Krista Endsley, Sage

The weakening economy has created a ripple effect across all types of businesses, including the charitable sector. Due to funding uncertainties, many nonprofit organizations and government agencies are more hesitant about expenditures, and keeping a closer eye on budgets and cash flows.

Yet, they are under growing pressure to do more with fewer resources, and to provide more transparency and accountability to members, donors, and the people they serve. In addition to following increasingly complex accounting rules, they also have more competition for grants and contribution dollars.

Typically, systems are in place to help each department meet these challenges and work effectively. Key staff members enter, manage, and report on this data, but it can be difficult to pull together snapshots of progress quickly in order to make real-time course corrections.

To help relieve these demands, many organizations are turning to Business intelligence tools to retrieve, organize, and share knowledge for analysis and guided decision-making.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence, or BI, uses technology to access and monitor information within a department or across an organization, enabling nonprofit professionals to effectively analyze data, and make timely, informed decisions. Using BI tools, complex data is converted into visual, graphic representations, which can be easily understood and communicated by both financial and non-financial professionals.

BI can improve the speed and quality of decision-making by providing real-time information about key performance metrics. These metrics enable management to take a logical approach to decision-making and problem solving. With BI, recommendations to executives, the board, or donors can be supported with facts.

Strengthening Stewardship with Business Intelligence

Nonprofit organizations provide tremendous value to the communities they serve. And, as any nonprofit leader knows, demonstrating value to donors and constituents is critical. Here are just a couple of ways that BI can strengthen stewardship and organizational performance:

1) Tracking Key Performance Indicators:

Just as blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature can help determine a person's overall health, key performance indicators, or KPIs, can check an organization's overall health. KPIs gather the most critical metrics for an organization, and BI tools can help monitor an organization's performance.

With financial dashboards, financial managers have access to data that can help them make timely tactical and strategic decisions. Having up-to-the-minute information on actual expenses against budgets allows program managers to see where they are at any point in time. They no longer have to wait until month-end reports are delivered to see where they stand. Likewise, development professionals can easily analyze campaign results, giving and demographic trends, solicitation cycles, and major gifts pipelines. These KPIs can help organizations develop more effective fundraising strategies and monitor fundraising efforts.

While KPIs check the pulse of an organization, BI tools enable nonprofit professionals to interact with this data in real-time. Slicing and dicing, and drilling up, down, and across information segments, to fully analyze financial and fundraising trends is a critical component to uncovering potential opportunities or pitfalls.

2) Improving Communications and Information Sharing:

BI empowers an organization's departments and segments to retrieve timely data, so that its executives and board get a complete view of operations. The ability to present information through visual aids simplifies the traditional approaches to reporting and analysis.

BI tools make it possible to pull charts and graphs for presentations instantly. Program and development staff can show funding sources at a moment's notice, or use this information when creating grants requests and annual reports. Executive directors can employ the visual aids to provide factual support for recommendations to the board and other key presentations. What's more, staff members don't have to be financial experts, or even involved in day-to-day fundraising activities, to see how the organization is performing, enabling all staff and board members to be fully engaged.

By having precise, up-to-date information at their fingertips, nonprofit professionals at every level can gain a deeper insight that allows them to strengthen stewardship, improve agility, and, ultimately, secure the success of their organization. BI can quickly become a nonprofit's best friend.

Krista Endsley is senior vice president and general manager for Sage North America's Nonprofit Solutions business, which develops such award-winning products as Sage MIP Fund Accounting and Sage Fundraising 50. Please visit www.sagenonprofit.com for more information.

Randy McCabe, MPower Open

A bad economy can be one of the best things to happen to a marketing professional. That seems paradoxical, but times of constraint -- when revenues fall or simply do not meet budgeted expenditures -- force hard decisions that do not even seem like options during periods of prosperity and largesse. As Samuel Johnson, the celebrated 18th century English author, once said, There is nothing like the prospect of being hung in a fortnight to concentrate a man's mind."

Limitation breeds creativity and innovation that can result in a more efficient, better run organization that serves more people and generates stronger impacts.

This economic downturn has affected nonprofits quicker and more painfully then previous episodes. Two key factors have combined in a sort of perfect storm that has curtailed giving at every level, from small to major donors.

First, the housing bust has produced equity losses across property and the markets, and tightening credit has restricted access to money. This has the largest direct impact on the major donor end of the spectrum, as well as foundations and some government programs.

Second, the dramatic rise in food and gas prices directly impacts a small donor's cash flow on a daily basis and, in turn, ability to donate. These are not just paper losses, but instead, significantly increased basic living costs. When that is compounded by the inability to get cheap credit and the sense of diminished wealth, it is not surprising that one of the first things people reduce or eliminate entirely is making charitable contributions.

As a fundraising professional, it is easy to feel helpless in these conditions as you watch response rates, average gift, and total revenue decrease. Most smart organizations are realizing they need to cut costs and simultaneously continue to invest aggressively in fundraising, especially new donor acquisition, to mitigate rising attrition rates.

There is a powerful opportunity here. With the limitation of lower revenues and the pressure to cut costs, this is an ideal time to innovate around your operations and systems costs while still funding programs and activities and, yes, increasing investment in donor development.

In recent years, organizations from Fortune 500 companies to the U.S. Navy have been broadly adopting open source software. This shift has provided numerous benefits, with one of the most important being a 40-70 percent reduction in software and associated costs without a loss in reliability or functionality (For detailed breakdowns on how to compare costs that validate these savings, see the Canadian government study and David Wheeler's often cited paper on free and open source software).

Organizations using open source software don't pay licensing fees and gain greater flexibility and freedom to tailor their systems to meet specific needs because these solutions enable a user to modify the software's code to create the exact functionality he/she needs for his/her organization.

If you could reduce software and systems costs by 40 percent or more over the next 12 months, you would have the freedom to reinvest those savings where they are most needed: donor retention or under-funded programs and services. You could alleviate all sorts of budget shortfalls during a period of declining revenues due to less giving.

The city of Washington, D.C. recently switched all of its desktop computer applications from Microsoft Office to Google Apps and Open Office, two open source (free of charge) solutions that can open, modify and save documents in the Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other formats. This has saved the city millions of dollars in licensing fees each year.

Really, it all comes down to a basic principle of physics: efficient systems are based on the concept of not wasting energy by attempting to focus energy inputs directly toward energy outputs.

As innovation and technology help us all become more efficient, it is a natural evolution for nonprofits to stop forking up money for software licensing fees and instead invest those dollars in fundraising and campaign execution where they can actually produce results.

In today's climate, more than ever, your constituent relationship management (CRM) or donor management software should be at the top of your list for change. The huge upfront investments and significant ongoing costs required by proprietary vendors are dollars that can and should be spent on programs or actually executing fundraising campaigns. Moving to open source software and flexible systems is a creative, tangible and immediate way for today's nonprofits to both cut costs and free up dollars to re-invest in programs, services and fundraising.

The limitations and challenges that a bad economy foist upon us are often the catalyst to the breakthroughs that create significant and lasting change for the better. Nonprofits should seize this opportunity to embrace innovations like open source applications that are becoming the standard for the future.

Randy McCabe is the founder and CEO of MPower, which provides the most open, flexible, and powerful suite of software and services for fundraising and constituent relationship management for today's nonprofit. For more information and also to download and begin using MPower without licensing fees, please visit www.mpoweropen.com.

Thon Morse, Kimbia

[This article was originally published on Kimbia's website.]

Today’s challenging economic times mean a lot of nonprofits are looking for new ways to raise money. Many organizations realize the Internet presents a huge opportunity, but most have achieved limited success. If your organization, like many others, has yet to experience strong results raising funds online, the coming year provides an ideal window to experiment with new approaches.

A good first step is debunking some myths about online fundraising that might stand in the way of your success.

Myth #1: Online fundraising isn't as effective as offline techniques

In the 2007 Philanthropic Giving Index report published by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, only 34 percent of nonprofits surveyed reported success with online fundraising, and participants ranked online giving as the least successful fundraising technique in the survey.

The reason for these lackluster results is that organizations have not applied the same focus to their online efforts as they have to other areas. Most donors expect professionally printed mailings that include good stories and related giving options. But too often when they go online, they find gray, generic giving forms with no associated content.

It's not surprising, then, that donors give so little online, and fundraisers conclude that online giving doesn't work. Organizations end up setting lower expectations and focus even less on their online efforts -- which leads to more bad results, and the cycle repeats.

The truth is, online fundraising can and should be far more effective than  "offline" fundraising techniques, in terms of response rates, dollars raised, cost per dollar raised and, importantly, connections with new and younger donors

Set high expectations and focus on achieving better results in 2009. Start by evaluating whether you are committing a comparable amount of resources -- people, time, and planning -- to your online initiatives. Keep in mind that since online fundraising is almost always more cost effective, your financial investment won’t need to be as high as other efforts.

Myth #2: People won't give online

Americans gave an estimated $300 billion in individual gifts to nonprofit organizations last year. About four percent of this amount -- $12 billion -- came online. That means that people give billions upon billions of dollars a year over the phone, in the mail, or by other means. The important question is, what is holding people back from giving more online?

One widely held belief is that donors choose to give offline because of security and privacy concerns. Some nonprofits even believe that their donors prefer to transact offline. But this is countered by evidence from the broader marketplace. A Nielsen Company survey earlier this year showed that 94 percent of Internet users in the U.S. have shopped online. In 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans spent more than $136 billion buying merchandise over the Internet.

Clearly, there is little reluctance within the general population to make purchases online. So, what is holding people back from giving online? The answer has a lot to do with the options donors are given. If online giving software is complex, cumbersome, and unrewarding for a nonprofit, it is almost certainly complex, cumbersome, and unrewarding for a donor, too. A donation is an extremely important social interaction, but once someone is committed to a gift, it is simply another transaction. The more steps a donor is asked to take, the less likely he or she is to complete that transaction.

Creating multiple giving opportunities for each of your programs and streamlining the donation process are simple changes that can increase online giving and strengthen donor satisfaction.

Myth #3: Online fundraising means raising money through my organization's website

The standard model of online fundraising is to divert people from wherever they are on the Internet to a central donation form on an organization's website. But the massive, untapped potential for your organization to raise more money isn't on your website -- it is on all the other websites that your donors and supporters frequently visit.

If we look at the places individuals visit online everyday, their favorite charity is probably not among them. However, they do visit their employers' websites and they might take action for a nonprofit their company supports. They likely edit their personal pages or blogs everyday, and they'll even publish about a cause that inspires them. They also visit their friends' blogs and personal pages, and may post, email, chat or tweet about their favorite charity.

The individuals engaged in these conversations include some of your strongest, most vocal advocates, and each of them is willing to evangelize your organization's mission. They have established bonds of trust with their personal networks. Why, then, would you ask them to leave a site they trust to go donate on yours? If they are willing to evangelize for you, they might also be willing to host a donation form for you. So, why not take the donation form to where the conversation is already happening?

Airline ticket sales provide a helpful reference for this point. It is possible to buy tickets on an airline's website, but it is more common to buy them from one of many "portals", such as Expedia.com. Millions of people buy their tickets on travel sites because they have an existing affinity for those specific sites. Airlines don't care where people buy their tickets, so long as they’re being sold.

Similarly, you can reach out to your network of supporting organizations, partners, or even the personal sites of individual advocates and turn them into donation engines for your organization. The coming year is an opportune time to look beyond your website and consider how you can more effectively leverage the broader Web to build new relationships and increase online giving.

Myth #4: Technology is not the problem

Most online fundraising tools have a few things in common: they’re expensive, they’re difficult to deploy, it’s hard to change anything once deployed, and they only work on a single website. Because of this, many nonprofits have extremely limited online efforts. As discussed earlier, organizations then mistakenly "blame" poor results on their marketing programs, or even on the donors themselves.

The truth is that online giving is often limited by online fundraising technology. Cost and complexity have led many nonprofits to focus on only a few, or even just one, online fundraising program.

The good news is that a new generation of online fundraising solutions are available today that don't have the limitations so prevalent in software of the past. Such next-generation tools are significantly less expensive and much easier to deploy and modify. One major benefit is that the flexibility of these tools allows experimentation with different strategies and tactics for online fundraising. This means it will be easier for you to create an online program for every marketing effort, and give donors more opportunities to support your organization.

Myth #5: Raising 10 percent of all gifts online is a great goal

In January 2008, the Barack Obama campaign raised $28 million online—88 percent of the total funds raised. In fact, on one day that same month, the campaign raised $525,000 online in one hour. Many political campaigns, like most fundraising organizations, consider raising five to ten percent of all funds online to be a success. But the incredible results of the Obama campaign should force many fundraisers to rethink those expectations.

Granted, most organizations don't have the marketing power of a presidential candidate, or the deep financial and staff resources. But there are two things the Obama campaign did that any organization can do: first, any organization can commit to making the Internet a major point of engagement with supporters; and second, any organization can commit to offering a variety of messages and giving options.

One public television station we work with applied this approach and saw online giving grow to nearly 30 percent of total funds raised -- about triple the amount they raised online a year ago. Total gifts and overall giving to the station were also up. This happened, by the way, as the economy began to enter its current downturn and average giving amongst their industry peers was down by about 12 percent. Best of all, the station didn't have to make up-front investments in new technology or launch entirely new marketing programs. They simply took better advantage of the programs they already had in place by using flexible and more powerful online tools. Importantly, their new approach to online fundraising is replicable by any organization that wants to take its own great ideas and achieve equally dramatic results.

Consider 2009 as an opportunity. The vast social shift happening online will create winners and losers. Organizations that set high goals and truly commit to online fundraising will reach and retain more donors in the coming years. Be one of the winners.

Thon Morse is the president of KIMBIA, Inc., provider of the most powerful and flexible online fundraising tools that enable organizations to more effectively use the Internet to inspire giving and raise more money. www.kimbia.com

Peter Deitz, Social Actions

With the global financial crisis at its peak and a recession looming, many nonprofit managers are probably asking themselves, "How will my nonprofit raise money next year?" I suspect fewer fundraisers are asking themselves, "How will my nonprofit raise the money it needs four years from now?"

The second question is the more important of the two, and the more difficult to answer.

Current best practices will serve nonprofits just fine in 2009. Between email solicitation, direct mail, major donors, and grant-writing, the vast majority of nonprofits will weather the economic hard times. But a shifting communications environment and changing donor demographics could render those best practices ineffective at best, and obsolete at worst, as early as 2012.

Raising money in 2012 will require creativity and foresight. Micro-philanthropy -- that ambiguous term that refers to all things socially networked, small-scale, and charitable -- will have matured.

Donors of all ages will be looking for meaningful points of engagement with your organization. They'll want to set the programmatic agenda, select the beneficiaries and target areas, communicate the organization's message, and, in real-time, evaluate feedback as it comes in.

Notice something strange about those tasks? None of them involve passive check-writing on behalf of your organization. In 2012, individuals will come to your organization with the expectation of being full partners in your work, not just dollar wells to be tapped when cash is needed. Donations will be a consequence of meaningful engagement, not a measurement of it.

Over the next four years, innovative organizations will use technology to transfer to individuals the reins on everything from program work and evaluation to fundraising and communications. Raising money in a micro-philanthropic environment will come naturally to these groups.

The economy may be hopping four years from now. For organizations that stick to a more traditional managerial and communications structure between now and then, however, raising money is going to be tougher in 2012 than in the darkest days of 2009.

So how should your organization prepare for the changes that are afoot?

Get accustomed to using social media to communicate with all of your potential donors.

There's an unfortunate consensus emerging in the nonprofit sector that social media is only helpful for communicating with young people. Nonprofits are spicing up their social media communications strategy with language and informalities that may turn-off older supporters and major donors. This is a flawed assumption. The fact is that program officers at foundations, boomers, and prospective employees are all turning to social networks to get a sense of your organization.

In this medium, openness, responsiveness, and inquisitiveness serve your cause well. Simplistic appeals targeted at teens and college students don't. Therefore, when crafting your social media communications strategy, focus on the qualities you want to be associated with and not the target audience you want to reach.

Experiment with online contests, both creating them and participating in them.

Online contests like the Knight News Challenge, The Case Foundation's America's Giving Challenge, and the AmEx Cardmember Project can be resource draining to participate in, especially for a time- and cash-strapped nonprofit. Nevertheless, participating in some (surely not all) of these contests will provide your staff members a focused opportunity to use social media to communicate with supporters. As a result, your nonprofit will get a sense of how many of your supporters are following you online, and to what extent you can count on them to act on your behalf.

Another approach to the online contest phenomenon is to run your own. Platforms like Genius Rocket and NetSquared provide nonprofits an opportunity to crowd-source a communications or technological need. Figure out what your need is, set a bounty on it as a deliverable, and then witness how the Internet responds. You'll probably be pleased with the outcome.

Participating and running challenges encourages openness, responsiveness, and inquisitiveness online. These are important traits to develop, and will make fundraising easier as micro-philanthropy matures.

Make hiring decisions based on social media know-how and not just resume smarts.

When it comes to preparing for the shifting communications environment and donor demographics, your employees are your biggest asset. Most job seekers still list their desktop computing skills in their resumes instead of their social media know-how. When interviewing for any position at your organization, make sure to ask about the applicant's familiarity with social media. Training employees down the road can be expensive and ineffective. You are better off hiring people who are at home online than trying to make them that way after they've been hired.

Note: Age is not a good indicator of social media know-how. Ask questions, and you'll be surprised who's on top of the technological changes and who's not.

Empower your interns.

If your organization has interns, make sure to tap them for ideas on how to use social media to create meaningful points of engagement with your organization. Too often, interns are given menial tasks like photo-copying and filling out Excel documents. And yet, they are the ones who have volunteered to spend time with your organization (read: “they care”). They also have an outsider's perspective on how your organization is represented online. Make the most of their time with you by asking them for ideas on how to better represent your organization online. Their ideas could very well lay the foundation for an effective micro-philanthropy campaign.

Get an iPhone.

The future of interacting with your organization is mobile as well as online. Get an iPhone or portable data-device in order to start experiencing the possibilities. If your nonprofit's managers are not using portable devices to communicate with staff and supporters, they're not going to understand the potential for mobile technology to change the what and how of your organization's work. Get them started now, so that in 2012, you're not beginning at square one to develop a mobile fundraising strategy.

Four years ago, web 2.0 was barely on the radar of nonprofits. Today, it's becoming standard practice to communicate with supporters using tools like Flickr, MySpace , Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. If four years of social media can transform the way U.S. presidents get elected and people connect with causes, imagine the changes that another four years of social media will produce.

My advice to the nonprofit technology community: let's start preparing now by thinking as creatively as possible.

Flickr Credit: PhilonHave you attended an NTEN webinar lately?

Over the last year or so, we've really bulked up our online seminar offerings, usually with at least one per week, and often as many as three for you to choose from.

We know technology tools and trends evolve rapidly, and you need to stay on top of what the nonprofit sector is doing and using to achieve their missions more efficiently. We also know that traveling to conferences and in-person seminars is often beyond the reach of most folks, be that because of location, time, or costs involved.

I bring this up because I get to give out a free webinar to a member today as part of this month's Member Appreciation festivities. But I don't want to stop there.

I want all nonprofit program staff, IT staff, fundraising and communications staff, and yes, nonprofit executive directors out there to stay on top of the tools and strategies that will make your jobs easier, and perhaps, as a result, the world a little better.

So, let's do this:

• First, I'm going to send Jenny Council, from Netcorps, a coupon for a free NTEN Webinar, because we're proud of her work and happy she's a member of NTEN.

• Then, I want you to go to http://nten.org/webinars (and even look through our archives) to find a webinar you think covers a topic that could help your organization, or an organization you know and care about. There are several free webinars among them, and members save on those that aren't free.

• Spread the word about the resource, or watch the webinar and share the knowledge with a colleague.

• Finally, come back here and leave a comment about what topics or issues you think NTEN should cover in a future webinar that isn't in our current lineup.

Over the past year -- or, I guess, 2 years, really -- we've seen the power of people-to-people, word-of-mouth, long-tail, whatever-you-want-to-call-it fundraising with the success of the Obama campaign's online efforts. They broke all sorts of fundraising records, and did most of it with donations under $100.

What really excites me about the result is the lesson it can teach advocacy and nonprofit organizations across the country.

Hopefully, as the veterans of the Obama team share their time and information with the sector, we'll learn more about the details of the strategy and execution so we can apply it to volunteer, awareness, and fundraising efforts. In the meantime, I'm happy to be able to send a piece of this type of strategy to today's appreciated NTEN member:

Sara Leedam, from the Level Playing Field Institute, we're sending you:

People to People Fundraising: Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Charities by Ted Hart, James M. Greenfield, and Sheeraz D. Haji, donated by Jossey-Bass/Wiley Publishers.

Don't forget, NTEN members, you can all get this book, as well as all the other great resources from Jossey-Bass/Wiley, at 20% off with your member discount.

Member Appreciation month continues with another NTEN give-away, a free webinar:

Terri Dufner, we're sending you a coupon for a free NTEN webinar so you can build on your nonprofit technology skills and put them to use toward your mission.

Reminder: All NTEN members can attend our special free webinar this Thursday:

> 10 Tactics for Growing Your Online community.

Happy 3rd-week-of-member-appreciation-month!

I'm excited to start off this week's NTEN give-aways with some NTEN Gear. I'm doubly excited to give that gear to an NTEN member participating in our group on Facebook:

Lindy Dreyer, from SocialFish, gets to show off her NTEN-ness -- after we send her the free gear! (Lindy, when you get it, you should take a picture and add it to your Facebook photos :)

Don't be jealous if you didn't win: you can go grab some of your own. Or, if you'd rather have free stuff available to all NTEN Members, how about joining us for another free-for-members webinar this week:

> 10 Tactics for Growing Your Online Community

Don't forget to renew your membership for 2009 before this month is out so you can grab a new webinar pass with an extra 10% discount!

Sure, you collect a lot of data, but if you don't use it effectively, it's essentially dead. And I'm talking "a tree falls on you in a forest and nobody's around to help" dead. This occasional blog series aims to give you some inspiration for creatively interpreting and using your data.

101. Track an Illness

Google doesn't really need the press, but they keep doing cool things. To wit: Google.org has developed a way to track flu outbreaks based on aggregated search data that trends two weeks ahead of government warnings. It passes the common sense test: as people get sick, they search for their symptoms; the more people searching, the higher the probability that something nasty is spreading. This being Google, they tested their results by comparing several years worth of past search data against the CDC's database of actual outbreaks. It correlates.

100. Track Anything

New kid Trendrr promises to let you "compare the popularity of anything, across any input, and draw your own conclusions." That's quite a claim. Right now, we're obsessing over why mentions of "NTEN" from a Google blog search declined .07% today. Do you love us .07% less today, cruel world? Oh, wait, we've only been tracking it for 2 days. Right. Trendrr may end up being just another diverting time suck, but we like the potential.

99. Make Art

Photographer Chris Jordan's new series of photorealistic images depicts everyday detritus on a massive scale, like the 2 million plastic bottles used in the U.S. every 5 minutes. We know these images have been digitally manipulated -- and we lust after the PhotoShop set-up he must have -- but they're seamless and, for the most part, quite beautiful. You can find more on his web site.

All week, we've been running our CRM plus Consulting hours give-away, and I'm excited to announce the nonprofit NTEN organizational member that will be receiving the following:

• 2 free seats for the first year of Common Ground, the new CRM from Convio
• 10 free consulting hours to help get things set up, from Causeway Interactive

And the winner is:

Writers in the Schools, Houston!

Thank you to all of those who participated in the blog comments, and thank you to Tompkins Spann and Kirk Watson for donating their time and services.

When economic woes and job layoffs dominate the news cycle, we tend to examine our own careers and financial standing.  Am I okay? Is my job safe?

Flickr Credit: RobbieG1It's times like these that being part of a community of professionals, a community of colleagues who share tips, insights, and even job opportunities, becomes even more valuable. 

For us, the nonprofit technology professionals -- a niche that includes IT professionals as well as fundraising and communications folks, as well as the small nonprofit staffers who are jacks-of-all-trades -- to do our jobs well, there's the added need to stay on top of the fast-evolving technologies and trends.

Building that community and providing that professional development training is the idea behind NTEN, and the mission we pursue.  The key to this community is, obviously, YOU, the community.  The key to professional development is learning about best practices and application of tools for mission-oriented strategies -- and those lessons come from colleagues (though we like to call them heroes around here) within the community.

It's NTEN Member Appreciation Month, so I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the NTEN community, past, present, and future, for building this successful network for your peers and colleagues (and yourself).  Here are some community resources you can benefit from:

• NTEN Groups (connect 24-7!)
• NTEN Speaker Directory (find your hero)
• NTC Archived Session Materials (notes at your fingertips)
• NTEN Office Hours (chat live with a hero)
• NTEN Jobs Listings (nptech jobs)

I'd also like to announce today's NTEN give-away as part of our month-long celebration of NTEN Members:

Heather Valli, Website Editor for IntraHealth, thank you for being a member of NTEN and doing the work you do! We're sending you a coupon for a free NTEN webinar so you can beef up your nptech skills.

As the second week of Member Appreciation month starts to wind down, I'm glad for the opportunity to discuss today's particular NTEN give-away:

AdWords for Dummies, courtesy of Jossey-Bass/Wiley publishers.

Now, I can bring up Google's AdWords and how it could fit in with your nonprofit organization:

• First, if you're a qualifying nonprofit organization, you can apply for a Google Grant to deploy up to $10,000 in AdWords spending per month.  That means you can use AdWords marketing for free.
• Even better, if you're a member of NTEN, you can get expedited consideration for a Google Grant.
• But, as anyone who has received a Google Grant could tell you, there's "free", and then there's AdWords: it will take some investment in time to deploy this marketing tool for your organization.
• So, you'll need to take advantage of the available resources to help you make the most of this online marketing opportunity:

1. Use Google's free online resources.

2. Get the AdWords for Dummies book, using your 20% member discount from Wiley.

3. Attend our upcoming webinar on Paid Search Advertising.

4. Check out the Google Grants webinar series NTEN and Google co-hosted eariler this fall.

5.  Hire an SEM (search engine marketing) consultant or firm to help you maximize the return on your AdWords campaigns.  This will cost your organization some $, but with the right campaign and the proper management of it, the $ you invest could turn into $$$ in the form of new donors, new members, and new constituents.  There are a few firms specializing in helping nonprofits deploy Google Grants, including World Benefactor and Didit.  And you could always seek pro bono work from charity-minded marketing professionals.

So, with that, I'd like to announce that we'll be sending the AdWords book as a gift to...

Warren Shaver, Director of Online Communications for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Thank you, Warren, for the work you do and for being a supporting member of this nonprofit technology community.

There are only a couple more days to participate in our CRM and Consulting give-away contest, so don't forget to enter. It's easy: just vent about what you wish your CRM could do for your organization but doesn't.

While you're waiting to hear who wins on Friday, join us for the free-for-members webinar about working with your CRM: Get More From Your Database, today at 2pm ET / 11am PT.  Sign up here!

In other Member Appreciation news, I'm also happy to announce today's NTEN give-away:

Alex Martin, Network Engineer &  Application Specialist for the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles, is going to get some NTEN Gear in the mail!

We appreciate the work Alex does to keep YMCAs humming in LA, and we're proud to have him as a member of NTEN. Thank you, Alex!

NTEN members: don't forget to renew your membership for 2009 this month so you can get 10% off 2009 webinar passes! 

A group of researchers recently claimed that hundreds of galaxies are moving in the same direction, "apparently toward something invisible and possibly very large", raising the possibility that the universe is just one enormous game of multi-ball Pong.

That's probably a long-term worry. In the short term, you've only got a few more days to submit articles -- or cool links -- for the next issue of NTEN Connect.

As you may have heard, November is Member Appreciation Month at NTEN, a time to celebrate the best thing about us: you. As part of that, the next issue of NTEN Connect will be created out of submissions from our Members and bad puns from our editor.

If you have an article you think would benefit the nonprofit tech community -- even if it's already been published (you did retain your rights, right?) -- send it to editor@nten.org by Monday, Nov. 17.

We're also accepting links to interesting things for our "Things We Like" and "How-To" sections. Feel free to leave those in comments, below.

We look forward to your submissions!

Each morning when I get ready to blog about that day's Member Appreciation winner and activities, I first think, "They're probably going to get tired of this. . ." Then I remember, "Hey, I'm giving away free stuff here. How can folks get tired of that?"

So, I'm giving away more free stuff today!

To start things off, I'm happy to announce today's member receiving an NTEN give-away, a free NTEN Webinar:

Thank you, Don Montesi! Your work and your NTEN membership make us proud, and we'd like to celebrate that by sending you a coupon for a free NTEN webinar. (Check your email.) Don is the Information Systems Manager at Sacred Heart Southern Missions.

But the free stuff and give-aways don't stop there:

Don't forget to enter the blog contest to win yourself and your nonprofit organization 2 free seats for Common Ground, the new CRM from Convio -- which also comes with 10 free consulting hours courtesy of Causeway Interactive (for a total value of $4000).

(Even if you don't want to enter the contest, you should check out the discussion of database woes and wishlist items in the comments there. I think we can all relate!)

And, even if you don't win the blog contest, don't forget about the free-for-members webinar tomorrow: Get More From Your Database.

Flickr Photo: Duane StoreyJames Carville helped keep the Clinton campaign on message in 1992 by hanging a sign on Bill Clinton's door that read, in part, "The economy, stupid." That now-famous catchphrase is widely credited with giving the Clinton campaign its win.  Although we don't know if it was ever taped up on any doors, I think the winning strategy for the Obama campaign was "Transparency, stupid!" 

In this election, Obama rode a tidal wave of youth vote to the presidency, with 66% of voters under 30 casting their ballot for the Democrat. What the campaign realized, early and often, is that the under-thirty crowd communicates differently from the rest of us.  As Allison Fine writes in Momentum, this group is "... likely to engage in two-way conversation with staff, volunteers, and clients, rather than in one-way broadcasts, the style of communication most often used by organizations now."

This meant two things for the campaign.  First, they couldn't expect just to talk AT people: as much as possible, they had to build conversations.  There are plenty of examples here. The Obama Twitter account mostly sent updates about the candidate's public appearances, but the use of Twitter meant that any follower could send a message to the candidate and respond to any of his appearances or announcements. The same idea played out on FaceBook and MySpace.  Although it's certainly interesting that Obama racked up more friends in each network, the really telling statistic is how many more comments and posts those friends made about and to the candidate.

The second implication was that they couldn't always control the message.  Although the campaign was characterized by a tight adherance to message, they let their supporters get in on the action, too.  After a mis-step with one MySpace friend, the campaign showed a great willingness to let a variety of supporters create and distribute their vision of an Obama administration. From will.i.am's Yes We Can video to the Obama Girl to the "I am a Community Organizer" group on Facebook,  user-generated content abounded.

The Obama campaign listened as well as it lectured.  It let people engage with the issues and the candidate in ways that were meaningful for them, their friends, their tribes.  Obama supporters felt they could really know their candidate, and truly participate in his campaign. It looks like his administration may run under the same rules.

This is a lesson every nonprofit can take to heart and put into practice: it doesn't cost money to listen to your supporters. 

You won't have to spend a dime on software to do it right.  You will have to change your old ways of doing things.  You'll need to spend less time talking and more time starting conversations.  It will take a commitment on your part, and a lot of time.  But since you'll be spending less time talking, you should have plenty of that, anyway.

We decided to pick today's Member Appreciation Month winner from the NTEN LinkedIn Group (a group exclusively for NTEN members).

In case you haven't yet explored the different features of LinkedIn and LinkedIn Groups for professional purposes, I'd like to offer a few quick tips for using Groups at your own organization: 

• Creating a group on LinkedIn is easy.
• You can  grow your LinkedIn Group by opening it up to anyone on LinkedIn. We often get requests from folks wanting to join the NTEN group who have never interacted with our organization before.
• You can also invite your current supporters and constituents by linking to your LinkedIn Group on your site or in an email.
• We like LinkedIn because it's a controlled group -- perfect for a membership organization or for  organizing specific groups of supporters.  The group manager can approve or reject requests to join the group.
• Use the Discussions and News features to engage your group.  Group members can ask questions or share online articles without directly emailing each other. It might take some time to build the right interaction here: these shouldn't be the same messages you'd send in an email.  Think Q&A topics, poll your group for feedback on an issue, or share special updates or information with this group.

We've only recently begun to develop NTEN's group on LinkedIn, but we're happy we already see LinkedIn working on adding to and improving the features for groups. Here are a couple of key things we've found:

• We've gained new members through our exposure as a group on LinkedIn. It's a new outreach tool that requires little effort! Those who request to join the group who are not already NTEN members get an email from me introducing them to NTEN and membership.
• We can communicate special or crucial issues to this group as a sub-group of our membership, so that we don't always have to send yet another email. We recently reached out to our LinkedIn Group to remind them of our Bring-a-Friend initiative, and that we were closing in on a special membership landmark.

We currently have 423 members in our LinkedIn Group -- less than 10% of our total membership -- so it was easy to throw a (metaphorical) dart and pick today's Member Appreciation give-away winner:

Jill Murphy (You can see her LinkedIn profile here!)

Jill's getting a free webinar on us because we're thankful for the work she does for the nonprofit community, and we're proud she's a member of NTEN.

If you want a cool NTEN badge on your LinkedIn profile like Jill has, join our LinkedIn group!

NTEN's Member Appreciation Month has gotten off to a great start with 5 days of prizes and 2 member-appreciation-webinars.

But you haven't seen anything yet!

I'm excited to announce a special Member Appreciation event and opportunity for this week:

• Join us for a free-for-members webinar this Wednesday, "Get More From Your Database", where you'll see and hear about what you probably should be doing with your CRM (that you aren't, because your CRM can't cut it, or because you just hadn't thought about using it that way).
• Enter to win 2 free seats for Convio's new CRM, Common Ground ($2400 value). You'll also get 10 free consulting hours ($1600 value) to help you get started with your new tools, thanks to Causeway Interactive.

>Here's how to play:

1. Leave a comment on this post telling us the one thing you wish your database did for you and your organization but doesn't. 

2. Attend the free webinar on Wednesday to learn more about what you could be doing with a CRM.

3. Check back on our blog on Friday to find out if you won the free seats and consulting, worth a total of $4000!

Note that you have to be a qualifying 501(c)3 nonprofit and NTEN organizational member to win. If you're not a member, learn more and join today.

(And don't forget to enter your e-mail address when you post so we can verify your membership and contact you if you win! It will remain hidden to everyone but us.)

Sure, we know you're innovative. You probably wouldn't be in this community if you weren't! But it's nice when our members get recognized for that outside of our community.

Kudos, then, to Doug Jacquier, one of our members from the other side of the globe, who was recently honored with the Equity Trustees Nonprofit CEOs "Innovator of the Year" award. 

Doug is CEO of Connecting Up Australia, formerly known as Community Information Strategies Australia, Inc (CISA). 

Congratulations, Doug! 

Our Program Coordinator, Anna Richter, has been on the road this week -- checking out hotels for future NTC, y'all! -- which means I got the pleasure of emceeing the webinars this week in Anna's absence. I bring this up because one of these webinars, "Podcasting 4+1," was presented by Jason Cormier, who is a social media and marketing consultant to for-profit companies. Jason brought our nonprofit audience some great insights and advice that for-profit businesses have been using to harness online media to increase brand recognition and, ultimately, profits.

Why is this important? Well, as you know, there's always been this weird non-relationship between the for- and nonprofit sectors in terms of business and marketing strategies. Sound strategy is sound strategy, however, and the truth is that successful nonprofits employ savvy business strategies to run efficiently and savvy marketing strategies to get their messages out.

This all leads me to the point of today's Member Appreciation post, which is to announce the lucky NTEN Member who will receive a book that helps nonprofits employ the marketing strategies of the for-profit sector for their good causes:

Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes, by Network for Good's Katya Andresen.

Thanks to Jossey-Bass/Wiley Publishers, we are happy to be able to send this book to:

Cecilia Snyder, Communications Director at Our Voices Together. Thank you for applying your tech and communications savvyness to good causes, Cecilia! And thank you for being a member of NTEN.

As a reminder, all NTEN members can -- and probably should -- get this book for their own causes by taking advantage of the our 20% discount!

Oh, and for those of you interested in more information about
podcasting for your organization, don't forget that you're invited to attend the free follow-up webinar today to learn about getting started with the creation and deployment of podcasts using ReadyTalk tools (and your member discount): Learn more and sign up today at http://www.readytalk.com/nten.