Good to Great and the Social Sectors

This is a book accompanying "Good to Great", which I haven't read, applying it to non-profit organisations. At £6.99 its quite expensive for a slim volume, but it has some wise words.

As the title applies it takes the principles of the main book and tweaks them. The "pivot point" of the main book is the Hedgehog Concept, the essence of which "is to attain piercing clarity about how to produce the best long-term results, and then exercise relentless discpline to say, "no thank you" to opportunities that fail the hedgehog test". So its an antidote to violent swings of direction in the organisation.

There's a good quote about what makes non-profits different:
"In business, money is both an input (a resource for achieving greatness) and an output (a measure of greatness). In the social sectors, money is only an input, and not a measure of greatness."

It's a handy book for when strategic thinking is needed, or needs evaluating, and I'd recommend it.

tags: non-profit
nonprofit
charity
books

VB Express 1990

This amused me. Shaun Sullivan, CTO of Blackbaud, has uploaded a sample Raiser's Edge plugin. (Good news - you don't need to pay the large amount of money for the API module to use plugins.) So I downloaded it, and then installed Visual Basic Express to use it. I already had Visual Studio Express. I double clicked the .sln (Visual Studio solution) file and was presented with this dialog:



Bold text, white background, how very 1990.

tags: Raiser's Edge
Blackbaud
VB Express

Yahoo Pipes

I think there's a lot of potential in these.

Here are some pictures "inspired" by the weather near me.

I'd rather have some sort of regexp module so that the pictures more accurately reflect the weather forecast, but maybe its on its way.

tags: Yahoo pipes

ISO 639 - language codes

As you'd expect, being in the business of Bible Translation we're pretty interested in languages, and being a computer person I'm interested in coding.

So it's good news when SIL, one of our partner organisations, is involved in the latest version of the ISO-639 code for languages as Registration Authorities.

tags: iso
language

Wycliffe needs many skills

Here's an old post, but with a good story about how Wycliffe needs many skills, even oscilloscope tuners! Here's another old post of mine with statistics on job vacancies.

tags: Wycliffe

Bible in a minute

tags: bible

Presentations from Blackbaud Customer Briefing week

The Presentations from the Blackbaud Customer Briefing week are now available, though you'll need a login to the site to see them.

tags: Raiser's Edge