Non-Profit Tech Blog

I’ve decided to write about uncharted and unblogged (in the nptech world that is) technologies today that can be used in the nonprofit sector. I’m getting tired of writing about social networking. You know it’s played out when you see videos like this:

Love them Gym Class Heroes though… Here are new technologies that haven’t been explored nearly enough by nonprofit bloggers in the last few months and part of the reason for that is that it’s not about social networking, a technology that is seemingly easy to blog about since the technical innards are usually hidden behind some friends list. Be aware that some of these technologies are not particularly easy to understand if you don’t have a programming or sysadmin background. If you need help, please comment below. To paraphase from the song, Click Read More And Show Me Some Kind of Sign!

Amazon Flexible Payments Service

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) — Amazon FPS is a new payment service built out of Amazon’s e-commerce services. This means that users who are used to Amazon’s payment processing service (who isn’t) can have that same experience on your site. Here is what it can do:

• Create “Payment Instructions” to define conditions and constraints desired for a given transaction, and programmatically obtain payment authorizations or “tokens” that represent these Payment Instructions from customers.
• Execute one-time, multiple, or recurring payments on behalf of customers.
• Aggregate micro-transactions into a single larger transaction using Prepaid and Postpaid capabilities.
• Build payment applications where you are neither the sender nor the recipient of funds. You can build marketplace applications that enable the movement of money between two third parties.

Obviously, this can change the game for even the largest of nonprofits. It’s not recommended yet as a service, but it’s certainly the gamechanger that Google Checkout never became. Why? Simply because nonprofits have one business model on their web sites, the traditional donations model. I have never seen third party transactions or micropayments explored in the nonprofit sector. (If you know of any, please tell me.) It seems fairly clear to me what the business ramifications are, as you can now build a nonprofit business model for earned income on items that are basically virtual. You can sell virtual badges, avatars, icons, e-publications and other virtual paraphernalia that go along with your nonprofit at pennies on the item. If your organization has a lot of research content, you can now create a paywall for it and charge a nominal fee.

You can also create a website that diverts funds from the account of a donor straight to a client. It’s an entirely different business model I know. It changes the very notion of what a nonprofit is if the money is never passed through its accounts and it makes 990-based metrics like Charity Navigator even less relevant. Trust me, old-school orgs will not adopt Amazon FPS but the new nimble ones will.

And even better, there’s already libraries in multiple programming languages for Amazon FPS. And even mo’ better, pricing is reasonable. For transactions over $10, the pricing starts from 2.9% + $0.30 for credit card to 1.9% + $0.30 per transaction if your monthly payment volume is over $100K.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Simple Storage Service

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are Amazon’s attempt at grid computing. Amazon has thousands of servers that they don’t use all the time. Basically, they let you rent their servers at very low cost but at the same time providing a level of scalability that your nonprofit never had. You want 1,000 servers online tomorrow because your ED is going on Oprah and you don’t want to miss any possible donations? Use EC2. You need to store terabytes of information cheaply and it has to be accessible? Use S3. A lot of new for-profit startups are using this technology but no nonprofits are using it right now. It’s a darn shame because this basically outsources the need for multiple web servers for a nonprofit and at the same time gives nonprofits more reliability and it does it cheaply. It’s that rare time where the old saw about having things fast, easy and cheap but you can only pick two doesn’t apply. Your website’s users will never have to experience a downed site from your org ever again.

Infinite Bits

OK, so let’s say you like the idea of storing your stuff online at Amazon S3. You find out that the pricing is ridiculously low. It’s only $0.15 per GB per month. However, you want your users to use FTP to get to it since it’s kinda hard to use S3 for normal people. Never fear — for $4.95 a month, you can use Infinite Bits which provides an FTP server that your users can upload to. They’ll be providing users their own custom Infinite Bits server so it can be used as a group file sharing mechanism as well. It’s all good here. Now all people have to do is build an online backup system for data and I can see this service showing up at your local datacenter for network admins as well.

inkling markets

I’m afraid I’m not going to have to just introduce a new technology but an entirely new concept here so bear with me. Decision markets are basically the idea that markets represent not just a series of bets but when the bets are all aggregated together is actually an attempt at predicting outcomes. The typical stock market represents an aggregation of all information about a particular set of companies and how well they’re performing. We can use that attribute in a decision market to make important decisions about the outcome of events in the future. I see a problem with adoption of decision markets in that nonprofits usually won’t or can’t publish enough information about an event in order for people to make a good reasonable bet on things but also that people for some reason think of “markets” as not appropriate in working with clients. I’m not talking about placing bets on clients but I could see a world where people could bet on the outcomes of a group of nonprofits in a sector. How can you get a taste of decision markets? Go check out inkling markets.

And how can you get a taste of how not to run a decision market? The way that globalgiving.com experimented briefly with inkling markets is certainly a case in point. The experiment was poorly run and they misunderstood some of the key issues about running a decision market. Global Giving ran a market where 22 projects were placed in a market and the users were asked the question “Which project has the greatest chance of succeeding on GlobalGiving.com?”. It seems innocuous enough but what happened is that the users were given a little Word document about each project and asked to make a decision based only on that one piece of information. There were no metrics to help decide which project could actually succeed, nothing was dynamic so of course, the decision market turned into a popularity contest because the flow of information was too small and too static. It’s as if a stock market were started, you could only read a prospectus, but you never knew how well a company was doing from month to month since no ledgers were kept. Worse, “the greatest chance of succeeding” is a pretty nebulous outcome to predict. What about clear and identifiable goals that people could use?

So what kinds of questions could nonprofits ask in decision markets? They can certainly ask questions relating to future predictions of government policy as much of that information is up on the Web already. They should ask questions about the simple statistics that define their client populations like:

“How many people will there be in the New York City shelter system at the end of October 2007?”
“How many crimes will be committed in Precinct 78?”
“What will be the average listing value in Brooklyn (as measured by Trulia) at the end of 2007?”
“Which charity will have more unique monthly visitors (as measured by Quantcast) in September 2007?”
“Will the Facebook Causes app raise more than $825,000 in December 2007?”

You’ll need to base the decision markets on clear and identifiable statistics. These statistics would be used to help provide your staff with some predictions that they could use to plan how much more capacity they will need in the next year. For more about decision markets, read Alex Kirtland’s great post on decision markets.

So that’s a quick wrap-up of some newer technologies. Next Uncharted Technologies post will cover more unusual technologies that can be used in helping out nonprofits with their missions.