One Woman's NTC 2007

What follows is my own personal experience at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, the biggie conference for people in my field.

Wednesday night: Internation Dinner with Teresa Crawford, Bill Lester and the CIO of Save the Children. It was a fine dinner but I didn't feel it advanced my network of international service providers, though I did have a good contact with Bill Lester, the big name in Engender Health. Teresa and I have had some contact before this, so even though I'd never met her, it was as though I had and we were just renewing acquaintance.

Thursday: Make your newsletter work better: Left--looked like a wrangle about whether newsletters are valuable at all.

What technology can do for your mission: This was presentations by two orgs (I missed the first one, Ashoka), one a poverty org in Philadelphia where their techie talked about using "Effort to Outcomes" software to really document the outcomes of the work they do. He made a very good case for intensive documentation using this software. After him, there was the CIO of Conservation International, and I got a glimpse into what a truly large and well-funded international org can look like. They have offices all over the world with the goal of making them all equal. Which means nearly 100 per cent online, email that functions all the time, and satellite connections everywhere. It's a huge committment of time and money and it pretty much daunted me.

How Low Income individuals use technology This is one of the most valuable sessions I attended, since it gives basic foundational information about how our clients use the internet, their cell phones, etc. This gives me some very good ideas about how to offer services at the Community Tech Center, when and if we get one up and running at the West End Ministries (WEM) community center. There is also a web site that is tailored to low income clients-- language they can read, and services they want: FAFSA, Income Tax Credits, Diabetes monitoring, etc. It's The Beehive.  

Building better online fundraising campaigns This was also an eyeopener, since it was a very detailed look at how to craft an email appeal for funds. It broke the email into component parts and then took you through how to maximize donations using the different parts together. The second speaker here talked about how to test for your own email list. By the way, the minimum number for a decent return donation is a list of 20,000 subscribers that you continually grow, since you lose a certain percentage every year. I've also since found an email company, Constant Contact, that has really reasonable rates. Since WEM wants to launch an email appeal, this is an excellent info. I doubt they have anything like 1,000 names on their email subscriber list, but they are all also previous donors.

Friday:

Nonprofit Tech Consultants Affinity Group: Left--too much going around the room listening to people talk about how they got into the field.

Community Technology Centers & Programs The once-federally funded CTCnet has lost much of its federal funding and is now lacking an ED. This was one of the sessions where the audience, notably some of the important people (I gathered) in the CTC field, basically took over the whole session and the kids who were trying to run it were out of their league. They kept trying to say damage control things, but really, they have lost their momentum. Consequently, I'm not at all sure what these people will be able to do for us as we move into the CTC fold. But there are two very important orgs in the area that ARE doing the community technology center thing, and I know who they are and how to contact them, so that will be one of the first jobs once I'm at work for WEM.

IT Budgeting: Templates for IT budgets This session fit right in with the financial management session from the Duke course. I now understand accrual basis for accounting, and also how to project costs for IT into the future of the equipment. The session puts some very basic items that most people don't think of onto an excell-like template and puts out some information about the steps involved in coming up with a budget projecting three-to-five years into the future. With these two courses, I'm feeling much more solid in the whole finances field. I know that I don't want to handle our finances or do the bookkeeping, but I have a much clearer idea of what our financial person is going to do.

Effective management of online collaboration tools What somebody said at the end of this session is that this is much more about project management, any project management, than it is about collaboration. But the slides were funny and effective, and available at their wiki, once you join the community. And a really funny video about herding cats.

Networking and Friend-Building I know this is an essential part of any successful nonprofit, and any successful consulting job. I watch other people just zip in there and before you know it, they are exchanging cards and promising to get together and thinking their careers will go forward with this contact. There are times and places where I'm better at this than others, but the techie crowd and a huge conference is not one of them for me. I went wanting to meet the people behind the names on my email lists, where I've learned so much in this field. I saw one from a distance, met one really, and actually talked to one. I made one lunch friend and he gave me some good advice and we exchanged cards. Another fellow, from the Dallas Central Ministries, I will contact since they are already doing what we want to do at West End Ministries.

All in all, I'd say that I focused most of my efforts on sessions that are directly relevant to West End Ministries, where I'll be working for the next year. That's appropriate, I think, though I'm so attracted to the GIS, wireless and radio possibilities that maybe at the next conference, the Grassroots conference in Lowell, MA in June, I'll be able to explore some of the edgier ideas.

Comments

[cheryl]

ooo, you're going to the grassroots use of tech conference? i'd like to but it probably won't happen. catch you later (in fact, catch you tomorrow i think :p)

[storm]

I'd be curious as to how your effort to grow your list through an email provider goes. I haven't had any luck and others I've spoken to had a backlash.

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