As promised, I spent yesterday at Organizer’s Collaborative’s Grassroots Use of Technology conference, up in Lowell. I went hoping particularly to pick up tips on donor management and fundraisining tools, and came away with some good leads. It was also fun to reconnect with folks.
Keynote speakers
Nick Jehlen of Action Mill shared his approach to social change projects, and how that approach played out for Turn Your Back on Bush, Winter Soldier, and Enough Fear. His basic premise is to take Ghandi’s idea of being the change that you want to see in the world, and bring it to the commons, so that principled actions have a chance to influence others. In addition to having interesting stuff to say, Nick really put together a handsome presentation, so if you get a chance to catch him speak sometime, go for it.
After lunch, Paul Niwa talked about his Boston Chinatown site, which provides a visualization of the community members’ connectedness. He’s a professor of journalism at Emerson, so his initial goals were mostly based in journalistic concerns, but one of the interesting results of the project is that it may have provided incentive for some people to become more involved in their community, to boost their importance on the visualiztion! It was also interesting how what Paul called his “journalistic arrogance” led him to publish people’s information on the web much more freely than many of us in the nonprofit / activist space would be likely to do.
Sesssions
The first breakout session I went to was horrible. No names, to protect the guilty.
Sura Hart and Katie Winterbottom of Grassroots.org ran a helpful session on SEO. Props to them on running the presentation from Google Apps, on a KDE laptop. As for the content,
- it was helpful to see specifics about keyword research, and the tradeoffs between keyword popularity in searches and the existing presence for that term on the web
- will have to think harder about the working of intrasite hrefs
- hadn’t really thought about using the title attribute on tables, forms, etc.
- Google Grants sounds like an amazing opportunity.
Nate Aune of jazkarta had a ton of useful tool suggestions. He started with the constituent database, as that’s at the core of almost any successful organization. His recommendation is salesforce.com now that they’re giving their service away free to nonprofits. This is significant because it’s a best-of-breed solution, with a thriving ecosystem of parters enabled by its comprehensive API.
From there, Nate went on a whirwind tour of helpful tools. I’ll only note here the ones that I can see looking into in the future:
Online donations
- we already use paypal, but I’m not sure if we’re taking advantage of the fact that they give nonprofits a lower fee than for-profits. Also, all processing can be done via their API - no need to send folks to paypal.com’s ugly pages (which we do now…)
- fundable
- chipin
- for nonprofits, google checkout is totally free through next year. Interesting, I wonder what happens then?
Mass email
- campaign monitor - we’ve just been giving them a try, so it was nice to hear that jazkarta has good luck with them. However:
- VerticalResponse is also supposed to be excellent, and is integrated to salesforce.com
Misc.
- eventbrite sounds very handy for online ticketing
- phone.com’s integration of voice mail and email could be very handy
