Nonprofit

If the THREE THOUSAND Drupal geeks at DrupalCon San Francisco in April, including the friggin' WHITE HOUSE wasn't enough to convince you that Drupal has hit "The Enterprise," this bit of news oughta' put a nail in it:

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Recently Acquia solicited some feedback from us about what kind of features we though would be useful to small businesses for their upcoming product, code named "Acquia Gardens". While we typically only work with small businesses with a social mission, we often do hear from businesses looking for web development work.

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Smashing Magazine posted a really great "best practices" piece about web design for non profits. They then provided 20 examples of great non profit websites, among them, two CivicActions clients, Amnesty International, of which they said:

The Amnesty International site makes great use of color, including a bright yellow header and accents mixed with shades of gray and black. A slideshow on the home page shows current news and research. Links to join, donate, or take other action are featured prominently in the sidebar and a link to media information is included in the header. The home page also includes plenty of current news and resources below the main content up top.

And Witness.org, for whom we built the Video Hub. We are very proud of our work for these two worldchanging clients, and happy that they are being recognized not only for their great work, but for their websites as exemplars for the non profit sector.

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I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people's issues as well as many others. Hawken's describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global.

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This week I came across three interesting articles that deal with non profits, website usability and donations. Taken together, I think they can be useful and instructive to non profit organizations working on developing new websites or optimizing existing websites and communication strategies.

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Last week Mashable ran a blog post about the increasing budgets for social media marketing at big businesses. It was based on a report by the Aberdeen Groups covered in more detail on EMarketer.com. The report had two important findings:

1. 63% of best in class businesses surveyed said they would be increasing their social media marketing budgets, 21% said by 25% or more.
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For many years now I (and then CivicActions) have been a member of NTEN (The Nonprofit Technology Entrepreneurs Network). Every year NTEN runs the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) an event that brings together NPTech providers and non profits.

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What does Free Software have to do with ending poverty? More than you probably think. It is not just at the core of consumer products like the Android loaded G1 phone from HTC, or the One Laptop Per Child XO. Linux operating systems like Ubuntu are deployed by community technology centers around the globe providing access to the internet, and all the information, data and resources that come with it. The Free Software (while having $0 in licensing costs) also reduces the cost of hardware, and allows programmers to improve upon it, and share their improvements without fear.

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During a recent client meeting, I had the opportunity to explain Twitter to an organization with very little social media experience.  I think my explanation may be of use to others who are just starting to consider using Twitter or other micro-blogging platforms (though I would argue that Twitter is where the people are and thus is where any organization looking to jump in should be. 

The Basics of Twitter

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Recently, NTEN (the Nonprofit Technology Network) released their 2008 Content Management Systems Satisfaction Report evaluating the most commonly used systems at small and medium sized organizations. The CMS systems were evaluated in five categories: Quality, Support, Delivers on Promises, Usability and Value. Drupal and Joomla! both scored the highest marks, yet Drupal had nearly twice the number of responses than the latter. Open source systems scored generally higher than commercial systems and custom systems were rated near the bottom of the pack. Kieran posted a nice summary of the report results at Drupal.org. The report is available to members of NTEN for free and to non-members at a discount rate. (CivicActions is a proud member of NTEN!)