I’m about to head to Dreamforce , Salesforce’s annual user conference. Last year it was 5,000 people. This year could be as many as 10,000. It’s a big conference with tons of logistics. But check out what the Obama campaign pulled off yesterday. They had an event in St. Louis with at least 100,000 people. No doubt about it.

This week I’m at Rockwood’s 4 day leadership training, the Art of Leadership. So far it’s excellent. When do you get a chance to think about the purpose of your time on Earth? When do you really get to think about what specific gifts you bring to the social change movement?

I came to Art of Leadership by way of ONE/Northwest, and I was thinking of it as a work activity. was looking forward to taking some time to think about my leadership role within and without my org. see them as my reason and my legacy. awoke this morning and it came to me. My purpose is to help people find their power. See the power you have?

Love it! Update: Apparently you can only see this here. Thanks Luke

Have you ever put yourself outside your comfort zone only to have that zone of comfort expand underneath you? Have you ever paid someone to make you do things that are very difficult, that you would never make yourself do, and come back the next day for another 10 hours of it?

h/t shemuses

Well said Charlie

The folks over at NPower Seattle have created a Salesforce User Group for nonprofits. Go to the first meeting on November 19th. I’ll be there, and you should be, too. Come to share, learn, and network! Wednesday, November 19, 8:00am - 9:00am. View Larger Map

All I can say is Bravo to Jon Plax and his team over at Salesforce.com. On first look the new IDE released this morning is absolutely excellent. My main issue with the v.13 IDE had to do with the organization of source files. This has been fixed in v.14 with a new reorganization based on type (class, trigger, static resrouce, etc.) Thank you!

Until now, any Senator who embedded a YouTube video or linked to a Flickr album was in violation of outdated rules that required them to keep within the senate.gov domain. Some posted such links anyway, and few were reprimanded. But last week, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee voted to allow Senators to use third-party sites.

Since we’re running a campaign in 2008 and not 1908, we won’t touch the gender criteria, but let’s go ahead and segment by age. It’s okay - I can wait…). Test driving the tool, I found three things: It’s immensely cool for a marketer, voter targeting guru, or demographics aficionado. million visitors, 1.3%

A couple of Saturday’s ago, a team of Beaconfire staffers and families joined Ocean Conservancy for their annual International Coastal Cleanup.  Every year, teams around the world give up their Saturday to clean up all the crap that’s been dumped along our local shore lines.  Our team worked along the Anacostia River in Washington, DC. 

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend ForeSee Results ‘ Digital Citizen 2008 Summit.  I was only able to attend the first half of the event due to client meetings in the afternoon. One morning session was fairly sales-oriented. But the best session I was able to attend was Eric Peterson’s opening keynote.

In the early days of web design there wasn't a great deal of difference between a web designer and a web developer. lot of organizations took the two roles, threw in a few skills like network administrator and content editing and termed the whole thing a “webmaster”, a virtual wizard of all things Internet, a magical being of tech. As Web 2.0

Beaconfire has been honored with four Silver 2008 W3 Awards for Outstanding Website Design in the following categories: Activism: Free the Slaves. … the International Academy of Visual Arts, that is. Best Visual Appeal : Free the Slaves. Charitable Organizations/Non profit : Share Our Strength. Best Home Page: Share Our Strength.

With news of Obama’s $150 million month still fresh on my mind, I saw an email from him appear in my inbox with the subject line “You Decide.&# Skimming the email, I hoped that it would lead me to a donation form that asked me to determine which states my contributions to go to. Running out of time to place more TV buys.

Now that you've seen the benefits of performing a usability audit , you're probably wondering, “What else can we do to improve the reach and effectiveness of our organization's Web presence?” ” The answer might be to apply those same audit principles and steps to your online marketing and engagement programs.

Part One of an Exciting Two-Part Series! In this episode, we explore why iPhone and its applications are the Robot Devil. The iPhone, somewhat justifiably, gets a lot of criticism for being the downfall of Western civilization, the reason the U.S. is in a state of economic turmoil, the bane of Miro’s existance, and so on. And nothing else.

new digital divide between groups and their high dollar donors. The study finds that "most charities are not making the best possible use of their Web and e-mail efforts to connect with a critically important audience" of affluent and Web-fluent donors. It suggests communications be tailored to fit a group it dubs the "wired wealthy."

There are some interesting assumptions in this theory of the inefficiency coefficient. Stefan Turner says that ineffency goes up in there are enough people to support independent coalitions and factions. am not buying it. So they set out to first empirically verify Parkinson's law and then develop a mathematical model to describe

If you tune in here often (the 86+ of you), you might find this job really fun and interesting. We have been picking up quite a bit of work in line with training people on the concepts of network-centric advocacy and we are providing partners with direct support, online training and strategy services. Network Advocacy Coordinator

Clay has been doing great work tracking a few of those cases that many of us interested in network-centric advocacy like to watch. We watch them because many people worry about the "staying power" of a network vs an institution. Many people think the organization is the only mechanism for fighting the long drawn out fight.

White Oak conservation reserve in FL. Testing the new typepad plug in for the phone

I was just reading some interesting information about agent-based modeling. They look at flocks. They are working on how to get computer animated icons to behave like a flock. The interesting thing is that there are three rules that drive the behavior and the way a flock of birds moves: 1. All birds try and fly towards the center.

could imagine a traditional organizer interviewing the folks organizing the astronomy research at Oxford. Q: Tell me about your project? A: We need to do a lot of research. Q: How much? A: Well it is like counting and looking at stars in space. Q: How long will it take? How many staff would it take? How much? A: Not long. Q: What do you mean?

I have said it before Yochai Benkler is my hero. hard to read.better to watch). This is a good background on the foundation of what trends are really playing with modern movement organizing. Network-centric advocacy stems from exactly the trends that Yochai introduces here. Money was a problem in social movements.

Mike Wesch Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Kansas State University does a fantastic overview of the culture shift. He looks at Youtube as anthropologic study area. It is definitely worth watching. Mike presents a strong case that culture is shifting the way that people connect and build relations.

Tracking government actions a hobby of yours? Here is a new interface that tracks agencies and generates an RSS feed of rulemaking notices. Want a view of the trends check these out. Sunlight then runs a query on LOUIS to calculate the most commonly used words for a given day, with some exceptions, (described in more detail below).

This is an absolutely brilliant. Deepak Bhargava, Center for Community Change finally creates the right narrative that has driven the US economy into this mess. have been waiting to see how this would play out and which party might be able to build the right narrative that makes it clear. Deepak nails it. recommend the complete read.

Here is an amazing example of the power of getting into the workflow of your target audience. It is actually very network based approach to gathering information and data. It gathers data on a pull rather than proactive basis. This example is a bit creepy but the thinking behind it fascinates me. Or phonebank lists to reveal organizing strength?

It is nice to see the ways that Obama and McCain are wrestling with the new network collaborative power fueled with modern tech. This is a good peek into what happens in a campaign that focuses on pushing power to the edge vs. the campaign that tries to pull resources to the center. revolutionize old traditional groups. disengage. Not new

The publisher apparently only spent a few grand on publicist and that ended up crashing for some personal reasons. Van Jones really did just lean heavily on friends and groups that they had worked with over the years. Great story. Link: www.huffingtonpost.com.

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. tags: depression recession ) There are lessons to learned for us looking to move our nonprofits into better position for the downturn. We have a huge opportunity to reshape policy, culture and legislation over the next two years (at least).

With Barack Obama's VP text, the single largest mobile marketing event ever , and new data suggesting exposure to mobile lifts brand awareness , the time has never been more ripe for nonprofits to at least get their toes wet in mobile marketing. Both workshops feature excellent panels on the forefront of the mobile initiative.

A big question remains for nonprofit marketers as to when it's best to make the first donation appeal: do you hit up new subscribers for money immediately or wait and cultivate them first. Inspired by the best practices of the online retail industry, the RDC program attempts to maximize the ROI of a nonprofit's email subscriber acquisition efforts.

In case you missed it, the Google Blog recently announced that the company will be hosting a competition called Project 10 100 (pronounced "Project 10 to the 100th") as a call for the best ideas that can change the world by helping as many people as possible. You can read all the details on the contest and submit your idea here.

The idea was that the federal agency would work with Care2 to build support for the International Year of the Reef 2008. From the article : "For example, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) partnered with Care2 , an activist social network of over 8 million Americans, to promote awareness of the deterioration of coral reefs.

We just wanted to make sure any animal shelter supporters or animal lovers reading frogloop knew about Care2's new America's Favorite Animal Shelter Contest. Care2 will be giving away some fantastic prizes to shelters that receive the most votes, such as: Overall winning shelter receives $10,000. 20 top recruiters get a $50 gift certificate.

Continuing our coverage of the power of online video for nonprofits, we wanted to point you to a cool series of videos released by See3 Communications as a beginner's guide to online video. This is a 7-part series of short videos designed to introduce nonprofit professionals to new ways in thinking about online video.

Jenny Dirksen works for illustrious NYC restaurateur Danny Meyer, who owns Tabla , Gramercy Tavern , Union Square Café and several other of Manhattan's finest eateries. But Jenny is not a chef, waitress, hostess or bartender. Instead, Jenny is a “cause marketer” in charge of Meyer's charitable efforts to help homeless and disadvantaged people.

Network Solutions is hosting a star-studded, free video conference on new and affordable ways small business and nonprofits can benefit from the internet on Oct. While we assume frogloop readers stay pretty up-to-date on online marketing, just a look at the brainpower that will be speaking at the conference might make registering worthwhile.

Consumers are much more likely to buy products from companies that support social causes -- and nonprofit organizations -- than from companies that don’t. This is the key finding of a new study conducted by Duke University and cause marketing agency Cone, Inc. In addition, sales for the cause-affiliated products were 19 percent higher.

Three months ago today, Cyclone Nargis slammed into Burma making more than one million people homeless and killing upwards of 125,000 people. Or had we forgotten that? Click here to view the embedded video. The Burma Campaign UK

Just returned from a weekend camping with some friends and their dog in North Devon. Wonderful site in Morthoe. Already looking forward to Cornwall next week. Not long for my wife to wait for her wrist-watch, which got left in a side pocket before we packed away our tent

I spent much of the last week in Cornwall with the family. We pitched up at the excellent Treen Farm Campsite , where I am indebted to Kevin for recommending I purchase some storm pegs! Busy working week ahead with two trips up to London, beginning tomorrow.

Jessica Hagy nails it

I was honoured to do some work with Amnesty UK last year. Hat tip to Marc van Gurp and his brilliant  Osocio blog for pointing me to this tour de force

I can’t get this out of my head. know this is simplistic, and I’d never have dreamt making this sort of comparison when I studied Development Economics two decades ago. But wait a minute, when other, less powerful nations needed bailouts in the past, weren’t these accompanied by stringent  conditions? We do need a new global order.

Click here to view the embedded video. This neat little video is part of Colalife’s  submission to Google's Project 10 to the 100th  - a call for ideas to change the world. Kudos to Simon Berry and the distributed Colalife team, for this one, and their intelligent and relentless campaign.

Last week we asked our friends on Twitter, “ How often do you check your email per day? ” As you can tell by some of their responses below, there are a lot of people who never sign out of their email accounts! What do you think? Is “always on&# email the most efficient way to work? Just reply @See3 on Twitter

YouTube has introduced a new feature called Annotations , which allows users to spice up their videos with notes, speech bubbles, “spotlights”, and links, creating a higher degree of interactivity with the viewer. To get an idea of what you can do, check out this high-tech version of a simple card trick.

With the election coming to a close I will be sad to see the comedy end. It has been a huge boon to comedy writers. The Daily Show is better than ever. Saturday Night Live is relevant once again, mostly thanks to the brilliant and beautiful Tina Fey. Was There Too Much Sex And Profanity In The HBO Presidential Debate

ONE Vote ‘08 is an unprecedented, non-partisan campaign to make the fight against global poverty and disease a key foreign policy and security issue in the 2008 election. This year’s topic was poverty so See3 decided to host a screening of the Dollar A Day film series released by GlobalDevelopmentMatters. link]. link]. link].

From their website: On November 4th 2008, millions of Americans will go to over 200,000 distinct voting locations and using different systems and machinery to vote. Alison Fine just gave us a head’s up about a cool project she developed with her colleague Nancy Scola to help ensure a fair and safe election for all U.S. citizens.

The comedic piece everyone is talking about today is from Ron Howard , which I have pasted below. think there is certainly an age thing here. get it, I appreciate it. My younger employees, not so much. Just to bring this back to our subject for a minute. Is it a coincidence that all this comedy is video and not a really witty blog post?

The nonprofit community is rightfully scared that the market and economic problems will mean a big hit for charities. If my portfolio is down 40% the first thing that might go is my annual gift. But nonprofits would be wrong not to ask for those gifts. Even in a downturn many people can afford to make charitable gifts. In defense of raising money.

In the Times yesterday is a story with the title “ If No One Sees It, Is It An Invention ?&# It’s about an inventor who, instead of writing a paper seen by a few tens of people in a journal instead made YouTube videos and became a huge sensation. These videos led him to all kinds of job offers and tremendous recognition.

This election has unleashed a tremendous amount of creativity. Here’s a piece I stumbled on today. It is remarkable how individuals with small or nonexistent budgets can do cool things that get attention.

It seems like every month or two, I happen across a forum thread about project management tools. What works? Can you do it with a wiki? Are they necessary at all? Often, there are a slew of recommendations ( Basecamp , Central Desktop , MS Project ) accompanied by some heartfelt recommendations to stay away from all of them. Healthy Communication.

Comparison of Email Newsletter Tools - Updated for 2008 (ONE/Blog) Update of ONE/ Northwest's terrific, detailed comparison (with matrix and all!) of a number of blast emailing tools. Make a Comic (The Bamboo Project) This is fun: it's a list of tools that can help you easily create a comic, using wizard-like tools.

We've got an online seminar coming up tomorrow on Website Analytics - essentially, how to tell what people are doing on your website. We talk through the metrics you can track, what they mean, and how to use them, focusing substantially on Google Analytics. This is one of my favorite sessions - it's fun to conduct. Interested? Join us!

I'll tell you where they shouldn't be - living in the heads and on the hard drives and post it notes of various disconnected staffers. If you are from a large organization with crackerjack IT personnel or have the capacity to create permission based information access on an intranet or internal file system, then this post probably isn't for you.

What does Social Networking have to do with Constituent Relationship Management (CRM)? Here are a couple of examples nonprofits are working on: 1) A health advocacy organization set up a Ning site to support collaboration and knowledge sharing among like-minded organizations. Look for ecosystems in which multiple vendors work together.

I keep being surprised by how frequently I hear clients tell me that a vendor has suggested they "build them a CMS," or by proposals from vendors that include custom building a CMS. hear people suggesting building their own social networking website. even occasionally still hear tell of organizations who want custom CRMs.

Overview of Social Networking Tools (Work Literacy) Detailed introduction to a number of different social networking tools (FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, many more) What, Why, and How of Facebook Pages: An Expertise Roundup (Beth's Blog) Setting up an organizational presence on Facebook? Should you use a Facebook Group, a Facebook Page, or both?

Like many of us, I've been using Microsoft products for a long, long time, and I appreciate many of them. Microsoft is a significant vendor, period, with their dominance in operating systems, productivity applications and, well, most everything else software-related. But they are a particularly compelling vendor in the nonprofit sector.

We've got a new article up - The Basics of Email Metrics: Are Your Campaigns Working ? This is a pretty hefty one, covering what email data you might want to track, where to get it, how to make sense of it in calculated metrics, and modifications to improve your results. guess there's just always a lot to cover

It just seems that too many databases are too complex to use. How many years have we had to develop simple databases, that just work? Most groups I work with can quickly list off the information they truly care about in their systems. had the distinct pleasure recently of working again on a Kintera driven website. So where are the easy systems?

I was at an event recently where I spoke to a bunch of people about nonprofit software, and the most popular tool of the night was not email software or a donor database or some fancy Web 2.0 thing, but. MeetingWizard. you should. They're simple, but they can be a huge help in getting everyone to a meeting time that will work.

Gabe asks : Have your thoughts on CiviCRM changed over the course of the last year, since your last post on the topic ? Now that it's at 2.0 is it "ready for prime-time?" Michelle Murrain, Principal of MetaCentric Technology Advising and Zen of NPTech blog, says: A year has made a difference in CiviCRM. in fact, 2.2 Have other great options?

It's the article all you research geeks (like me!) have been waiting for: A Few Good Online Survey Tools. Eric Leland compares some of the lower price and more advanced options, and talks about what features you can get for a song, compared to one that you'll need to pay more for

Looking for an office productivity suite? Use an Apple Mac? great new alternative has arrived! have been using OpenOffice.org (OOo), the free and open source office suite since before it was OpenOffice.org. That would be when it was Star Office. That was a long time ago. The Apple OS has been the poor stepchild when it comes to OOo for a long time.

In a recent conversation on Progressive Exchange, Michael Hoffman of See3 shared some thoughts about considerations when choosing a video sharing site. With his permission, I wanted to share them here, as I think they're really useful. Michael said: You need to look at video sites in two ways. One is as a host -- a free host -- for your video.

I've been having increasingly good conversations recently with clients about staffing for their technology efforts (particularly web site and CRM/database projects). Fabulous!! would argue that insufficient staffing is one of the top causes for the underperformance of new initiatives, both during a new project and on-going.

The folks over at O'Reilly, who brought us the term "Web 2.0" and lots of great software books for geeks, are having a benefit auction in conjunction with their annual Web 2.0 Summit this November in San Francisco. Summit" community. like the focus this year, which is looking at how web 2.0 can be used for solving pressing world problems.

Lenny asks : We're an all volunteer 501c4 that has been using Kintera. They're asking a great deal of money for continuing to use Kintera. We would greatly appreciate suggestions of other service providers. We can segment the list and target specific geographic regions, and we're able to provide copy for the readers to send as well.

Online maps are great. After working on this mapping report , it became clear that half the battle with mapping is finding the right data. Recently I was asked where nonprofits can find data about their community. There are so many sources," I sputtered, before realizing I did not know many of them by name. Which ones have you used?" she asked.

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