Drupal is very good at building complex websites that can vault a nonprofit past brochureware or a blog and into the position of being #1 on your subject matter. I’m sure Joomla can do the same but there are certain Drupal practices and modules that can fundamentally alter the balance of power between your nonprofit and the competition. If your nonprofit is interested in being the biggest and baddest Website on the block and in winning your vertical, I’m pretty convinced that Drupal is the technology that can take you there. Don’t get me wrong, I still love WordPress for smaller nonprofits but once your nonprofit has started to do multi-user blogging or if your nonprofit is very aggressive in the online space, you can’t really take WordPress in that direction. However, there are caveats. You WILL need dedicated staff or retain consultants to maintain the Drupal beast. It’s not cheap.

It’s important to note here that I support the use of Acquia Drupal instead of the regular Drupal distribution that you normally find. Acquia is the company that is dedicated full-time to Drupal development in much the same way Automattic supports WordPress development. They have created a customized distribution of Drupal called Acquia Drupal that bolsters Drupal’s ability to become a community website.

Here is a quick comparison of the feature sets between WordPress and Drupal that you should be aware of.

Ok, here’s some typical information architecture nomenclature that you’ll need to learn in order to discuss these strategies with a Web designer. Note: if your consultancy’s designer doesn’t know what you’re talking about, ask to see an information architect. If they don’t have one, they’re probably not right for your nonprofit redesign.

The river

The river is that stream of posts that you normally see in blogs. You can see this in effect on this blog with the blog entries listed by date from newest to oldest.

The (endless) queue

This is derived from a Drupal module called “nodequeue”. It basically allows you to order articles at will in whatever order your editors so desire. You won’t need a user to go in and manually hack out some HTML to make headlines for all the other blog entries on your site. In other words, it’s a human-powered headline builder for your website.

The teaser

This is the first few lines of the article used by Drupal and by WordPress to entice users to click on a link to that article.

The teaser thumbnail

This is the picture that accompanies the teaser. I also use teaser thumbnail videos but that’s a much more advanced tactic that I’ll discuss in another article.

Your Strategies

Nonprofit strategies mentioned in Part I that fall underneath the purview of a Drupal installation include (listed in the order that it would be encountered by the average reader):

• Magazine-style layouts
• News aggregation
• Editorial filtering function
• Blogging community

Key modules we will be discussing will be blog, imagecache, nodequeue, Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views. These modules constitute the core of any good Drupal community site as together they allow for a nearly infinite level of layout customization. CCK and Views are a profoundly powerful aspect of Drupal but they require a high level of technical knowledge to use properly. CCK allows you to create customized blog entries in which certain fields are used to specifically fill in portions of a magazine layout like the teaser thumbnail Views are a way in Drupal to customize the ordering and layout of specific pieces of content on your Web site. Those of you who have used report builders in Raiser’s Edge or Crystal Reports will be surprised that there is now the same capability in a CMS. Learn more about Views here. For those of you in Joomla world, CCK and Views don’t have any equivalents although there is something in beta that is rolling out.

Magazine-style layouts

Magazine-style layouts in Drupal are basically concerned with the layout of content comprised of a teaser, a teaser thumbnail, meta information like the name of the author and date, and the article itself. Let’s take a quick look at a typical “design pattern” for the headlines section of a web newsite.

Typical News Headline Design

It’s almost impossible to build this into a WordPress design consistently because WordPress has no built-in facility to automatically resize and crop images to fit into a specific size. WordPress is wonderful at one-blog-entry-at-a-time posting. However, a magazine style layout will require the ability to reformat and resize content into an existing template. WordPress doesn’t have that capability. By using CCK, Drupal allows developers to customize blog entries that a user fills out which can then be reformatted to fit an existing template. In essence, you can make a magazine lay-out composed of blog entries. In fact, the APAP web site is a perfect example of this, you’ll notice that an image is repurposed as a teaser thumbnail and as the lead image on many of the articles there. That’s only possible because of the imagecache module which allows for the dynamic resizing of your pictures depending on its position in a page. When you combine this all with Views, you have the groundwork for an automated news magazine website built entirely by your user community.

News aggregation

Your nonprofit will have to create personal blogging environments for its staff. This is where social media is remarkably useful and I wholly endorse THIS kind of use. Basically, you open up a Twitter account and start following other Twitterers who are in the same policy area as your nonprofit. You can also set up RSS feeds to do the same thing. Between Google Reader and Tweetdeck (I use Twhirl), you can have a fairly robust set of news items flowing into your desktop in real-time. Your editors can then pluck the necessary items from their feeds and write about it on the site. APAP has gotten a lot of hits using this process and has eventually gotten good search engine results page (SERP) rankings over time. This is crucial to building up your PageRank. When I started working with APAP, it was at three and now it’s at five. It’s moving up in the world. Also, it’s old Website Grader score was in the low 30s. It’s now at 95.5 indicating that we’re pushing up at the top of what’s available in terms of SEO but I still have a few tricks left up my sleeve to push that up higher.

Editorial filtering function

This strategy requires nonprofits to get their head wrapped around using their expert domain knowledge to filter out news items for their users. Once nonprofit management understands this, you need to implement this in Drupal. Here is the design pattern you should follow for this strategy.

Aggregate Your Headlines With a Nodequeue

What you are doing with an editorial filtering function is two things: your nonprofit is telling your users what it thinks is incredibly important to read with one big headline and your nonprofit  is shaping content based on site traffic using your queue.  Basically, your editors can see what is getting read by users in real-time and then adjust the queue accordingly. This is how the “Top Five” section gets reordered every day by editors on the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress site. If a post is in the river and starts getting traffic, we push it up to the Top Five to accelerate that process. The three modules you need for this is nodequeue, Views and imagecache.  The nodequeue module should be installed so that your editors can reorder the queue to suit their taste but the Views module is how you present the queue to your users. Imagecache is useful to dynamically resize your pics to fit the different layout options you can give yourself.

Can you do this in WordPress? Oddly, before I even heard about what nodequeue and Views could do, I actually had a crude node queue running at asianamericansforobama.com. With the help of another techie volunteer, we wrote a nodequeue-like piece of code that reordered the WordPress loop so that it would highlight the ten headlines with different colors and points sizes. This is why you see the large Huffington Post-style headlines over at that site. It wasn’t an easy kludge either and was prone to a problem wherein users would add too many posts to the queue. I very much prefer nodequeue over our WordPress hack.

Blogging community

Multi-user blogging capabilites  are available out of the box with Acquia Drupal and it’s fairly easy to simply turn on the blog module. This blog module is so attuned to a multi-user blog format that it has to be differently configured for single-user blogging. There’s even room to support distinct RSS feeds for every blog generated by every user. While Drupal can be extremely maddening at times, this is one of the things it gets incredibly and totally right.

In the end, your blogging workflow should look something like this:

Information Workflow

Basically, information from the outside world gets sliced and diced by your staff, which in turn, gets turned into user-generated content by your community.

Your Mission Should You Choose to Accept It

I don’t think you should go out and set up a Drupal site tomorrow. In fact, if you already have a Joomla site, there’s a good chance you can do this as well. What I do think is that nonprofit managers and techies should  work together to iron out these sorts of information architecture issues. Simply by improving the ability of the user to focus on important headlines, APAP generated a 10.73% increase in time on site while simultaneously seeing a 19.62% increase in absolute unique visitors during the month immediately after these changes were rolled out. To grow in site traffic yet improving the length of  each reader’s engagement with a web site is pretty hard to do. Generally speaking, any growth in site traffic tends to mean a decrease in average time on site. However, we were able to forestall that from occurring with the new information architecture redesign.

Chart of APA for Progress site traffic

What we have above is a chart detailing the last six months of traffic for APA for Progress. In return for my volunteer work with them, I asked that I be able to blog freely about the site’s growth and how I did it on basically a very, very tiny budget.

Be aware that the time period in the chart above begins the day before Obama’s inauguration so there is no bump from the political campaigning of last year. Also, the group had a very low number of new blog entries on it and was unable to get a bump from the campaign. Site traffic has grown from 91 visits a week to an all-time high of 2,356 about two weeks ago. The site is probably going to undergo a summer slump as many students will be on vacation but I expect the traffic to grow again during the fall. At the time I found them, APAP had suffered the loss of a previous Drupal site and was temporarily on a WordPress site as a stopgap measure. In other words, they were simply like many other tiny nonprofits in terms of the transitory nature of their IT assets.

First, let’s list APA for Progress’s online and offline assets:

• Email list of around 3000 people
• Facebook group of 1000 people
• APAP’s Volunteer Executive Director does offline organizing with college campuses showing a film about Vincent Chin
• Extensive contacts with Asian American political figures and the Democratic party
• Overcrowded WordPress blog (way way too many widgets)

With little money and no traffic, APAP had to figure out how to maximize their current assets. I ran into them as a way to work off my Obama addiction. I decided that they would make a great lab for many ideas swirling around in my head as to how nonprofits should carry out their advocacy campaigns on the Web.

Over time, I’ve had to seriously rethink the role that nonprofits can play on the Web. Most of the time, nonprofits like to use Web sites to promote their mission and monetize their traffic. It’s basically a 20th century industrial model akin to radio and TV. The nonprofit broadcasts and the donor listens. The problem with this model is that it’s a guaranteed way of falling straight into the black hole of mediocre web design and low site traffic. There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few years given to email marketing and social media but primarily email and social media end up being used in the same way: to broadcast a nonprofit’s news and events. Just because your site has some moderate interactivity given you by an email vendor or your CRM, it’s not going to fundamentally change the nature of your site.

And unfortunately, much is made of social media’s ability to break up this model to the detriment of what I believe should be the cornerstone of a nonprofit’s online strategy: the Web site.  Social media (in this case, Facebook and Twitter) simply cannot carry the burden of the work. It cannot generate traffic on a consistent basis and relies all too often on the most mercurial of personal relationships. If your nonprofit has little penetration with the right digital media rockstars, it’s difficult to get your message out there. This is not to say that your nonprofit should NOT have a social media inititative. If your constitutencies include young people, you should definitely have a Facebook fan page or Facebook group for your organization. You CAN use Facebook to drive traffic to your site but mostly for increasing traffic to your already popular blog entries.

What APAP needed was a surefire way of generating site traffic without hoping on hitting a social media jackpot and absent a compelling event that would organically drive interest in a nonprofit like APAP that dealt primarily with Asian American politics. It’s difficult to raise interest in politics regardless of your ethnicity if you’re not in an election cycle.

Because of this, I had to think about the assets that tiny nonprofits have. All small nonprofits are mostly made up of a collection of people interested in working on a particular issue. Their main assets are their fundraising and community relationships. This means that you have to grow and nurture those relationships into an online design. I’ve got a couple of “theorems” about nonprofits as a result:

1. Nonprofits best serve as news aggregators due to their in-depth domain knowledge and consistent advocacy of particular public policy positions
2. They don’t have the ability to produce news content on their own easily and should use volunteers to help them out

These two observations have a strong impact on the way I believe nonprofits should create their sites in the future.  It suggests that nonprofits can use their staff to create a strong editorial “filter” on news items happening in their geographic catchbasin. It also suggests that they should use their existing community of volunteers to build out content that more closely matches their advocacy positions.

These observations simply hung in the air until I started thinking further about taking these observations and turning them into an operational plan that could be implemented into APAP’s website. After working on this blog for two years, I had learned a lot about SEO and was intrigued by the success of sites like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. I thought to myself: what can be gleaned from those sites and be applied to nonprofits? Here are my simple recommendations that I think nonprofit websites should adopt from news sites.

1. Big headlines get clicks
   There’s no doubt that Huffington Post does an amazing job of organizing the front page of its site to cue readers as to the most important thing that they should click on.  This type of headline design originated from  drudgereport.com. In fact, I consider this to be Matt Drudge’s singular insight on website information architecture.
2. Pictures next to headlines get more clicks
   You’d think this was pretty obvious but it’s not. However, most commercial news site have adopted this as a standard. Great examples are Yahoo! News and MSNBC.
3. Big pictures next to big headlines get even more clicks
   If you need more data on this, I can give it to you but this is pretty much common sense if you accept the first two ideas.
4. Give people an anchor to look at — i.e. headlines with pictures
   This means putting all the big headlines and pictures into one area in a prominent portion of your Web site – just like the Huffington Post. You’re making it SUPER easy for the user to understand what he or she needs to click on. No more random clicking from users looking for the good stuff.
5. Aggregate the news for your nonprofit vertical
   Use the strong editorial filter function that is inherent in your nonprofit to rearrange the day’s news in terms of how it affects your constituency or policy goal. Act like your nonprofit cares about the world’s current events.
6. The order of presentation for your news is YOUR value added
   What makes your editorial filter stronger is the sense imparted to the reader that you are making it easy for them to imbibe your view of the world. This means you really mean it when your biggest 30 pixel high headline is really important.
7. Tag, tag, tag, and tag again
   Tags are one of the ways Google tries to understand your blog entries and pages on your site. Don’t forget this part. SEO is everything.
8. Magazine-style layout is the future of nonprofit web sites
   And ultimately, what you’re doing is creating a news magazine akin to Huffington Post. This is not the same as creating a newsletter. Newsletters aren’t done on an ad hoc basis like the front page of your website. They also don’t tend to aggregate news sources and are more about the internal operations of your nonprofit.
9. Timeliness is everything
   Like all news magazines, your website has to thrive on timeliness both for more referrals from Google search and for establishing a reputation as a competent and driven nonprofit directly immersed in the issues of the day.
10. Allow your users to blog on your site
    Yes, I know established nonprofits would fear this user-generated content the most. However, small nonprofits have very little access to paid staff and should consider this to be their secret weapon to establishing mindshare within their constituencies.  That is, when you’re broke, you should adopt user-generated content.

So ultimately, my earlier two theorems and these ten tips combined together into the current site design for APA for Progress. I understand that these strategies would create a fairly radical shift in the way nonprofits organize and distribute their communications. It’s a user-centered model built on serving users with content that doesn’t necessarily originate from the nonprofit. Indeed, most of the people creating the content are not staff.

This has tremendous ramifications for the way a nonprofit will organize itself on the web. With the informal and highly opinionated nature of most user-generated content, it’s probably a good idea to include a disclaimer saying that your organization doesn’t necessarily share the opinions of its bloggers. It also means the traditional role of a communications director moves less from creating press releases to more of a “business development” role asking other blogs and nonprofits in the same policy space to syndicate content from the site by either linking to it or republishing. It also means using your contacts to generate good “gets” — getting good guest bloggers or having important individuals participate in conference calls to your membership or in live video conferences. There are many different ways to use traditional PR means to get more traffic for your site.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a remarkably labor-intensive endeavor. Writing content and/or getting people to write for your site is time consuming. However, it IS free. And when you’ve got more time than money, this is a fairly clear way of getting your nonprofit out there. Oh, and how much did this project cost? Less than $600 for the Drupal redesign.

I attended IgniteNYC to try to understand the state of tech in NYC. What I found out instead was the state of art in NYC. Not the state of the art, but how artists are using technology for their projects. Many of the people here were discussing how their art interacted with technology. It’s 2009 and it seems that the use of Web 2.0 technology and data visualization techniques has become de rigeur for artists.

The use of imagery on the Internet, the manipulation and remixes inherent in such a febrile Web culture as well as the the art inherent in data itself were common threads through many of the discussions. We are talking about an obsession and DIY attitude with data, both its creation and reuse, as the very definition of what I call nerdism. As a long-standing member of the nerd class (i.e. you are reading the writings of a high school Computer Club president), it’s very satisfying to watch nerdism become the default intellectual stance for artists and hipsters. I predict that over time that successful nonprofits will also adopt nerdism as an intellectual stance too. Ultimately, we will have hip and cool nonprofits obsessing over their beautiful data visualizations and discussing their work in venues at IgniteNYC. Of course, it hasn’t happened yet but the day will come when some nonprofit 2.0 ED will present on the stage at an IgniteNYC and just royally geeks out over their cool heatmap overlay over metropolitan New York.

To find more links and other information about #ignitenyc, check out my live tweets during the event and everyone else who tweeted about it..

This is the second part of Build A Nonprofit’s Technology Assets From The Ground Up, Part 1 OF 2. In this post, I talk about the website tiers of the Maslovian hierarchy of nonprofit technology needs for the small nonprofit. Unfortunately, this article about a nonprofit website is so long that I’ve decided to expand the series to one long posting for each of the website, CRM and social media layers in the pyramid. And that’s why this series is now four parts long and not two. 

Website

Why do I make having a website more important than a CRM? You need Web traffic first to get people to even read about your wonderful mission and programs.  The amount you raise for your nonprofit online will be a function of how much traffic your website is receiving. If you have a significant offline presence OR you already have a legacy donations management program in place, then you can switch this layer out for the CRM. This is where your work at the lower levels of the pyramid will start to pay off. A great mission, competent staff and a rock-solid network will definitely put you in position to work on your website. Most nonprofit missions usually have an educational and policy advocacy component to them. Your progress towards this portion of your mission can be measured by using website traffic numbers. Your website is also the demarcation point where you turn your previous investment in IT resources into something approaching revenue generation.  Yes, that’s right, I’m urging nonprofits to make sure that their IT efforts can actually make money for them.

Driving traffic to your website and then monetizing it will take a lot of design and analytics work. Unfortunately, nonprofits seem to be more concerned with how their website looks as opposed to how it functions. I urge you to flip those two priorities around in your head. You are spending hard earned donation dollars on your website. You owe it to your donors and your fundraising staff to maximize performance from your website. Some small nonprofits do incredibly well on the Web, if you’re reading this post, this is probably not you.

Design

Design always seems so simple. It’s the most visually creative and can garner all sorts of feedback from the stakeholders in your website from program managers to fundraisers to your donors. Before you start, be aware that making and designing a web site for a re-launch is relatively easy. The number one thing for all your stakeholders to remember in Web design is: it’s not about you. Your favorite color may be blue and you may love the font Helvetica but that doesn’t mean those are design choices that should be imposed on your nonprofit’s website. 

I strongly recommend that you read this book called The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites (2nd Edition). You don’t have to go through the whole thing but you should definitely read the first few chapters of this book. The book is intended to help you understand how websites are supposed to be designed and implemented from a design and usability point of view. Good design is key and you should certainly shoot for  the strong graphical quality of the websites listed here despite what I have to say about them.  Being a good looking website has all sorts of benefits to it like getting people to buy into your mission and then having them trust your donate button (if they get around to that).

Be aware though that design is only the beginning of this process. Frankly, it will merely start off your website but it will not be the thing you’ll be doing on a daily basis with your website. That’s what analytics is all about.

Analytics

Analytics is the art and science of looking at website traffic data and then implementing changes to your website in order to improve that website traffic. If you do it right, it will improve the articles you write for your website, the textual ads you place on other websites as well as how you serve your community on the web.

I suggest that you start with this book: Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. Both myself and Beth Kanter took a look at this book and found that it was extremely useful in understanding web traffic. I was already pretty into web analytics before the book and it served to validate techniques I was already using. Learning from this book will give you a huge leg up on improving your website traffic.

Many of the lessons I’ve learned on making a nonprofit website has been from my experiences managing nonprofit websites. To that end, if you want to see what I mean by managing traffic, please check out the traffic statistics for these three websites I’m currently managing for fun: asianamericansforobama.com and apaforprogress.org. and even this blog.

Analytics should take up several hours a week at first when your website is launched/relaunch. It’s akin to a video game where your Web analytics tools will give you daily feeback about your site’s design and content. Every new piece of content gives you yet another chance to connect to your Web audience and to rejigger the way you approach your mission. It’s like a grand experiment that takes place day after day. Unleash the mad scientist in you.

UPDATE: This is now a four-part series instead of two. The next installment will appear on 2/18/2009.

Hat tip to Sonny Cloward for suggesting that nonprofits should have a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when it came to implementing nonprofit technology. It was in response to Tweets I made last month stating that social media has been oversold to nonprofits and that they really needed to concentrate on their Web site first.  I’m going to circle back to my thinking on social media in the second part of this article.  However, it’s high time that a Maslovian hierarchy of nonprofit technology is written for  someone who is looking to improve their small (under $5 million in revenue) nonprofit.

Think of this as a hierarchy of things your nonprofit should probably have in place before you can get to doing social media. There’s no doubt that each level represents a moving part that may require a nonprofit’s focus from time to time. That’s the nature of how nonprofits work. However, for the small nonprofit still spinning up their operations, it’s best to approach this pyramid from the bottom up as you really cannot move towards social media without everything else working. 

Mission

You know your mission statement? Remember that ratty old thing written on your first grant application but then promptly forgotten after it was submitted? You really need to have that pasted next to your monitor when you do your IT initiatives. It will allow you and your staff to ask:   “Are my efforts helping the mission? And by how much?” A focus on metrics-driven management is essential for getting your nonprofit’s technology to work right. Basically, if you have a great mission statement and follow through with measuring your progress towards it,  it should reduce the need to keep re-aligning your IT assets to your nonprofit.

This means you have to have goals and metrics in place. If you find it difficult to have a goal in place, at the very least start to measure your results somehow. Frankly, a good mission statement that has realizable and measurable goals is probably more important than every other layer in this pyramid. Not picking a goal will just have your nonprofit steering aimlessly through the sometimes murky waters of technology. You may not even know how unrealistic your goal is until you start getting feedback about your efforts. However, that’s OK. Failure IS an option. Steering blindly? Not so much.

People

Nothing works without people. This means hiring savvy computer using staff and getting people on your board who know things about technology. Be aware that “computer people” come in all different stripes and it may be difficult to judge a person’s value from the outset. Generally speaking, I just look at previous projects they worked on. That seems to be the best predictor for understanding whether a person will work towards your mission statement and be a good fit with your nonprofit’s culture. 

Your very first IT hire will be by necessity a jack of all trades. Unfortunately, “jack of all trades” is NOT a job title in the IT field. I suggest that the most bang for your buck will be hiring someone whose main expertise is programming. Programming requires some computer science background and you can be somewhat assured that that person can adequately morph their knowledge base to whatever IT task is at hand. That is, it’s harder for a network admin to become a good programmer than vice versa. Don’t get me wrong — I respect network admins a lot but when discussing a $5 million nonprofit, many of the issues will not be whether or not some huge router needs to be configured but whether or not the website is up and running and fully configured to take advantage of whatever fundraising and ecommerce APIs are out there. That’s right, making money for a nonprofit is mostly a programmer’s job, NOT a system administrator’s. A good programmer will, almost by default, be able to help you with online fundraising because they will understand how your fundraising program can work and customize reports for your development staff. A system administrator will not be able to do that without a lot of ad-hoc learning.

By the way, for all you techies out there, I predict nonprofit data centers will shrink in size as more cloud computing initiatives and SaaS software get built. This means that nonprofits will hire less system administrators and more programmers in an attempt to make IT less of a cost center and more of a revenue generator.

Beware: Many people pass themselves off as technical but are actually people who have managed technical people or only worked with technical people. Look through their resumes and see if they ever held a front-line position as a programmer or a database administrator. If they’ve moved up, that’s even better (proof they’re not totally socially incompetent) but make sure they’ve done front-line work.

If you’re a small nonprofit, managerial types or “analysts” are NOT going to help you as much as having people who can actually program software or administer a network. Higher-level management may be useful later if you have or plan to have substantial IT programs and assets but if you’re small and your nonprofit doesn’t have a specific IT component to its mission, it’s better to have people who actually can do the work since you won’t have the money to carry out the highfalutin’ concepts of your IT “manager”. 

Network

Please see my article on building networks for small nonprofits. Basically, make sure you build an IT network that takes advantage of very low desktop and laptop prices, good support contracts, and redundant Internet connections. A lightweight network will give you more flexibility in the long run as no one (definitely not me) can really predict what will come down the pike. Don’t build something that paints you into a corner in terms of technology. This generally means using stuff that works on a well-known industry standard. It also means not heavily relying on any one vendor to take care of you.

Diversify your IT investments whenever possible. Keep trying out new vendors until you find ones that have the service levels and skill sets that you need. At least in NYC, there are some incredibly good consultants and firms out there but you’ll never know if you don’t seek to improve the service levels you get from your current vendors.

This network will form the basis of all your IT efforts afterwards. Unlike your Web site, CRM or social media efforts, this is where you’ll have to be the most effective with your dollars. Network uptime, security and backups are absolutely key in this part of the pyramid. The network, because of all the documents and other media in it, represents the sum total of the intellectual property of your nonprofit. It’s the vault that contains all your work. Treat it as such.

I’ll post the second part of this article fairly soon. I still have to get my thoughts together on social media but suffice it to say, ROI and metrics will be considered when discussing social media.

I’ve been lucky enough to meet millennials who are working in nonprofits in the last month and I’d like to highlight them here.

• Jonathon Lunardi from Charity for Debt
• Cristina Moon from 8-8-08 For Burma
• Karina Qian from TechY (so new that they don’t have a web site)

Jonathon Lunardi’s startup nonprofit is based on getting students into paid volunteer positions at local charities and using those positions to help pay for the loans incurred while getting a college education. What’s really fascinating is that he’s adept with PHP and also coded the org’s website. This seems to be typical of millennials in that they reach for digital tools at the same time they’re starting up their organizations. Traditionally, to start a 501c3, you’d form a board, have a few constituents in your neighborhood form around you and and start fundraising. These days, a website and an organizational e-mail address is the real de facto beginning of a nonprofit.

Cristina Moon’s 8-8-08 For Burma is an organization formed on Burmese advocacy using the startup to the Olympics as part of the campaign. The Web site just came up a week or so ago. It’s actually WordPress (designed by Matthew from theCoup) that powers the site which is perfect for very small nonprofits.

Karina Qian hasn’t even finished college yet and she’s already trying to match up nonprofits in Southeast Asia and the Middle East with technologists. She’s already been to Netsquared. Has your Executive Director been there yet? And her organization is mostly Facebook-based.

I find it fascinating that these millennials have such facility with social media. I’m a Gen X-er myself and I find myself surrounded by ignorant over 30 types whose primary modes of communication are still e-mail and not IM or Twitter. I’m still told that Facebook is for kids (sigh).

For these three, blogs and IM are as natural to them as writing a grant. There’s been much made about the loss of executive leadership that is going to come in the next decade. For one, I don’t think that’s a terrible thing and given the new crop of Executive Directors coming into the sector, we’ll at least not have to explain IT basics to these folks. Imagine yourself as an IT director years from now, and you won’t have to worry about explaining the loss of control due to a “comments” section on a blog, indeed you won’t have to explain what a blog is. Your primary worry years from now when these folks come into their own in the sector will probably in redefining what an IT director will be. If you don’t have enough hardcore skills now, it will be harder to differentiate your services versus what the average nonprofit manager will have in a few years. Learn to code, learn to innovate, learn to align IT resources with the mission — your nonprofit manager counterparts are catching up!

NTEN scooped us all with the news that nonprofits are now eligible to use Google Checkout for free (no gateway, processing or monthly fees) until the end of this year2008. And for the low, low rate of 2% and $0.20 per transaction after that! But wait, there’s more. The annoying problem with Google Checkout for nonprofit usage was that it forced donors to go through a shipping screen. They’ve fixed that problem.

If you’re a developer and you’re looking for the API, click here. It’s yet another huge development in the nonprofit space. Kudos again to NTEN for doing it this for us! I may be critical of their web site statistics stance but I’m a loyal member for precisely this sort of reason.

Amongst 7,000 of my closest friends, here I sit at the opening of DreamForce 2007, the SalesForce.com extravaganza being held this week in San Francisco, (see http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce). My quest: to figure out if this marvel of SAAS (software as a service) can live up to Allan’s devotion as a key element in his stack. (http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/more-about-my-stack-of-stacks). I always thought a stack was something best served with maple syrup, but anyway…

I will be interviewing customers with the singular question: Can you say mine works?, and if yes, or even sort of yes, what is it doing for you?

Something that we should all take to the bank: when SalesForce talks to the plenary, and when they talk to the special sessions devoted to the press and analysts, one-third of their success stories come from the nonprofit sector. When CEO Marc Benioff gave his keynote, the fourth point he made was to stress their corporate commitment to the 1/1/1 idea. (see http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/). They are serious about their commitment to philanthropy.

I am off to rub elbows with people to find out if their’s works.
Doug Yeager

[ED: Yes, folks, Doug Yeager is Non-Profit Tech Blog's first guest blogger!!! If you want to guest blog for me, send me e-mail at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org.]

I know I know — I haven’t posted recently. However, it’s because I’ve been putting more and more effort into my startup at socialmarkets.org. You probably have seen Deborah Elizabeth Finn’s posts regarding our efforts. Anyway, I’d really love for people to comment on our manifesto over at socialmarkets.org. I want to know what you think about the idea of a social capital marketplace for the nonprofit sector. I know — that’s a mouthful but let me give the quick and dirty pitch on socialmarkets.

We know that the nonprofit sector has accountability and transparency issues. Many donors, especially younger people, don’t really feel connected to nonprofits as a result. They want to do good but they also want to see the money actually do work. Meanwhile, nonprofits are not so great at pushing their cases and project listings to the web. They don’t do public progress reports, outcomes aren’t reported publicly and there’s no public discussion of the risks inherent in trying to do social good except by some foundations. Notice I say public — nonprofits probably do all those things for their funders but definitely not the public.

So what’s obvious here is that the ledger books aren’t open. Oh, I don’t mean 990s. They’re a terrible way to find out whether or not a nonprofit is doing its job. What we don’t have is a ledger that tells the public the actual social good that a nonprofit is doing. So one would think, “Can’t we just get nonprofits to do that?” No, they won’t bother to put up an account of their work unless there’s a good reason to do so. They’re here to do good, not to fill in Excel spreadsheets and many of them don’t want to take on additional administrative overhead. However, you can incentivize them to do it. Well, how do you provide that incentive? You have to use an exchange of goods to do that. We’re talking money, folks. You need to pay nonprofits to measure and account for the social goods they create.

And this is where socialmarkets comes in. We create a marketplace for nonprofits to show their case listings and projects. In return, they get to be on a Web site where donors are looking for great returns on their donations. It’s not any different from say Kiva, but there’s a twist here. We ask nonprofits to report back on outcomes as well as their SROI (social return on investment). Yeah, that’s right, we get down and dirty with the numbers and will tell donors that if their donation is successful, they will get back SROI dollars in their portfolio. However, not every project is successful. Many things that nonprofits do are extremely difficult and we want to show this to the public. We want to show that it’s not all unicorns and roses in our sector. In fact, some of the most difficult tasks are carried out by nonprofit line staff EVERY DAY.

And oh yeah, those SROI dollars that donors would be receiving? It’s not real money. It’s just an indicator of basically how savvy a donor you are. We’re going to put up a leaderboard that will allow people to track the best social investor on socialmarkets. We think there are going to be social investment geniuses on socialmarkets and we’d love to find out who they are and how they do it. And how do we compute these SROI dollars? We use a counterfactual. We imagine a scenario where the nonprofit didn’t exist and try to figure out what the world would be like without the proposed project or casework involved.

Let’s say a nonprofit wants to save a river. How do we quantify the SROI? We look at all the industries tied to that river and figure out the economic cost of the loss of that river to those industries. I’m pretty sure we’d end up looking at fishing, tourism and recreation industry figures and saying that the river costs $X amount if it’s not saved. This is how I look at SROI in general: if it were not for the nonprofit, then who would do it? How much would it cost if it the nonprofit wasn’t around? And who is affected by all this? But Allan, the astute reader may say, won’t nonprofits just game the SROI numbers? What’s to stop them from claiming an unrealistic number? We would just say — it’s a market. Markets have a way of self-regulating themselves. And one of the first things people will look for is gamed SROI numbers. It’s like any prospectus we see in the regular NYSE market. No one is going to buy a company that claims unrealistic returns when it obviously doesn’t have the wherewithal to gain those returns.

However, all this talk about risk and outcomes leads us to a very important point. We will have a somewhat complete picture of many SROI-generating activities of many nonprofits over time. This is the ledger of nonprofit social returns on investment. The sharper among you may already understand the true nature of what we’re building. We’re building a database that will be able to give researchers and managers deep access to the outcomes of what will be thousands of cases. Ultimately, a ledger isn’t just an accounting instrument, it’s a research instrument. And with our fancy REST-ful API, we can let other researchers access our own databases and generate even greater social returns by researching the very patterns of successful outcomes that are reported by nonprofits.

This is a tremendous undertaking, I know. And I haven’t even begun to list the full ramifications here — that’s going to happen in the manifesto though. I urge you to read it and comment on the socialmarkets site.

Ok, so you’d think the easy answer is… why not e-mail the document to them? They do. However, not all nonprofits have Internet access even in this day and age. Ok, so you think, there’s got to be a better way. Let’s set up a fax server and a document management system to watch over all these documents. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Heavy iron, new hardware, more IT toys. There’s some truth to this conventional solution. It’s probably a solution that we’ll be implementing anyway. However, it’s a longer-term solution dependent on larger capital funding. What can be done now? It looks like this IT guy is going to have to convince people of the necessity for Internet access for these smaller nonprofits.

However, the volume of faxing is probably asymmetric. That is, my org probably faxes a lot more than the smaller partners. For them, faxing is probably not the chore it is for us. Are there any goodies I can produce that will get them to REALLY want to get Internet access. Aha! So I’m thinking salesforce.com. What? You ask? How does salesforce.com enter into this equation? For that, we need to think about SaaS and what it really means and what’s in those faxes anyway?

I’m looking at the fax. They’re case files, that is, papers containing the whys and wherefores of how this client became in danger of being homeless and supporting documentation about how they were denied an application by the local city agency in charge of rental assistance. Fifty page case files are the norm. However, looking at the files, I see lots of structured data. Data that can be represented as fields. Fields that can show up in a salesforce.com implementation. That’s right, I’m building a case management system in salesforce.com. So… this means I can offer my fellow nonprofits a chance to interact with me in a meaningful way through data interchange. And because they can get their own copy of Salesforce.com, we can have two open systems talking to one another. Isn’t that really what faxing is all about? And in the process, they help themselves. We’ll probably ask these nonprofits to not only get Internet access but sign up for salesforce.com as well. Talk about market penetration on their part. I could never ask other nonprofits to do, say a Raiser’s Edge deployment just for solving my org’s problems. Sigh. Yet another lost opportunity for Blackbaud. At some point, this is all going to pile up and they’ll end up in a limited market while salesforce.com and its ecosystem gobble up nonprofit after nonprofit in precisely the manner I’m considering.

So that’s the quick and dirty vision of the eviction prevention application I’m building. I’m wondering though, does anyone out there want to volunteer for my org so they can get some experience building a Salesforce app too? If you’re interested, e-mail me at abenamer [at] nonprofittechblog.org.