I joined Adam Frost for another workshop dialog at the annual Grassroots Use of Technology Conference, at U Mass Lowell June 23. This year, we again focused on tips and perspectives on how to help your computer system grow up. Adam entertained and insisted on good back-up and basic security policies. I focused more on the software side of things, and collected together ten new lessons about software, including your web site, from a bunch of experiences this year.
1. Make technology a senior management activity in your organization. Whether you work in a small or large organization makes no difference. Typically and traditionally, technology implemented strategy and management policy. The organization might set a membership recruitment target and figured having the supporting stuff on its web site. With the power of software and Internet tools today, it makes sense to bring technology into the planning and goal setting process directly, from the beginning. How should new social patterns of Internet use affect what it means to be a member of our organization, and how can we adapt those concepts to take advantage of what's there for us and what competes for attention with our audience?
2. Invest some every year. Nonprofit funding cycles, more than government or business funding cycles, tend to favor long periods of planning, putting up with old things that appear work as long as possible, and then undertaking massive change. The longer you wait to address software problems, the more disruptive the eventual phase of change. Sometimes big changes make sense, and sometimes you do not have the finances to devote to technology each year. That said, from experience, the less you do each year to enhance critical software or web systems each year, the more likely the organization will end up throwing out the whole thing and spending much more than if they had made steady improvements.
3. Build in sustainability from the start. Shame on both consultant (including ourselves) and organization if a tech project starts without consideration of what support will look like once the project concludes. Sustainability does not necessarily mean complete independent self-reliance. Goals of complete knowledge transfer and traditional capacity training phraseology may have mythic quality. Sustaining a newly launched software system typically will be a shared responsibility. Here are two small examples of building in sustainability from the start. First, make sure that organizational staff have the primary responsibility for producing a user guide for the software or web site. If only the consultant can produce documentation, then its not yours, no one will read the manual, and you will be more depending on outside help than you need to be. Conversely, the people who produce the system should do the training. Getting generic Access database training instead of having the consultant teach general techniques against the inner workings of your system miss a chance to truly transfer knowledge to staff.
Planning for the short term
4. Take only what you need. The rate of change in technology shortens the planning time frame. If previously you planned five years ahead, now plan two. Whatever inefficiencies might come from not fully anticipating all future needs will be overcome by the relentless improvement in software tools and systems. (This is one lesson of various forms of “agile programming” in software design. )
5. Have a guiding focus. Also proceed from the most strategic element of your databases, websites, commercial software: constituency and membership? Managing services? Fund-raising? Ensure that the most strategic systems get the first cut of services for customization, training, and support.
The web continues to change everything
6. The web continues to change everything. Software and infrastructure will continue to move to the web. Not everything today needs to be on the web, and we continue to build and integrate many internal networked systems. But of are looking more than a year or two ahead (despite point 2), you need to consider, or get help considering, what more your staff and constituency will need to do on the web in two years.
7. And within the web, that collection of increased interactivity called Web 2.0 is for everyone. Collaborative communications, advocacy and organizing, and community building all intertwine off-line and on-line themes today. This point is a corollary to point 1: you cannot be strategic today in these areas without consideration of Internet power.
8. Don't mistake the generational divide for the digital divide. Always have an implementation plan that includes what is within reach of your staff and community today. And to paraphrase Alison Fine's keynote comment at the Grassroots technology conference, better to fight to democratize those resources rather than draw back from their absence. All that said, before you object that not everyone can experience the web and its latest things, consider how much today's youth of all classes, and increasingly worldwide, find their way in. (Hmm. See July 2 s Business Week cover story, “Children of the Web.”) They do this if not on a fancy home computer, than on a cell phone, at school or work. (Visiting one inner city school we work closely with, I couldn't help but be impressed that the staff fought a daily battle with students by passing network security to access proxy servers and the like to enable them to break school rules and go on myspace and the like.)
9. Don't wait for your funders to understand what is new. Local funders appear to catch on slowly to strategic use of technology. For a perspective on what this means locally, see my colleague Steve Rockwell’s instructive MBA comparative study on nonprofit technology investment. Here an abstract from his blog.
Open source tools/ open source content
10. Be effective in an open source world. Not everything open source is free (especially since you still need to figure out hosting and support), and not everything free or low cost is open source. Yet the open source wave pressures not just technology but every thing and every place that people and organizations produce and discuss ideas. Where are your organization's ideas, policies, approaches to organizing or service? What’s on your web site and how easy is it for anyone to find it, comment on it, use it, help you spread the word? If you give up some control, what will you get in return? This last thought most focuses the challenges facing nonprofits seeking to grow gracefully in the face of explosive technological change. May we all continue to enjoy the ride.
