problems and facing similar challenges?

Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects is an event series designed to help you better manage technology projects in your nonprofit or as a consultant to nonprofits.

Aspiration and Community IT Innovators are hosting the fourth Nonprofit Technology Project Management event in Washington, DC on Monday and Tuesday, February 8th and 9th, 2010.

Complete details are at http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/mntp-dc/2010

And you can register directly at http://bit.ly/4q1AgC

A detailed agenda for the event is also available at http://mntp.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Event_Agenda.

The agenda will continue to evolve up to and during the event, as we dialog with participants and strive to meet specific needs in the domain of technology project management for nonprofits. We invite participants to both request and propose sessions.

Informal, information-rich, discussion-based sessions will allow participants to compare processes, tools, successes, and lessons learned. We will discuss areas such as team collaboration, project planning, software selection, migration, and project roll-out, and map out the software tools – from project management packages to collaborative communication to issue tracking and more – that support successful technology projects.

We look forward to seeing you there!

CrisisCamp Haiti is a project of Crisis Commons, an organization that brings together technology volunteers to help with disaster relief and humanitarian crises.  This weekend, in DC and several other cities nationwide, tech-savvy volunteers will be gathering to contribute skills to compile information and resources to help the recovery in Haiti.  Anyone with a laptop and internet-savvy can help, and programmers or those with mapping/GIS skills are particularly encouraged to attend.

View additional details on the January 30th CrisisCamp in DC.

There are a lot of interesting nonprofit technology events coming up in DC in the next few weeks:

• Wednesday, Jan. 27, InsideNGO Technology Update: Inside NGO will be presenting a full day course detailing four technologies. CITI’s Matthew Eshleman will be presenting on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).  Virtual collaboration and training, Windows 7 deployment, and WAN optimization will also be covered.

• Wednesday, Feb. 3, CITIzens’ Forum: The Value of a CIO Perspective: The second forum in our series asks, who is managing technology at your organization? Do you have one person  who takes a big picture view, or are different people responsible for managing your network, website, databases and applications?  What’s the difference between a CIO and a CTO? Join in an open discussion to share what you’re doing and how other organizations address similar challenges.

• Monday-Tuesday, Feb. 8 – 9, Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects: Our second conference partnering with Aspiration to help you better manage technology projects in your nonprofit.  See this post for additional details

• Wednesday, Feb. 10, NTEN Webinar: Greening Your Nonprofit’s IT: Find out what all the green IT buzz is about and get practical information for greening your IT infrastructure.  Matthew Eshleman will be presenting with Peter Campbell on virtualization; other breakout sessions will cover green IT strategy, hardware and software, case studies, and sustainable design and printing.

• Friday, Feb. 12, Nonprofit 2.0: This unconference will let participants shape the agenda around how nonprofits use the latest technology to communicate, fundraise, and organize and advocate for their issues.  The event is already sold out, but there is a waiting list, and there may be a conversation or two to follow on Twitter…

• Wednesday, Feb. 17, CITIzens’ Forum: Salesforce: Learn how organizations are using Salesforce as a powerful CRM to manage contacts, campaigns, and related data; find out how Salesforce could be helpful for your organization, and share your story if you’re already using it.

We’re starting a new series of informal gatherings to discuss topics important to nonprofits. The idea is to bring people together to talk about your ideas, successes, failures, needs, and best practices.

Our goal is to create closer community ties, connecting you with other nonprofit professionals. We want to create an atmosphere where you can feel empowered to talk openly about your challenges at work and what we, as a community, can do to address them.

CITI will be hosting these events, but we’ll be learning as much from these events as anyone there. We hope you’ll join us for an evening of exploration and sharing.

Register now for the first forum on January 20 to discuss Social Media.  Many of you are likely already familiar with and using tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to spread your message and gain supporters.  Come share your story and learn more about how other organizations are using social media.

Save the dates! The CITIzens Forums will be on the first and third Wednesday evening of every month, each one discussing a different specific topic of interest.

• Jan 20 – Social Media
• Feb 3 – The Value of a CIO Perspective
• Feb 17 – Salesforce
• March 3 – Nonprofit Capital Markets
• Mar 17 – Raiser’s Edge
• Apr 21 – Post NTEN Conference Wrap-up
• May 19 – Data Management, Cleansing, & Conversion

We’re a little late with our Best of 2009 list, but here are the most popular CITI Blog posts of last year. Thanks for reading!

1. Up Close Review: Blackbaud’s NetCommunity

2. Twitter/Netflix Integration

3. You are Authorized to Virtualize

4. Advocacy vs. Direct Service

5. Almost All Things Are Equal When Accepting Donations Online: Tools Comparison

6. Greening Your Office: Measuring Carbon Footprint

7. Cloud Computing: What’s It Good For?

8. Project Management Tips from Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects Event (2009)

9. William James Foundation: Helping Sustainable Start-ups

10. Online Communications Takeaways from NTEN

The following article, by Washington Business Journal Associate Editor Timothy Burn, appeared in the December 11th, 2009 issue of the Washington Business Journal.

Exec helps nonprofits do more with technology

Like a true entrepreneur, Rob Jackson has used his career to identify a need and find ways to fill it. After spending some time at the See Forever Foundation/Maya Angelou Public Charter School, Jackson realized nonprofits need help making the best use of technology. Now he is vice president of business development for Community IT Innovators (CITI), where he helps nonprofits use technology to fulfill their social missions, and do it in a sustainable way.

What’s at the top of your ‘to do’ list?
First, build greater awareness for the strategic value of IT in social-mission organizations. Right now, IT is considered to be a cost center that plays several different tactical roles as opposed to a strategic business driver for the entire organization that requires an informed investment. That needs to change. Second, in order for IT providers like CITI to help social mission organizations make the transition into strategic IT, we need to spend more time talking about the organization’s business objectives with leadership. Third, build greater awareness internally among the staff about the business value of IT.

What’s the biggest challenge CITI clients face right?
Learning how to become more efficient in order to mitigate the well-publicized funding challenges. According to the Foundation Center, giving in 2009 will most likely finish down about 10 percent from 2008, and it’s expected to be down a little more in 2010. So, for the smaller organizations that we serve who have traditionally been asked to do more with less, it will be even more difficult to provide the administrative and professional services capabilities necessary to perform their work.

Many area nonprofits have had to tighten their belts. Has that hurt CITI’s business?
Our growth slowed earlier in the year, but we have been able to diversify our client base and identify new opportunities so that the effect of the downturn has not been catastrophic.

What do you think will be the next must-have IT capability for nonprofits?
With scarce resources and greater accountability standards, social-mission organizations will request information systems that can provide real-time, on-demand access to management information. So, defining the organization’s performance metrics, collecting the data, aggregating, analyzing and publishing the data using Web-based technologies is definitely going to be a must-have.

Can you explain CITI’s “triple bottom line” business model?
People. Planet. Profits. We measure the health and wellness of the organization by measuring individual goals, employee morale, and the company’s carbon footprint in additional to the traditional financials. Everyone at CITI has a coach (a CITI staff member) that helps define individual, quarterly goals that we track. These individual goals, team goals, business unit goals, and company goals get scored by our peers at the end of each quarter.

Your web site says CITI is employee-owned. How is that structured?
In an effort to ensure long-term success of CITI, the company established an employee stock ownership program. The impetus for this came from our staff who wanted to establish a participative, socially responsible, worker-ownership culture. So after one year of service, an employee becomes eligible for shares of company stock. The goal is to increase ESOP ownership and transfer up to 45 percent of the ownership to staff.

Seems like the nonprofit world is a finite market. Has CITI thought about how it can grow?
Ultimately, our growth is dependent upon our ability to leverage technology to make a significant impact for our clients. One way to grow is to serve more clients and play in a larger sandbox. This is possible, but the challenge becomes scaling our services so that we are providing consistently to a growing number of clients. Another way to grow is to provide more IT services to the clients we already have. This is also feasible, but then the challenge becomes offering technology services that are “just right” for the organization rather than being determined by an internal growth number. If we are successful in making a significant impact that dramatically accelerates the progress on our most urgent social issues, would our clients require more technology support or less?

Another great project I saw at the Dev Summit was Ushahidi — an open-source crisis tracking and management platform that was developed quickly to track the violence that followed Kenya’s 2008 election. Ushahidi allows data collection via the web, email or SMS. Within minutes of the presentation, various Bay Area developers were planning to roll it out to track ICE raids in their area. There are plenty of other uses from the community level on up.

Ushahidi is getting a lot of well-deserved funding lately, which points to a bright future for the tool.

When I was at Aspiration’s Nonprofit Dev Summit 2009 in Oakland, I heard about All for Good, which is a relatively new volunteer opportunity aggregator. They roll up opportunities from many of the biggest volunteer opportunity listing services out there, and you can also submit opportunities directly, via an XML feed. If your organization is looking for volunteers, you should definitely investigate the various routes to adding your listings to their feeds.