I’ve been using WordPress now since the inception of this blog and used it for several other blogs as well. I haven’t been recommending WordPress mainly because it has needed a lot of care and loving from an administrator. No longer. WordPress can now update itself with the click of a button by its administrator. This totally changes the game and gets us closer to a Web publishing model that more or less removes the need for a techie on a daily or weekly basis.

If you’re a nonprofit that has less than 5 people on their Web team, I suggest you consider WordPress 2.7. It has an all-new administrator UI to boot. There are so many things you can do with WordPress it would be a shame not to use it.

Here’s a quick list:

• Killer SEO strategy with All-in-One SEO plugin. I was brought in to help with asianamericansforobama.com and they had a lousy pagerank (big fat zero) being hosted on Typepad. I told all the posters to start filling in the necessary SEO fields on All-in-One SEO and to start adding tags. Their pagerank now is (5/10).  Traffic hit nearly 40,000 viewers in November and holding steady at around 20k viewers this month. You can check out our stats at Quantcast.
• Easy to add Google ads. It’s as easy as pie to add Google ads. This means you can get a decent job of monetizing your traffic when you’ve got a little bit of traffic going.
• Remarkably easy to train people how to post. The only major problem is when people try to cut and paste Word documents into WordPress but you’ll see this problem from everyone who is a Word user. They just have to be taught to use the special Word to WordPress button on the WordPress editor to remove the extra HTML fluff that Word adds.
• Tons of WordPress themes out there and I mean a TON. You can pay or not pay. You can go halfsies on the customization and pick an existing theme and alter it.
• Support for all the latest standards. If you pick the right theme, it can be all tricked out with SEO goodness as well as with the latest semantic Web standards.
• Runs in PHP and is easy to code. If anything, WordPress is still kind of the Wild West in the way it’s programmed. It’s not particularly object-oriented in its thinking so it can lend itself to spaghetti code. On the other hand, even programming novices can kick ass in WordPress.
• You can create pages instead of posts. Pages are how you make a WordPress site look like any other site. A page is basically a post that shows up on your menu and never is subject to being shown in chronological order on the front page of your site.
• Long, long lists of plugins that work with everything. WordPress is pretty much the standard for first-cut attempts at a plugin with whatever new standard comes along. Those of you trying to integrate fundraising with a WordPress plugin will find it ridiculously easy to find a plugin that works with your payment processor and your e-mail list software.

Totally excited, now? You can download WordPress for free at http://wordpress.org/download/. Be aware that you should probably have an ISP. I heartily recommend Nexcess.net. I use them for this blog and for asianamericansforobama.com. For most small orgs, the mini-me package is great. However, asianamericansforobama.com is running the Gettin’ Hits service plan and running over 35 GB a month. I assume that if your nonprofit is getting that much traffic that you’ll be more than happy to pay .

Does SalesForce work for nonprofits? According to my highly sophisticated survey… yes.

The data:

• Now you might suggest that nonprofits who had tried SalesForce and hated it might not come to a SF conference in the first place. And further, that the 80 or so of the 350 at the conference that came the breakout session on the AppExchange (which is the marketplace for SF plug-ins) might be the geekier subset and therefore susceptable to acts of impulsive optimism, but:
  • 80% of the people in the room indicated that “YES, mine works!”.
  • 90% of people that had used an AppExchange module said “YES, it works!”
• Those are high numbers. People like this stuff: it is stable and scalable, and developing solutions something often measured in weeks (not years, sometimes months).
  • 
    Take Bob Bennett, for instance. The Family Service Agency of San Francisco describes itself as the safety net of the safety net, working with the homeless and mentally ill – a tough job.  But they built a case management system for its clients and have deployed it to 125 of their staff, and are looking to expand it to another 125. If you have ever worked in human services and attempted case management, you will recognize this as an achievement.
  • SalesForce acknowledged Bob and his team with an Appy award for innovation.
• Some other numbers: Of nonprofits visiting the AppExchange web site, something like 10,000 have given a “test drive” to a custom module. Of those, 6,000 have installed special features to their “sandbox” (a copy of your account SF gives you to play around in). Of those, 1,600 lead to deployments within the nonprofit’s live database. That is a lot.

I have been watching and waiting on SF for six years. In my book, it has finally crossed the tipping point between skepticism about its relevance to our space, and confidence that it can deliver.

Doug

A few little dishes for the weekend:

As of yesterday, Google is offering nonprofits Google Apps Education Edition for free. This turns the world upside down for nonprofit system administrators. I’ve changed the Leaderboard to reflect my new recommendation for enterprise e-mail services for small nonprofits. Yup, Gmail for Domains is the ultimate Exchange killer for nonprofits. Microsoft can’t keep its hold on enterprise e-mail forever and Gmail is going to loosen that grip. I use it, I live by it, I swear by it, it’s time to migrate. And speaking of migration, check out Ltech Consulting. They’re hoping to help you with that migration.

What’s the ROI for larger orgs with lots of e-mail? Add the cost of the Exchange server plus file backups plus the cost of administration (licenses and administrator time) and your anti-spam software (and the cost of administering that!). If that cost over three years is greater than the Ltech Consulting migration plus some extra bandwidth to handle the possible load of getting your e-mail over the Web, I would seriously consider it. Frankly, the cost of extra bandwidth is always dropping. Of course, those of you heavily involved in using all the little gewgaws of Office (public folders, shared calendars and the like) may want to do some extra review but after having had to use Outlook for years, I have to say I greatly prefer Gmail in terms of user experience and accessibility. Believe it or not, it’s easier to make it sync with Windows Mobile devices in some respects but it doesn’t have the cool direct push capability of Exchange but that’s not a real showstopper in my book.

I have a suspicion that NTEN had something do with this as the announcement was made during the NTEN mixer at Google. If NTEN even had a tiny role to play, I still have to give a lot of credit to NTEN for pulling it off. Kudos to Katrin and Holly!

Kintera picked up 28 votes on 7/13 in the CRM poll. That’s a huge number for one day. Someone really tried to spam the poll — 85 visits in one day??? Add that to Kintera’s stock growth in the last month (something like 30%) and the constant chatter on Yahoo! Finance about KNTA and I can’t tell whether it’s enthusiasm or cynical manipulation (or both).

Also, we hit 4,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days. Thanks to all the people who’ve always been around and welcome to all the new visitors too! This week has been the most heavily trafficked so far for the Non-Profit Tech Blog. Yay!

Oops! One last thing — I’m going to be in Boston next Tuesday. If you’re around, e-mail me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org. I love to meet readers (all 4,000 of you!)

I’m not picking any Web 2.0 technologies yet for this stack. However, this software stack should allow a nonprofit to have a powerful presence on the Web. Like any leaderboard, the recommendations will change over time.