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Archive for the ‘non-profit’ Category

Cluetrain Revisited – Emerging Conversational Ecology for Nonprofit

Friday, February 15th, 2008

Ten years ago, four authors came together to start a new conversation about marketing. The result was a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto and with it, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger nailed 95 Theses on the door of the Internet and challenged us all to wake up to a transformation underway in how companies and people engage in markets.

Their Ideas have grown up to become a reality during past ten years. Today markets in corporate space and consumer products have begun to recognize that they have to listen to their customers. Their recognition of collaborative online communities has created new opportunities for them.

Those who are interested in identifying real world applications should listen to a weekly podcast. It attempts to put into practical, usable terms the methods of implementing the ideas laid out in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Three interviews available at BlogTalkRadio provides summary of reflection on ideas proposed by Cluetrain Manifesto.

There are several initiatives showing adoption of these practices in the nonprofit world. Increasingly organizations are realizing that initiatives which ignore the people behind the computers are going to fail.

Call to action is not new for Nonprofit. In-fact some of them can’t survive without it. It would be interesting to find out how emerging ecology of conversation have begun shaping call to action and role of professional Nonprofits in this changed environment. Internet profoundly changes the way people interact with nonprofit. Creative uses of these challenges have created new opportunities for nonprofit work.

Nonprofit: Evolution of IT – Does IT really matter?

Monday, January 21st, 2008

Recently I came across 2007 IT Staffing Survey: Take it Now! on NTEN site. They plan to publish results of their survey in January 2008.

One of the findings of their 2006 Survey indicated that “More than 95% of nonprofits routinely outsource specific IT functions.” This makes me wonder how far the issues raised by Nicholas Carr in his polemic during 2003-2004 (IT Doesn’t Matter) are relevant to understand investment decisions by nonprofit – both for IT staff and IT infrastructure.

Describing his posting IT Doesn’t Matter he wrote:

I examine the evolution of information technology in business and show that it follows a pattern strikingly similar to that of earlier technologies like railroads and electric power. For a brief period, as they are being built into the infrastructure of commerce, these “infrastructural technologies,” as I call them, open opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain strong competitive advantages. But as their availability increases and their cost decreases – as they become ubiquitous – they become commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they become invisible; they no longer matter.

Carr’s new book (2008), The Big Switch, targets the emerging “World Wide Computer” — dummy PCs tied to massive server farms way up in the data cloud.

It seems that while evaluating IT investments and staffing by Nonprofit one would need to take into account these changes and arguments. Today IT is becoming a commodity and a big switch from the desktop to the data cloud is gaining momentum. May be it is time to incorporate these emerging trends into our analytical frameworks. It quite likely that evolution of IT in Nonprofit might follow patterns one observed in business sectors few years ago.

Non-Profit: Online Forums, Blogs and Comments

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

Most Non-profit sites have yet to create / add mechanism to facilitate audience participation. Liability for third party content and managing forums without online flames remain one of the key concerns for these groups. Mark Glaser has very interesting post on this subject: Traditional Media Ready to Elevate the Conversation Online — with Moderation. According to him:

What has changed in the last year is that major media companies are no longer arguing over whether they should have comments under stories or blogs; instead, the debate is about how they should moderate them and even highlight the best ones in eye-catching editorial spaces. Many sites are embracing the concept of “news as a conversation,” and trying to create active conversations among reporters, editors and readers online.

It would be interesting to evaluate status of debate on this subject among NGOs. If Non-profit web strategies consider that the web is a dialogue and not a lecture then they will need innovative ways to facilitate conversations. Growth without deepest, most meaningful engagement for users may not help their mission.

Track and Analyze Online Videos

Friday, May 25th, 2007

Yesterday I came across posting on TechPresident (Personal Democracy Forum) announcing their partnership with TubeMogul, a new site that creates beautiful charts that make it easy to track and analyze online video.

TubeMogul is a free service that provides viewership-related analytics for those that publish and monitor online video. TubeMogul gathers intelligence across major online video sites including Metacafe, MySpace, Google Video, Revver, Yahoo! Video and YouTube.

NGOs and others who use online video sites may want to check out easy to use Dashboard based service avaialble on TubeMogul to track and analyze use of their videos.

GoogleEarth: Creating understanding for Darfur victims

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

On April 1oth, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, inaugurated online mapping initiativeCrisis in Darfur, using Google Earth in partnership with Google. This lets you visualize, better understand, and respond to the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur.

According to Google about 200 Million users use Google Earth. This provides huge potential for outreach for NGOs.

In the past number of NGOs have used Googlemaps for news and advocacy purposes. You can find extensive list of GoogleMap mashup and how to use tools on this Blog.

Above initiative provides interesting example of how to merge high resolution images from satellites, testimonies and other data compiled by NGOs with Google Earth. Ease of use and powerful presentation of complex data can be extremely useful for advocacy and expanding out reach to new constituencies.

Museum expects to use these tools to creating understanding and empathy for Darfur victims.

Applying Viral Principles to Charity / Nonprofit work

Friday, March 30th, 2007

A Blog post on TechChruch provides very interesting information about new project / startup- Agape.

Describing how non-profit and other charities have been raising support for their it argues that “Charities, political parties and affinity groups all rely on participation from people who share the same beliefs and ideals. But recruiting and fund raising are largely stuck in the pre-Internet era.”

Agape wants to harness principle of viral new startup to increase their effectiveness.

Those interested in these ideas may want to check out here to find out more information in future.

ROI in Non-profit – What Web Metrics to Use

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Return-on-Investment – ROI is a common concept used in the business world. Here it is common to argue that “measuring the right metrics — metrics that are in line with your business objectives — can shorten the investigation and ultimately put more profits in your pocket.”

I have been wondering about appropriate metrics to measure impact of various online campaigns by Non-profit organizations.

In his recent posting What Will Replace the Almighty Page View? Steve Rubel – Micro Persuasion provides quick overview of challenges one will need to address while defining and measuring web performance metrics.

Use of RSS, Flash and Ajax (at least in the form of mashups with Google Maps / Yahoo Maps) has been steadily growing on sites for non-profit.

Today it is hard to say what metric most non-profit organizations use to measure their impact of online activities. Quick look at couple of big NGO sites like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, ACLU, Environmental Defense Fund WorldWide one find very little / old information about their web traffic. In case of both AI and HRW web traffic data is quoted in terms of page views and visitors. While in case of ACLU and EDF Google search didn’t yield any useful information. Number of non-profits use free services offered by Alexa to measure their traffic (which is also quotes page views and visitors) .

It appears Non-profit world may take some time before they finetune their web performance measurements and share this data with public.

It is usual that for non-profit world to define impact (of their online advocacy/campaigns) in terms of end results / actions. These actions could include number of letters sent, number of signatures collected (online petitions), growth in donations, number of reports downloaded etc.

Performance of big websites in for-profit world is monitored / estimated by companies like Nielsen, Comscore and Alexa. Finally they have begun reworking their web traffic metrics.

It will be interesting to see how non-profit world (and foundations supporting their activities) respond to these technology led changes in usage patterns to rework their web performance metrics.

PS: After posting above I came across a blogs discussing how NGOs can measure ROI for their investment in Usability. This post summaries original article: Do Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability? by Jakob Nielsen (February 12, 2007).

Non-profits and user-generated videos (part I)

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Max Kalehoff in his blog post Consumer-Generated Ads Will Disrupt Existing Production Models evaluates impact of this emerging phenomenon on traditional media production / ad service agencies.

Issue of user-generated content (including online forums, blogs, videos) has begun becoming part of Non-profit/social justice organizations work. Some high profile groups like Amnesty International, Witness, Human Rights Watch and others have expanded their use of YouTube and working to expand their outreach and/or share user generated content on specific campaign.

Recent example include Close Guantanamo campaign by Amnesty International. Make Some Noise – Amnesty International. Close to 100 video clips in various languages (most less than a minute long) are posted on YouTube. It does manage to provide visibility to voices of ordinary people.

Responding to this emerging trend Witness started a pilot project on Global Voices (as a subset of the functionality of their forthcoming Human Rights Video Hub) some time in September 2006. This page allows users to “Watch and comment on human rights video from around the world curated by WITNESS”. Commentaries along with these clips on Global Voices add extremely useful context and some analysis while users what these clips. Thus Witness is using some what different model than used by Amnesty International in their Say ‘Close Guantánamo’ on camera! initiative.

Use of this medium is no longer limited to English. During last quarter of 2006 Farsi Tube was launched in the U.S. FarsiTube is a video sharing community targeted towards Iranians, and has all kinds of videos about Iran and Iranian culture.

There are many video sharing services in Korea. It will be interesting to find out how these sites are impacting social and political discourses.

According to China Daily report (February 1st) “almost half of China’s Internet users were found to be focusing in on video-sharing websites. There are hundreds of websites offering webcast and podcast services in Chinese. Tudou.com is considered to be the most popular video-sharing site.

In short any evaluation of user-generated content must include all such global initiatives.

YouTube: Emerging Popular Media and a New Political Force

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

YouTube ad – Vote Different – attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton potraying her as the “Big Sister” (remember “Big Brother” from 1984?) launches a new chapter in 2008 presidential campaigning in the United States of America. The recent demonstration of YouTube’s political impact came to notice during November 2006 elections in the United States.

Since then, the Internet has been buzzing about political video mashups. Observers of this media have begun recognizing that citizen activists are increasingly able to affect the political process. Vote Different video has become part of many other successful viral smash (more than 3 million requests in three weeks) and has created a debate about the impact that user-generated political videos will have on the 2008 presidential election in the United States.

Well known Blogger Arianna Huffington argues that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens, and that “the old political machine no longer holds all the power.” Many others see YouTube As New Political Force. It is hard to say how long the political class will continue underestimating the impact of changing technology.

While YouTube video wildfire was gaining strength in the United States, users from Turkey were banned from accessing YouTube videos.

Activists worldwide have been using YouTube and other online video sharing sites for quite some time. Recent examples include:

Philippine left-wing groups turn to YouTube, Internet to spread word about killings

Anti-gay propaganda from Christian activists on YouTube

Coffee Wars: Activists Battle Starbucks on YouTube

It will be interesting to see how Google – with its less than perfect record of protecting freedom of expression of its users in a country like China – handles pressures from political machines around the globe.

On August 23, 2006 Britt Bravo in his blog post Is Your Nonprofit on YouTube? found 76 videos tagged as Non-profit / nonprofit on YouTube. As of today I found 2,030 videos on YouTube using the same tag(s). Interestingly only one clip (The Best War Ever — by John Stauber & Sheldon Rampton) , which could meet traditional criteria of political issues raised by non-profit, made to the Top Five videos – listed by view counts.

Does it mean that non-profits will need to improve their message packaging while they use popular media? Or that YouTube is a fad soon to disappear without long lasting impact on the way non-profit do their outreach?

Future will tell us.