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

NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) brings together nonprofit technology staff and consultants (loosely defined – if you use a database, social media, or send mass email, you’re an nptechie) for conversations, networking, learning, and having a great time.  NTEN has opened up the planning process for the 10NTC, April  8-10 in Atlanta, to the nonprofit tech community.   You can rate and vote for your favorite sessions, submitted by the community.

Community IT Innovators has submitted a batch of session ideas that we hope will provide some great information and discussion for the nonprofit community.  Follow the links below to see more details and rate each session individually.  Feel free to also tweet about and otherwise spread the word about your favorite session ideas! Voting closes October 16th.

THE 21ST CENTURY NONPROFIT: THE UNLIMITED POSSIBILITY OF THE FUTURE
What does the new, 21st Century Nonprofit look like? This session will explore the new ways in which cutting edge nonprofits are using technology to advance their cause and what these trends mean for the nonprofit sector.

RESEARCH FINDINGS: IT BUSINESS DRIVERS AT NONPROFITS
CITI is partnering with the Groundwork Group (OH) to determine the IT business drivers that will give smaller social mission organizations the ability to use IT more strategically. What conditions are changing and how are organizations changing to take advantage of evolving circumstances?

THE CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER: WHY YOUR NONPROFIT NEEDS SOMEONE IN THE CIO ROLE
What does it mean to have a fully developed CIO capability at your organization? This session will discuss what the CIO role looks like and how taking a strategic, holistic approach to IT can help an organization by opening up new opportunities for efficiency, operational integration, and mission success.

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO INTEGRATING CLOUD SERVICES INTO YOUR NETWORK
We’ll look at some of the most popular cloud services such as Salesforce, Google, Amazon S3 and others. Through case studies and sharing from audience members, attendees will get a sense of how to setup policy and procedures that ensure that an organization understands where its data is and how to manage it effectively.

REDUCING ENERGY CONSUMPTION
What does it take to reduce your organization’s energy footprint? This session will cover implementing green IT practices that can lead to a reduction in energy consumption from a leadership perspective.

GREEN IT FROM PROCUREMENT TO IMPLEMENTATION TO RECYCLING
This session will cover how choices about your IT infrastructure can reduce your direct hardware/software costs, lower your carbon footprint and improve staff productivity. We’ll also discuss how your old computer equipment can continue to provide value to others when the technology has reached the end of its useful life to you.

PERSONALS FOR PROFESSIONALS: HOW TO WRITE A WEBSITE RFP
You want a new website (who doesn’t?). You’ve got some ideas for the website and you’ve got (maybe) a budget. Now what? How do you communicate what you need to the community of developers? And how do you choose among all the potential firms and freelancers?

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF YOUR WEBSITE?
In this session we’ll propose and examine a model for assigning monetary value to website outputs. This model helps frame decisions to invest in user testing, marketing, and other methods of increasing website usage and conversions.

GROUPS OF GROUPS: THE FUTURE OF ORGANIZING
The Powershift Conference drew over 40,000 participants who gathered in DC to tell their representatives that Climate Change was the most important issue the U.S. – and the world – was facing and to demand immediate action. We’ll look at the Zanby organizing platform they used, the plan for rolling it out to the masses, how the platform performed and what lessons to draw.

Of course, there are a lot of great session ideas in addition to ours, so please take a look at the other sessions and rate your favorites!  Session materials from the conference will be online afterwords for everyone to access, so even if you’re not sure if you’ll be attending 10NTC, you can tell NTEN what topics will most help you and your organization.

Are you an NTEN member? We thought many of you would be interested in the below announcement from NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network. The event is also open to non-members at a slightly higher price.

We’ve been hearing from folks that while they really want to attend the Online Nonprofit Technology Conference next week, they just can’t work it into their budgets right now. Since part of our intent with the ONTC is to help people who couldn’t attend the 2009 NTC in San Francisco learn to manage the intersection of technology and mission unique to their organizations, we can’t help but feel like we’re letting you down.

So, we’d like to offer you a 25% discount on the cost of registration. This is as low as we can cut the price and still fulfill our obligations. Here’s how to do it:

• Sign in to your NTEN account.
• Select the $250 NTEN Member option and add that to your cart. Don’t forget the “How did you hear?” field!
• On the next page, enter ONTC25 in the discount box, and click “Apply”.
• Now you’re ready to check out and join your peers online, September 16 & 17.

What is the ONTC?

• 2-day online conference, taking place September 16-17, 2009
• Keynotes from Ami Dar of Idealist.org and Marnie Webb of TechSoup Global
• 15 live webcast sessions on need-to-know topics from a veritable Who’s Who of nonprofit tech speakers and facilitators
• A free copy of the NTEN book, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission ($40 value)
• Professional networking and sharing in an online community that “lives” after the event

If you’re still not sure, I hope you’ll check out our web site for all the details, including a full agenda and list of presenters. And, as always, please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions.

Learn more and register today!

At this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, CITI Director of Professional Network Services Matthew Eshleman, along with Earthjustice’s Peter Campbell, presented a session covering virtualization technology. We’re pleased to announce that their session was included in NTEN’s June newsletter summary of the best NTC sessions, selected based on conference participant feedback on each of the sessions.   A summary article by Matthew and Peter on “Virtualization: The Revolution in Server Management and Why You Should Adopt It” is featured on the NTEN blog. Excerpt:

Most of the discussion related to virtualization has been centered on large data centers and enterprise implementations, but a small network can also take advantage of the benefits that virtualization has to offer. Here are three common scenarios:

• Using a new server running a virtualization hypervisor to migrate an existing server
• Using a new server to consolidate 3-4 physical servers to save on electric & warranty expenses
• Using a storage area network (SAN) to add flexibility and expandability to the infrastructure

In the first scenario, an existing server is converted into a virtual server running on new physical hardware…

Visit the NTEN Blog to read the full article.

Visit this NTEN website to view videos of the key speakers from the Nonprofit Technology Conference last month.  Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations talks about the impact of self-organized online communities on traditional organizing.  Eben Moglen, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School and Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center, gave a thought-provoking talk in favor of open source software and open knowledge sharing in the technology community.  I highly recommend taking time to view these insightful speakers if you were not able to attend NTC.

M&R Strategic Services and NTEN work together on the annual Nonprofit eBenchmarks Study (you’ll need to register to see it), which allows you to look at your key metrics against a number aggregated from other organizations. Everyone’s mileage is going to be different, of course, but knowing how everyone else is doing gives you something against which to evaluate your results. The numbers are broken down by sector, so you can compare against your direct competitors, and know if it’s time to up your efforts or ask for help.

I particularly like the chart on page 7, which gives statistics for both advocacy and fundraising on open rate, click-through rate, and page completion rate, with a final response rate (being the click-through rate times the page completion rate — page completion is a percentage of the number of people reaching that page, not of the original sample.) This is a good yardstick to see where you’re weakest. If your click-throughs are competitive, but your page completion is falling short, you should work on your landing pages first. If your open rates don’t seem to measure up, work on your subject lines. (Though, as they spend a lot of type explaining, open rates are an unreliable metric. They also vary across the year — which is another chart on another page.)

Email is still the killer app, according to the study, at least for fundraising and advocacy. Not that anyone is really disputing that, particularly for short-term results. The study does give some quick case-studies on using text messages to boost email response and social networking to boost list growth. I was tickled to read in the social media case study (about a National Wildlife Federation program) that they had “no budget for list building,” which was followed by a pile of outreach they did to boost their list, which must have taken a lot of hours of staff time. Not to pick on NWF — I know of plenty of organizations that don’t really account for staff time invested in various projects, be they online or off, like special events.

I’ve been quiet on the blog front lately. In part, I’ve been waiting for the recordings of the NTEN plenaries to go up, at which point I’ll insist you listen to them. Both Eben Moglen and Clay Shirkey gave very thought-provoking presentations. What else can I tell you? I enjoyed Dean Hollander’s session “I Hate My Website!: Overcoming the emotional and logistical challenges of Web site development and online communications planning.” It wasn’t much different in content than a lot of the high-level online strategy sessions you get at NTEN, but I liked his take and his presentation. Unfortunately, his slides don’t seem to be available online.

In “A Nonprofit’s Guide to Client Data Collection and Privacy” we had a great, focused discussion on privacy issues. Presenters Sarah Tucker and Toby Shulruff made a great number of resources available online — sample policies and release forms, in particular.

I was also jazzed by NPower’s presentation on their tool for Measuring the Impact of Technology Projects, though the actual implementation remains to be done, and it’s huge. Slides for the presentation are linked through the session title, above.

On another NTEN-related subject, yesterday Beth Kanter summarized an NTEN webinar on Facebook: So you want a Facebook Fan Page for Your Nonprofit? Here’s the Scoop!. There’s a great list of linked resources at the end of the post.

With Clay Shirky’s popular opening keynote on the power of online communities and social media organizing (summarized with key quotes here), and dozens of sessions on social media related topics, NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference was atwitter (with blog links and quotes in the twitterverse) with strategies and panels on integrating social media like Twitter and Facebook into effective online organizing and advocacy campaigns.

One session by John Kenyon, however, stood out by emphasizing the basics of successful online communications – the importance of eating your vegetables before you get to the dessert of playing with social media.  Based on a chapter from the NTEN book: Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission and featuring William Neuheisel of DC Central Kitchen and Jennie Anderson of AIDS.gov, this session was packed with useful tips and case studies on how to move your website and email from lackluster to inspiring.

A few takeaways:

• Use metrics (such as Google Analytics) to analyze what people are looking at on your website and what you can spend less time working on
• The 4 C’s of effective websites:
  • Credibility: You have less than 1 minute to establish your credibility as the public face of your organization.
  • Cultivation: Invite visitors to participate and join in your cause, rather than simply stating what you do. Build relationships.
  • Clickability: Clicks are interactions; how can you provide information in different ways and give people lots of opportunities to “interact?”
  • Content: Keep it real, current, and concise.
• Coordinate e-newsletter, fundraising, direct mail and website campaigns for maximum impact.
• Integrate stories and connect emotionally with your audience.

In a live-tweeted session on organizing online for positive change, Ben Rattray summed it up thus: “The killer app is the content.”  While having a sustained organizational presence on social networking sites can help build brand awareness, having an authentic, consistent message that makes a connection with potential supporters remains the key to successful non-profit campaigns.

Whether you need guidance on your website and email campaigns, or feel ready to dive into social media, CITI can help you develop an online strategy action plan to measure and increase the effectiveness of your organization’s online presence.

The annual NTEN Non-profit Technology Conference (NTC) was April 26th-28th in San Francisco, CA.  CITI staff were there to learn more and share our knowledge about the latest developments in technology for social mission organizations.

CITI’s Director of Professional Network Services Matthew Eshleman presented scenarios in which organizations of different sizes can employ virtualization to maximize their technology resources. He presented along with Peter Campbell of Earthjustice, and their presentation was well-received.

NTEN is bringing the conference to those who could not attend with their NTC-live site, where you can find live blogs of many sessions, session materials, and more.