Joe’s Amazing Technicolor Weblog

We already had a serviceable in-house email server, so why change? In no particular order,

• Cost savings. We’d been spending $1k+ annually on postini’s spam protection service alone, which Google Apps conveniently bundles in for free. Also a maintenance contract on the email software, depreciation on the server, electricity
• One less server to manage
• Far superior webmail and group calendaring to what we’ve been using

When first thinking about doing this conversion I talked to a bunch of people whose organizations were already using google apps. Nobody really had any complaints. Given the upside, I certainly don’t feel like I’m in a position to complain, either, but I thought it’d be worth mentioning a few issues I encountered:

• I applied July 22nd for nonprofit status, and heard back (in the affirmative) on August 5th. Fortunately, it’s entirely possible to switch over with just a standard account, but I wish I’d applied earlier and not had to worry about whether or not that was going to go through.
• While it’s nice that there’s an open source LDAP solution for syncing user accounts, it has had some issues and even when working it only handles people’s names, email addresses, and passwords. At the time I was working with it, the best bet was to use the latest tarball, into whose directory I had to copy the above-mentioned file. Even after that, I continued to have enough trouble to abandon ship — was quicker to do the work by hand than to fix the bugs.
  In case anyone’s also trying to hook this tool up with Apple’s Open Directory, I had some initial luck with the following:
  Command: set ldap_url LDAP://servername.example.org
Command: set ldap_base_dn dc=servername,dc=example,dc=org
Command: set ldap_user_filter (objectclass=apple-group)
  though it doesn’t look like anyone’s worked through the mapping from Apple’s schema.
  Beyond just working stably, it would be great if group membership could be used to configure mail lists — I see that’s listed under possible improvements (bottom of page). I’ll try to take a look at that some day & see how feasible it would be to work it in.
• Transferring old emails is a pain if you’re not on a mainstream email server (raise your hand if you’ve heard of Stalker Software’s Communigate Pro). We’re doing it by setting both the old and new servers up in the same email client & copying messages over through it, but then we lose the date emails were sent / received.
• I couldn’t find any way to turn on IMAP access across the board, so I did a lot of logging in & setting people’s account preferences. This wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t for the old email transferring issue mentioned above.
• While it’s possible to create an email list containing all addresses in the domain, only admins can send mail to it; to get an all-staff list, I had to actually type everybody’s address in. More motivation to work on the LDAP group-to-list mapping mentioned above.

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

On my agenda this weekend is the ‘08 edition of the Grassroots Use of Technology conference, happening up in Lowell. I was a volunteer at the conference back in ‘04 and ‘05, but I’ve been out of town for the last couple.

This year I’ll be wearing my IT Manager hat & looking to pick people’s brains particularly about mass emailing, online donations, and fundraisining tools.