Non-Profit Tech Blog

I’d like to expand further on my earliest post about Nonprofit 2.0. Specifically, I want to talk about the things that Org 2.0 proponents don’t seem to consider when they get excited about the latest social media experiment. I feel that there is a serious disconnect between Org 2.0 proponents and people like me who are actually trying to do the hard work of instilling IT and associated IT practices into our employees’ daily work routines.

Many nonprofits are stuck in what we techie types call a non-scalable solution. That is, social services are not usually amenable to a solution that allows for the use of a technology that allows us to multiple the efforts of our employees. An example is the social worker’s case management load. Due to the face to face need for case management and the particular privacy issues surrounding it, you cannot replace social workers with “traditional” means of Internet-based technologies. You can’t IM, IRC, FTP, HTTP, Google, XML or SNS your way out of case management. Full stop. It’s not possible. You can however, take a look at the business processes surrounding case management and work accordingly. Many case management workflows are actually very similar to legal case management work flows. Documents needs to be kept, retained and indexed accordingly. This means that you’ll find yourself adopting for-profit technologies to nonprofit needs. Again, this means taking advantage of new developments in office technology.

Here’s are three office technologies that I guarantee will have more impact on your nonprofit than say, Second Life (which I believe is a boondoggle and a half) or Myspace (marginally interesting but Myspace doesn’t support an open API).

Copiers. They’ve advanced so far they’re not even copiers anymore. They’re MFPs (multifunction printers). Basically, all MFPs can print, scan, fax, e-mail, FTP or use SMB to send digital documents into your organization’s document store. These MFPs are not your father’s MFP.

As always, every MFP manufacturer out there has a different take on how to do things. Kyocera sells a fascinating turnkey solution called iTag which combines a workflow process designer, Sharepoint, and a Dell Server with the ability to dynamically modify the control panel of a printer in order to create custom workflows for your documents. Sharp is selling their printers with something called OSA which is tada! an open API for their printers. Canon has been selling the MEAP which gives developers the ability to write Java code that actually sits on their printers and can modify the printer’s control panel. All of these changes in MFP technology can only mean one thing — an easier interface for document retrieval and storage. You can literally pull case management documents straight off the printer without requiring a PC. This means that volunteers can be easily trained to implement document-based workflows and that employees won’t need to wrestle with a document management system just to do work.

Windows as a service. mygenii.org is now selling Windows dialtone for nonprofit organizations. What does it mean? It means you can use Remote Desktop on a Windows XP machine or thin client to connect to a session hosted on mygenii’s machines from anywhere in the world. In other words, we push the hassles and expense of maintaining dozens of workstations over to mygenii and as our desktops slowly go out of service we will be replacing them with thin clients. Essentially, this is a back to the 1970s model of resource allocation. Everyone at your organization will give up their local desktops in order to have a virtual desktop hosted elsewhere. This works extremely well for case workers should they want to connect to their work files at home. This stuff is so new that not many for-profits are doing it. Once you work the numbers though, you’ll see that this solution is a no-brainer.

Interactive voice response systems (IVR). One of the few things that do scale well in a nonprofit environment is telephony. I see seasonal variances with telephone usage due to the cold weather we experience every winter in New York that in turn causes our clients to seek shelter (and call my organization). This means we have to resort to automated means of answering the telephones. Using an IVRis the only way to scale a solution that can answer up to hundreds of calls an hour with the kind of information that our clients need.

Yes, I know, copiers aren’t sexy. Nobody has web pages devoted to Copiers 2.0 and nonprofit technology like social networking does. There will be no Second Life version of a bunch of people picking up the telephone and answering phone calls from distraught and anxious clients. There’s just going to be nonprofit workers trying to be resourceful with what they’ve got. It’s in our interest to get out of their way and provide them with the tools THEY need, not what some marketing consultant wants.