Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 13, 2009

He gave me a demo and overview of their NetCommunity tool, which has been around for a while, and I figured it deserved a blog entry. However, it is true that Raiser’s Edge, the CRM/DMS tool that this integrates with, is inarguably one of the most important tools out there. Some call it the gold-standard.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 16, 2009

There is a Plone/Salesforce.com Integration group , that keeps working on this, and a number of organization, including ONE/Northwest , have invested huge amounts of time and resources to working on this integration. Tags: CRM salesforce Nonprofit Tech Web Tools CMS plone.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 11, 2010

It’s a really solid post, with an information-packed report attached, as well as some resources. And then, I’ll do my best over the course of the next few weeks to answer how these would get accomplished via the technological tools that most nonprofits use or can get access to.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

Even if they do, it takes developer time to write the code to do the integration, and that may be resources that a nonprofit doesn’t have. Trade-off – you don’t get best of breed tools for both. All of these strategies take time and resources, but of different kinds. All-in-one. Web forms from CRM vendor.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 10, 2008

June 10, 2008 Today, someone on the progressive exchange list asked about a tool called Rapleaf. I actually thought this could be quite useful for organizations to figure out how to allocate sparse resources in the Web 2.0 What is public? But that’s not the point of this post.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 10, 2008

But should the organization as a whole put resources into a “twitter strategy&# ? I’d be really hard pressed to suggest that they spend much of their meager resources on that. I know that people are doing fantastic work around the ways in which social networks can be powerful tools. 4 James Young 04.15.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 17, 2008

ReviewBasics is a collaborative editing and reviewing tool. It’s actually a pretty interesting resource, and worth a read. I don’t always have a lot of time to investigate them, or figure out if they are useful, but I do like to not completely ignore the ones that look interesting.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 25, 2008

It leveled the playing field, so that an organization without many resources could do what at that time, required a lot of resources. Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

On the other hand, perhaps it means that these new, larger entities can provide services and resources that the smaller ones could not. And, it’s still clear that CRM/Fundraising software is where the money and resources are going in nonprofit software development. It doesn’t really change anything.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

On the other hand, perhaps it means that these new, larger entities can provide services and resources that the smaller ones could not. And, it’s still clear that CRM/Fundraising software is where the money and resources are going in nonprofit software development. It doesn’t really change anything.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 9, 2007

Excellent resource. 1 comment… read it below or add one } 1 Beth Kanter 10.12.07 at 11:01 am Congratulations! You deserve to be proud of this work! Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 19, 2007

We were talking about whether or not this certain nonprofit, who had mondo resources, should help facilitate web development for their client organizations. at 5:14 pm That’s a pretty sad story, Michelle, and interesting that it was coming from a nonprofit that based on resources shouldn’t have been thinking that way.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 29, 2007

He wanted to know how to get his kids access to tools that were affordable for them to create and edit media. But their number pale in comparison to, say, the plethora of, say, network sniffing tools, for instance. It’s not just about access to resources in an economic sense. But it needs addressing. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 27, 2008

I think one of the biggest mistakes that an organization can make with its website is to promise more than it can deliver – make sure that the resources to create that blog, or podcast, or photo gallery, or whatever bells and whistles that you promise on your website, are there when the website goes live.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

One of the most important things to understand is that SaaS is primarily built upon open source tools such as Apache, MySQL, and MySQL. It’s my understanding that none of the major non-profit SaaS players use open source tools. 3 Jon Biedermann 09.25.08 5 friarminor 09.30.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

NTEN is, to my mind, a critically important organization in the ecosystem that is the Nonprofit Technology field, as the convener of the gathering that anchors the community, as well as a unique and necessary multi-dimensional resource at the regional and national levels for all sorts of constituents in the nptech world.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 9, 2008

.&# And, of course, there has been a lot of resources and money poured into server software for Linux, but not as much for tools for the desktop. And I’ve talked about how the means and the ends are the same – so it’s important to me to use open source tools. This is my dilemma.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 11, 2007

I think part of the answer has to be to provide the resources for people to become better providers – whether it be to help budding accidental techies get off the ground to become great IT staff or independent consultants, or helping individual and small consulting firms learn what makes really good nonprofit support.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 12, 2007

IDI’s Blogger Relations has some good ideas and resources on data management – they suggest, and I agree that it is critical to managing fundraising strategy. tools , i-Lighter and Google Notebooks for managing online notes and such. .&# I wish all nonprofits understood this!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 12, 2007

IDI’s Blogger Relations has some good ideas and resources on data management – they suggest, and I agree that it is critical to managing fundraising strategy. tools , i-Lighter and Google Notebooks for managing online notes and such. .&# I wish all nonprofits understood this!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 13, 2007

Give me tools, like Yahoo Pipes , or other kinds of things, that help me to whittle down the information I’m taking in – make it more useful, help me find things faster and easier. It will use up server resources at some server farm which uses electricity (which means, probably burning dirty coal, or natural gas).

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 14, 2008

Also, to be fair, SourceForge supplies a lot more “raw resources&# to its projects — web space, databases, login servers, compile farms, and so on. It’s not intended to scale up to the proportions one would need for a major project like Python or Amanda. Depending on the project, those can be really useful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 13, 2007

More adoption means more developers involved, more users helping, more resources available. It’s not only that they are going to be contributing to the project – but remember the old adage “no one ever got fired for buying IBM&# ? IBM’s reputation is bound to help increase adoption of OpenOffice.org.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 27, 2008

I do a ton of technical writing, and I have become the “documentation facilitator&# of the OpenMRS project – it is an open source medical records system, designed to serve clinics in low-resource areas (such as sub-sarahan Africa) that treat patients with HIV/AIDS.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 27, 2007

It’s enjoyable writing them, and also writing them for a non-US audience (although I’m sure plenty of US folks take advantage of their amazing resource.) One on Open Office, and FOSS on the Mac are forthcoming. This will be my last tech blog entry until at least August 6th.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 2, 2007

I like the wide variety of resources he brings to bear – he’s introduced me to a lot of great writers and thinkers in varied areas. What I like: I hear about a lot of new things from Deborah, and she explores a lot of new tools, and asks good questions. I like the design of Ed’s blog as well.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 20, 2006

One vendor said that very few nonprofits have the resources to take advantage of APIs. Someone (I think it was Nick or Peter) said that nonprofits can do more than vendors think they can – so providing the resources is important.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

It is an internal assessment tool which helps organizations figure out what parts of their online strategy are working, and what parts might need tweaking. How does giving resources to nonprofits to help them understand how to use web stats to do internal assessment of web strategy inconsistent with choosing not to publish raw web stats?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2006

This is what I call “commons-based peer production.&# He talks about three examples which have become classic – free/open source software, SETI@Home , and Wikipedia. Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 1, 2007

It’s doesn’t have nearly the user base, or the amount of available tools as the others, but InterBase is a pretty interesting product, with some good features (like a small footprint, server performance tuning, and a great rollback and recovery system.) Firebird – this is a newer kid on the block, sort of.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 1, 2007

It’s doesn’t have nearly the user base, or the amount of available tools as the others, but InterBase is a pretty interesting product, with some good features (like a small footprint, server performance tuning, and a great rollback and recovery system.) Firebird – this is a newer kid on the block, sort of.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 17, 2007

So, once I decided that, I realized I needed to find the right tools. ReadyTalk – this had been the tool I thought I’d use. that said, because this conference tool offers so many features, i can imagine some users would feel overwhelmed. I thought it would be a good endeavor to start with. It’s $.24

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2007

Its focus is on servers, and Fedora , it’s “community version&# does certainly benefit from Red Hat’s development expertise and resources, but it doesn’t have as vibrant a community as Ubuntu, for instance. It was the first Linux distribution to make it big in the business world.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 18, 2011

Most nonprofit leaders think of technology as something in between a useful tool to be leveraged, and a necessary evil. There are lots of folks (I do this on occasion on this blog, and Idealware is a great resource) that can provide you with information about specific platforms, and comparisons between them.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 7, 2007

The new journal, the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change , is, I think, a needed part of our landscape of resources for the sector. Benkler goes further , and I go with him: Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant role in economic opportunity and human development.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 4, 2011

The advantage of using Sharepoint for Microsoft-centric shops is that there is full integration with lots of internal network resources. Ektron is another one that I’ve heard folks talk about, as well as ExpressionEngine.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 6, 2007

As for open solutions, Charlie is correct- the majority of non profits do not have the dedicated resources to implement an open source solution or even something ‘low-cost’ such as Access or Excel. It all depends on the individual set of needs and resources available to an organization.

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