My grandfather was a teamster–a team of horses teamster– in the teens and twenties in South Boston. When businesses adopted gas-powered delivery trucks, he stuck with his horses. As the adoption of automobiles became more widespread, Pop didn’t budge. He waited too long to make the transition to the new technology. When there was no call call for his skills, he spent the end of his working life in the stock room of the local grocery, no doubt pondering how a man in his 50’s ended up in a job populated by teenagers in search of walking around money.

Throughout 2008, I’ve been acting a lot like my grandfather when it comes to the rise of Social Media. As more and more nonprofits started asking us about Twitter and Facebook and Ning and such, we counseled them to wait and see what happens. We’d wave our hands and say “Focus on getting yourself to a stable and secure IT infrastructure, an easy-to-manage Web site, a CRM system, and a great email marketing service.”

That’s all still true. If you have inefficient, always-breaking-down systems, all the Twittering or Tweeting  in the world is not going to make your organization better. But, in the past four months or so, I think we’ve hit a critical mass. Your donors, volunteers, and–increasingly–some of the people you serve are using the Social Web. Right now, ignoring the Social Web is missing a big opportunity for extending your reach and depth of engagement. Soon, ignoring it will be like my gradfather’s horsebound intransigence.

So, I’ve been thinking about tomorrow’s Innovation Awards Luncheon as sort of like NPower Seattle’s Social Web coming out party. We’ve invited two of the leading thinkers about harnessing the power of the new social technologies–Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li–to speak to us all about this phenomenon. There are still seats available –join us for a couple of hours that will change the way you think about the Web.

As an aisde, I should mention that one of the Innovation Awards finalists, our friends over at the Washington Health Foundation, have been gearing up their use of “Web 2.0″ tools in the past few months.–with great results. A few members of the WHF team were planning on being in DC for the Inauguration last month, so they brought along some relatively inexpensive flip cameras. The results were quick and easy to produce, and pretty darn cool. Check it out at their Healthiest State blog.

Wow NTEN is just cranking out the great posts in preparation for the NTC conference in April. They have a follow up post to the one I commented about last week on technology & change. Seems the author of that post is co-presenting a sessions titled “Technology Ch-Ch-Ch-Change: Managing Technological Change in Your Organization“.   AND they’re coming out with a new book. You can check that out at the NTEN website, the contents look very interesting.

Their post, session & book re-iterate the need to get your staff on board with change and new technology. And I really liked that they pointed out that ROI (return on investment) doesn’t always cut it. Check it out!

NPower has been offering technology planning & advice to the Puget Sound nonprofit community for 10 years now. I’ve helped lots of nonprofit staff to use technology though our training program. It’s always a great experience for me to see one of my fellow nonprofit employees get how that particular program can actually make their job easier, increase their impact, etc. That’s when it stops being a barrier and starts being just another tool for them to use. And let’s face it, we use our technology in very innovative ways.

But then there are the times when it is a barrier. When nonprofit staff don’t get it, when they don’t use it effectively (or don’t use it at all!). Then, to me, it’s a shame. A waste of time and money because there wasn’t buy-in from everyone that that organization.

In one of our classes recently a student said that they didn’t get the tool we were training them on. And that as far as they could tell, it was only going to add to their work load. And in this particular case, it was pretty much true. But the value of that tool, what they could get out of it and the impact it could make, was exponential to the amount of work they would have to put in.

I was reminded of this recently by an excellent post on the NTEN site. Bev Magda, who is with the Humane Society of the US, was talking about managing technology change and how it effects people. Let’s face it, if you’re investing in technology; you want to get your money’s worth. I highly recommend reading this article if your nonprofit is even thinking about implementing either a strategic technology plan or new technology at your organization. She makes a lot of good points, points that we should always consider when it comes to technology change at our nonprofits.

You can check it out at the NTEN website.

Now in my job here at NPower, I have to update statistics for the training program all the time. Usually this involves numbers that I keep track of in one sheet but have a total linked to another. And I want to see how it effects the rest of that sheet.

Well up til now, that meant I had to open both of those sheets. Well the folks over at the Contextures Bloghad a great post about using “Workspaces” in Excel. This is a handy way of saying, “I want to open all these files at the same time and have them displayed this way”. It then creates a shortcut, so to speak, that allows you to do just that. How cool is that? Check it out the post here.

There is a lot of conversation lately about the tough economy, and how it is impacting nonprofits. One way that nonprofits can continue to further their mission is to ensure that their technology helps, rather than hinder. But with tight (and tightening) budgets, what should nonprofits do?

Many people are familiar with the Iron Triangle - that tangle of price, feature set and timeline. With an unlimited budget - you can control the other two (features and timeline). Or - if timeline is the most important thing - you might be able to control when you launch - but might launch with fewer features, or at a price which you find unattractive.

In our sector though - we know that almost all of our work is budget driven to a large degree. In some instances (such as hardware) - getting 75% of what you need my be crippling - you get a workstation without a monitor!

However - since both of the tools that we use here for websites and databases are feature rich out of the box - a budget driven approach can sometimes work to get you started. Here’s a quick description of different ways you can approach a technology project:

1. Budget driven. In this case – budget drives everything –so you have little control over desired features/design. This can work in environments where you are getting a package–because you have some assurance about what you’ll get. But it doesn’t help for customizations and so on – when those are unknown and your budget is the driver – you may not be able to afford those items.

Both Plone and Salesforce are feature rich, out of the box. If you can approach your project in phases, are willing to start with high priority features, and are confident that you can grow your technology budget - this can be an effective approach.

2. Needs driven. In this case, you invest in planning, because you want all of your needs met. Then you estimate the costs for all of those needs, and then you prioritize and find funding. This is nice because you let your actual needs dictate what you are going to get – but requires a bigger investment in planning up front. And you may or may not be successful finding donors to help support those needs!

Both Plone and Salesforce are highly customizable, but start with great out of the box features. If you prefer to start with knowing what is possible and then proceed with creating a plan to accommodate all of your needs, this is an excellent approach.

3. A blended model. That’s where you do a bit of both. This is attractive because your budget constraints are clear up front –but you also do enough planning that you avoid painting yourself into a corner. You still might not get all of your features, and you still might not know total costs – but you ought to finish with a working tool that sets you up for phase two when ready.

This balances the strengths and weaknesses of the first two models. It can provide some budgetary assurances, but also requires that both you and your vendor work diligently to share risk. The risk for you is that you run out of time/money/features, and the risk for your vendor is that they don’t feel successful implementing your project - because they have run out of time and money, too!

The folks at CreativeTechs, a design company here in Seattle, are offering a series of free Photoshop trainings over a 10 week period. Nothing like a quick 90 minute chunk of learning on various aspects of using this power house program.

They need a minimum of 1,000 people enrolled to make this happen so I encourage you to sign up! And did I mention it’s free???

I attended their InDesign CS4 webinar on moving around faster. It had some good information in it, I even picked up a thing or two that I had forgotten. They are also going to be offering this one again.

Check it out at http://creativetechs.com/tipsblog/

That’s right – Amazon has opened their tools to the public – and while we haven’t implemented for anyone – I’m glad. PayPal, Google Checkout, SkipJack, and others are terrific places to start. I often think that there are too many vendors in the nonprofit space – but in this case, I’m bullish because:

• Amazon has a very long track record with payment processing
• They have a terrific infrastructure – as a matter of fact – if you need server space – they have services you should check out
• Like Salesforce – they have a model which is open and encourages development and experimentation
• People are used to paying with Amazon

The details are important – you can read about their pricing structure and more – and you should! And I’ll let you know what we find out should we integrate with Salesforce, Plone or other tools!

My colleague Peg Giffels and I participated in the Pacific Northwest Digital Inclusion Summit held at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle  last week. It was a great day of knowledge-sharing and discussion hosted by the City of Seattle, Washington Communities Connect Network (CCN), and One Economy. I gave two back-to-back co-presentations that couldn’t have been more different.

The first was with Robert Bole, a driving force behind One Economy’s online media. We provided an overview of Web 2.0 concepts and tools and then, unintentionally, a sort of dueling banjos on the merits of various approaches to using social media. I felt little bit like Andy Rooney next to Rob’s great presentation of the benefits and upside of blogs and social networking and video-sharing. I found myself telling people “you can’t do it all,” “you should think before you dive in,” “don’t expect to increase donations two-fold.” This all seemed strange to me, because I thought going into the presentation that I might come off as hyping the technology. I’m a true believer in the possibilities presented by the Social Web. But next to Rob’s convincing evangelism, I felt like a plodding analyst with a lot of “on the one hand and on the other hand” stuff. Funny. 

The second presentation was about tech planning and nuts-and-bolts IT infrastructure with Derrick Hall from the City of Seattle’s Community Technology Program. Derrick does an amazing job of supporting all of the city’s public computers and providing technical advice to community technology learning programs throughout the area. Instead of alignment and engagemnt and messaging we talked about RAM and servers and firewalls. This was my change to be prescriptive and hyped up, while Derrick added the grounding balance.

I enjoyed both experiences and the strong feeling of shared purpose from presenters and audience participants. It was all over much too quickly. The city will be putting up all of the slides presented over the next few days on the Community Technology Program site, but you can grab mine right here: Web 2.0 Presentation | Wired/Tech Planning Presentation.

The folks at the Salesforce Foundation have posted a video regarding advanced reporting, and you can read about it and view it over on their website!

Some of the topics covered include: 

• Creating and customizing a report
• Filters
• Tabular, summary and matrix reports 
• Groupings and aggregations
• Dashboards
• Custom reports
• Managing your reports

Or – perhaps – the better question is:

Can you measure how you added value today?

For the last, oh, twenty five years or so, I’ve worked in places where more wasn’t better – not by a long shot (at least when you measure by sheer volume).

My first job, working with young people was terrific, and while I slowly grew a program – more wasn’t always better. Turns out – deeper relationships often trump lots of less significant ones.

My second job was working with adults with developmental disabilities. We had two houses, then three – and – that was about enough. Sure – we could have added a fourth, and then a fifth –but a part of the charm and ALL of the quality came from long term relationships, minimizing turnover, and the slow and steady joy of being with people for a long time.

My third job was working for a theatre company – and while a few more tickets sales would have been great – the size of the theatre is just perfect: No mics needed (most of the time), every seat in the house a good one – the audience and actors right up next to each other. “Growth” in terms of ticket sales? Bring it on! Donations? That too! Huge theatre? Not so much. At some point – quality suffers when the only metric is quantity.

Currently, I help nonprofits with technology. Some growth would be okay – but really – I could do a lot of smaller projects, more quickly –but I don’t know that we’d have much impact. Our most successful projects are more in depth than that – and if I grow my team too quickly – I think I might also loose the culture that has made us successful.

I’ve become a reader of The Economist of late, and this weekend, I spotted this quote (taken in context of the financial mess, but written in 1984 by James Tobin):

I [suspect] we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this ‘paper economy’, not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges…I fear that, as Keynes saw even in his day, the advantages of the liquidity and negotiability of financial instruments come at the cost of facilitating nth-degree speculation which is short-sighted and inefficient.

And that set me to thinking. What did I create today, at work?

In my line of work – I don’t create much. I’m a step away from that – but my team does a lot - they do some pretty terrific things. Code that makes a website render, tools that allow for automatic donation processing, strategy that helps customers better identify their audiences, a whole mess of migrating data from sloppy to structured, and much, much more.

I measure my days more in terms of if I’ve removed obstacles or not to that work. Some days – I’m pretty successful – and others – not so much.

All told, though – my day to day work IS about creation – when we’ve completed a project there is something to show for it – and I’ve helped, just a little. Helped my team, helped a local nonprofit, and helped the broader community because of it.