LASA Charity Digital Summit

("Summit" is a bit grand.) Yesterday I was in London for the LASA Charity Digital Summit (#lasadigsmt on Twitter).

Update: slides and audio are of the digital summit are now available.

The first session was about the Future of Social media, though most of the discussion was about where we are now. One of the predictions was that location would become more important. This ties in with Robert Scoble's latest book idea about "context", i.e. your devices being helpful because they know where you are and other stuff about you. If Robert's interested in something like that he's usually worth following.

My take on location is that apps have to be really smart with it, and give you the warm feeling that you're in control of your data. This isn't new, look at Yahoo Fire Eagle which has been around since 2007, but I've heard no mention of for years.

Then I went to the session Light up Your Digital Campaign. Lucy Buck from Child's i Foundation talked about how she started the charity. Right from the start she was videoing and sharing stuff - she's a TV producer by background. Jude Habib talked about pitching your photos and audio to the media. As they get increasingly short-staffed they are more willing to use your stuff. Peter Gilheany is from an agency and talked about old-fashioned planning of your whole campaign (what are your objectives? who are you trying to reach? what are the best routes to reach them?). It was good down-to-earth stuff. Digital is just one of those routes to reaching people and he made the observation that people use a different persona online to what they might in other circumstances.

After lunch I went to the session on Digital Fundraising lead by Rachel Beer from Beautiful World agency. I have a lot of time for them as their blog is really good at highlighting what you need to know as a charity about online stuff. After some general points she focussed on banner adverts and took us through some good and bad points of some adverts and donation forms from various charities that I won't mention.

It was a good day, and worth the price of a train ticket (as entry was free). I got to meet Paul Webster for the first time, who I've been following on twitter for years, as well as Louise Brown who I've met once before.

Charity IT Conference 2011

I attended the Charity IT Conference yesterday.

Cloud

"I think we're all getting a bit bored of the cloud" said the chairman of the meeting. You're telling me. The first two speakers covered this subject. The first was from an outsourcing company, who reminded us that just because the technology's moved to a different place doesn't mean you don't need to get your ducks in a row with contracts, agreements, T&Cs etc.

The second spoke about the need for business processes to change. He talked about a process in a bank that took 15 weeks to get something going. Having reduced the technological side to 20 minutes it still took 12 weeks because of the other processes around it.

Bring your own device

As I'm going to be looking at security of mobile devices this was a good session as it covered that, and other aspects, like support (you don't get any) and administration (I may want to wipe my data from your device). And of course you need to be letting users know where they stand.

Website personalisation

It's a good idea.

Security

As well as detailed steps which you can see on the powerpoints when they put them up on the conference site the speaker suggested using an iterative approach - improving things everywhere, rather than trying to do one thing well. He also suggested a risk assessment approach, which I was planning to do anyway. He mentioned a Charities Security Forum that he's part of, but the website appears not to be working so I won't link just yet.

Knowledge management

The speaker had quite a hard job giving an introduction to a big subject in half an hour, but she did well. I realised that a couple of the projects I'm working on are actually doing knowledge management, so I can find resources under that name to help me out.

Final session

In order to manage my own knowledge I left before the final session as my brain was full. It was from the global CIO of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Seeing as we're a bit smaller than them, it might not have been relevant.

Social media

It was interesting to see the place of social media. Normally every conference like this has something about social media on the programme. However it wasn't there this time. Maybe because it's a bit more mainstream now. The conference had a hashtag on the publicity #citc2011, which I don't remember last time. I saw tweets about another conference Lasa European Not for Profit Technology Conference when it was on last week #lasatech11. I don't know for sure, but I get the impression that Lasa is more useful to small to medium charities (though I may be wrong), whereas this conference was definitely for the bigger charities. However they did get Martha Lane Fox, who has quite a big responsibility! Lots more tweets on their hashtag too.

You can quote me on that

I was just getting ready to leave work last night when I glanced at a brochure on my desk, a brochure I'd already read the inside of.

The brochure is for the Charity IT Conference 2011. I went to the same event last year and that quote was taken from my feedback form, so I'm not entirely surprised that they used my words. And they spelt my name right.

I guess I'd better go this year as it comes so highly recommended.

Alternatives to Dabbledb - my conclusion

This is a follow up to this article - Alternatives to Dabbledb.
In the end I picked Teamdesk (but see update at the end). Here are my conclusions.

Zoho Creator
The deal breaker with this one was that you couldn't display parent records and child records on the same page. Also, according to one person their support isn't so good. From what I can tell they only have one person assigned to support.

So in the end it came down to Infodome or Teamdesk. Looking at their respective pages with wishlists of features it looked like Teamdesk had more people using it. Also, the fact that Teamdesk has other products was encouraging, as it meant that their income wasn't vulnerable to the popularity of one product.

As I started implementing I struggled with the complexity of our data, with four levels of relations to nest. However that's the limitation of these web interfaces and programming-free approach. There were also some niggly things with the way that relations worked, but I could have lived with those.

Due to external reasons we're thinking of using another system to manage the data.

(Update 18 March 2011 - That other system is Highrise, and we've decided to go with that instead. That's not because of a shortcoming of Teamdesk - it is a good equivalent to Dabbledb. However the nature of the data is about people - contacts and cases, not so suited to a rigid database format like Teamdesk or Dabbledb.)

Alternatives to dabbledb

(Update: I've come to a conclusion.)
I'm doing some work in my spare time for a local charity. They are using dabbledb, which has been acquired by twitter. The future is not certain, though they are supporting existing customers and say they will give 60 days notice before they shut it down.

I looked around for alternatives and came across this helpful article - migrating away from dabbledb. It lists a number of alternatives. I'm still investigating the alternatives, but I thought you might find it useful to know what I've found so far.

Zoho Creator
They are the only one I've found to have a specific dabbledb migration tool, which takes the schema and sucks it in. What it can't do is spot which tables link to what, but once you tell it that it brings all the data in. Once you've created your app joining two tables can be done, but not through the interface, you have to resort to the scripting language. Update: you can join tables. However, the fact that it has a scripting language increases its power. If you want to make forms available to non-users you can ask them to do that, it can't be done yourself. (Update: this is a one-off and you can do it with subsequent forms - see comment below.) As you'd expect with a web page, form layout is pretty basic, though you can put fields in a second column. The form editor has drag and drop. Reporting options are varied: you can have lists, grid, chart, calendar, HTML page, as well as pivot table and pivot charts.

"Creator" is one of many applications they offer.

Teamdesk
Teamdesk offer a Dabbledb migration tool, though unless I'm missing something, it's just an import tool that reads in all your CSV data. It's been around for 5 years, which is quite a long time in this business, but is probably a good thing. It looks a little outdated, but is quite capable. When I imported data it didn't recognise data that was a picklist, but by using the move column function you can convert an existing column to a picklist. It was easy to set up relationships between tables. As well as normal data table views you can have summary, chart, calendar and timeline views.

ForeSoft, the company behind Teamdesk, have a small number of other applications.

Infodome
Infodome is Flash-based, so looks a little more swish than the others. The import from dabbledb worked well. You can define table relations through the interface. You don't seem to be able to make forms available to non-users. Forms have free-form layout (probably easy because of Flash) and you can have subforms. It's reporting function allows you to do simple grouping and totalling, as well as just listing things, so less options than the other two.

Infodome is the company's only product.

There were three others that I'm not considering.

Caspio is another Flash-based one, but needs you to host it on your own site, even though you work on designing your database via their site. After I signed up for their trial I was contacted by someone wanting to help me, so that's good customer support. One gripe on the import - it couldn't recognise data types, like dates, by default, and made everything text.

Qrimp looks quite capable, but the company seems quite small. I asked for an account on their demo system and never got one. Although you get two free months (all the others have 14 day trials) you only get that by signing up with your Paypal account.

Intuit Quickbase is an order of magnitude more expensive than the others above.

MyTaskHelper had a lot of features in beta when I first looked, but since then the product seems to have matured - see the discussion below.

It's always hard to evaluate suppliers without having access to their financials. You don't want them to go under, or be too successful like Dabble and get bought out. Zoho boasts a large number of users. I couldn't tell much about the other companies.

Interim Conclusion
I had hoped that writing this would help me decide which to use, but I think I need to try and do more real stuff before I see if it fits what I want. I haven't mentioned features that they mostly or all have - separate applications, users, dashboards, email functions, sample/template applications etc.

The real conclusion is in another post.

Civil Society IT Conference

Yesterday I went to the Civil Society IT Conference.

The opening plenary talk was from Ian Osborne. He talked a lot about the Cloud. I'm still sceptical as to whether it will make much difference to small to medium charities. One of his passing comments was about online databases which made my ears prick up, as I'm working, in my spare time, with a local charity to get them off DabbleDB, an online database tool. There are a few around and I think for a very small charity, they represent a good solution for record keeping. It's not rocket science, but if well packaged and delivered it could give a good alternative to Access.

The first workshop I went to was Martin Jervis from Blackbaud talking about a CRM implementation they did with British Heart Foundation. He did well at not blowing their own trumpet and the fact that the BHF project manager co-speaker wasn't able to attend meant he could be effusive with his praise for the absent person.

One of the things BHF did was to fit their processes with the software, something which I remarked on after a conference four years ago. Someone else said you do that for the run of the mill stuff, like HR and Finance, and work on tweaking and bespoking the area where your charity specialises. Interesting thoughts.

Andrew Brenson from Save the Children spoke about Creating a sustainable IT strategy, with some common sense stuff about hitting the right point on the adoption curve, and the importance of not letting a strategy gather dust, but refining it.

I was fortunate enough to meet my counterpart in another Christian charity and it was useful to share experiences and explore the differences between our approaches to CRM and websites.

There was a session on Getting Your Website Strategy Right with Catriona Campbell from Foviance, and her work with clients on user personas. Also talking about TV and online video was Jackie Brambles who I vaguely remember from Top of the Pops, but who has been presenting other stuff in the US and then back over here since then.

Touchstone did an extended plug for their CRM stuff. The interesting thing about that session was that it works in an online way with Azure. I wondered when Azure first came out why it was positioned in the way it was, not directly rivalling App Engine or Amazon EC2. However now I can see that it's a platform for their own offerings, like Dynamics, or for third parties to do the equivalent.

Robert Schifreen from Security Savvy gave a talk about security, which can never be really done well in a short space of time. However I think he was scary enough to make you look at it again.

Recent IT conferences have had social media all over them. This one didn't at all which was strange. I found all but one of the sessions (guess which one) were useful, and if there's a different spread of stuff next year I'd consider going.

Charity bag overload

This is a picture of all the bags that have been put through our door by charities over the last couple of years. They are all asking you to put unused stuff in there and leave the bag on your doorstep on a certain day. Even if we'd used them (which we haven't) by the time we'd used the first couple or so we wouldn't have much more to give away every few weeks as the next bags arrive.

It's like fishing in an empty pond. Come on charities, be more smart.

Lessons learned from a book collaboration

A new book is out: Social by Social, "A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact". It's available as a free PDF download as well as a non-free dead tree version.

At a quick glance it seems full of useful stuff, along with some familiar things if you've followed blogs with the word "social" in the title.

The bit that grabbed my attention was the stuff in Chapter 9 about the making of the book. As someone whose job it is to make sure people can use the tools provided, some things struck me about their choices and the problems they had. (It's good to see such honesty in the first place too!)

The group was, as a whole, pretty technology savvy – or at least that was the assumption. This assumption led to the first major mistake [emphasis theirs]: not enough thorough evaluation of each participant’s level of social media competency and experience.
...
We ended up defaulting to e-mail quite quickly for two reasons:
firstly, because everyone was definitely using it; and secondly because we trusted it to give us our own record of what had been said that we knew we could rely on.
...
The project wiki was useful for collating content together, but it became cumbersome and ineffective for editing the final document together: it was too text-focussed and wasn’t useful for showing layout and graphics to the designer, and also it wasn’t appropriate for delivering to the client at NESTA and inviting formal feedback and signoff. We ended up collating the final handbook in Microsoft Word and using e-mail and tracked changes – which worked very efficiently but broke our collaborative approach in favour of getting the job done.

I'm not surprised they ended up using email. Even though it's not very good for collaboration, there's no obvious replacement (I wonder how they would have got in with Google wave?). Wikis are very text orientated, so you can see why they wanted to use Word for layout. But multiple copies of a document with track changes is still a bit clumsy. There must be a need for a good tool to do that sort of thing.

It's worth reading that chapter to hear what the other three major mistakes were.

Institute of Fundraising IT Special Interest Group Conference

or the IOFITSIG conference.

(One aside: on the train up I noticed that hardly anyone had a tie on, just suits and open necked collared shirts. As I'm not a regular commuter I must have missed the memo saying that we don't have to wear a tie.)

I found this very stimulating. Not being a fundraiser I found the initial session from Alan Clayton of Cascaid (that's the agency, not the careers people) very interesting.

(Update: I missed out the Social Media Game. That link is about the session that I went to.)

I went to a session which had someone from Comic Relief. Obviously that's very big scale stuff, but some of it is applicable to even an organisation like us. For example, we've been getting people to run events recently.

"A Best Practice Framework for Managing a Big, Sophisticated Fundraising Information System" was about a Raiser's Edge implementation at Help the Aged. Much bigger than us, but good lessons to learn.

"Social Media feel the fear and do it anyway" gave me my to do list to take to the boss.

As an aside, it's interesting that the Fundraisers have their IT bit. The Charity Finance people have their IT bit. Where are the Charity IT people? There's CITRA, which is owned by several organisations, including those too. However their website has events from 2004 and 2005 on it, and nothing in the future, so that doesn't inspire confidence.

Sage Charity User group

When we started planning our installation of Sage MMS I looked around to see if there was a Charity User Group. A company called Intelligent Solutions mentioned it on their website, but they had no-one to run it, so things were dormant. Now, however things appear to be waking up. There's a page for the User Group on their website, though you won't find mention of the upcoming User Group meeting.

tags: Sage
charity

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

Update on Helpalot

I got a comment about my long tail of charities post from the creator of helpalot.org, which I said was a one person effort. He now has some backing. Worth watching...

tags: non-profit
charity
long tail

Review of the Long Tail

I've finished The Long Tail now. There are lots of reviews out there summarising it, so I'll say some personal things about it. Unlike the previous book I was sent a review copy of, this one wasn't pre-released via the author's blog. He discussed some of the thinking that went into the book, but didn't show us chapters as he was writing them.

Before I started I wondered what else can you say once you've explained the initial long tail thing. The answer is that he goes into more detail about how niches work, finds long tail examples back in history (mail order catalogues), as well as covering how people find stuff when there's so much choice. The latter was another question I had, which was fairly well answered.

His examples of Long Tail businesses was pretty limited to a few: Amazon, Ebay, Netflix and a couple of others, and to a US perspective. The former is probably because of where he could get stats from, and the fact that it's early days still. The latter is probably because its so much harder to write a world book, but then the internet is in most countries, so I think its worth making the effort.

As for the subject of long tail and charities which I covered in my previous post on the book, I found a few more things to think on, like reducing your costs, and building findable niches.

Disclosure: I got this book for free.

tags: non-profit
charity
long tail

The long tail of charities

I've just got a review copy of The Long Tail. I've been following the blog for a while so I thought I'd share some relevant thoughts as it applies to charities before I dive into the book.

The Long Tail premise is, in the subtitle of the book "Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More". A non-profit IT director writes on the subject, but I'll speculate further.

Small charities need to make themselves findable. Guidestar in the UK is a start (also available in the US). A Dutch student is working on Helpalot.org, "a website that makes every charity findable". That's a one person effort though.

If I were in a small charity rather than the medium one I'm in now, I'd be wondering how I could create a web presence without too much work (I'm not aware of some easy options), how I could take donations (CAF looks simple, but we've struggled with the paperwork they send you to tell you about the gifts), and how I could get found on the Internet.

So far there's no iTunes for charity, unless you know about it...

tags: non-profit
charity
long tail

Charity news from the budget.

Tags: charity

With a new project comes the inevitable question of the appropriate technology. We have a project that needs a bit of database stuff, some data entry, some automatic processing of files (originally emails) and some production of XML files. One of the top priorities I have is maintainability. We have two people supporting our information systems and we can't be sure that over the next few years there will always be those two. If we had a larger team we could assume there would always be someone around.

So the maintainability criteria for technology choices is for when there is no-one around, and we have to appeal for some volunteer help. We want to pick something that it is likely a volunteer will be familiar with. So we choose Access, which we already have as part of our MS Office desktop installation. For some of the processing/glue stuff we're using Python. In the past we've chosen Perl, but Python is recommended because it is easier to work out what it is doing (see Maintainability). There are newer scripting languages, but we're trying Python for the moment.

tags: charity non-profit Python Perl Access

More on the Charity Finance Directors' Group's IT Conference:
Michael Jackson from Sage gave the opening speech on lessons that charities can learn from the commercial world. He spoke for 15 minutes when he had a 45 minute slot...

Ian Smith from Oracle UK had more to say, particularly on "Embedding CSR (Corporate Social Responsiblity)" - their involvement in Childline for example.

The thing that stuck in my mind from the presentation was the comment "People should fit their process around the software". The reason he gave was that if you have people using standard software then upgrades are cheap, because you don't have to upgrade all the little customisations that have been built in. I think he's talking about big off-the-shelf-and-customised packages.

This does go against my programmer's brain as the user is (almost) always right, but I can see how it applies to big systems. I don't know much about the new NHS central booking system, apart from the fact that it's late, but as I said before, sometimes there are cases for not fitting in with the way that thousands of GP surgeries do their business.

On the other hand, I could go into a surgery and be told "we can't do that because the system won't let us" and get annoyed with that. I really feel tension with this point.

Maybe it comes down to cost. If you can pursuade people that its better to fit the software because it's cheaper in the long run, and you want to keep your job don't you, then they may accept it. Healthcare is pretty much free in the UK, and I would guess that GPs aren't paying for the new system, so they don't see the cost benefit in standard processes.

I went to the Charity Finance Directors' Group's IT Conference last week. I'll write more about the other speakers, but I want to mention Richard Barrington from Sun first. His was an inspiring talk, so much so that at the end I looked down at my hand to see if I had a bottle of Kool-Aid in it, so much was I taken in by it.

Seriously though, he convicingly presented Sun as a company:

• with good environmental credentials - producing low energy products, recycling their own paper and plastic, as well as their own computers: "if it's got a Sun badge we'll take it back"
  
• committed to Open Source
• not forcing users to upgrade and supporting all the old kit
• supporting education with free stuff
  

The Sun Ray thin client looks good. Richard said he could insert his id card into one of them in any Sun office around the world and within 4 seconds he was logged into his account with his documents and applications.

The thin client argument generally is impressive, but I don't know why it hasn't taken off. Certainly I've never heard of people using Sun Rays in any company. I'm sure they've sold a few, but it's not making big mindshare from my perspective.

His pitch to the charities was about "delivering an online Global CVS (Community and Voluntary Sector) Community" by providing shared services. There are things to think on there with the trends in online applications, like CRM. My brain is ticking...

I can highly recommend the Idealware monthly newsletter for information useful to non-profits/charities. Sign up at their website. It pointed me to this excellent white paper on Open Source CMSs.

tag: charity non-profit CMS

Now here's something that may prove to be revolutionary. I don't know if salesforce.com were the first people to do hosted CRM applications, but they are certainly the ones that seem to be the most talked about.

Now they've got AppExchange where you can develop or use applications that people have written to work with salesforce.com.

Mashups are very Web 2.0, but here you have a mechanism that you can make money out of a mashup that you create.

The Regiser has a good overview of it.

I looked for nonprofit or charity applications and only found two, no make that four, two more have appeared since I started looking yesterday. The most useful one is volunteer management which salesforce.com use themselves for when their employees do volunteering.

The attraction of the hosted CRM application idea for charities is the fact that you don't need IT support staff so much, which may be an issue if you're small.

tag: charity non-profit crm web 2.0