NTEN NTC Presentation Online: An Open Civic Engagement Platform

This past week I had the chance to present, with Jon Stahl and Steve Andersen of One/Northwest, about the work we have done on integrating Plone and salesforce.com with a suite of tools to create an integrated communications platform. We featured the evolution software is making from large, limited flexibility systems to integrated, specialized systems. We also had a series of 4 demos on how to integrate your Plone-based website with salesforce.com. The demo-driven presentation concluded with reflection on the real world challenges of using these systems and some pointers on making it real. (if the presentation doesn’t appear below, click on the link to be taken to it on slideshare.net)

Here’s a comment from the twittersphere on our presentation:

ehrenfoss: “Very impressed with One Northwest & IfPeople – articulating some very deep lessons of consulting in NPTech space. #09NTC”

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New Nonprofit Tech Reports: Website, Social Media, Donor Software and more

The NTEN Nonprofit Tech Conference, held in San Francisco, Apr 26-28, was fertile ground for launching new reports for the sector. Here’s an overview of reports you should be aware of:

• Nonprofit use of social media: The Nonprofit Social Network Survey report compiles the experiences of ~!,000 organizations in social media. The report shows that the sector’s uptake of these tools is growing quickly and receiving real resources, though it is a new process and relatively little revenue is being generated this way.Get report here.
• Nonprofit websites: The 2009 NonProfit Website Study: Building Donations and Loyalty Through the Web Channel was the first study of constituent satisfaction with nonprofit websites by Foresee Results. According to the report, the nonprofit sector is lagging other industries in site visitor satisfaction. And that’s important because if you make your site visitor happy, it greatly increases their chances of donating, volunteering, returning, etc. The most important things to make them happy? Functionality and how your organization’s image are represented (we’ve got a fair bit of experience in handling both those at ifPeople – check out some case studies). Check out the report here.
• Donor management software: The folks at Idealware released yet another great report! This one, A Consumer’s Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Software,  is on affordable donor management systems (everything under $4k for the first year). They evaluated systems on 127 criteria and provide guidance on choosing systems for different types of organizations and helping you understand what these tools do. Get the report here and find the full analysis here.

I think there’s actually one, if not two, more reports (incluing one from a session I attended), but I’m still trying to match up paper notes with info I can link you to online. More soon…

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