The Blog Stump

Josh Goodwin, from our DonorTec technology donation program in Australia www.donortec.com.au, recently asked our nonprofit organisation donation recipients to send in photos that captured what their organisation is about and he made it into a competition called ‘A Jpeg’s worth a thousand words’, for which entries are still pouring in. You can see some of them that Josh inserted into MS Movie Maker on YouTube at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Baa6mKletKg&feature=youtube_gdata .

I just thought you might like to share in the experience.

Do you have an idea for using government information that you’d love to have but you can’t get now? Would you like to win $5,000 for your favorite nonprofit? Well, all you have to do is come up with a
great idea for the nonprofit sector to use government information to make the world a better place. The contest details are below.
Who’s behind this? The Gov 2.0 Task Force, appointed by the Australian Government.
What’s Gov 2.0? It’s about governments being more open with information and using social media to communicate with the public, so they are more accountable.
So how does this contest work? The Taskforce will select the best idea(s) for using public sector information in a nonprofit/charity setting and award a cash donation of $5,000 to the charity/not-for-profit organisation of the winner’s choice.
What happens after that? The winner(s) (or their nominated not-for-profit organisation) will get help from Connecting Up Australia to scope their idea as a project proposal to the Taskforce.
What does that mean? It means that your idea may get funding from the Gov 2.0 Project Fund to be put into action.
How long have we got? You’ve got until Friday 30 October, so hurry. But don’t panic, you just need to generate the idea at this stage, but you’ll need to provide some broad details to allow the Task Force to make a decision.
What sort of government information are you talking about? Have a look here for some ideas of what’s already out there. But we’re really looking for great ideas about government information that the nonprofit sector could use to make a difference. We’ve also included a light-hearted example to kick-start your brain-storming but the only limit is your imagination.
What other smart ideas for Gov 2.0 have others thought of, just to get us started?  Check out some of these ideas  for a bit of inspiration
OK, we have an idea – how do we enter? Go to the Idea Scale site, sign up, and then submit your idea.
While you’re there, you can vote on other people’s ideas as well.
Don’t forget, the contest closes Friday 30 October, so get your skates on!

Well, Senator Conroy has finally unveiled his “Digital Economy Future Direction Paper” and (surprise, surprise) not a single mention of the nonprofit sector in 103 pages.

He calls this a ‘roadmap for Australia’s Digital Economy Future’ but for the nonprofit and charity sector it’s simply a dry gulch. In over 100 pages the nonprofit sector, employer of over 600,000 Australians, gets not a single mention. We can only assume that Senator Conroy and the Government don’t regard Australia’s 700,000 nonprofits, of whom 35,000 are employers, as worthy of any consideration.

We see digital capacity programs for government, for business, for education and seemingly every other interest group and no doubt all very worthy. We see $43b to build a national broadband network. But we don’t see a single cent for a sector that accounts for over 3% of Australia’s GDP. Before the last election Senator Conroy told the nonprofit sector he supported their technology aspirations. Instead we have seen this Government systematically disengage itself from the sector from the moment it came to power and that’s simply not good enough.

These are the organisations that care for children, support the unemployed, look after the aged, protect the environment, run thousands of sports clubs and offer services in all the other areas that hold our society together. When volunteer hours are included, they contribute more to Australia’s GDP than the mining industry. Yet the Government obviously sees them as totally unworthy of participating in the digital revolution.

Not that they’ve bothered to tell anyone about it but last year’s Senate Committee Inquiry into the Disclosure regimes for charities and not-for-profit organisations has finally received a response from the Government on its recommendations. Well, if you can call a skew-whiff, photocopied table a response. But hold the fanfare. About the only things the Government have made any definitive statements on are the idea of cleaning up the description of the size of orgs in the sector (oh, still my beating heart) and kyboshing any notion of a Minister for the Third Sector (damn, I was sure Julia would want another portfolio).

Everything else has been referred or deferred to the Henry taxation review, the Productivity Commission inquiry into the sector, and the Council of Australian Government’s Business Regulation and Competition Working Group (COAG BRCWG - now there’s a set of acronyms to roll off the tongue), which has apparently included regulatory reform of the third sector as part of its 2009 work plan.

And we are assured there will be extensive consultations during the deliberations of these august bodies. One can only hope their budgets extend beyond visiting the mainland east coast exclusively as occurred with the Senate Inquiry. Surely they will, won’t they?

In the meantime it appears its business as usual for the foreseeable future.

It’s been fascinating watching the various reactions to the launch of All For Good , a nonprofit sector initiative that seems to closely parallel the Obama adminstrations’s United We Serve program. It’s attracted some very heavy hitters, including Google, Facebook, Craig’s List and many more. The intention is that: “All for Good helps people instantly find simple ways to get involved in their community, from being a mentor to helping design a website for a nonprofit. The platform also lets people sign in with services like Facebook or Google to share volunteer activities with friends across social networking services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others. “

Now who could possibly want to criticise something as wholesome as that? Well, quite a few people actually, including Peter Deitz from Social Actions, who addressed Connecting Up 09 recently, and Volunteer Match.

It’s not the first, or last, time a seemingly well-intentioned initiative has rolled over the top of existing services, especially when the initiators have broader agendas. Stand by for the launch of ROSTI (’Round Object to Support Transport’ Initiative), aka the re-invention of the wheel.

Good morning! My name is Doug Jacquier and I am the CEO of Connecting Up Australia. It’s great to be here in Sydney and may I personally welcome all our delegates, speakers and sponsors, especially those who’ve travelled great distances and invested precious time and money to be here.

For those of you attending Connecting Up for the first time, here’s some brief background. Our nonprofit organisation, CISA Inc, now trading as Connecting Up Australia, has been operating for over 28 years and over the past six years we have been expanding our national profile in bringing information about technology to Australian nonprofits. Some of you will be familiar with our web-based ICT Resources, which you can link to simply at ConnectingUp.org where we will have podcasts, videocasts, photos and follow up from this conference.

And of course we hope that everyone here is aware of our DonorTec and TechSoup New Zealand technology donations programs, which we operate in partnership with US nonprofit TechSoup Global, bringing technology donations from global and local IT companies worth over $40m to over 3,000 Australian and New Zealand nonprofits in the past two years.

This is the sixth annual Connecting Up conference and the second we have conducted outside Adelaide, as part of our continuing commitment to a national profile. For the past three years we’ve added the Australian Community ICT Awards to the conference program and we’re delighted to see the number of entries double this year.

Last year we were delighted to see broadband emerge as a key Federal election issue and we awaited with great interest the universal roll-out promised. As you all know, we’re still waiting but at least the National Broadband Network is now a funded plan, albeit with a less than satisfactory outcome for those in regional and remote areas.

On the optimistic assumption that we will eventually be ‘Online and Off to the Future’ via something other than the current fraudband, this year’s program continues to be heavily weighted towards asking whether we are there yet when it comes to Web 2.0 or the social web.

I note in passing here that for the first time ever we have not had a single dollar of support from either the Federal or State Government for this year’s conference. We’ve had a Senate inquiry into regulating the sector, there’s the Henry review under way into the sector’s tax arrangements and now the Productivity Commission is reviewing whether the Federal Government is getting sufficient bang for is buck from the sector. In amongst all that, a select group of not-for-profit agencies is negotiating a proposed Compact with the Government on our behalf. I encourage all organisations to have their say in these various processes.

The bottom line out of all of that is that if you are waiting for governments to help you develop your capacity then your funding strategy may as well consist of buying lottery tickets.

Couple that with the greatest economic crisis we have faced since the Depression, created by the greed of those least likely to want to pay their taxes, to say we have a challenge before us goes beyond the level of understatement.

So what can we do, especially when it comes to looking towards what technology might have to offer?

I’ve recently returned from visiting a number of nonprofits and companies serving nonprofits in the US and Canada, courtesy of funding from Equity Trustees, and I want to share with you some of the insights I gained there. I am doing so because I think it is likely that the trends we are seeing there will rapidly evolve here.

The headlines for me read something like:

1. We have to face a future where Software as a Service and cloud computing, where applications sit on someone else’s server rather than in your office, will become increasingly prevalent. This will bring with it dilemmas of trust and privacy protection that will challenge the very foundations of what we understand to be the internet.

2. Online fundraising and campaigning will continue to grow in importance. If there was ever any doubt about that, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign finished that debate forever

3. We need to become skilled purveyors of social web technologies and to employ and upskill accordingly.

4. Organisations can no longer rely on the support of passive lists of supporters and donors. They will need to create and nurture a genuine community of supporters, which will open them up to being ‘steered’ in directions they may never have imagined and which may be disruptive to their thinking.

5. We will need to build alliances with like-minded nonprofits and with business, rather than looking to governments for support.

6. The Boards and staff will need to broaden their vision of the possible and become far more entrepreneurial in their activities. Simply having a good cause will be far from enough.

7. We need to find ways to be constantly noticed and quoted in decision making circles and challenging to the status quo.

8. We need to get a whole lot better at assessing ROI, especially when it comes to measuring actual behavioural change from our interventions and providing tangible evidence of our value.

OK, so what does that all mean in practice? Let me share some of the goodies I brought back in my showbag. (The links to these will be posted on the conference website.)

www.good2gether.com A connect to cause widget that links media stories to relevant nonprofits in the local area

 

MaRS www.marsdd.com in Toronto, Canada, is a multi-disciplinary innovation centre housing innovation projects in health, technology, education, transport, finance etc, as well as social innovation.

Center for Social Innovation  http://www.socialinnovation.ca/about

This social entrepreneurship incubation centre houses literally dozens of ventures and provides hot-desking and meeting facilities for a myriad of smaller operations. It has multiple funding sources and makes a modest surplus for re-investing in the sector.

Canada Helps - Toronto

Canada Helps www.canadahelps.org , who are the local equivalent of Network for Good in the US, in that they are a charitable giving portal. They have some 84,000 charities listed and around 6,000 are registered to access their services.

Scott Case, Chair and CEO, Malaria No More   www.malarianomore.org    , and Chair, Network for Good www.networkforgood.org  - New York

Essentially Malaria No More’s objective is simply that, eradication of malaria as a disease affecting humans, which is achievable with current knowledge. Their biggest hurdles initially were setting the right ambition (measurable goal) and dealing with widespread ignorance of the issue, especially since it mainly occurs out of sight in Africa and Asia. They have had to engage heavily with key players in the medical, government and corporate fields, as well as actively fund-raising..

Two key take-aways from our discussion were:

-         Your web presence needs to be handled by a dedicate full-time ‘evangelist’ for your cause who is expert in social web strategies (not necessarily the technology behind them) and someone who can marshal a small army of similarly dedicated volunteers to help spread the word through their online networks e.g Facebook.

-         All nonprofits (and indeed the sector overall) need to be researching their effectiveness (not efficiency), not just because that’s what funders want to see but because it is our responsibility to ensure we are not just creating feel-good jobs but actually making a difference.

 

Allison Fine, Senior Fellow at Demos www.demos.org  - New York

Demos is a non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization founded in 2000. Allison’s work concentrates principally on building value through social networks . She is the author of Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age and she is working on a new book with Beth Kanter.

She believes strongly in the need for greater accountability and transparency in the nonprofit sector and, like Scott, wants to see more concentration on measuring effectiveness. She also advocates the employment of staff with highly developed networking skills and, sees the need for a dedicated social media coordinator to ensure the ‘weaving’ of organisations’ strategies into the broader sector’s collective efforts.

 

While we’re discussing the web’s ability to in fact enhance, rather than detract from, face to face local action, check out Meetup http://www.meetup.com/about/ as a tool to assist in this process.

 

 

Jonathon Peizer, President, Internaut Consulting  www.internautconsulting.com  , Chair of AspirationTech http://www.aspirationtech.org/  and one-man band behind  Capaciteria www.capaciteria.org  - New York

Capaciteria is Jonathon’s heroic attempt to pull together the most comprehensive resource directory possible for the US nonprofit sector and he has done a magnificent job of encouraging others to constantly add to it to lighten his load. 

 

www.missionfish.org  - Washington DC

MisisionFish vetts charities for ebay in US and UK  and we’re discussing bringing this to Australia.

 

Ilive.at  www.Ilive.at – Washington DC

How neighbourhood maps should be.

 

SXSW (South By South West) Interactive conference – Austin, Texas

For anyone interested in social media and the breadth of what’s on offer this is simply breathtaking, if not a little intimidating.  http://sxsw.com/interactive/talks/schedule .

 

 

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/ Part technology guide, part productivity tool, Lifehacker aims to help you organise your workday and maximise your playtime.

  

The Future of Social Networks – Charlene Li – Thought Leader (now there’s a title) – Altimeter Group

Her paradigm is that in the future social networks will be like air. (Clouds and vapour kept springing to mind.) Essentially her thesis is that the future social web will centre on the individual, via something like Open ID, which will pull together all the various versions of ‘you’, which will be shared on a ‘need to know’ basis that you will control. She argues for a new social algorithm, mediated by levels of closeness and permissions. The most worrying aspect of this model is that she argues that ultimately we have no choice but to subscribe to ‘In Google We Trust’ as the search platform for this Brave New personalised World and it will happen because it will be driven by money. Yikes!

 

Social Media Nonprofit Return On Investment (ROI) Poetry Slam

Highly entertaining and instructive panel exercise on how to measure ROI on social web-based campaigns, based on nonprofit case studies, and judged by an expert panel, and all done in poetic form. The most original and effective workshops I’ve been to in many a year and achieved in the graveyard shift of 5pm. Chaired by Beth Kanter in grand form and case studies from Danielle Brigida - National Wildlife Federation, Wendy Harman - American Red Cross - National Headquarters, Carie Lewis - The Humane Society of the United States, and David Neff - American Cancer Society. Some brief notes from Carie’s presentation should suffice here:

-      An email address is worth $3 p.a. to a fundraising org

-      Therefore building long term loyalty is the ultimate measure of the success of a campaign.

-      They set up systems to track from contact through to donation.

-      They raised $650,000 from one campaign alone that used social media exclusively.

Key measurement tools used by all included Technorati, Radiant 6, Feedburner, and blog back-end tools. New social media sharing application to me: Utterli http://www.utterli.com/u/get_started

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business – Jeff Howe – Wired Magazine

Author of the book Crowdsourcing. He described how ‘amateurs’ have fuelled crowdsourcing and described phenomena like:

http://www.istockphoto.com , with some ‘amateurs’ making up to $20,000 per month

www.ebird.org.au which has revolutionized ornithology

http://www.innocentive.com/ which outsources scientific problem solving to the crowd, with a 30% success rate. Best insight of the session: the person furthest removed from the expert area is the most likely to crack the problem.

www.threadless.com where T-shirt designs are submitted, voted on, and then made available for sale if chosen

 

How Social Networks Are Killing the Revolution – Panel

• Steve Swedler - Gangplank
• Jeremy Tanner - @Penguin
• Todd Huffman - BIL Conference
• Shannon Paul - Detroit Red Wings (professional hockey team)

At last, I thought, some dissenters, but relatively tame in the end. They defined ‘the revolution’ as changing actual behaviours rather than just building lists. They say simple Facebook, Twwitter etc numbers don’t necessarily translate to action because:

-         It provides a false majority view, though sampling bias

-         It simply creates bigger silos of people who already agree with each other

-         It generates noise vs action

 

They noted that the Obama campaign brought people to the internet for the first time so they could help, not that the internet caused them to help. They warned in this context that the digital divide is far from closed, even in the US, and the internet is no different in that on the net some people are still more equal than others.

Their recommendations:

-         Base your position on facts and information, not emotions

-         Use feedback effectively, especially when it contradicts your view

-         Keep a retro view of social networks in mind i.e. think real people doing real things – break the loop of mere conversation

-         Use mobile applications

-         Make the message actionable

-         Make the intermediate steps transparent

 

Elisa Camahart Page – CEO and co-founder of BlogHer Inc

 

Elisa’s thesis is that blogs are mainstream, addictive and trusted. In fact more people are reading blogs than are downloading music and this has caused a measurable timeshift in the way people are using their reading/viewing time (at least in the US). Despite this, non-blog-readers remain generally distrustful of blogs. Obviously her examples come from their research on the perspective of women but she believes the following applies generally i.e. that blogs are changing the way people deal with life’s pressures and challenges. She also believes it will change the way history is written because now the lives of ordinary people are there to be mined for their experience of events.

  

Using Social Media to Accelerate Sustainability

Panel:

• Emily Gertz - Change.org
• Jon Lebkowsky - Social Web Strategies
• John McElhenney - Clear Green Technologies
• Rob Reed - Max Gladwell

Their starting point is that sustainability depends on knowledge being facilitated by social media and gave the following examples:

WorldChanging http://www.worldchanging.com/

350 campaign http://www.350.org/

Bright Green Living Wiki http://www.socialtext.net/brightgreen/index.cgi

My Herefordshire http://www.myherefordshire.com/

World Date Center for Climate http://www.mad.zmaw.de/wdc-for-climate/

Sustainable South Bronx http://www.ssbx.org/

Max Gladwell http://www.maxgladwell.com/

All powerful stuff on saving the planet.

John Kenyon

The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving’s “Strategic Technology Program” that he will be doing the workshops for this year: http://cli.gs/P6ZRz1  Under this program, nonprofits can get grants of up to $25,000 to have opportunity to participate in a Technology Strategies for Nonprofit Leaders workshop , have support from a Technology Circuit Rider/Technology Consultant to develop of a technology plan, and then be eligible to apply for a Strategic Technology Grant for technology needs established in the plan.

 

 

All exciting stuff, to be sure, but just more noise if it doesn’t lead to action. So what is Connecting Up Australia going to do to adapt to these trends?

 

For starters we’ve already begun to re-vamp our web presence to make it much more your space than ours and to provide opportunities for you to create an online forum for networking, have a go with tools such as flickr (to share photos), blogs (to listen to and share ideas, information and have conversations), you tube channel – to share your stories – what your organisation is doing and online communities to create your own group with a common interest e.g. Web fundraising OR regional youth services or, or or. Each group can email members, has an rss feed to alert members of new entries, has a blog to post ideas, conversation etc.

 

We’ve just completed our second national survey of how nonprofits are using technology and you can download the reports and use Are We There Yet? online benchmarking tool.

 

We’ve been a sponsor for Genevieve Bell’s Adelaide Thinker in Residence project and we’ll be sharing her anthropologist’s view of web technologies in the near future.

 

We’re investing significantly in a comprehensive online listing of nonprofit organisations and their resourcing organisations and ensuring its accessibility to an increasingly mapped and mobile world and to the social web’s rapid evolution. This includes working with Google.

 

We’re re-vamping our websites to make them inviting centres of ongoing dialogue and thinking User Generated Content (UGC).

 

We’re upgrading our skills in web usability, especially in mobile contexts

 

We’re drawing on the considerable experience held within TechSoup Global in developing powerful online communities, including recruiting highly skilled volunteer moderators.

 

We’ll become a high level adopter of Community First, a set of aggregation tools being pioneered at TechSoup Canada . This tool is an online social network, which acts as a de facto RSS feed of everything TSG is doing online (from YouTube channel, Friend feeds to Facebook to Flickr to Second Life to Twitter etc).

 

We’ll be encouraging greater involvement from Australia and New Zealand developers in the NetSquared conference and the various Challenge programs leading up to it. This could include scholarships to attend the conference and/or a mini-Challenge series here leading up to the ‘main event’.

 

We’ll continue to grow the technology donation program in Australia and NZ and develop a strategy for engaging and supporting nonprofits in Pacific nations such as Fiji, the Solomons, Papua New Guinea etc

 

We’ll serve up more greens. We’ll be sourcing and offering environmentally responsible and sustainable goods and services suitable to the sector (as well as get our green act together internally).

 

The theme for all these moves is to listen and to build our community with you together. You will be shaping our future. You will be designing the next Conference. You will be driving the agenda on what information is important to you and your organisation. And you will be the ultimate arbiter of whether there is a place for us in your increasingly overloaded information world.

 

We don’t intend to fail you and if we do it won’t be for the want of trying.

 

Thank you

 

PDF download of this speech available.

Alright, you not-for-profit lot, the world’s about to find out just how productive you are. The Productivity Commission is about to run the rule over us via an inquiry into The Contribution of the Nonprofit Sector . (Ironically, the scheduled consultations and discussion paper promised for March have unproductively yet to appear but I’m sure they’re working on it.)

To quote: ” The study’s focus is on:

• improving the measurement of the sector’s contributions
• removing obstacles to maximising its contributions to society

and will take into account “the findings of the Government’s Taxation Review headed by Dr Ken Henry and the Inquiry into the Definition of Charities and Related Organisations (2001).”  Strangely, there’s no mention of the Senate’s recent inquiry into the regulation of the sector and its recommendations.

Check it out and register for updates. This could be interesting, to say the least.

It’s always good to see the rise of another media outlet for our sector and we wish the Third Sector Magazine well, especially when they give us this wonderful coverage.

http://www.thirdsectormagazine.com.au/editions/tsm_jan09_web.pdf

In October 2008, we invited Australian charities and nonprofits to take part in a survey similar to one we conducted as a part of the NNIC project in 2006. Once again we had a fantastic response, with over 1,000 organisations of all sizes and from all over Australia logging on to record their information. A very special thank you to all of those who took time out of your busy working lives to complete the survey. And once again it was a pleasure to work with Digital Business Insights and utilize their survey methodologies and benchmark tools.

 Briefly, the survey has found that Australia’s charities and nonprofit organisations are missing out on opportunities presented by the social web and are unhappy with software that does not meet their needs. Those that have  embraced the digital future are experiencing gains in productivity but some still face major challenges.

Those organisations who are ‘ahead of the game’ are using online banking and purchasing more than they were two years ago when we last surveyed. They are also taking up internet-based phone systems, raising more funds online, and adopting some new software. However, they are not moving towards improved Customer/Member Relationship Management (CRM) systems or significantly participating in the ‘social web’ revolution via sites such as Facebook, blogs, RSS feeds, and mobile technologies. This is worrying because it risks not engaging the next generation of donors, volunteers, employees, sponsors and supporters.

Those ‘behind the game’ seem content to stay there and deliver ‘business as usual’. While that may be appropriate in some specialised circumstances, the increasing trend toward lower levels of support from government and increasing reliance on public fund-raising, corporate sponsorship, and private philanthropy will mean these organisations will find it increasingly difficult to get on anyone’s radar when they need support.

 The survey outcomes throw out a real challenge to software developers in that charities and nonprofits are between two and four times more likely than other sectors of the economy to conclude that the software they have does not meet their needs. However the most worrying result from this survey is that despite the sector spending up to an estimated $500m annually on technology, three out of five charities and nonprofits are not spending a cent on technology-related training.

 We’d now like to invite you to:

1.      Download the two parts of the Report – one from Digital Business Insights reporting the main survey data and providing some excellent case studies on technology implementation,  and one from us here at Connecting Up Australia that provides some analysis of the outcomes and some recommendations for the future. Visit here to access the reports  http://www.connectingup.org/NFPtechnologysurvey2008

2.       The data from the survey has also been fed into a terrific new service we are offering Australia’s nonprofits – Are We There Yet? (or AWTY  for short) . AWTY is an online tool that allows you to benchmark your technology capacity against similar Australian nonprofits of your size and in your specialised area of service . This in turn makes the benchmark data even richer over time, as more organisations participate. Give AWTY a try at http://www.db-insights.net/

Contact details for feedback are at http://www.connectingup.org/NFPtechnologysurvey2008  or simply comment on this post.

At a time when we are already seeing people laid off around the country, it has struck me as bizarre that this also includes those in nonprofits and charities. If ever there was a time to be stimulating this sector, it is now. Having no sooner thought that than I came across a recent article from the Brookings Institute, ‘Don’t Forget the Human Infrastructure’, which urges President-elect Obama to include the sector in any economic stimulus package. Sure, it’s American in its focus but the essential arguments are sound and I hope Kevin and Wayne get the message.