The Tactical Technology Collective is a nonprofit based in Amsterdam that has been doing great work distributing Free/Open Source technology to the global NGO sector.
This morning I was reminded (via Worldchanging) that they are working on creating several different “best of” software compliations for NGOs– kind of like that lovely old mixtape you have in your car, except with encryption tools, spyware tools and Firefox, among many others. And better liner notes. The first to be released was the “Security Edition” last October (which I suppose is, um, not to be confused with the ubiquitous AOL Security Edition discs at the grocery store).
The security version of NGO-in-a-box … is aimed predominantly at human rights, anti-corruption, and womens groups, independent media and journalists. Its purpose is to help these groups, and those who work as trainers and technical support with these groups, to orient themselves with the kinds of security and protection tools they could use and the ability to easily access and try them out. This boxset is made of three CDs and printed manual.
One of the most important parts of the CDs is the documentation, which somes in English, Spanish, French, Russian and Arabic. (Unfortunately a lot of the software only comes in English.)
It came as some surprise to me that the Security edition comes with a collection of FOSS applications that are designed to run on Windows (TM)(!). I think the decison to run on a closed platform (instead of Linux) was rather unfortunate … and unfortunately necessary for now. This CD provides a lot of great tools for NGOs at zero cost — and very few of the Tacitcal Tech’s audience is up and running with an Open platform on all of their machines. I hope, of course, that this won’t be the rule for future releases, but for now it seems pragmatic.
I’m looking forward to their future releases of a “Base Edition” “Advocacy Edition,” and especially the “Open Publishing Edition” (they’re only a few months behind schedule …)
Also worth noting: the Tactical Technology Collective is also a great proponent of the E-Riders philosophy + practice. They have a great page about eriding, and will be releasing a new white paper on the subject sometime soon. There is also a good website about E-Riding at http://www.eriders.net/ … it’s really too bad their blog has been dead all year!
The Committee to Protect Bloggers is shutting down! Can anyone help?
If you are an individual or a company with sufficient funds to sponsor the Committee’s activities for a year, please contact committeetoprotectbloggers(at)gmail(dot)com.
Website: http://committeetoprotectbloggers.civiblog.org/
The CPB has long been (um, in internet terms, I mean, that being all of 2005) a great resource for finding information about “blogging under fire.” From their website, the CPB has several main purposes:
1.) A clearinghouse for information on incarcerated members of our community, as well as those whose lives have been taken from them because of their enthusiasm for the free exchange of information that blogging allows.
2.) A pressure group to force governments to free imprisoned bloggers, and make restitution for tortured and murdered ones.
3.) CPB will bring to bear the formidable communicative power of the blogosphere to keep pressure on governments to stop arresting and abusing bloggers and to mitigate or reverse measures designed to restrict speech.
4.) CPB will act as direct agents in negotiations to free imprisoned bloggers.
If you are interested and able, please visit their site or email them.
(FYI. I have no connection to CPB)
The concept of eRiders is deceptively simple: people with lots of tech skills don’t need to be on the staff of every NGO or nonprofit, they can “ride” a circut of folks that they help. This idea is being presented at WSIS this week, and I think it is an incredibly powerful idea that will be used increasingly around the world.
TUNIS, Tunisia — One of the focuses of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process has been on the cross-cutting nature of technology, and how it can act as an enabler of other development objectives.
Civil society has always had a significant part to play in development objectives and achieving the . Except for a few notable examples though, civil society has not fully embraced technology in its development work.
In a workshop session on eRiders at WSIS, Toni Eliasz from Ungana-Afrika today presented a “replicable and low cost ICT capacity building and support model” uniquely suited to enabling technology within this under-resourced sector.
He presented eRiders as an ICT consultancy solution for small, mission-focused NGOs which can’t afford a full-time technology support person.
eRiders are consultants that work with a group of development organisations concurrently. They are motivated by the development objectives of the organisations they work with, but their focus is on helping these organisations employ technology to achieve their missions.
Although eRiders perform a number of technical functions, one of their key functions is demystifying technology and making the concepts accessible.
Initially, an eRider\’s focus will be on smoothening normal operational activities within an organisation. As the relationship develops, the eRider will encourage a more strategic approach to technology, and new program delivery innovations may become available through technology.
Internet & ICTs for Social Justice and Development News - APC
If you need a free place to host your website, make sure you check out AmbitiousLemon. They look very good at what they do; they at least have a very capable open source software setup on their server, with Ruby On Rails, PHP, Perl, Apache etc. :
We are not a company. Our aim is not profit. We are a handful of computer enthusiasts dedicated to building a free web hosting service where our emphasis is the community we host rather than our own financial gain. You have the talent, the content, and the desire to share it with the world. We are the means to that end.
If you are a nonprofit that needs discounted web design, then visit, nonprofitdesign.org (which I run, in addition to this site.)
Here’s a link to a nice comparison of Google Scholar and Scrius. It points out that Google Scholar has become neglected and is no longer updated regularly. This is a super-unfortunate development; Google is the web’s best hope for easy, inexpensive archiving of scholarly research. (In other news, however, Amazon is now offering scholarly articles for a fee. It’s easy — they’re delivered electronically, but they aren’t cheap — about $5.00 per article.)
Here’s the link to the Google article:
Scholarly Web Searching: Google Scholar and Scirus
Evaluation is an important, albeit rarefied, science of promoting nonprofit organizations. Do you need to measure the effectiveness of a specific program — or your entire organization? Well, there’s an entire discipline devoted to helping you do just that.
Unfortunately, as with most rarefied, important sciences, the “discipline” part tends to mean something more like “punishment,” rather than “a codified mode of study.”
At any rate, doing a real, formal evaluation of a program is still better than wasting your time doing something that’s useless, fruitless, a waste of energy or just a sham. So here’s a buch of resources from the internet to help you get going for free. Thanks for this post go to Joyce B. Morris and David Colton, Ph.D., from the EvalTALK Listserv.
Evaluation Resources:
The Program Manager’s Guide to Evaluation
Taking Stock: A Practical Guide to Evaluating Your Own Programs
Understanding Evaluation: The Way to Better Prevention Programs
The 2002 User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation
User-Friendly Handbook for Mixed Method Evaluations
Tools for Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation
“Also, there are some good, free resources on the Internet and from state and federal government agencies. For example, you can order “Introduction to Program Evaluation for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs” (2001) from the CDC (www.cdc.gov/tobacco). Don’t be turned off by the reference to tobacco control as that is used for context. The “W.K. Kellogg Foundation Evaluation Handbook” can be ordered from the foundation or is available as a free download in pdf format
.”
Summary: There is a new, exciting model for programs exporting technology to the developing world. But the real issue is about education, not just setting up a rural network.
Here’s the scene: A decade after the technology-sector collapse in the highly industrialized world, a humbled tech industry has begun to take interest in exporting basic technologies to extremely poor countries.
Here’s an example: Geekcorps, founded by techie Ethan Zuckerman with his cash-out-quick money from now-defunct Tripod.com (remember them?), is sending folks to Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America to live out a kind of Peace Corps for nerds.
It’s … exactly like that, actually, so much so that the Peace Corp reportedly has plans to create a nerd project sounding very similar to Geekcorps. Likewise, Carnegie Mellon University is starting a Technology Peace Corps, and so is the UN, which has a three-year-old ICT (Information Communication Technology) Task Force.
Contemporary communications technology is central to the process of international development because it is effective — and damn efficient. Communication systems can organize political movements, prevent humanitarian disasters, strengthen communities, streamline markets and enrich education. In fact, they will do these things.
Here’s the point: These new groups are doing good work. Technology can work for people. It can work wonders for really poor people. Communications technology, in particular, has the potential to connect and empower places that you have never heard of, perhaps in poor parts of your district, perhaps in Africa or Asia. Just like it connected you.
But perhaps that’s a problem. Do we want the Ugandan internet to look just like the US internet? Are we capabale of taking a critical approach to the way that we are teaching people to use the internet? Will the internet of 2030 connect communities or consumers? Will it empower or merely reinforce existing power?
Information technology is a virtually limitless resource. A single telephone (or perhaps a bicycle-operated VOIP system, if you prefer) is a surprisingly powerful vehicle for community development. Installing a single, inexpensive server can support the communication needs of an entire village, just as digging a well can support a village.
But ICT (Information Communication Technology) is not just a commodity, it is also a system. It requires a market, consumers and investors. Which means, I think, that there is a lot more than just altruistic service-giving, training and infrastructure development going on here.
The effort to grow ICT in the developing world is not just a “new model of volunteerism,” as the Peace Corps describes it. Because the power of technology is social. Tech training is an intervention in society akin to grassroots organizing. In this way, teaching technology is a political movement, a movement primarily toward open expression of ideas, in whatever form they may come.
Or it can be, at least.
We (the ICT development community) recognize that we have to train people, not just build phone booths. This has long been seen as the difficult side of exporting technology, but I think it’s important that we value the process of teaching that is at the core of this process.
And teaching has its attendant concerns. Teaching can be progressive, or teaching can recreate the ways of thinking that have led to our current crisis of poverty. Those who are involved in the transfer of technical knowledge for the sake of human development need to think about their method of creating this change, their pedagogy.
Education, not technology per se, is the only sustainable path out of inequality, and we would do well to be appreciative of the fact that we are teachers.
Here’s an interesting article from an old Harvard Business School Working Knowledge series. It’s about branding, which from my perspective is a very diffucult thing to incorporate in online communications.
Websites and emails, for example, need to reflect some kind of graphical relationship with the rest of your organization. But I think they should also reflect a “tone” of your organization and its role in the world.
This article deals with these concerns in a broader sense. Here’s a bit:
One of the additional challenges nonprofit brands face is that they must appeal to a broader array of stakeholders. Nonprofit brands have a dual objective: to enhance fundraising and to ensure the implementation of the organization’s mission. In addition, nonprofit organizations tend to be more decentralized, with little formal hierarchy. This can mean that implementing activities that protect the brand or attempting to update or modify the brand often meets with resistance internally. In some cases, highly decentralized organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontiers [also known as Doctors without Borders] depend on their brand to provide organization cohesion. The brand is the glue holding the components of the global organization together.
You can read the whole thing here:
HBS Working Knowledge: Social Enterprise: The Tricky Business of Nonprofit Brands
There is an interesting discussion going on (for some time now) over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review forum about charitable donations and the new “ranking systems” that have emerged to help the public find the most best organizations to give to. The rankings are extremely flawed in the eyes of many, and may be shaping the public valuation of the nonprofit sector in a truly unhealthy, bottom-line-obsessed manner. Here’s an excerpt:
“Wouldn’t it be nice, as we are sitting down to write our year-end checks to our chosen causes, to have a ratings system to help us make these difficult choices? Indeed, it has long been a dream of many involved with philanthropy and charitable giving to develop such an objective set of criteria to rationalize what is inevitably a highly competitive funding process. Well, several enterprising nonprofit organizations are trying to do just that. The result? Beware of what you wish for.”
Read the conversation:Stanford Social Innovation Review: Forum: The Ratings Game
Mission-Driven nonprofits have, I think, the most to gain from blogging than any other organization or type of individual. If your organization has a site, I think you really should have a blog. There are a number of clear reasons. Seriously.
The reasons to maintain a blog are all about education — which is at the center of most nonprofits’ agendas. How many ways can you raise awareness and make changes in people’s lives? Blogs offer a number of advantages over newspapers, magazines and flyers as mediums: They are free to print, they are easy to update and they are easily targeted to your base of stakeholders.
Here’s an extract from an article published for a 2004 seminar on blogging and Public Relations:
“In the past, you’ve most likely depended on good relations with traditional media, and some combination of website, e-mail, and printed or electronic publications. Printed magazines and newsletters are expensive to produce, and e-mailed items run the risk of being neither received nor read. A website by itself can’t always be updated as quickly as you’d like, and none of these provide the immediacy or the conversational attributes of a blog.” Read the article.
Yes, they are certainly cheaper than print — you already have the web space and need only pay for the time it takes to post. If you already have regular emails that you are sending out to a list of subscribers, then you already have the content. By posting them to the web, you can memorialize your communication, keeping your activities transparent and engaging others.
By posting something to the web you are making it public and, even if it is only your staff reading it at first, this can really have a strong mobilizing effect on your organization.
Blogs can also help you build your fundraising mission, but, more importantly, they can also become part of your mission — you can contribute directly to your goals by keeping a record of your creative, collaborative thoughts on the current state of things.
A single-subject blog will help push your organization’s site to the top of the Google results, becuase search engines love pages that are frequently updated. People will begin to find your page more if you put more information on it — and they will be people who are already interested in your subject.
Blogs are truly flexible tools: you can set up multiple blogs to serve multiple purposes. Most notable, you can have a private, group blog for internal communication and a public blog (perhaps maintained by one person) on your website.
Blogs help organize the web: Do you have a ever-expanding folder full of favorites that would be great to share with others concerned about your mission? Post them as you find them (with little reviews to clue people in).
Examples of other nonprofit blogs:
http://www.citizensleague.net/ “The Citizens League promotes the public interest in Minnesota by involving citizens in identifying and framing critical public policy choices, forging recommendations and advocating their adoption.”http://community.oceana.org/ “Organizes campaigns dedicated to restoring and protecting the world’s oceans through policy advocacy, science, law and public education.
Registration is now open for the RTPnet Conference, North Carolina’s only annual statewide conference that focuses specifically on nonprofit technology. The conference mission is to help nonprofits use technology more effectively. It’s May 20th.
Conference subjects this year will focus on: Technology Volunteerism, Technology Infrastructure and Technology Innovation. More than 100 people are expected to attend the conference.
RTPnet is a volunteer-driven, 501 (c)(3) nonprofit corporation dedicated to helping North Carolina nonprofit organizations leverage Internet tools to promote and support their missions. RTPnet has hosted the conference for five straight years around the theme of “Bridging North Carolina’s Human/Digital Divide.”
RTPnet offers annual fee-based memberships to North Carolina nonprofits and community technology centers in the Southeast. Member benefits include Internet services and discounts to RTPnet-sponsored events.
Who should attend?
* Nonprofit professionals
* Technology providers
* Government officials
* School administrators and teachers
* Anyone interested in technology issues affecting the nonprofit sector
There’s always a lot of curiosity about online fundraising among organizations that are new to the web. Rightly so. Having a “donate now” link could be, by itself, a reason to have a nonprofit website. You can give out the address of your site with all correspondence and know that you’re getting the plate passed at the same time, for much less money than a direct mailing or phone solicitation.
But what’s the best way to do it? You could take credit cards on your site, but generally the trend for mid-to-small organizations is to outsource the process entirely. By far it appears the most common technique is to register with a service such as groundspring.org or networkforgood.org, which take the security issue of processing credit cards out of your hands. Either of these sites provide simple setp-by-step directions and are quite reliable in our judgment. But they take at least a 3% cut of a few percent for each donation. Groundspring take 3% plus a set up fee and a recurring bill of about $15 - $30 month. Groundspring’s fees come with added services: a “tell a friend” button for donators, the ability to give rewards for certain levels of giving, extra security and automated chariable giving receipts.
I’d stick with one of those unless your organization is very large, recieves a large amount of funding through online donations, or has a savvy techie on staff with plenty of time. It’s a good way to make sure your donations are handled accountably, which is important to donors of all stripes.
The “donate now” button is but one of the many ways to use the internet for fundraising. Regarding the wider spectrum of online fundraising, of the best articles on the subject is published by Groundspring: the Online Fundraising Handbook. It’s about 100 pages and isn’t shy about referring you to their “competitors.”
On a related note, if you just need to sell something (like T-Shirts or something), use Paypal’s “merchant tools.”
How do nonprofits grow? That’s a much discussed — and much answered question. There are thousands of books, articles, consultants even entire schools devoted to the subject of growing your nonprofit.
But there’s not much to growth if you don’t have a similar rise in creating change. And growth doesn’t necessarily make an organization stronger in the nonprofit world.
That’s the idea of Jane Wei-Skillern, at least, and she has the research to back it up. Her investigation into several national nonprofits has led her to appreciate the “networked” model of development over one of scale. It’s about who you know, basically — and not being afraid to actually stop doing some services that other organizations might do better if they had your help and guidance.
Here’s a bit:
“Previous research with colleagues on growth suggested that growth does not necessarily translate into greater social value creation. Based on interviews and a survey done on nonprofit leaders, managers often cited a preference for growth by branching, i.e., replicating the organization from one site to another and maintaining central control and ownership of the new units.
“What Wei-Skillern and her research colleagues found, however, was that growth did not always lead to the benefits the organizations had anticipated. For example, many organizations anticipated that fundraising would be easier once they were larger. In fact, fundraising did not necessarily become easier with organizational growth, yet significant new costs were created as the organization needed to now manage and coordinate operations across multiple locations.
…
“[One sucessful but small organization] raised the capacity of the visually impaired charities by creating an umbrella organization with a unified agenda and creating a single voice on certain issues where it was critical. But organizations still had their own brands, did their own fundraising, and were run independently.”
Here’s the entire article
If you need to easily display slideshows online, there are a couple of options that I have recently run across. The simplest, though not as sophisticated, process is to use a site called Flickr, which was recently acquired by Yahoo! and can be a lot of fun. You just upload your pictures and folks can link to them to form online picture-sharing communities. The best feature is that it can export to your blog or website, though the format is not as customizable as I’d like.
The second, more complicated, option, is to go with javascript. For our purposes here, we’ll assume you don’t want to write a bunch of javascript yourself. Instead, BarleyFitz studio will take care of that. Just go there and upload your pictures on their site, and you’ll get very straightforward instructions for inserting the resulting code in your site. Customization can make it look especially good (here’s a fantastic example posted to a recent css forum. The fade in is especially nice). I have used BarleyFitz’s javascript in some forprofit work with greta success, but is rather convoluted javascript in use, so be ready to sit down with it for a while if you want it to look really nice.
This type of slideshow would be good for nonprofits that need a way to showcase their activities on the web. There are other, more expensive solutions, but they are often overdesigned (with noises and animations at every click of the mouse).
Here’s a chart of evaluation software packages form the Evaluator’s exchange. The list is untested by yours truly, but the Evaluation Exchange (From the Harvard Family Research Project) is an excellent resource for folks working with children.
Here’s a bit from the article, the chart is about a 60K PDF.
A wide variety of software packages are available to help nonprofit organizations track program management data and outcome measures for evaluation. One advantage of an “off-the-shelf” package is that these packages are often “tried and true.” Another is that the software makers often supply training and technical assistance to users. On the other hand, organizations should carefully consider whether the available packages are appropriate for their needs. In some cases, organizations may find it more useful to design their own tracking systems, although the process can be time-consuming and may require extensive technical training.
The Evaluation Exchange Harnessing Technology for Evaluation: Promising Practices - at the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP)
Stephen Pinker writes in his book How Minds Work that “the emotions are mechanisms that set the brains highest-level goals.” This, it seems, is a good description of why small, mission-driven nonprofits exist despite the innumerable difficulties of keeping such an operation afloat. It’s also an essential idea to consider when advertising your organization.
People are drawn to imagery and emotions that inspire them to work for a cause. If you have ever been saddled with the task of creating ads or promotional material for your organization, you would do well to keep these emotions — not facts about your job or accomplishments — at the front of your mind.
This concept is just one idea among many in an immensely useful e-book published a couple of years ago by Cause Communications called Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes. It should be in every nonprofit office (unless you have the luxury of an ad department to think about such things). It covers broad ideas like the above, but it also goes into detail about using layout and text to keep people reading and engaged in your message. And it has great reviews of nonprofit ads over the last 10 years. It is, in short, an eminently readable advertising textbook for nonprofits; check it out before your next ad deadline.
NetCorps is now providing the “technology of list enhancement” for nonprofits in NC. I have’t worked directly with them but they do good work (in Durham, NC and in Oregon). They have worked with folks at Volunteers for Youth that we are beginning a project with.
If you are interested in nonprofit technology, check out NetCorps LEAP — netcorps.org
From their site, about one of their services:
Membership lists of partnering groups are “enhanced” by appending demographic information, gathered from publicly available voter registration files, to each person’s name on the list. This information includes age, ethnicity, gender, congressional and legislative district data, and how many times their members have voted in the last four elections.
Strength Through Collaboration
LEAP organizations have used their list enhancements internally to help with fund raising, anti-racism work, neighborhood organizing, and collaborative efforts. By bringing together justice-oriented organizations with different backgrounds, diverse approaches to organizing and an array of issue foci, LEAP serves as a platform for statewide collaborative efforts planned and implemented by partnering organizations.
The Linc project (based in NY) has an interesting article on their use of del.icio.us (a web service that maintains lists of links for you.) I really appreciated their technical description of everything they’re doing with it, but it isn’t a beach read.
LINC Support Grab Bag Archive: Are you del.icio.us?
Here’s a bit:
Are you maintaining lists of links someplace and looking for a way to keep them up-to-date?
You might consider taking a look at del.icio.us, a free service that will allow you to aggregate links on their system, tag them with category names of your own choosing and then display them in other forums.
If you like to think about branding (not a really pleasant idea, I think), you’d do well to visit the wealth of information at the PND Nonprofits By Design Column.
Read it: PND Nonprofits By Design
