What is NTEN to You?

Submitted by Holly on Thu, 02/21/2008 - 4:39pm.

As many of you know, I just became Executive Director in November of last year. Although I've been in the nonprofit tech community for nearly a decade -- and at NTEN for over 5 years -- I have to admit that I was pretty startled the first time someone asked me, after I took over as ED, "So, what is NTEN?"

I didn't have a good answer.

Of course, I've used a variety of stock responses over the years, none of which have ever really satisfied me. We help nonprofits with technology, but we're not ABOUT technology. We're a community of nonprofit technology professionals, but we're not all server room geeks. It gets a little confusing, and I'm spending a lot of time thinking about it these days. I don't think I'm any closer to the mythical elevator pitch, but the one thing I can say for sure is that NTEN *is* our members.

So I figured I should ask you: what is NTEN to you? What do you get? What do you learn? What do we empower you to do?