In addition to my primary pursuits—managing technology at Earthjustice and being a good member of my family—I’m working on a few additional projects that I’m also excited about:

• Virtualization Webinar

I’m preparing a webinar for NTEN on the power and benefits of Virtualization technology. Geeky stuff, yes, but the entire concept of server management has been turned on its ear by this development and it’s fascinating stuff for even smaller nonprofits.

• Software Purchasing article

Idealware will likely publish an article I’m writing on how to successfully accomplish a major software purchase. How to identify the suitable apps, prepare the Request for Proposal/Quote, and get the right people at the evaluation sessions.

• BDP Website

The Briggs Delaine Pearson Foundation is a nonprofit in Clarendon County, SC, where the first action in what eventually became Brown vs. the Board of Education began. My Grandmother-in-law was one of the original signers of that petition, along with other family and the attorney, Thurgood Marshall. My wife and I are going to revamp the current website to tell the story in an engaging fashion, invite participation from others, and, ideally, make the site more of a tool in garnering support for an organization trying to accomplish the unfullfilled promise of the Brown decision in the community where it all began.

What are you up to?

A sad, but all too common problem was presented on NTEN’s main discussion forum yesterday:

An IT Director in New York City, working for a large nonprofit (650 people, multiple locations, full IT platform), got approval from his boss to hire in a Systems Administrator (punchline here) at $40,000 annually.  Understand, System Administrators rarely make less than $75k a year at similarly sized for profits.  The boss pulled that number out of a salary survey, but, given the quality of it, I say he might as well have pulled it out of a hat.

Determining what’s fair—or, as we call it “market”—pay is an art in itself, and good salary surveys, like the one NTEN produces, offer far more than suggested wages – they provide context, like location, industry standards; they discuss trends, and the best ones frame the survey results in what the numbers should mean to us.

So, when I read the NTEN survey, and saw what were still ridiculously low salaries in comparison to the for-profit pay scales, I didn’t read it as “these are good numbers”.  I read it as “our industry doesn’t value technology.”  Literally.  If our salaries are at 50-75% of the rest of the world’s, how are we going to attract long-term, talented people?  And if we have a revolving door of mediocre (or, more accurately, some stellar, some miserable) sysadmins running our critical systems, how much money, productivity, and plain competence at our important work are we going to sacrifice?  What’s the cost of maintaining instability in order to save bucks on payroll?

So my pitch is that we have to stop thinking that there’s a metric called nonprofit wages.  There are market rates for positions, and there is a value in serving a mission.  So a nonprofit salary is a market salary (what a for profit would pay), less the monetary value of being able to serve the mission.

Nonprofits can’t keep thinking that they exist in some world within a world.   They complete with all businesses for talent, and, in the IT realm, for profits not only offer better compensation, they offer more toys, bigger staffs (which translates to more techies to pal around with, something a lot of my staff have missed in nonprofit), and, often, newer technology to learn and deploy.  In our field, it’s all about current skills.

So I feel for my compatriot in NYC, and hope that he can muster a case for his boss, for both his and his bosses sake.  If NTEN is reading, a great accompanying metric for the salary survey would be IT turnover tracking, as well as interims when key poisitions (CIO, Sysadmin) are unfilled.  Info on how that impacted business objectives.  We need to do more than just report on the pay – we have to document the impacts.

Everybody who enjoys calling tech support, raise your hand.

No one?

As a long-time IT Director, who came up through the system administration ranks, I dread those situations where the deadline is near, the answer is far, and the only option is to call the company’s support line.  Mind you, it’s never my first option – a well-phrased Google query, first sent to the web, then to Google Groups, is far more likely to get an answer quickly.  And there are those application manuals, gathering dust – the best ones will have good indexes. Also, decent applications have online support forums, and the best ones let you search without joining first.

What makes me crazy is this:  the chances that the $10/hr front line support person answering the phone will know more about the application than I do are slim.  This isn’t arrogance, it’s experience.  I’ve almost certainly installed more applications in my career than he or she has ever used.  And I know, for a fact, that that support person has a script—a series of questions that they have to ask me verifying that I’ve tried all of the things that I’ve already tried.

So my mission, should I be lucky enough to accomplish it, is to bypass all of this.  Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t – kind of depends on how much independent thought the $10/hr type is willing to apply.  Here are my techniques:

1. Remember that I’m speaking with someone who makes $10/hr (or less, particularly if it’s outsourced to another country) to take all sorts of abuse.  I’m patient, polite, gracious.  It’s not their fault that I have the problem, whatever the problem is.


2. Appeal to their intelligence.  Experience, which I have the edge on, isn’t intelligence, and salary level isn’t an indicator, either.  If the support dude feels like I’m treating him or her respectfully, they’ll be more motivated to really help me.


3. That said, still be authoritative and a touch arrogant.   Let them know that you are not a novice.  “I’m IT Director for a national organization and have years of experience with all types of software.  I have a specific question about this feature; I have tried all of the standard debugging methods and have been through the manual and support forum.  If you are not the person most knowledgeable about this area, can you connect me to someone who can assist me?”  Goal here – skip to the higher level tech support, do not pass go, do not collect half an hour of aggravation.

I don’t vary any of this for U.S. based vs. outsourced support.  It’s the same job and territory.  If anything, based on experience, it does seem to me that the outsourced first-level support is often more knowledgeable than American counterparts, maybe because it’s not an entry level job in India or China, or one with high turnover, as it likely is here.

[This post is a shout out to friends in the NTEN IT Directors Affinity Group, a few of whom made the request]

What a week – I flew to Tallahassee in Sunday and had a great visit with the attorneys and staff at Earthjustice’s office there, then hopped a couple of planes Tuesday night to New Orleans for NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC). As usual:

• a bigger crowd than the prior year;


• a meticulously planned event that leaves no room for anyone not to get a lot out of it;


• great speakers; great food; great networking.

I participated as a panelist in three sessions:

• Change Management: The People Side of Tech Adoption, which I designed. Steve Heye, a technology planner for the YMCA, and Dahna Goldstein, CEO of Philantech joined me, replacing Amir Tabei, CIO of NPower Texas, who fell victim to air traffic problems that messed up a number of NTC commutes. I thought the session went reasonably well, with some valuable info imparted and a good dialogue, but it got a little testy toward the end, which I think is indicative of a lot of the frustration we all have with the knowledge that technology planning is key to successful change management, but there are still far too few CEOs that get that. Or, it could be because the room was too small and we were practically sitting on top of eachother…


• Will Your Data Be Yours? Evaluating Data Exchange in Software. This one, led by Laura Quinn of Idealware and with Alan Gallauresi of Beaconfire, was far more technical, diving deep into data exchange technology. Alan took the real technical role, and I did my bit to soften it and tie it to real world examples, but, truth is, I think we had an audience that was pretty good with the acronyms, and it was another successful session.


• Finally, Roundtable: How I Solved my Data Integration Problem was led by Dahna (above), and we were joined by Corey Snipes of Twomile Information Services and Richard Jeong of The Friends Committee on National Legislation. Again, the other guys took the more technical side while I presented the management issues. This was, I think, the best session of the three. It really was a mix of the first two topics, focusing heavily on the politics around integration projects, and the dialogue was really robust, as with the Change Management session, but much more friendly.

Rumor has it that that last session was videotaped – I’ll link here if it shows up.

I also attended a pretty compelling session on organizational metrics. Steve Wright (Salesforce) and Rem Hoffman (The Center for What Works—day job: Exponent Partners) pitched a movement to change the metrics that nonprofits are judged by from the standard financial ones that Guidestar tracks to a more mission accomplishment-based model. This is an ambitious, but important effort, and Rem’s Center is a good place to start.

On Friday, I attended the first Meeting of the NTEN IT Directors Affinity Group, and, once again, we were in far too small a room. It started out a bit surreally. We all agreed that this was a place for the leaders of Information teams in organizations to talk freely about our challenges and our vendors. We started the session with round the room intros – name, org, number you serve and number on your staff. The fourth person explained that he was from some charity-focused telco and wanted to talk to us about his company’s offerings. I truly thought this was a joke, but when I called him on it he got up and shuffled uncomfortably out of the room. If you do anything similar to what I do for a living, then you know that it’s an endless barrage of cold calls and spam. As IT decision makers, we are all walk around with big targets on our chests for these vendors. They have little sense of propriety, as this truly illustrated. It’s amazing that they don’t just ring my doorbell and invite themselves over for dinner at night.

Note: I make a huge distinction between vendors selling products and services and nonprofit-focused consultants (circuit riders). Circuit riders tend to people who are just as mission-focused as I am, and see a more effective role for themselves as freelancers than employees. Vendors want to sell me products. There are many decent, nice vendors, and many who will discount software for worthwhile organizations, and I’m highly appreciative. But the best ones also know that we have enough to do without listening to pitches every ten seconds. Hard selling in the nonprofit community is not cool.

So, rants out of the way, the conference also offered great New Orleans excursions for food, the traditional Day of Service, where conference attendees donate time and expertise to local non-profits (I consulted for the Pro Bono Project), and a couple of keynotes. They were unusually weak this year – David Pogue, NYTimes tech critic, gave an entertaining canned performance that, while funny, lacked much in the way of relevance and depth. Most of us actually already knew about cell phones, Google, Internet TV and Web two-dot-oh. He would have done better to find out who he was addressing prior. On Friday, three women from New Orleans non-profits told interesting stories and painted the rosiest picture possible of New Orleans’ post-katrina recover—I mean, renaissance. Their talk was countered by a rash of twitter links to articles on how only a 16th of the families that own houses have actually received the money promised them (not to mention the fact that anyone renting is just out of luck). New Orleans felt like a ghost town, with pretty empty streets and lots of for sale signs. It is certainly inspiring to see and hear about the efforts of the local churches and nonprofits to rebuild it, but it’s a continuing disgrace that the government and national media ignore the situation and let incompetence guide every move. The federal government has pretty much abandoned the gulf coast.

Next year, NTC comes home—it’s in San Francisco. I look forward to attending without flying, for once! I have every confident that it will be one of the five best conferences I’ll have ever attended, as this, my fourth NTC, was one of the four.

If you missed the announcement, I’m giving a webinar titled “Preparing for Your New Database: Making the Transition as Painless as Possible” on Tuesday at 11:00 am Pacific time. Registration details are at http://nten.org/webinars (It’s not free). If you saw the announcement, note that Holly or someone at NTEN wrote all of that copy – shame on me for not getting them a description on time! But it’s pretty close. What it lacks is the specification that we are talking about Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) databases, not just any database.

I’ve managed CRM rollouts at two large companies: most recently, Salesforce at SF Goodwill; years earlier, an obscure but awesome CRM called Interaction at Lillick & Charles, a San Francisco law firm. My take on it is that CRM can be business-model altering software. Mind you, it doesn’t have to be—- it can be a simple contact and/or donor management system—but maybe it should be. Because properly deployed CRM gives your organization the ability to operate in a relationship-centric fashion. Instead of having isolated departments and functions that, of course, are heavily involved in relationships with other people and organizations, CRM centralizes all of the information and history of your organizational contacts and allows you to far better understand and manage those relationships. Vendors can be donors. Donors can be volunteers. If you have that overlap occurring today, you might not even be aware of it.

Zooming down to earth, my experience is also very hands on when it comes to the actual technical work involved in moving to a centralized CRM platform. I can share a lot about the tools and methods available for integrating and migrating data from other systems.

The webinar will focus mostly on best practices for implementing CRM. But we’ll start with some of the high-level, what this means for your org; spend the bulk on the project planning and implementation practices; and, if there’s time and interest, dive into some of the techie stuff. My approach to these things is to have half the session prepared and half of it open to the group interests, and I think I’ll make it worth the $50 ($25 for NTEN members) if moving to new donor databases and CRM platforms is something you’re likely to be involved in.

So, I think it’s safe to let everyone know that I start a new gig as IT Director at Earthjustice this month. For those of you who don’t know, Earthjustice is a law firm dedicated to protecting natural resources and the environment. Originally founded as the legal arm of the Sierra Club, they now do advocacy and litigation in defense of the planet. They are an international firm with the awesome tagline “because the earth needs a good lawyer”. My role there is a strategic one—in addition to managing the IT Department, I’ll be looking at ways that we can decentralize the technology platform so it can better support the global operation. This is a challenge that I know I’ll enjoy, and bring a good perspective to.

It’s funny how many connections I had to this organization prior. First, the Communications Director there is a dear friend of mine who used to work for me at Goodwill. When they asked for my references, I had to explain that she had been on the list for years. Second, the consultant they were working with is a friend of mine through NTEN, and he had actually introduced me to my predecessor there last year, who gave me a heads up about the job.

But the connections are even deeper. My first “real” job (discarding the ten years I spent working in restaurants and playing in bands in Boston in the late seventies/early eighties) was with a small law firm in SF that had spun off from a larger firm called Lillick & Charles. My second job, where I was first promoted to the IT Director role, was with Lillick & Charles (since merged with giant firm Nixon Peabody). I took a very intentional detour after that out of the for-profit world and to Goodwill. Earthjustice, oddly enough, was founded by a couple of Partners from Lillick & Charles.  So it’s a small world I work in.

Just a note that my article on IT Leadership was featured in the latest issue of NTEN Connect.

On a related note, my blog entry on Joomla Day West was almost quoted verbatim in the latest Joomla Weekly News (this is a PDF download). And I have an article coming out soon in Non-Profit Times on Data Management, a summary of the Managing Technology 2.0 presentation that I led at the NTEN conference in April. (Powerpoint link here).

Last week, I jumped pretty deep into a debate on the perennial “Should non-profits run more like for-profit businesses?” question. The debate is still going on at Deborah Elizabeth Finn’s excellent Information Systems Forum. A number of comments supported the idea that non-profits are very different from for-profit businesses and should remain so:

• There were numerous referrals to horror stories where a new exec or a board member had imposed a more business-like structure on a non-profit to disastrous results.


• Others suggested that non-profits, being mission-based, as opposed to profit-based, are fundamentally different from for-profits. And some went further by limiting the concept of efficiency to simply streamlining expenses and increasing revenues, as opposed, to, say, more efficiently communicating with constituents or managing client data..


• Some seemed to equate for-profit business practices with unethical or customer-abusive practices.

On this last point, let’s quickly acknowledge that many business have unethical practices, and those are not the ones that we should emulate or adopt, of course.

On the first two, let’s establish a few givens here:

1. Non-profits are businesses, with distinct features of their business model and great diversity among the non-profit models, just like for-profits.


2. The question is less “should non-profits act like for-profits?” than it is “Should non-profits use more for-profit models for efficiency?”


3. Many non-profits are completely sustained by donations, grants and other forms of charity or voluntary funding. Adopting business practices does not mean that you neglect or damage your ability to nurture your primary sources of revenue/funding. Um, quite the opposite!

I totally believe the horror stories. I’ve managed technology for over twenty years – I’m well aware of how poorly thought-out changes in business practice can be disastrous. My question to each of those relaters of horror stories is, was the problem that they were “acting more like a business”, or was it that they weren’t strategically improving their business practices, using, as appropriate, models from the for-profit community? Botching up a business by imposing organizational change in a dictatorial fashion is quite easy, and, again, is not at all unique to the non-profit sector. It’s all well and good for the new CEO to say “we’re going to start running like a business”, but it’s also crystal clear that, even in the nptech community, there is great confusion as to what “running like a business” means.

So, some big factors play into why non-profit leadership is often inefficient and ineffective. The two big ones:

1. The key factor in selecting a non-profit CEO is their ability to fund-raise. Resource building is valued far more highly than people or organizational management skills. And leadership flows from the top. So if the leaders best talent is to schmooze donors, and not to manage people, then you run high risk of wasting a lot of the money that those donors provide.


2. Non-profits are still rated and rewarded based on their ability to serve clients without making business investments. Guidestar and the like all have formulas that rate non-profits on their service to infrastructure ratios, with tiny numbers of people and expenses being trumped as a success factor. And these ratings are annualized, meaning that labeling one year as “an investment year” could be disastrous for your fund raising in the following year. This is a huge fallacy – you can’t be effective if you are not allowed to make strategic investments, and, depending on what you are doing, you might be able to far more significantly change the world with ten staff and 70% of your budget going to mission than five staff and 85% going to mission. That determination needs to be made by people who understand the particular business, not Charitynavigator.org.

I just don’t think that bad management is a by-product of being mission-focused or having strong ethics. It’s an outcome of not valuing business planning, good management practices, and the concept of budgeting to long-term outcomes, as opposed to just doing things the way we’ve always done them, by the seat of our pants. Bad management is a crisis for our industry, and it does not serve our missions or the world to continue to condone it.

As NPTech community members have heard, a brilliant metaphor was coined the other day by Karen Schneider in her excellent article titled IT and Sympathy:

“Free as in kittens” (as opposed to the popular “free as in beer”).

It’s not a hard sell to tell the average executive that open source, or donated Salesforce.com licenses, or volunteer labor isn’t exactly free of cost. But “as in kittens” really says it well, implying the commitment and caring that need to be applied to critical IT investments, regardless of the license terms.

I think Salesforce.com’s offer of 10 free licenses to any 501©3 is a great example of this. Salesforce rises to meme status in the NPTech world these days, with their corporate philosophy that 1% of their people. product and profit should be donated to non-profits. I could write another blog entry on all of that – but I’ll boil it down to this: one part “Great ethic to model” and nine parts: “Only 1%?!?“. But anyone who thinks for a second that taking Salesforce up on their offer has no budget impact, well, right away you’ve cost your organization every minute that you’ve invested in a project that’s doomed from the start. CRM doesn’t deploy itself – a successful CRM strategy generally involves dramatically altering your corporate culture. Is it worthwhile? For people-based organizations, like non-profits, that’s a general yes. But is it free? No way.

Any major technology project has potential for gigantic leaps in productivity and success or flat out disaster. A key skill for any of us who manage tech is fiasco avoidance. Fiasco avoidance has far more to do with company culture, planning and politics than it does with the actual technology. Salesforce offers a powerful, flexible system that can do incredible things for you. But Convio/Kintera, Raiser’s Edge, or ETapestry might do exactly what you need and are ready to take advantage of out of the box. Software evaluation for strategic projects requires an organizational readiness assessment right along with the product evaluations. Lots of things in life are free, but the “as in” modifiers tell the story.

Earlier this month, in the Q&A following my Managing Technology 2.0 presentation at the NTC, I was asked how OpenID would impact organizational data management issues. I was somewhat familiar with OpenID, in it that I knew that it was a proposed standard for single sign-on and identity management on the net, but I hadn’t paid a lot of attention and I think my answer, that it would make verifying user data easier for non-profits, might have been way off target. So, to clear it up, I did some research.

The “I’m feeling lucky” response from a Google search for “Open ID” is the very informative home of the project, OpenID.net. This site does a great job – it is largely an extremely geek-speak affair, but it starts off in very plain english. The proposed standard is that every person, just like every web site, can have a URL of their own that is their open ID. Along with the ID, they will have an identity provider that serves as the home for that ID, and provides the authentication service. With the standard in place, it would work like this:

1. You connect to a service (“consumer“) that supports Open ID.


2. You input your URL in the Open ID login field.


3. The consumer redirects you to your identity provider (the target of your url),a nd they prompt you for your password.


4. The identify provider then sends back a “yea” or “nay” based on whether you successfully authenticated (this works very much like a credit card authorization).

A few nice details about the specification:

• You can be your own identity provider if you have the resources.


• The specification calls for a strictly browser-based interaction, no javascript or additional software required.


• Open ID login fields will have a graphical identifier:

The two clear advantages of OpenID, from a net user perspective, are:

1. Single sign-on. No more long lists of passwords for myriad web sites or, worse, as we know many of our loved ones do, single passwords being used at dozens of sites.


2. Privacy – no need to provide passwords or email addresses to services in order to authenticate.

Microsoft’s Passport service was the biggest stab at identity management on the net to date, but it suffered from the initial premise that you should trust a convicted monopolist to manage your identity, and then from some serious security flaws.

So what does this mean for non-profits? Well, unless I’m missing something, it’s possibly a threat, and it will probably put orgs in a bit of a catch 22. Like most companies, you want to capture contact data from your web visitors. It’s key to your CRM strategies. Supporting Open ID removes the most compelling reason for them to give you that info – access to your interactive web services that require authentication. You’re going to have to beef up the begs and rewards for sharing more data if you support it. But, if you don’t support it, and it becomes a widely-spread standard, you’re going to look unethical.

I do think that additional trends and standards will grow around the personal URLs. I can’t see why they wouldn’t grow into Plaxo-like contact pages, to a small degree. But I doubt people are going to standardly publish addresses, phone numbers, etc, for the same reasons why you would hesitate do that on MySpace or Yahoo!. OpenID will not be a contact verification standard – it’s an authentication standard. Like a lot of things that threaten our marketing efforts, we’ll probably all really appreciate it, at least when we’re not in the office.