Clients

A week or two ago at the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference I lead a Birds of a Feather about Using Agile Software Development Methodologies to Manage your Organization.

When I submitted the session proposal I thought it would be a small group of people over lunch, talking about how they are introducing and driving agility in their organizations. 

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Affinity Bridge's Katherine Bailey and Tom Nightingale gave an awesome introduction to the Search API module at the recent Vancouver Drupal User Group's meeting.

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As mentioned in the previous post, the recently announced Blackbaud acquisition of Convio - two giants in the closed-source world that provide web services primarily for non-profits - caused a stir not only in the non-profit world but also in the Free and Open Source software world.  Allen Gunn of Aspir

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Why do so many organizations waste the opportunity to hook their email subscribers with the first line of the email message? I hadn't really noticed this sooner because of the way I consumed email: through a series of complicated email aliases and gmail filters.  Honestly, in Gmail, I was basically ignoring most solicited bulk email (organization email lists). But since I've been taking a first look at my email through my iPhone and iPad using the iOS mail app, I've begun to notice this shocking fact.

Here are some facts about viewing email via the iOS mail app:

• Approximately 35 to 40 characters of a subject are displayed
• Approximately 100 characters from the top of the email message are displayed

Two lines at 50 characters, and a subject of 35 to 40 characters. That's basically a Tweet.  And that (plus the "from" name) is all you have to get your reader's attention and convince them to open the email message and read on.

Why do so many emails waste this space with something like:

• "Click to view this email in a browser" (37 characters)
• "Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser." (64 characters)
• "If you're having trouble viewing this email, you may see it online." (68 characters)
• "Web version | Edit your subscription | Unsubscribe" (55 characters)

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Earlier this year I was tasked with migrating a 60K contact Kintera database to CiviCRM. To make matters more "interesting", the client also had a home-grown database with mixed information, some defining new contacts and some adding information to the Kintera contacts. As it was a custom database, I won't discuss the second database merge issue any further (perhaps I just want to put it all behind me) except where needed to fill in other points.

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I think that most organizations are a little bit afraid of video. And if they are a little bit afraid of video they are even more afraid of live video.  Video, the conventional wisdom goes, is expensive and hard to produce. Your chances of doing it wrong are higher than of doing it right, and either way the cost and time involved is probably out of reach. Live video, well that is just crazy talk! Anything could happen!

As we all know, the cost of video cameras has come way down, the once much heralded inexpensive Flip camera is now obsolute because of smartphones with high quality video cameras! And editing technology has also become cheaper and easier. For years now every Mac has shipped with iMovie, but today you can edit video with a range of online services including YouTube.

Video engages people. How many times a day do you want a few minutes of video on the web? That clip from the Daily Show, a segment from the local news, something on YouTube (perhaps involving a cute animal) a friend posted to Facebook? Or maybe you were glued to live streaming of the #occupy demonstrations this fall?

How can nonprofit organizations make use of video easily, and without great expense, to connect with their audiences? My, perhaps counter intuitive answer, is through live streaming. Yes, jump in on the deep end.  With live streaming video there is no post production necessary, just a camera and an internet connection. UStream has garnered much press because of the #occupy movements and it is a great platform, scales well, offers some good tools, but it also requires a bit more setup than, say, Google+ Hangouts.  

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If you've been feeling like more people have smart phones than don't, you are pretty close to being right.

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Yesterday I wrote about a recent study suggesting that millions of baby boomers want to start their own nonprofit organizations or social ventures. This morning I returned to a tab opened in my browser a day or two ago, an article on the Harvard Business Review blog, "Don't let What You Know Limit What You Imagine."  I'd highly encourage reading it, but for now I will draw some connections between it and my post yesterday.

The author, Bill Taylor, references a book by Cynthia Barton Rabe, The Innovation Killer, in which she talks about how experience in a field can become a detriment to innovation and success. Her answer is that organizations should hire "zero-gravity thinkers," innovators "who are not weighed down by the expertise of a team, its politics, or 'the way things have always been done.'"

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Ten developers came to the Big Apple earlier this week to sit with primary CiviCRM developers @lobo and @dgg during a two-day Usability, Test and Code Sprint. Once again, Rayogram hosted the event, providing a central location in Manhattan and an excellent working environment.

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Vancouver's HTML5 Meetup Group hosted John Boxall “Common Mobile Layouts” talk on Thursday, Sept. 7, 2011. I'm going to share his wisdom with you, as well as that of Mozilla's Jeff Griffiths, speaking on new and developing Mozilla initiatives, and Steam Clock Software's Nigel Brooke, introducing WebGL.

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