Infrastructure

5 Questions: Are You For Real? Working with a Virtual Team

Ed. Note: As we prepare for the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference, we wanted share a wee bit of the wisdom our speakers will be serving up, so as not to overwhelm you when you get to Atlanta. We're asking them all to share their answers to five very important questions.

Speaker: Jenn Sramek, CivicActions

Session: Are you for real?! Working with a virtual team

1. What's the most important trend in nonprofit technology for 2010?

Openness and FOSS (free and open source software) are really perfect fits for nonprofits who share the values of collaboration, community, empowerment, and sharing. We are seeing significant numbers of nonprofits gravitate to open source tools such as CiviCRM and Drupal as more attention is paid to usability and support for the non-technical user.

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Ask the Expert: George Durham on Cloud Computing & The Social Sector

Cost: FREE for NTEN Members!

Start: 03/31/2010 - 11:00am

End: 03/31/2010 - 12:00pm

Timezone: US/Pacific

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the way we do our work. Chances are you are accessing the cloud to do your daily work. It's ...

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If you're interested in this event, you may also want to take a look at:

We use ReadyTalk for our webinars, and you can, too: ReadyTalk offers special discounts to NTEN members. Learn more.

5 Questions: How to Win Friends and Influence Luddites

Speaker: Peter Campbell, Earthjustice

Session: The Tech Track

1. What's the most important trend in nonprofit technology for 2010?

It's cloud computing, hands down. I know, I know: Social media! Online fundraising! All well and good, but those are evolutionary trends, cloud computing is a revolutionary trend. As it matures, it will remove the frustrating burden of managing servers and applications from our under-resourced organizations and allow IT to focus on tying systems to strategy, not just keeping the six year old systems alive. That's a really big deal.

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2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report

Submitted by Brett on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 12:47pm.

Category Vendor Satisfaction

The data ecosystem is the collection of tools we use to manage all the ways we interact with donors, volunteers, activists, and supporters. We wanted to find out how happy organizations are with each of the tools they use, but also what tools make up their ecosystems, and how happy they are with those ecosystems as well.

> Download the 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report

In 2008, NTEN began asking the community to tell us what they thought of the tools they use. We conducted vendor satisfaction surveys for the Constituent Relationship Management, Content Management Systems, and the Donor Management Systems nonprofits use. The results help organizations understand what software is in use by their peers, and how happy they are with the service, support, usability and overall value of the software.

Still, these reports were only shedding light on a small slice of the software pie. In summer 2009, we went looking for a better way. Our great friend Paul Hagen suggested that we ought to be looking at the larger picture -- at the data ecosystem.

The Overhead Question: What's Our Role?

Flickr Photo: tylerdurden1Ask any nonprofit to describe how they feel about their overhead percentage, and you're most likely to be met with groans, sighs and rolls of eyes. None of us like the fact that the percentage of income we spend on "overhead" is the primary measure of our effectiveness.

The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle aptly summarized the problem with the overhead measure this summer. Then, in December, some of the sector's top rating agencies, including Guidestar and Charity Navigator, agreed that a new measure is needed.

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Greening Your Technology

Anna Jaeger, TechSoup Global

By now, you're aware that "green technology" exists. But do you know if organizations like yours are using any of these technologies? Are they working or cost effective? Are you overwhelmed by the thought of trying to add environmental concerns on top of your other concerns about technology -- like affording it and having the expertise to chose, implement, and support it?

There are a few relatively easy things you can do to educate yourself and start saving your organization money while reducing your footprint. Many organizations have already implemented green technologies. And I'm not talking about enormous companies with their own data centers.

I'm talking about organizations like yours.

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