Notes From Here And There

Notes From Here And There

Long time no blog, but I have good excuses.  Moving cross-country, even with a modest family of three, is no.

Pop Quiz: PCI Compliance

Pop Quiz: PCI Compliance

The credit card industry is doing the right thing by consumers and enforcing proper security measures regarding the handling of credit card information. You might have heard about this - a number of the popular vendors of donor databases are recommending upgrades based on their compliance with these regulations. The "Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard", commonly known as PCIDSS, is a set of guidelines for securely handling credit card information. The standard has been around for about four years, but early enforcement efforts focused on companies with a high volume of credit card transactions. Now that they're all in compliance, they've set their sites on smaller businesses and nonprofits. So, what does this mean?

Balancing Act

Balancing Act

My friends at Blackbaud referred me to this excellent post by Jay Love, CEO of ETapestry, once a small donor database service, now a subsidiary of the mother of all donor database companies. Jay's timely caution to nonprofits is that they be skeptical about all of the for-profit folk answering their employment ads in the face of the poor economy. People from that side of the dollar fence are generally unprepared for the culture of nonprofits. His story about vendors trying to break into our sector with no experience or research into our needs is fascinating. But I have a different take on hiring people from the for-profit world, and while Jay seems t be saying "don't do it", I'm on the "be sure to do it - in moderation" side.