Highlights Of The 2015 Nonprofit Technology Conference

I’m back and moderately recovered from the 2015 NTC in Austin, Texas, where, along with plenty of good Texas food and beer, I shared some wisdom and learned a lot.  Here’s a summary, with my favorite pics:

#NTCBeer is a proven formula. Take a decent bar, Nonprofit techies, and a room without blaring music, and everyone has a great time, whether they’re NTEN mavens like me, or first time attendees. We estimate that about 275 people came by this year. Here’s a great shot of the room by Jason Shim:

On Wednesday morning I led my session on contract negotiation.  I’d been hoping for an even mix of nonprofit staff and vendors in the room, as these are the types of topics that we don”t spend enough time discussing together, but we were skewed heavily on the customer side.  All the same, it was a good Q&A. I learned some tricks to add to my arsenal, such as, when buying software from small vendors or developers, arranging for rights to the source code should the vendor go under. One vendor somewhat sheepishly asked if I thought that scoping out a fixed bid discovery phase to be completed before submitting a project bid was a bad thing, and I am with him all of the way. We need to stop asking vendors for fixed pricing when there’s no realistic basis for estimating the hours. My slides, below, are a good read for anyone who is responsible for negotiating contracts; and whomever took the collaborative notes just rocked it, capturing fully the wisdom of the crowd.

On Wednesday afternoon I attended Dar Veverka and Andrew Ruginis‘ session on Disaster Recovery and Backup. A solid session that covered every aspect of the topic, with practical advice for nonprofits that might have trouble budgeting time and funds to do this critical work well. Slides are here.

Thursday morning’s choice was Google Analytics session by Yesenia Sotelo. I was looking for a good overview on what Analytics can do and how to do it, and this fully met my needs. Great news: NTEN recorded this one and the video will be available from them by March 12th! Here’s Yesenia’s inspirational presentation style, captured by official NTEN photographer Trav Williams:

The afternoon session was a panel by four of my favorite people, Robert Weiner, Tracy Kronzak, Dahna Goldstein and Marc Baizman. What To Do When Technology Isn’t Your Problem focused on the user side of systems implementation, pulling heavy on the mantra of “People, Process, Technology”. The , and the collaborative notes on this one are pretty good. Even more fun: here’s the quiz they gave us that you can take to see how ready your org is to implement systems successfully.

“I just decided that failure was not my story anymore.” ~ @askdebra #15NTC

— Jereme Bivins (@jcbivins) March 6, 2015

Friday started with an ignite plenary that featured a moving presentation by Debra Askanase on how she overcame vision impairment and unsupportive teachers to beat math anxiety and ace Calculus. Then Johan Hammerstrom of CommunityIT and I did a rambling talk on IT security, policies and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). I was a little worried that we might have leaned too heavily on the talking head side, with the presentation weighing in at close to an hour.  But it was a crowd of our people (IT staff) and the feedback was positive. Slides are here; collaborative notes here; and, keep your eyes open, because I’ll have a URL for a video of the session later this week.

NTEN gave out a lot of awards. It was great to see Modern Courts, a New York org that advocates for adequate numbers of family law judges, win the DoGooder ImpactX video award. It was also great that friends mentioned in this post, Ken and Yesenia, won “NTENNys”, and very moving that they gave one to the late Michael Delong, a colleague with Techsoup who passed away suddenly, and far too young, last year. Lyndal cairns joined the NTEN Award club. And I was moved to tears when my friend David Krumlauf picked up NTEN’s lifetime achievement award. David’s generous, untiring work supporting the capacity of nonprofits has always been an inspiration.

There were also a couple of pleasant surprises: Ken Montenegro, IT Director at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and a colleague of mine in the Legal Aid community is the newest member of the NTEN Board. And Karen Graham, recently of the sadly shut-down Map Techworks program has got a new gig: Executive Director at Idealware! Congrats all around.

The last session on Friday was a strong one on User Adoption, led by Tucker MacLean, Norman Reiss, Austin Buchan and Kevin Peralta. Pushing more on the people-process-tech theme, this session really engaged the crowd and offered solid advice on how to help users feel involved in technology rollouts. Bonus: their resource section included my post on Building NPTech Culture. Sadly, they have yet to share their slides. Update! They do have slides.

As usual, I had a blast at the conference, meeting new people and catching up with old friends. It was a little difficult to socialize as well as I have in the past, given that we were staying at a variety of hotels and the convention center was massive. With a little less than 2000 attending, I think we might have been better off in a hotel. But I still had a great time at Box.org’s offices Wednesday night (a party co-hosted by Box, Caravan Studios, Twillio and others); a small Access to Justice get-together with Michelle Nicolet, Jimmy Midyette, and the aforementioned Ken Montenegro on Thursday; a great party at Container Bar, hosted by the Chronicle of Philanthropy; the dinner below on Friday, followed up by Michelle Chaplin‘s karaoke party, where I scratched “singing Randy Newman’s Guilty (best known by the Bonnie Raitt cover) in public” off of my bucket list. What’s going to top that next year?