(N.B.:  This article was originally published on 12/29/2004.)



1.  Very little technical knowledge is required in order for nonprofit CEOs to participate actively in strategic IT planning.

As long as you thoroughly understand your organization's overall mission, strategy, and tactics and (are willing to learn a little bit about the technology), you can keep your information technology infrastructure on target...
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I'm scheduled to have surgery on January 20th.

When I had surgery in 2009, I used eHope as an online tool to help me stay in touch with my community and ask for help.  It was an awe-inspiring experience,* although eHope was probably a much more powerful tool than I needed.  It was designed for long term care in very serious cases.  It was almost an anti-climax when my eHope crew found that they weren't called upon to perform any dramatic Florence Nightingale tasks; I didn't need any serious nursing, and I was working again (albeit from my sofa at home, wearing pajamas and slippers) within about a week. 

However, using eHope gave me a raft of new insights, about how online tools for coordinating care should really be all about building community on a face to face basis, and about how mission-based organizations could learn lessons about collaboration. 

This time, I'm going to try out two other online tools:


Basically, surgery is a bummer, and so is the slight possibility that the tumor that the surgeon will be removing is malignant.  However, it's pretty cool to turn this situation into an opportunity to experiment with social media tools that help communities and mission-based organizations support those who need assistance.  I'm constantly striving to learn more about matching needs and resources, and to bring the lessons learned to nonprofit and philanthropic organizations.



* Actually, the privilege of knowing Jeffrey Wood, the founder of eHope, is an awe-inspiring spiritual experience in itself.  If you ever have an opportunity to meet him, I strongly suggest that you go for it.

  


I love Helen Keller.  She was a tireless advocate for world peace, justice, and understanding.  She was all about the triumph of what is best in the human spirit.  Though deprived of sight and hearing at a young age, she lived in a broad world that was full of hope and human potential.

I was lucky enough to learn about her when I was a child, so I grew up knowing about the Perkins School for the Blind, the inspiring education institution that she attended.

Naturally, when the Perkins School brought me in as a consultant, I was excited!  And, indeed, it's an incredible privilege to spend time on campus.  It's so much more than the 19th century school that Helen Keller attended, though the 21st century version has a motto that she would have loved:  all we see is possibility.  What inspires me about its organizational culture is the unusual degree of dedication, creativity, and harmony among the employees.  Perhaps the quality of harmony is the most impressive, since our sector demonstrably abounds in dedication and creativity.  At the Perkins School, it's not that there's a lack of differing interests among the staff, but that all concerned understand that everyone is doing their best for the mission. 

And it's a great mission, one that involves operations that are both complex and disparate.

My new (and highly affectionate) sobriquet for Perkins is The Educational-Industrial Complex.  They don't keep their activities secret, but very few members of the public seem to know about the amazing range of initiatives in progress at Perkins.  In fact, their web content management, email management, and constituent relationship management needs (which I am working to address on a strategic level) are shockingly complex, because all of these initiatives work in very different ways toward very broad goals.

Prepare to be astounded by a small sample of these activities:

So how would you weave together an infrastructure that meets the web, email, and constituent relationship management needs of such a complex organization? Can the various systems allow for data sharing or possibly even interoperabilty? As I strive to answer these questions, I  find myself asking What would Helen Keller do?  The human spirit must rise not only to the technical challenges (which are many) but to the challenge of promoting knowledge sharing, understanding, cooperation, and infinite possibility.

Thanks to the inspiration of my nptech colleague Joel Remigio, I am now experimenting with a Google Voice phone number!

Historically, I have disliked using phones, mostly because:


But Google Voice intrigues me, because it automatically transcribes the voice mail messages to text, and emails the transcripts to me. Maybe this will work!

However, this blog is not all about my personal dislikes; it's about how nonprofit and philanthropic organizations use information and communication technologies to achieve their missions.

So here are a few thoughts about why Google Voice might turn out to be useful to mission-based organizations:

As you can see, most of my enthusiasm focuses on the availability of easy, free delivery of transcriptions of voice mail.  Thus far, my impression is that the actual phone service is pretty standard. Most of us already understand the upside of a using a phone.  It's nice to be able to control the options (e.g., forwarding phone calls to the number of your choice) online from a computer or a smart phone, but I persist seeing the real power of this service in the transcription options.

If I find that the other features have strong potential to service nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, I will post further reports.

And now for the downside.  This means that we're living in Google's world.  Our crucial and sensitive information will reside on Google's servers.  Nonprofits that are bound by HIPAA regulations will need to exercise due diligence.  Moreover, if the U.S. government subpoenas our information, Google will probably hand it over. So let the buyer beware.  Speaking of buyers, that leads us to a second potential downside:  when we accept a free service, we are not getting a lot a leverage for demanding customer support.  The more crucial service is, the more vulnerable we are under the circumstances.

However, even with those complications, it's worth trying out Google Voice for every day use.

I hereby invite you to participate in my exploration of Google Voice by calling me at 1-617-958-1959.

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I'd like to offer a special hat tip to Michael Gilbert and the Gilbert Email Manifesto, by pointing out that once our voice mail messages are transcribed and converted to email, they become subject to this principle:  "Email messages are treated as To Do items....Email is always a call to action."

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The latest shiny new toy in social media is Google+.  I like it.  It's fun, it's interesting, it has relatively simple functionality, and it offers users a lot of control over who sees what they post.  It has many of the virtues of Twitter and Facebook, without the annoyances.

But let's get a grip, people. It's not an achievement on the order of world peace.  It's a new social media channel.

I think that Google+ has plenty of potential for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations that want to create and maintain relationships with their stakeholders.  But it's basically the same "Micromotives and Macrobehavior" situation that you get with any new channel of communication:  if a lot of key stakeholders go there, then it will be valuable, but it's not clear yet whether or how they'll be motivated to join Google+.

I'm pleased to report that this blog is now being aggregated by Nonprofit Tech, which means that I'm joining a pantheon that includes:


Oddly enough, I haven't been able to find an exhaustive list of blogs that are aggregated by Nonproft Tech. This seems to be a gap in the effort to deliver information to the readers of the aggregation site, but perhaps that will be filled soon.

At any rate, I'm please and honored to be in such good company.  I have long contended that the future of blogging lies not in single, freestanding blogs, but in well-designed aggregations.  If Aggregage, the folks behind NonprofitTech.Com, can provide this, more power to them!

I've devoted a lot of time this month to recording podcasts with some of my favorite colleagues, and the pilot segment has now been published to the web, thanks to my esteemed client, Community TechKnowledge.

The topic of the pilot segment is finding nonprofit technology job descriptions, and the guest expert is Dan Scharfman. The latter is vice president for information solutions at Baird Associates, and a man widely revered among his colleagues - not merely for speaking in complete sentences, but also for infusing his words with wisdom and usable technical information.

This podcast series is very precious to me, partly because it's a way to get paid for something I do all the time as a courtesy for nonprofit professionals who don't know where to find answers to obscure questions.  But the project is equally delightful because it gives me a chance to chat with some very wise colleagues and friends in the field of nptech, and to capture some of their insights in a way that will be useful to others.  In addition to Dan, these colleagues and friends include Tim Gassert of the Boston Foundation, Steve Backman of Database Designs Associates, Peter Campbell of EarthJustice, Marc Baizman of My Computer Guy, Jayne Cravens of Coyote Communications, Jay Leslie of Idealware, Gavin Murphy of Annkissam, Gavin Clabaugh of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Eric Segal of the Data Collaborative.  And that's just the pilot series!

In all of these pilot segments, we've looked to Juan Garcia Cid of Community TechKnowledge to be our producer, recording engineer, editor, and spiritual guide.  Our motto is "in Juan we trust," because the guest experts and I keep it very conversational, knowing that Juan will refine it down to something that is brief, informative, and seamless.

My hat is off to all of the aforementioned, and I hope that the listeners will find the podcast enjoyable and helpful.  Please take a moment to listen to the first podcast segment, and to leave some feedback in the form of comments on this blog.

If you've talked to me for even three minutes in the last month or more, then you already know how excited I've been by the Heart and Soul grant program that my esteemed client, Community TechKnowledge has spearheaded.

When the grants were announced, I received an extra thrill in learning that a nonprofit here in Massachusetts that I especially revere, the Prison Book Program, had won the Blogger's Choice Award with a poem by Jim Huber, who is currently incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.

I've always admired the Prison Book Program (PBP), because one of my notions of hell is being behind bars with nothing to read.  The volunteers of PBP collect books, and send them out at no charge to prison inmates throughout the country.  They work around all sorts of constraints and censorship codes, doing what they can, not only because education is one of the few factors that reduces recidivism, but because books provide an avenue of personal and spiritual development for prisoners.

Here's the poem by Jim Huber that PCP submitted to the Heart and Soul grant program:





I shed a tear myself, reading this, because I could so easily visualize what life in prison without books would mean. 

Apparently, this poem also moved Howard Lake of UK Fundraising.  The latter is one of the bloggers who published an article about CTK Foundation's Heart and Soul grant program, and therefore his name went into the hat with the names of all the other bloggers.  He was randomly selected from all those bloggers, and was therefore give the opportunity to select the recipient of the Heart and Soul Blogger's Choice Award.  Much to my delight, he chose PBP, and therefore the cash grant of $1,000 goes to them.

The other CTK Foundation Heart and Soul grant winners are:



Along with the cash grant of $10,000, Adoption Resources of Wisconsin also won a song by Bill Dillon, which has lyrics that are based on the poem that they submitted.

That CTK Foundation is now making plans to offer grants across an even wider international range, and will make an announcement about its "International Nonprofit Technology Initiative" on April 30th. 

I also hear that CTK is thinking of publishing a book of poems that were submitted during this grant cycle.  Imagine a volume of poetry written by the stakeholders of various nonprofit organizations about why their missions are meaningful! 

I'm looking for feedback about this.

Ever since I started the Nonprofit Tech Jobs list, I've wondered about how effective it is in matching technology professionals with nonprofit organizations that want to employ them.  Ten years and more than 4,000 job postings later, I thought that I might as well solicit some anecdotal evidence that someone is benefiting.  I also thought it would be interesting to hear about other channels through which ideal matches between techies and nonprofits were made.

I recently did an online shout-out soliciting success stories from members of the list, plus a couple of other nptech-oriented forums.  Results: one extremely gratifying success story about making a great career move through the Nonprofit Tech Jobs list, and one Twitter message assuring me that the sender had a story but was unable to find the time to write it up.  

So I'm thinking - two success stories after ten years and over 4,000 job postings?  What's that about?

I've come up with two possible explanations:

1)  Very bad sampling methodology.  The techies who find their ideal jobs (and the hiring managers at nonprofits who find their ideal techies) don't stick around on the Nonprofit Tech Jobs list.  Moreover, perhaps they don't participate in general interest online communities about nonprofit technology, such as the Information Systems Forum.and NTEN's general discussion list.

2)  Very low success rate.  There just aren't that many success stories to report.

The first explanation seems likely and not terribly discouraging, except for people who are passionately interested in research methodology.  

The second explanation seems like a real bummer, especially when I consider how labor intensive it is to maintain the Nonprofit Tech Jobs list.

If the second explanation is valid, do you think I should shut down the Nonprofit Tech Jobs list? Please let me know what you think by posting a comment.

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I'm very grateful for all of the reflections that have been shared here as comments!  Thank you so much.

It seems that there are several people who are interested in assessing the effectiveness of the Nonprofit Tech Jobs list, or in reorganizing it so that the burden of maintaining it doesn't fall on one single volunteer.

I've started a Google Group for those who want to brainstorm about next steps.  It's called "Reorganizing the Nonprofit Tech Jobs Service."  (Or "Reorganizing NTJ" for short.) If you have something constructive to contribute to this effort, I invite you to join the group and participate.

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This is an insight that I keep coming up against in strategic technology planning with nonprofit and philanthropic organizations:  it's all about meeting people where they are.

It's why really brilliant user experience designers and reference librarians are my heroes.

It's why I have to show how and why a technology strategy works for the decision makers, the line staff, and the external stakeholders in an organization - rather than explaining why it appeals to me.

The importance of meeting people where they are is probably a good all-around lesson in life, and not just one that is confined to the profession of nonprofit technology. Sometimes I excel at manifesting this principle, and sometimes I don't.  I win some, I lose some, and I constantly strive to do better. 

I constantly labor to understand other people's feelings, world views, experiences, needs, wishes, and motivations - because my goal is to foster positive change.  If I can do the latter, without being a bully or a manipulator, I count it as a success.

The reason that I'm reflecting on this goal in this way today is that I just finished reading "Switch:  How to change things when change is hard," a book by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  The latter was a keynote speaker at the recent Nonprofit Technology Conference, and all of us received a free copy of the book as part of the swag that we collected for showing up.

"Switch" is a pretty good book, full of practical advice for change makers.  This is an unusual concession on my part; on the whole, I'm allergic to books that tout the latest management wisdom.  Such books are usually extravaganzas of selection bias, chock full  of anecdotes that are meant to show that the people using strategies endorsed by the authors tend to succeed, and that everyone else is sort of obtuse and bound to fail.  When I read anecdotes in management books (or as the really "classy" ones call them, "case studies") I can't help thinking about old jokes about would-be sharpshooters who fire at the side of a barn, and then run up and draw bulls eyes around the bullet holes.

I can't say for sure whether the anecdotes in "Switch" amount to evidence that their theories are valid, but I certainly do appreciate the way they've articulated the importance of meeting people where they are, and then outlined some powerful strategies for going out and doing it.

It makes a lot of sense to understand the human approach to change as a rider on a elephant going down a path.  The rider is the head, relatively weak but forward thinking.  The elephant is the heart, far more powerful than the head but mostly oblivious to consequences.  The path is the situation, the context.  Unless we get the rider and the elephant pointed to the path, and ensure that the path is as smooth as possible, change is going to be difficult.

To me, Chip Heath and Dan Heath's insights, systematized and explained in terms of action steps, seem much more powerful than simply reminding myself that my task is to meet people where they are, and for that I'm extremely grateful.