The success of your work depends, in part, on making sure you deliver services in the ways your constituents want and can use. Joyce Raby, a Program Services Analyst with Legal Services Corporation, knows that technology is often the best and most efficient way to deliver services, and that you need to look at technology differently when your services are targeted to low income people.

Read on for a quick look into Joyce and her work, and learn more about this topic at Joyce’s session “How Low Income Individuals – Your Clients - Use Technology” at the NTC on Thursday. April 5th, at 1:30 pm.

Picture it - a gigantic black tour bus pulls up in front of your NTEN summer block party. Darkened windows, no visible activity... Who the heck is this and why are they crashing our party??

The "who" is us - the Blackbaud User Society. Our snazzy black bus gets us to where we need to go in our ongoing quest to change the world. We are doing this in two ways:

1. Ensure that clients of Blackbaud are getting the best value possible out of the software they've purchased.

2. Maintain close communication with Blackbaud product developers so they know what we our priorities are as users.

Why would we want to do that? The same reason NTEN exists at all. We have people and families to serve, and we all believe that by exploiting new and innovative technology we can get that work done more effectively. It is for these common goals that we are partnering with NTEN as an Affinity Group.

Our community has been around in various incarnations for several years, but the Blackbaud User Society was created in May 2006 under the banner of the "Raiser's Edge User Forum". Since that time we have grown and evolved into less of a passive community and a much more proactive force for our members. Partnering with NTEN is the latest proactive effort we have started in accomplishing our own mission and those of our members. We are not officially endorsed by Blackbaud or affiliated with them in any way. That being said, they are aware of who we are, and particpate regularly.

Anyone and everyone is welcome to join our community, though we are primarily focused on those people who work at organizations that use Blackbaud products. Our biggest audience within that group is the fine folks who administer Raiser's Ege and other Blackbaud products for their organizations. Those of us who interact with the techology on the most fundamental levels, and ideally have the influence to change business processes in our organizations to exploit the technology as much as possible.

Come take a tour of the bus. It's comfy. Have a drink, and chat with us. We're here to join the party, not to crash it.

http://www.blackbus.org and Peter Gulka

What is your organization’s online personality? Susan Finkelpearl, the Director of Online Strategy at Free Range Studios, says your website if often the first impression people get of your organization. And we all know what people say about first impressions.

Get to know Susan a little here and learn how to show off your organization’s personality in her session “The Fundamentals of Storytelling in Online Communications” on Thursday, April 5, at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

How did you get into helping nonprofits?

"I've always had a passion for helping organizations communicate effectively and started my career working in traditional PR, first for a relief agency and later for the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental think tank.

With the Nonprofit Technology Conference just a week away, it’s a great time to start thinking about which of the breakout sessions you’ll be attending. No matter what you are trying to do, there’s a session to help. If you need to design a disaster-proof back up system or figure out how to use the next generation of web tools, there are breakout sessions to get you started and finish the job.

One of the hardest and most important responsibilities IT staff have is to make the case that your organization should invest in technology. If your powers of persuasion in this area could use a little help, attend The ROI Question: Demonstrating the Value of Technology to Your Organization. You’ll learn what Return on Investment means, how to calculate it, and the best ways to make your case to upper management.

“Don’t you wish your city was cleaner and greener? Begin by planting free saplings offered by Greenpeace. Reply GREEN to 6363 to get your sapling.”

The campaign, run by Greenpeace India, generated 149 new members, a conversion from lead to member of 16%.

How are mobile phones used in fundraising campaigns of NGOs around the world and what results are we seeing? How about the United States - where is mobile fundraising now and where is it headed? For a critical and insightful review, download the latest MobileActive Strategy Guide in our series of hard-hitting evaluations of the potential and perils of mobile phones in social change work.

See all guides and download the latest here.

The results of our technology service provider survey are in! In late 2006 we surveyed tech providers across the country - the first step in the TechImpact research project to help us understand what technology assistance means for nonprofit capacity.

We wanted to understand:

• Who is providing technology assistance to nonprofit organizations? Who do they serve?
• What services do providers offer? What approaches do they use to deliver technology assistance?
• Where are technology providers located? Where are they delivering services?
• When do providers employ evaluation strategies to understand the effect of their work?
• How do providers implement strategies to foster key outcomes for organizations, and how do they successfully achieve those outcomes (e.g., improved efficiency and effectiveness)?
• How do providers measure the success of their projects?

If you work in a nonprofit, you know that there isn’t enough time in the day (or fiscal year) to do everything you need to do yourself. To get it all done, you better know the outside companies that can best help you do what you can’t do yourself.

We asked two people whose organizations provide technology services to nonprofits a couple questions about themselves so you can get to know them and what drives their work. You can find out more about their organizations and meet people from other tech companies Wednesday, April 4, at the Science Fair, part of the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

April Pedersen, Executive Director of Democracy in Action

What motivates you to work with nonprofits and specifically to help them with their online advocacy?

“It's all about being effective and making real-world change. Whether it's using online tools to organize hundreds of vigils on the anniversary of the Iraq war or helping groups raise funds to build awareness about the atrocities in Darfur, I'm able to see firsthand the difference we make in the effectiveness of organizations we serve nearly every day.

Personally, I think the best part of any NTC is the people that you meet. So, we want to help you get a jump start on that! If you're coming to the NTC and want to connect with other registrants before you get there, join the NTEN NTC 07 list.

We’ve selected the finalist videos in the NTC Video Contest, and now it’s time for you to pick the winner!

Go to DoGooderTV to watch the finalist videos. Once you’ve decided on your favorite, vote online or text in your vote.

We received so many creative, well done, and powerful videos – thank you to everyone who submitted one. It was great to see the amazing work nonprofits are doing with video to spread their messages and mobilize people to act for social change.

For more videos, check out some of our favorites that didn’t make the top six. And stop by Movie Night at the NTC to see them all on the big screen.

Katrin Verclas, MobileActive.org

Social networks are mushrooming and nonprofits are flocking to them. MySpace is the 3rd most popular website in the United States and Facebook is the 7th, according to Alexa as 3/19/07. Care2, a social network of activists, boasts six million users. Senator Barack Obama unveiled My.BarackObama.com, a social network created for his presidential campaign, and there is even a Club Penguin, a brand-new social network "in braces," catering to the 8 to 12-year-old crowd. Even the CIA has launched a (albeit closed) social network similar to Wikipedia - Intellipedia - to allow analysts to collaborate across agencies and build a collective body of intelligence information. Social networks are clearly hot.

At first is was old-fashioned blogs that created communities of their own. Lateral connections among blogs via cross-linking and RSS syndication feeds create loose sets of like-minded social communities. And these communities have influence. Blogs are playing a similar role to satellite and cable TV shows in the late 70s and early 80s, when these shows gave the religious right - a then-marginal group - the power to form a public identity, attract others, and later develop its own cultural agenda and political institutions.

Nonprofits naturally go to where people hang out in the hope to recruit supporters, donors, and activists. There are more than 20,000 nonprofit and philanthropic groups on MySpace alone. With more than half of MySpace visitors 35 or older, they are on to something. O’Reilly's architecture of participation is in full swing with corporations and nonprofit alike using social networking to stay competitive, secure 'mind share', and harness collective intelligence.