fundraising

My Foray Into Personal Fundraising

This article was first published on the Idealware Blog in December of 2011. My work planning for, evaluating and deploying technology at nonprofits requires that I have a good understanding of fundraising concepts and practices, and I do.  It’s an area that I’m sufficiently knowledgeable about, but no expert. So my current personal fundraising campaign for Idealware is an amateur effort. It is, happily, a successful one. I did some things right, including, I think, making strategic use of my social networking connections and channels. I might have done a few things differently, given what I’ve learned.  And much of the success has been instructive. Setting Up… Read More »My Foray Into Personal Fundraising

My Idealware Campaign

Regular readers know that I’m an active contributor, board member and supporter of Idealware, an org that works full-time practicing the mission of this website: to help nonprofits use technology effectively. Please join me in contributing to their work in 2012 by donating to my campaign

Is It Only Spam If The Other Guy Does It?

This was originally posted on the No Nonprofit Spam blog on November 3rd, 2011. Hat tip to Deb Finn, who started that blog. You work for a great org.  What you do is important and meaningful.  To you, it’s not just a job — it’s a mission.  And it deserves funding and support from the public.  I get that.  But if your next logical step in that progression is to assume that I want to be on your email list, you’ve stepped over a line.  It’s a line that does not invalidate your mission, or your devotion to it.  But it doesn’t serve your mission,… Read More »Is It Only Spam If The Other Guy Does It?

The Idealware Research Fund

Fans of this blog are likely fans of the other site I blog at, Idealware. So you already know that Idealware offers a rich, valuable service to the nonprofit community with it’s reports, webinars, trainings and programs that help nonprofits make smart decisions about software. One of the big challenges that Idealware faces is to maintain a high level of independence for their reporting. If your goal is to be the Consumer reports of nonprofit software, and you need funding in order to do that, you also need to be very careful about how you receive that funding, in order to make sure that no bias creeps through to your reporting. Laura Quinn, Idealware’s founder and primary force, has come up with a few clever models for eliminating such bias, but today she unleashed a more sustainable approach to funding that will greatly simplify the process.

The Silo Situation

The technology trend that defines this decade is the movement towards open, pervasive computing. The Internet is at our jobs, in our homes, on our phones, TVs, gaming devices. We email and message everyone from our partners to our clients to our vendors to our kids. For technology managers, the real challenges are less in deploying the systems and software than they are in managing the overlap, be it the security issues all of this openness engenders, or the limitations of our legacy systems that don’t interact well enough. But the toughest integration is not one between software or hardware systems, but, instead, the intersection of strategic computing and organizational culture.

Salesforce Show and Tell

Day 2 of the Salesforce Non-Profit Roadmap session was focused on refining plans and sharing information. We had sessions and reports from Salesforce Product managers and developers, and we discussed and demoed some of the creative things that our community has developed. The Salesforce guests showed off Apex, the new scripting language that will be available for live use sometime next year; and we had a fascinating (but non-discloseable!) peek at where the reporting is going. A lot of the talk focused on ways that we can — or will be able — to get around Salesforce’s core assumption that we deal with companies and… Read More »Salesforce Show and Tell

Are there barriers to effective non-profit management?

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… Read More »Are there barriers to effective non-profit management?