Inside ASI-AP

Susan Gordon, Causes

Planning for the year-end giving season is in full swing throughout the nonprofit sector. In 2009, giving in December alone brought in about 1/3 of the fundraising dollars to nonprofits. And in 2010, online giving is expected to bring in more donations than ever, after having seen a 46% increase in online revenue between 2008 and 2009.

At Causes, the application on Facebook, we’re releasing huge improvements to our fundraising and communications tools just in time for the year-end giving season. Nonprofits have already raised over $26 million using Causes -- and to start the giving season off, we recently announced that your causes will soon be able to publish to members' News Feeds (like a Fan Page can now).  Once you’ve built a vibrant online community, the end of the year is the perfect time to make a fundraising appeal.

Fundraising Projects

Facebook users are more motivated to donate to specific projects rather than general fundraising appeals. Causes has just updated their Fundraising Projects feature so nonprofits can effectively do project-based fundraising campaigns through Facebook. 

Using this tool, the National Wildlife Federation has raised over $100,000 for their oil spill work in the Gulf Coast. The Humane Society of the United States raised $20,000 in 6 days, all through their cause, to fund a team of journalists documenting the seal slaughter in Canada. And Camfed raised $4,500 to build a roof on a school in Malawi, then turned around and funded another $3,386 project to give shoes to schoolgirls in Zimbabwe. 

The new Fundraising Projects have a Google Maps integration, the ability to set price points for your donors ($10 plants 10 trees, for example), and an easy browsing page for new people to find your nonprofit's projects.

To create a Fundraising Project on Causes, go to http://nonprofits.causes.com/campaigns/new

There are a few things to keep in mind to make sure your fundraising campaign using the Causes Fundraising Project is successful:

1. Feature your Fundraising Project on every cause that benefits your nonprofit - not just the ones you created.  You can affiliate with any cause created for you, which adds your nonprofit as an administrator of the cause, allows you to send that cause bulletins, and feature your Fundraising Project on that cause. Click "Send Affiliate Request" here: http://nonprofits.causes.com/causes/independent and add your Facebook profile here:http://nonprofits.causes.com/account/facebook_accounts and you'll be all set to make the most of the network of causes that benefit your nonprofit.

2. Don’t be scared to drive home the message.  Create a messaging schedule that involves sending a kick-off bulletin, updates, and a wrap-up message.  Motivate supporters through descriptions of your work and the impact they can have by donating.  And don’t forget to send your Causes Fundraising Project to Fans, Twitter followers, house lists, etc.  Here are some sample bulletins: http://exchange.causes.com/resources/features/bulletins/

3. For more information and help creating a strategy that makes your project successful, read How to Run a Successful Fundraising Campaign on Causes.

Birthday Wish: Peer-to-Peer Fundraising

Causes' Birthday Wish feature is the single most effective nonprofit fundraising tool on Facebook. Causes users have raised over $6 million for nonprofits through the tool in the past year. 

Birthday Wish is a feature-packed fundraising tool for your supporters to raise money for your nonprofit on their birthdays. Supporters choose your cause for their Birthday Wish, then use many peer-to-peer outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and email to ask their friends to donate instead of giving them gifts.

The old design was already bringing in an average of $100 per active Birthday Wish -- and the new design adds more features like reminders, the ability to create Birthday Cards, and easier ways for your friends to promote your Birthday Wish for you.

Go to http://birthdays.causes.com to get started or click on the Birthday Wish link on any cause that benefits your nonprofit. You can use that link in email blasts, on your website, and in e-newsletters to ask your supporters to start fundraising for you on their birthdays. 

Everyone who is already in your causes will also get an email 1 month and 2 weeks before their birthday, asking them to create a Birthday Wish. 

More tools for nonprofits to promote Birthday Wishes are on their way but there's no need to wait to start using it. Feel free to email us at partner@causes.com if you have questions or go to the Causes Resource Center at http://exchange.causes.com.

Best of luck for your end-of-year fundraising!

Flickr photo: shareskiHow much cash do you have in your wallet right now?

As I sat in the Grand Junction Colorado airport -- which is charming -- I had a conundrum: the contents of my wallet came to a grand total of 72 cents.* This is a common situation for me, a situation that means if I need a Diet Coke later (inevitable), I will likely also be forced to buy some chips or something so that I can put the charge on my ATM card. (Those chips clearly have nothing to do with my lack of will power.)

But I digress. My point is that real currency, the silver and green stuff we lug around, is about to get an upgrade.

In Pocket Change, author Dan Macasi points us to osaifu keitai, the Japanese phrase that means cell-phone wallet. The concept is simple. An NFC chip -- that's near-field communications -- is placed on your existing cell phone, or is built into new phones. When it's time to check out, you wave your phone over the payment center and the transaction information is passed through the chip to your bank. Done. 

Visa is testing it right now with Bank of America and Device Fidelity, which created a new iPhone case to house the chip. Here are a couple of ways to think about what this might mean:

Personally

• Be thrilled that you may be able to get a Diet Coke from that vending machine without fishing around for quarters.
• Maybe also be a little concerned about the potential rise in your Diet Coke consumption. Seriously. If you thought you spent money fast in iTunes, wait until you see how you burn through money you never have to see anymore.
• Another downside: when you lose you phone, you also lose your wallet. As your personal information consolidates, so too does the danger of identity theft. (This is why I actually want an NFC chip embedded in my wrist. Problem solved.)

For Nonprofits 

• Immediacy is something we bank on in the sector. It's the emotion or connection the donor feels RIGHT NOW that we want to capture. Imagine holding an event and being able to let anyone donate $5 with a swipe of their phone as they enter and exit.
• Online donations have made it easier to collect donations in the field, but this would take that to a new, and potentially much more efficient, extreme.
• The easier the transaction, the less tied that donor may feel to the organization. Can you move a $5 donor up the ladder of engagement? Will s/he even remember donating?

Paying by mobile is already a done deal in Japan and Europe. Analysts predict it will go big in the US in the next three to five years. Are you ready for it? And does anyone want to invest in one of these for the NTEN office?

* Also found in the money part of my wallet: 3 free song downloads from Starbucks, 2 bobby pins, a note from my daughter, a receipt for crayons, and some rewards coupons for my local garden center (expired, of course).

Sarah Durham, Big Duck

We're all nerds when it comes to new media.

No matter how many studies tell us that that the gadgets we're hooked on aren't good for us, most of us technology nerds still can't get enough. In part, it's because the technology is now so fast, easy and cheap to use that simply investing our time to figure it out seems like a pleasure. After all, I was that kid who stayed up late playing video games. (Ah, Joust... how I miss thee.) Now I'm that grown up who stays up late building communities for my obscure personal interests on Ning, and aimlessly chatting with my long-lost friends from elementary school on Facebook, and even (cough, cough) playing on Polyvore. 

At work, all of this gadgetry often comes in handy, too. After all, who doesn't revel in the wonders of the innovative microsites, campaigns, and transparent goodness that Beth Kanter and Allison Fine wonderfully illustrate in "The Networked Nonprofit"? I sure do. One of the reasons I love the NTEN community is that I can revel in the joys of hanging out with other geeks like me. (That means you.)   

Then there's the flip side: how do we keep these exciting initiatives moving ahead despite such limited staff time to devote to them? Sure, it's easy for that board member to thump her fist on the table and exclaim, "We need to use the Facebook!" (I know: I love it too when folks call it the Facebook.)

But we all know it's just not that simple.  

When the Fruit Doesn't Much Resemble the Tree

Projects of all kinds start with a flurry of activity. If they're digitally driven, they're often conceived, designed, written, and launched in a matter of days -- often with a special name, logo, tagline, color palette, and other unique branding. Staff spend all their mojo getting them up and going and then watering them, like seedlings, as they bloom into full-blown advocacy, outreach, or fundraising projects in a matter of weeks. To work the gardening metaphor even harder, it's almost like the nonprofit is a peach tree bearing fruit that looks more like oranges and lemons: vaguely related, perhaps -- but not much.  

Over time, these special projects can start to wither: staff time to devote to them gets limited as new initiatives get started, the community grows so large it requires more time to manage -- who'll be the mayor of the lemons? -- or it's hard to respond in real time to conversations that unfold.  

So how can we launch innovative digital initiatives that use all of this rocking technology to advance our missions without driving ourselves stark, raving mad and entirely confusing our target audiences?  

What's a Poor Nonprofit to Do?

In my book, "Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Money and Visibility Through Smart Communications" (Jossey-Bass, 2010), I adapted two tried-and-true for-profit marketing concepts, positioning and personality, for nonprofit use. 

Positioning is the big idea we want to establish in the minds of our target audiences.

Personality is the tone and style we'll use as we communicate.  

When we help organizations shift their communications here at Big Duck, we often start by establishing clear organizational positioning and personality regardless of whether it's a branding project, website, campaign, etc. That's because it's critical to have some way to weave together all of the communications.

And that thing has to emerge from a nonprofit's vision and mission above all else.  

For example, let's say the Lead Pencil Association of America (names changed to protect the innocent) launches a revolutionary 'Lead the way' campaign to get folks to throw out pens and go back to the classic yellow #2 pencils. They use a special look and feel (yellow with pink and grey, perhaps), Facebook page, Twitter stream, and so forth, and it's very different from the organization's typical blue and black, rather serious branding. You can bet that the organization's leadership wants to capture the 10,000 people who're connected to the project and be sure they know who's behind the campaign. Better yet, let's convert them to donors or advocates for future Lead Pencil Association work. But with the media and the messaging so unconnected, that's going to be a seriously uphill battle.  

On the other hand, a well-defined brand like Apple computers makes sure that every campaign they launch ties back to their core positioning and personality. Remember the "Think different" campaign featuring Ghandi and Einstein? Or the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials of the past few years? Both are different campaigns conceptually, but they're united by a common underlying strategy about how Apple wants to be perceived. Someone who participates in a social media action as part of the 'Think Different' campaign can't help but know that it's an initiative of Apple computers, right?  

Let's Grow Peaches

What I love about positioning and personality is that they're actually time and cost saving tools any nonprofit can use. Sure, it's work to figure out what they should be for your organization and build buy-in for them. But once that's done, it becomes so much easier and faster to grow peaches.

When each initiative you launch clearly links back to the 'mother brand' of the organization, you're building a much more cohesive and valuable community no matter what technology you're using.

Want more about how to do it? Well of course, there's my book, or you can watch or participate in the brandraising series of webinars I'm doing with NTEN. 

Here's to tasty peaches.

Until this month, we've used our monthly e-newsletter, NTEN Connect, to debut new content, typically publishing the 5-7 articles we've solicited all at once. While that gives us a nice traffic spike, it's a lot to drop on y'all in one day.

So, in the spirit of Holly's call for innovation, we're going to try something new. 

Each weekday, for the first couple of weeks of each month, we're going to post a guest article related to our monthly theme. This month, it's fundraising; next month, Tech Trends. At the end of the month, the articles you, the NTEN community, like the most -- as determined by time on page, pageviews (over the first few days), and social media mentions -- will be highlighted in the newsletter.

We're approaching 20,000 subscribers to NTEN connect, and the majority of them don't follow us on a daily basis. We hope that by crowdsourcing popularity and engagement, we'll be able to give them the articles they'll be most interested in reading, while giving you more time to absorb all of it. (Don't worry: we'll bump up the extras in the newsletter to keep you entertained, too. And we'll be sure to include all of the articles we've solicited, in some form -- because all of our authors deserve a read.)

If it doesn't work, hey! We'll go back to the old way -- or try to come up with something else. That's just how we roll.

It starts today with a piece by Mal Warwick on "Fundraising When Money Is Tight".

Mal Warwick, Mal Warwick Associates

Our economy is still in bad shape, and a growing number of economists is telling us that it may well get worse. So what can we fundraisers do to minimize the impact of this difficult period on our organizations, and at the same time maximize our income?

I suggest a cautious and balanced nine-step approach: 

1. Reassess the whole ball of wax: fundraising, marketing, communications

Now’s the time to take advantage of the opportunity to put in place an intensive evaluation process that will allow your fundraising, marketing, and communications programs to function at the highest degree of efficiency and effectiveness. Cut out any programs that aren’t advancing your mission.  

2. Strengthen your case for giving

Be certain your donors understand both the more urgent need for your services during tough times and the many concrete steps you’re taking to increase your efficiency and effectiveness.  

3. Stick with what works

If the decades-long experience of direct marketers has anything at all to teach the fundraising profession, it’s that different isn’t always better. An economic downturn does not justify throwing out what has worked in the past. In fact, it’s a time for caution and cost-cutting.  

4. Cut costs with a scalpel, not an ax

You can’t not raise funds. You can’t treat loyal and responsive donors like statistics. And you can’t stop building your donor database. If you do these things, your donor list will shrink through attrition, both natural and unnatural, and your income will slack off to a dribble. 

5. Fish where the big fish are

Focus more time, effort, and money on generous and responsive donors and less on less productive ones. If your organization has the habit of treating all your donors the same way, it’s time to examine how you can fine-tune your program with a well-considered segmentation plan.  

6. Stay close to your donors

At no time can a nonprofit organization operate as though its donors will continue giving no matter how they’re treated. During an economic downturn, it’s doubly urgent to hold your donors close to your chest, because it’s all too easy for a donor to lose a sense of connection with you.  

7. Get personal with your donors

If we have anything more than the most rudimentary of databases, we know how long our donors have been giving to us, how much they’ve given, and how frequently. Even if that’s all the information we integrate into our appeals, surely that’s got to do a better job of securing additional support than a crude “Dear Donor” letter or email! And since it’s so simple to gather even more personal information from at least some of our donors, what’s stopping us? Are we afraid of actually raising more money? 

8. Step up your efforts online

Online fundraising in and of itself does not represent the salvation of the nonprofit sector in a difficult economy, at least not in the short term. However, the online channel has multiple benefits for nonprofit fundraisers: attracting younger supporters, providing constituents with opportunities for participation in your work, and reinforcing appeals sent through other channels, to name just three. An enhanced investment in online communications will pay many dividends, reinforcing near-term fundraising efforts in the short term and laying the foundation for a more prosperous future. 

9. Break down the silos

Some minimal degree of centralized scheduling among all the people who are communicating with your donors — the online folks, the direct mail people, the marketing department, the planned giving office — would surely reduce donor attrition. That alone would be an accomplishment. But take the logic one step further, and you’ll realize that a truly integrated program of fundraising, marketing, and communications would boost revenue... even under the worst external conditions. 

Mal Warwick has been raising money professionally since 1979. This post is adapted from his nineteenth book, Fundraising When Money Is Tight: A Strategic and Practical Guide to Surviving Tough Times and Thriving in the Future, published last year by Jossey-Bass. Copyright © 2009 by Mal Warwick.

Flickr photo: Gilberto ViciedoIn her book "Zilch", Nancy Lublin recounts the time she was seated next to "The Donald" at a play. They had a little chit chat, which included Mr. Trump asking her, "Oh. So you're in the not-for-profit sector. You don't find that boring?"

I can now say from experience that Nancy Lublin is neither bored nor boring. (Seriously. When I met her, she was wearing a necklace made of plastic hula girls, and she WORKED it.) From what I know about you, you aren't either.

As Nancy points out in the book, it's hard to be bored when there's so darn much to do and so little time do it in and so little money to do it with. This is where innovation comes in. They say necessity is the mother of innovation -- and we know all about that in this sector.

We have a lot of work that NEEDS to get done. 

In many ways, technology and innovation go hand in hand, so it's a theme that we address here at NTEN on a regular basis. In fact, we had an Ask the Expert chat with Ed Happ on Monday about the future of nonprofits and technology. Many of the questions submitted by our listeners were about innovation: what it is, how to foster it, and what resources you need to make innovation happen. 

Ed's take was tweeted by Wendy Harman during the call:

Openness, humility, and tolerance for failure. These are themes Nancy echoes in the last chapter of "Zilch." When we talk about innovation, we often identify what we think we need to facilitate it in broad, sweeping terms like Ed's. That's exactly the right prescription. But how do we take the medicine?

Nancy gives us some concrete examples:

• "Create a Small, Crowded, Boundaryless Environment" and "Cross-Pollinate." Many nonprofits, NTEN included, work in small spaces with few walls. We stick people together in a small space, regardless of job function. These kinds of situations make it tough to talk on the phone sometimes, but when people -- especially people with different perspectives -- are stuck in the same 100 square feet together all day, they tend to get into each other's business in some rewarding ways. I would call this internal openness: setting up your organization to be open to other ideas.
• "Make Everyone Do Everything." If you put the database guy on the task of stuffing, sealing, and stamping that annual mailing, do you know what you get? A really efficient process! I bet that database guy will find the most precise way to position each element, the most precise hand movements, and the best way to run those envelopes through the sealing machine. When everyone has to get engaged in a variety of your organization's work, you get new ideas -- but you also get more invested staff, who better understand the larger context of their piece of the work. 
• "Stay Close to Your Target Market." It makes sense that if you serve a particular audience, you ought to be talking to them, and maybe even letting them design parts of your programs. You should at least be open enough to solicit their ideas, and maybe try them once in a while. At NTEN, we get some great ideas, and they usually come from our members. The sticker-trading game at the NTC? That was a member idea. Our roundtables for IT Staff, Communications folks, and Consultants? Also a member idea. Be humble enough to know that you don't know it all.
• "Outlaw the Words No and But." Or, as Beth Kanter likes to say, ask "Why Not?" instead of "Why?" Instead of simply saying no to a new idea, see what you can do with it. Maybe you don't have the time or resources to gamble on an entirely new endeavor, but maybe you can do a pilot project, or iterate something you're currently doing. If you can learn something from the process, it's worth a "Yes."

It's clear from our conversations with you that innovation is a struggle. What are you doing to make innovation happen at your organizations? Share your experiences and we'll send one lucky commenter my (slightly hilghlighted) copy of "Zilch!"

A monthly roundup of our favorite nonprofit tech resources. Read more posts on our blog.

1. HBR's Dan Pallotta thinks it's unethical that your organization doesn't spend more time and money on fundraising. Them's fightin' words to a lot of commenters.
2. We think it's unethical that this crazy yo-yo guy hasn't been worked into a fundraising campaign. He will seriously blow your mind. But we have to wonder what his parents think. Somebody find him a spokespinner job, quick!
3. A friend posted that yo-yo link to Facebook. Adina Levin thinks Facebook's not the best place for community organizers -- but it may depend on the community. If your community is into cat fashion shows, or any number of silly memes, you're golden. We have a way of finding each other.
4. For instance, we know a certain number of people will love this slideshow of hi-resolution space images. (They're quite spectacular.) Which people? Our people.
5. But you kind of have to wonder what will happen if everybody just starts listening to people they agree with. After all, if it's on the Internet, it must be true. Dahna Boyd has some thoughts.
6. Macrowikinomics.
7. Star Wars Cupcakes. We're not sure we could bring ourselves to eat these, they're so fantastic.
8. If you're looking for a new mass e-mail platform, you should check out Groundwire's precisely named "E-mail Service Provider Comparison Report 2010".
9. Wired recently declared that the Web is dead. We think they're getting ahead of themselves.
10. Regular readers of this space will know there's a growing consensus that technology is physically changing the ways our brains work. Fortunately, there's an easy way to reboot: get outside.
11. There are so many social media options these days, you may be feeling a little lost. Here's a map to help you find your way.
12. Finally, in the interest of making you feel good about the world, monkeys love kittens, too! (Also, how can you not want to visit a place called Monkey Forest?) Now, go forth and be productive!

If you're in charge of your organization's web analytics, you undoubtedly know about bounce rate -- the measure of visitors who enter your site, say "Enh" (or something ruder), and immediately leave, without viewing any more of your carefully crafted pages. Yeah, those people annoy me, too.

But unless you're a consultant working with several nonprofit clients, you're probably working in a vacuum: you know your own site's bounce rate, but you don't know how good it is compared to other sites.

I recently had the opportunity to see anayltics for more than a few other sites, including one with nearly 2,000,000 monthly visitors, and if those are any indication -- they were all above 71% -- your bounce rate isn't as bad as you think it is. But that's no reason not to keep improving! Around here, we operate under analytics guru Eric Peterson's definition of what your bounce rate should be: 10% better than it is now.

As luck would have it, there's an easy way you can use Google Analytics to simplify that job.

Let's dive in. You want to go to the "Top Content" report:

As you can see, in June, 2009, NTEN.org had an overall bounce rate of 61.29% -- from 5,280 viewed pages. That's too many to deal with, so we need to start filtering down. 

First, let's get rid of the blog pages. Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik has said you shouldn't consider blog pages as part of your main site when thinking about bounce rate, since it's the nature of the web for people to come read an article (linked to from elsewhere) and then leave. (That's not to say you shouldn't worry about your blog's bounce rate, but that's another topic entirely.)

You can use the quick filter at the bottom of the content report to get rid of the blog pages quickly. In our case, that reduces our page load by about 700:

That's still not nearly enough, so it's time to employ some advanced filtering. You can find the "Advanced Filter" link at the bottom of the content report. Click that, and then "Add new condition":

I've chosen to filter by "Pageviews", to find only the pages with more than 200 views, the pages we need to worry about the most. You should set your own metric based on your overall site traffic.

That's much better! It gets us down to 40 pages:

I can see there are some pages with "event" in the URL, though. I'd still consider those to be landing pages -- and temporary ones, at that -- so they may be something to work on separately, but for our purposes, I want to get rid of them by adding another filter:

Then, to find only those pages with poor bounce rate (I've gone with 45%"), add a 4th filter, this time using the "Bounce Rate" metric:

Ta da! We've found the 15 worst performing pages (with significant traffic) on NTEN.org:

Notice that these 15 pages represent 25% of our overall traffic. If we spend time working on these few pages and manage to improve the bounce rate significantly, it's going to impact the bounce rate for the entire site.

If this kind of stuff interests you, you might want to check out our upcoming webinar series on Web Analytics. 

Happy filtering!

William (Bill) Lester, NPOKI

It’s an old problem, made worse by the tantalizing potential that technology provides: how do you collect and aggregate quality data when you work in low resource areas?

Imagine this scenario:

So what do you do? How do you start to tackle this problem?

For the last 15 years or so, there have been many experiments using the tools of technology and new media to improve data collection. These efforts have met with mixed success. They include things like:

• Access/FileMaker databases on desktops or laptops
• PDAs
• Mobile phones
• Tablets/Touchscreen devices
• Scanners
• Wikis/Blogs
• Voice Recorders
• Email
• Floppy disks/CD-ROMs

Sometimes the problem is the technology -- or rather, inappropriate technology. Computers and phones require power, and whether batteries or electricity, if you don’t have it, you can’t work. Wikis and blogs require some writing skills (in addition to power).

Sometimes, the procedures aren’t right. For instance, if you don’t back up your data (seamlessly), you can easily lose all the work you’ve done. 

Sometimes the problem is training. Your staff need to be able to use the tools you give them comfortably.

Sometimes the problem is cultural. People can fear or mistrust or envy someone walking around with a laptop or a PDA.

Sometimes the environment is too harsh or too dangerous. There are bugs. (Literally!)

And sometimes the problem is something you never imagined.

A few things have changed for the better. Infrastructure has improved. The cost of some technology tools and solutions has gone down. More and more people are comfortable using the tools. Those of us who collect data in low resource areas continue to evaluate technology’s role in finding the proper solution(s) for collecting data.

If you look at the path that information must travel, there is a point where the tools that NGOs have used for data collection work well. As information moves up and down the highway, from headquarters to field offices to in-country partner organizations, to consultants, and volunteers, and to the general public or the clients or the project sites, there is a point where the structure breaks down. It’s often referred to as the “last mile”, but the term I prefer is the” Edge of Network”. That’s the point where you are dealing with people and forces outside of your area of comfort – the area that you cannot control.

My friend Damir Simunic of WA Research talks about the "principles of success on the edge”, and while he is addressing the problems of virtual collaboration, these rules apply to those of us who design technology solutions as well.

The first and foremost of these principles is SIMPLICITY.

The tools we use must be simple enough (limited features, limited points of failure, easy recovery) for the task of data collection. A check of a YES or NO box or an ON/OFF voice capture or a tap of a few keys on a keyboard or a finger on a touchscreen and you’re done!

The second of these principles is OWNERSHIP.

The users of the tools must feel as if they own the solution. Often, it’s as simple as branding. Sometimes, it’s having the solution use local languages or other appropriate cultural marks. Pictures or colors that evoke locality and ownership can help. The user must understand the importance of the role that s/he plays.

The third of these principles is BASIC TECHNOLOGY.

You need foolproof solutions that work. For instance, we like email and SMS. These text-based simple communications technologies require such basic resources, that they can be easily maintained. Building solutions upon basic technology improves the likeliness of success.

The last of these principles is TRAINING.

Basic comfort in the use of technology tools in general, and the solution you’re advocating in particular is a necessary part of success at the edge. Peer training is the ideal method, since it engenders trust between equals.

With these principles, you have the start of understanding how to solve the problems of data collection in low resource areas.

Efrat Ben-Dor Erez, NPTech Israel

Imagine a Jewish girl, selling Challah bread on a college campus in America to help support black Muslims in Darfur. This amazing project, initiated by Eli Winkelman, came to life with the help of PresenTense. PresenTense is an international nonprofit organization founded in 2006, which uses technology effectively to sustain its activities, functioning as a "start up incubator for social entrepreneurs". Their mission is to engage and inspire the most creative minds, investing their ideas and energy to revitalize the Jewish community and the world.  

So how does this "incubator" work?  

One of PresenTense's core activities is the Global Summer Institute, held in Jerusalem. The fellowship participants, who are carefully chosen, each bring an idea for a venture, such as the project "Bible Raps". At the institute, they are provided with practical tools that enable them to launch their ideas, receiving training on building a business plan, developing a strategy, budgeting for fundraising, planning communications, finding connections, and more. Each fellow is guided by a personal volunteer, mentor, and a coach, who are professionals in different fields.

There are 500 volunteers working for PresenTense each year, mainly from North America and Israel, but also from other places around the globe. PT currently has fellowships in Boston, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem -- and will be expanding next year to Europe and other cities in North America. 

With only 7 people working for them on a daily basis in Jerusalem, along with 1 in Tel Aviv and 3 in NY, they rely on technology to do the rest of the work.

Online Collaboration

PT used technology from day one, says Simi Hinden, the director of the online community. A print magazine is one of PT's main activities, providing an additional channel for the global community of young Jews to exchange ideas. 

"Google was our first office", Simi explains. They used Google docs to help share documents with the volunteers worldwide as they worked on the magazine. They also used wufoo.com, which helps create online forms, process applications for programs, manage magazine applications, subscriptions and more. 

CRM 

PT started using Salesforce.com in 2008, taking advantage of its free licenses for nonprofits. Salesforce helps manage PT's contacts, work flow, fellows and mentors tracking, magazine subscriptions, opportunities, and donations.

It was not used efficiently at the beginning. Today, Simi is the sole person is dedicated to customizing Salesforce. Although she doesn't have a strong technical background, she picks up things as she goes along. 

At one point, they considered using civiCRM, another CRM platform, designed for nonprofits, but they found it to be too basic for some of their needs, like managing and tracking all the different people and organizations with whom they are involved.

Social Media and the Concentration of Information  

Social Media helps PresenTense manage their big community: they use Facebook, twitter and Google Apps. These applications make it easy for PT to stay in touch and communicate with volunteers and fellows, announce events, seminars and more.

The down side is that it's easy to forget things using these applications, like finding an email from a person who agreed to become a volunteer, so it was decided to use something more solid. At this stage they met with Royi Biller, CEO of NPTech Israel, in Jerusalem, and with NPTech's assistance, began customizing Salesforce to their needs. Oded Segev, System Analyst at NPTech, guided Simi on how to customize Salesforce, but she does the work herself.

Simi says that one of the big advantages of using Salesforce is that "everyone is on the same page at the same time", all the information is in one place, and everyone knows where to update it.  

Managing Events 

In order to manage PT's events and track attendance, wufoo.com and Facebook are used. They integrate the information received from Wuffo into Salesforce, and the Wuffo form is embedded in PT's website. 

PT also broadcasts some of the events using livestream.com. Long videos are uploaded to Blip.tv, short videos to youTube, and pictures to Flicker.com. PT's web site is constantly updated, another way to keep in touch and inform people.  

At the seminars, the fellows participate in an intensive tech treating session, and are provided with tech tools to enhance their projects, like weebly.com, which provides a free tool for building basic web-sites.  

The Hub 

PresenTense has even created a live Hub. They describe the hub as a "physical and psychological space for innovators to build their ideas". It's actually a meeting place, located in the heart of Jerusalem's historic German Colony -- a place where people can come and work, enjoy free coffee and internet, make connections and exchange ideas, and enjoy PresenTenses' creative atmosphere and inspiration.

We remain inspired by them.

Matt Berg, Millenium Villages

I’ve been working or interested in the space of ICT for Development (ICT4D) for about a decade now. During this time, I’ve seen a lot of exciting changes, but nothing has been exciting or frankly paradigm shifting as the wide spread growth of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks and emergence of applications that leverage the now ubiquitous mobile phone to deliver services by leveraging their ability to deliver and collect data. 

Achieving limited scale, chasing sustainability 

Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester, and one of the premiere scholars in the ICT4D space, describes this shift aptly as a transition from ICT4D 1.0 to 2.0. According to Heeks, the field of ICT4D emerged really as an artifact of the telecenter model which was used successfully to extend basic ICT services at the periphery in North America and Europe.  

Starting in the mid-1990s, telecenters provided a relatively quick and measurable way (# computers bought, # people trained) to show change in access (digital divide) and capacity building (Microsoft UP).  Telecenters helped “prime the pump” in areas of ICT access market-failure.

They were also costly in that they pushed earlier and arguably more successful forms of ICT4D like community radio to the periphery, in an attempt to overcome the basic untenable economics of a rural telecenter, namely: 

The field became fixated on achieving two holy-grails, requisite in every proposal, but nearly always unattainable: sustainability and scalability.   

User fees -- necessary if you ever wished to achieve sustainability -- were always a struggle, as they often shut the desired audience out. At Geekcorps Mali, our approach was: through great engineering feats attempt to somehow lower the costs of access, while hopefully creating sustainable “business models” in the process. This resulted in us creating a “sneaker-net” approach to providing basic asynchronous ICT services to rural villages: a complete offline Wikipedia that fit on a CD-ROM, and severely restricted bandwidth throttling to allow community radios to access the Internet (via prepaid RBGAN) for $2-3 a day.  

While clever, our solutions could simply not overcome the maddening math nor achieve the requisite access levels to scale. Luckily, we, like all successful groups in the field, excelled at anecdotal evaluation. We knew that what we were doing was so hard, no one could produce consistently better results (that would make us look bad). Anecdotal evidence was not only accepted but encouraged by donors -- it was the only way we could make them look good!     

At the Millennium Villages Project, with the help of groups like Inveneo, we’ve been able to take advantage of the advent of low cost and low power computers, long range wifi-networks and, increasingly, GSM-based data to deliver ICT services in a much more affordable way. Sustainability is still a real challenge, but the cost to value ratio of a school computer lab is shrinking to the point where you are starting to see governments and local communities invest more on their own to promote ICT access. 

The revolution that has allowed ICT services to transition to a point of real uptake and impact -- or as Heeks describes, from a tool of development to a “platform for development” --is the mobile phone.  

Realizing Potential 

Mobile phones have made the uptake of ICT services achievable because they have become incredibly available. Mobile phones have gotten to a price point where even the most poor can afford them -- and GSM networks, financed a dollar at a time through prepaid scratch cards, are increasingly ubiquitous.   

Voice remains the killer app.

The ability to communicate freely connects families, strengthens social networks, reduces travel, overcomes illiteracy and provides safety. With voice, many solutions for issues like the “market price” problem can be human engineered, as that information is now only a phone call away to a trusted source in a bigger market. Access to voice has already had a transformative affect for much of the world’s poor and will only increase as the price of making a call decreases through price-wars and increased operator competition -- something we’re already starting to see play out in south-east Asia. 

Mobile phone based applications and service 

Mobile phones themselves are increasingly being used as a platform on top of which applications using SMS or EDGE/3G are being used to collect data and facilitate service delivery. More recently, I’ve been actively involved in the rapidly growing field of mHealth, where we focus the use of this platform on improving health. For now, my colleagues and I, along with groups like UNICEF and FrontlineSMS, have focused on applications in health that make clever use of SMS. This allows us to leverage basic phones that are already in most people’s pockets and work in environments where there is still no GSM data connectivity.   

I’ve been part of two particular SMS health projects that have convinced me of the viability of this approach.   

About a year ago in Kenya, we launched ChildCount+, which helps community health care workers register children under-5 and pregnant mothers in their communities and facilitates monitoring their health. Within three months of use, the CHW team was able to register 95% of the 10,000 children in their cluster and have been using the system to log over 30,000 routine nutrition screenings, detect approximately 3,000 cases of malaria and identify over 500 cases of of acute malnutrition.  

In Uganda, we worked with the ministry of health to convert the form, used for clinic based weekly disease reporting, to one that can be SMSed in. In the 180 clinics spanning two districts where the system has been tested, we’ve been getting roughly a 90% reporting rate. This has allowed the ministry not only to get an accurate view of levels of malaria, but also see where key drugs are out of stock. 

In ICT4D, where the direct beneficiaries were usually counted in the hundreds. The speed of uptake of these services and their seemingly replicable scale is really exciting and representative that real change is at hand. Reduced SMS cost and an increased shift to data should hopefully help to improve the viability of these services in the future.

A limiting factor, to scale up, will remain the local technical capacity to support and “own” these systems over time. 

To achieve this, it’s important first to ramp up efforts to strengthen university computer science departments. Second, it’s important to provide space for young programmers to hone their skills, develop their ideas and establish the relationships that will form the identify of a tech community.

It’s exciting to see that innovation labs like the iHub in Nairobi, Hive in Kampala and Limbe Labs in Cameroon are starting to emerge to address this need.

Please keep in mind 

Technology makes it increasingly easy to be removed from the field and practice “armchair development”. We also need to remember we are only creating tools for people to use to help create solutions to their problems.   

Fields like mHealth also suffers from “technocentricity”. Technologists and not health experts are still seen as primarily driving the field. The fact that I’m a respected figure in the mHealth community is testament to this.  

Finally, there is a growing of m-hype which we should be aware and cautious of.

The potential for mobile services, however, is undeniable and we will ultimately figure out the right mix.  The good news is that the math is finally starting to add up. 

Melissa Ulbricht, MobileActive.org

Two years ago, Bev Clark, the co-founder of Kubatana.net, was awarded a large grant in the Knight News Challenge for Freedom Fone, an open-source software platform for distributing news and information through interactive voice response (IVR) technology. 

Freedom Fone leverages audio as a mobile function using IVR, a technology that allows a system to detect voice and keyboard input. IVR allows a user to call, enter or say specific numbers, and listen to or contribute audio content. (You’ve likely encountered it when you call a customer service number and are prompted with instructions to press numbers for different issues or service departments.) 

Freedom Fone was officially launched in late February of this year and has since been downloaded about 200 times, said Amy Saunderson-Meyer of Freedom Fone. Since the launch, Freedom Fone has received about 100 inquiries from individuals and organizations interested in a broad spectrum of potential uses outside of news and information distribution. 

Freedom Fone in Tanzania and Ghana

Recently, Freedom Fone was adapted by two farm radio stations through the African Radio Research Initiative, a 42-month project, the aim of which was to assess the effectiveness and impact of farm radio in many parts of Africa. 

Freedom Fone was introduced at two radio stations: Radio Maria in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Volta Star radio in the Volta region of Ghana. Before the project, neither station had an existing IVR system in place and the primary feedback loop with listeners was through written letters.  

Bartholomew Sullivan, a regional ICT officer for AFRRI, and Farm Radio International had been in touch with Kubatana, the parent organization of Freedom Fone, in Zimbabwe and thought IVR technology could be used to improve programming at the stations by making the experience and content more interactive. 

“We’re looking for something that can enhance radio,” Sullivan says. “Because at this point for us, radio has been very effective in reaching people, but it’s not always the most effective for getting a feedback loop or making it interactive.” 

Capturing Voices from the Field in Tanzania

At Radio Maria, Sullivan and the group used the IVR very simply, almost as a “glorified voicemail service.” During the selected weekly program -- called Heka Heka Vijijini, which means "busy busy in the village" in Kiswahili -- broadcasters announced an upcoming competition that asked for “the best story of how you’re using the knowledge you’ve gained from this radio program in your life.” Listeners could call in to the radio station and leave a message on the IVR system. 

The station received “wonderful stories from the field,” lasting anywhere from 10 seconds to 3 minutes. They received a total of 2,499 calls to the hotline, with 1,448 unique callers during the month and a half that it was available.They also received a total of 297 SMS messages, which were usually requests for information or greetings. Many of the audio responses were later rebroadcast on the program. 

Making radio more accessible in Ghana

Where Radio Maria collected and re-broadcasted incoming voice content, Volta Star in Ghana focused on improving access to radio segments by posting outgoing content. Each one-hour segment was reduced to about 5 minutes and this audio summary was made available every week on the IVR system.  

When listeners called, they were able to choose their language. Sullivan said that this dual language ability increased the complexity of the Freedom Fone interface quite a bit.  

The listener could then choose a specific summary to listen to. They received a total of 4,503 calls to the “farmers fone” and 2,041 of these calls proceeded past the welcome message (meaning that the user accessed the information or left a voicemail). 

At Volta Star, a lot of people called, but a smaller percentage called on a regular basis, Sullivan said. One question Farm Radio International is currently looking into is what made these repeat users call again and again and really use the IVR. Sullivan suspects that it was because some people didn’t really know how to use the system; whereas an IVR system might be intuitive to some, many Radio Maria and Volta Star listeners are not as accustomed to the technology or the process.

Photo: Bart Sullivan 

What worked well (and why)

One benefit to Freedom Fone integration at an established radio station is the ability to promote the IVR service. At Radio Maria, the broadcasters relied on the large number of existing listeners to promote and explain the service, including the specific local numbers to call. The group created a special jingle and message to promote the competition. (Listen to the jingle here.)  

Another thing that Sullivan said worked well was the ability to set up multiple call-in numbers for each of the main local mobile providers in the region: Vodacom, Zain, and Tigo. This allowed listeners to call from their respective networks, making it cheaper.  The group used similar sounding numbers for each of the networks.

The participatory radio campaign approach was used to enhance existing systems, not add new content or processes to the farm radio stations. So, Sullivan and others were able to incorporate and adapt Freedom Fone to best match the needs and uses of the listeners.  

At the end of the day, it’s an open-source IVR platform that you can adapt to what your needs are, Sullivan said. “It’s very basic. You can nest menus. You can have a voicemail service.” 

A more general success for Freedom Fone is the ability to provide an alternative, mobile-based medium for news and information. Saunderson-Meyer said it “provides a particularly important alternative communication medium for community radio stations in Zimbabwe, as no community radio stations have received licences to operate.”  

Challenges and issues

The projects at Radio Maria and Volta Star (and specifically in regards to Freedom Fone) were not without challenges and issues, including reliable hardware, cost, human error, power, and training. 

One challenge is obtaining high-quality or dedicated hardware. In Tanzania, Sullivan bought a second-hand computer locally to host the Freedom Fone software. But he wouldn’t do this again. At the most crucial moment, Sullivan said, the hard drive didn’t work and the group lost several days of up-time because of the crash.  

Cost can be an issue with some hardware, but often there are alternatives. 

Human error is a challenge inherent with Freedom Fone, which ironically stems from the high adaptability of the platform and the ability to control many of the parameters of the IVR process. When adjusting the settings on the modem at the Radio Maria station, for example, Sullivan said he had turned up the amp to the highest level. This resulted in significant audio distortion because the responses were so loud. Because of this, the IVR system was not recognizing user input.  

Power is an issue, especially in areas with unreliable power because, “when the computer is off, then Freedom Fone is down,” Sullivan said. Similarly, infrastructure is really important, including having backup power supplies for power outages. 

Another issue to incorporating Freedom Fone is training local employees to continue to use the IVR technology after the project concludes, Sullivan said. 

“Working with their staff -- their technical team -- so that they really feel like they own the technology, is a challenge but it is definitely worth doing,” Sullivan said. “Because it means when something comes up they can handle it on their own.” 

Finally, another challenge with Freedom Fone was the ability to deal with user error or confusion. At Radio Maria, the group also used the IVR system to establish an SMS poll, asking listeners what they wanted to hear more about on the program. The radio station would broadcast the poll and the number and explain the process, such as “press 1 for maize,” “press 2 for chickens,” and “push 3 for other garden crops,” and so on.  

But many users had never completed an SMS poll before and were confused on how to submit a vote.  

“It’s a lot for people to remember over the radio if you’ve never done it,” Sullivan said, so some people would spell maize instead of pushing “1” for maize, or spell out the word “one” rather then sending the number 1, or mix up the order of things. These responses would not register in the Freedom Fone system as a vote and instead “would just sit there as an SMS.” 

Despite user and technical challenges, “people really like it,” Sullivan said. The station received well over 100 votes when the polls first opened up, and the responses helped to shape future broadcasts.  

Of Freedom Fone, Sullivan said, “they’ve got a really great idea but I think if it’s going to work with rural people, especially in a radio context, who don’t have a lot of experience with voting or using their SMS that way, it’s going to need some foolproof methods.”  

What’s ahead for Freedom Fone

Farm Radio International is currently analyzing results of the initiative and plans to publish a report this fall on the findings. The Volta Star IVR content is still accessible to listeners and the mobile competition at Radio Maria has since closed, but they are starting another deployment based on what they learned at Radio Maria and Volta Star. The project will be atRite FM, a radio station outside the greater Accra region in Ghana.  

Sullivan said he is interested in exploring different revenue models for Freedom Fone, including a subscription model. Currently, the caller incurs the costs in a typical IVR system, which usually amounts to the same prepaid deduction of making a phone call or sending an SMS.  Early on, Sullivan said, many didn’t think this was a good model, and that somehow people, especially rural farmers, wouldn’t spend money to interact with an IVR system.  

“But, turns out, they do,” Sullivan said. “People are willing to spend money on information that is important to them.” 

A potential future subscription model, for example, could allow a user to purchase prepaid airtime for unlimited monthly access. A subscriber’s number could then be added to a list, which IVR technology would identify as a “to call” list whenever there is pertinent information. Saunderson-Meyer said Freedom Fone version 2.5, which is due out this December, will include this call-back functionality.  

For now, simplicity is the goal for projects like Radio Maria that involve news and information distribution to rural populations. Simplicity is also important for other projects that do not involve long-term, on-site support from Freedom Fone or Farm Radio International. 

“We believe that voice is still the richest medium for getting information to rural people, and that’s why we chose the IVR. But the challenge is to also not cut out those people who are not super savy,” Sullivan said. “You’ve got to try and keep it as simple as possible.” 

MobileActive.org has also reviewed other IVR systems.

Debra Askanase, Community Organizer 2.0

In early August, NPTech launched Guidestar Israel. It took almost five years to make GuideStar Israel a reality, and it is an incredible resource for Israeli nonprofit organizations. The GuideStar project was established as an unique cooperative venture by the Ministry of Justice, JDC-Israel, and Yad Hanadiv with the objective of developing civil society in Israel.

NPTech (established by JDC-Israel and Yad Hanadiv) is the operating organization behind GuideStar Israel. It provides services and activities designed to help social organizations make information and communications technology (ICT) more accessible to social organizations to reach their goals. NPTech wants to create a "socio-technological market" in which different providers offer their products for social activity advancement, internet sites encourage social action, and social organizations use these products in accordance to their needs.

I had the opportunity to ask Royi Biller, CEO of NPTech, about why it was so important to bring GuideStar to Israel, how it could change the Israeli third sector, and upcoming NPTech initiatives.

What are the technology needs of Israeli nonprofit organizations? 

Our analysis and market research indicates that nonprofit organizations (at large) make use of the relatively simple tools the IT industry offers, especially with regards to organizational information systems. However, most nonprofit managers reported that they lack knowledge about the opportunities available to them, as well as available funding sources for such purposes. The role of CIO or CTO usually does not exist in most nonprofits, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is commonly not budgeted or planned ahead routinely.

Another phenomenon identified is typical to the Israeli market – the language barrier; there are far less tools and applications available in Hebrew then there are in English, and when it comes to specific applications for nonprofit needs there may be zero solutions available in Hebrew. Nonprofit managers have expressed a need for support from a trusted partner to help decision making and adoption processes of ICT tools in their organizations.

How do these needs compare with worldwide trends? 

Most of the findings are quite similar to the common challenges nonprofits face when trying to adopt technologies into their organizations. The only unique pattern was the language barrier and market size that are the main reasons for the shortage of Hebrew software tailored for nonprofit needs.

What is GuideStar Israel? 

GuideStar Israel is intended to be the main information website resource about nonprofit organizations in Israel. The website currently features mostly official information regarding all NPOs in Israel from the Registrar of NPOs. It is gradually being updated with additional richer and more "colorful" information provided by the NPOs themselves. This combination creates the most comprehensive and qualitative database of civil social organizations in Israel.

Why is it important to have a GuideStar Israel and offer this database of nonprofits? 

The goal in building this database is foremost to create public transparency regarding the conduct of nonprofit organizations in Israel. Anyone who has any interest in nonprofit organizations – donors, volunteers, suppliers and customers – may surf and find official information reported to the Registrar of NPOs regarding the conduct of each non-profit organization operating in Israel.

GuideStar itself operates from within and for the benefit of the third sector, out of the belief that public transparency is an important means for the development of this sector.We see great importance in providing "as is" information, without any judgment. We focus on providing surfers with maximum updated information, in a digital, accessible and convenient format for searching information about all active nonprofit organizations in Israel.

Just as important is the internet exposure offered to all nonprofit organizations operating in Israel, even to the smallest NPOs which have, thus far, not been able to exploit this medium.This exposure will encourage donors and volunteers, as well as cooperation between non-profit organizations with a view to reinforcing the third sector in Israel and making it more accessible for everyone.

How do you think GuideStar Israel will change nonprofit operations, organizations, or the way that Israelis (and others) perceive Israeli nonprofit organizations? 

We expect that the readily available information provided by GuideStar will help nonprofit organizations become more effective by making data-driven decisions, comparative analysis and sharing knowledge. We believe the public perception of the Israeli third sector will become more positive once each and every user will be able to easily determine whether an organization is being run properly, and that the “rotten apples” would be easier to distinguish from the legitimate majority. We expect to see more fact-based discussions taking place regarding nonprofit activities.

I know that NPTech is a TechSoup Global partner. What does that mean for Israeli NPOs?

We are in final stages of preparations for the launch of the software donation program in collaboration with TechSoup Global, which will enable eligible nonprofits to acquire state of the art software for a fraction of the cost. We intend to launch the program during the last quarter of 2010.

Royi Biller is the CEO of NPTech. Royi initiated the establishment of NPTech during his work as a Program Officer for Technology and Knowledge at Yad Hanadiv (the Rothschild Foundation). Royi is well versed in technology project management, relying on vast experience from his military service as an intelligence officer, his work as a Decision Support Systems engineer in Intel and his position in Yad Hanadiv.

Debra Askanase is the engagement strategist at Community Organizer 2.0, a social media strategic consulting firm to nonprofit organizations. Before founding Community Organizer 2.0, Debra worked for 20 years in nonprofit organizations in many positions, among them executive director, program director, fundraiser, and community organizer. You can connect with her on twitter @askdebra or at www.communityorganizer20.com.