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Allan Benamer provides insight into how nonprofits can benefit from the new data-sharing feature on Salesforce.
The impact for non-profits? Non-profits can now sit down in a circle, hold hands, sing Kumbaya AND share their data with one another. It’s going to be a slow process but it WILL happen.
For example . . .
Here in New York, I can imagine it being used as a way to create an HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) that would be spread over multiple non-profits so that they could share eviction prevention information with one another. It would certainly beat the faxes (yes, faxes!) that are still being sent from one non-profit to another. I’m sure there are even more applications if non-profits were willing to share data.
One of the most important yet least understood aspects of running a nonprofit is managing its intellectual property. This podcast interview with Professor Susan Scafidi covers the basics.
All the questions in the interview were drawn from actual questions I've received from students, nonprofits or other social enterprises. And here are a couple follow-ups:
Q: Can a nonprofit get a trademark, since it's not a business?
A: Yes. A trademark is a symbol used to identify the source of goods or services in the marketplace. Even if a nonprofit does not perceive itself as a business, it may actually enter the marketplace in any number of ways, not least of all by fundraising. For more on nonprofits and trademark, check out the article linked here.
Q: When I start my nonprofit, do I have to register its name as a trademark?
If you are going to use the name on goods or services, then it's a good idea to protect yourself by registering the name as a federal trademark rather than simply relying on common law trademark protection. On the other hand, the name of a nonprofit (or for-profit) organization cannot be registered as a trademark unless it is also applied to goods or services.
Q: Can a church get a trademark?
A: Yes. Here's an example of how the Presbyterian Church (USA) uses trademark law to avoid confusion with other churches and to prevent unauthorized use of its name. Similarly, here's the trademark policy of the Seventh Day Adventists. Religious groups may generally be full of peace and light, but mess with their trademarks and they can get pretty badass.
And finally, here are the web sites noted in the podcast, plus one extra:
Doodlekit . . . goes even further by providing a suite of advanced features, all of which can be set up with a few clicks of the button: forums, customizable forms, shopping carts, advertising, user accounts and profiles, restricted areas for approved members, file uploading, full site search, RSS feeds, photo albums, blogs, basic site statistics, and domain mapping. Some of these features are available for free, but many will require that you pay $15 or more per month.
If you don't mind a little hands-on designing, you might also want to use the tools in a desktop program such as Dreamweaver. Here's a set of free video lessons providing a basic overview of Dreamweaver; you can also find free instructions on specific tasks online. Here, for example, are various options of designing your own forms for gathering customer input.
"You are not in my extended network" T-shirt available here.
The revolt against commercialized social networks has been getting a bit of media play, particularly following the backlash against Facebook's Beacon ad system. In today's International Herald Tribune: a feature on Kaioo, a nonprofit social network designed to serve as a more-or-less noncommercial alternative. Of particular interest: note who's funding it.
The founders pledge that its mission is to create an international haven from networks like Facebook and MySpace, where advertising and the sales pitch are becoming as elemental a social ritual as flirting. And Kaioo says all the profit it might make from limited advertising will be donated to charity.
"Users want to have an independent, democratic system that they feel is theirs," said Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, chief executive of the music giant Sony BMG, who is financing the initial start-up of Kaioo out of his own pocket with €500,000, or $730,000. "The biggest asset that we have is credibility and this platform can only grow if users feel that this is real and totally independent."
There's a conceptual link here to politics, where the emerging conflation of independence with wealth. Autonomy: the ultimate luxury good?
Russian elections?
Venezuelan constitutional referenda?
Nahhhh, the biggest story this weekend is the announcement that Viacom is going to archive the complete South Park online.
For folks who know where to look, of course, getting South Park for free online isn't all that difficult. But what's so great about this latest development is that it'll be completely legal. Viacom's success in archiving the Daily Show--making all the episodes available for free was followed by a jump in the ratings--has apparently led it to conclude that the best way to promote broadcast television is to give shows away online.
Which pretty much confirms what I've been thinking about online distance education. Y'see, there are a bunch of hearty noble souls out there in nonprofit university land who see online education as a potential goldmine. Blogs, podcasts, wikis--the assumption is you'll pay for 'em at full price tuition or a little less. Post it, and they will buy.
Nope. Sorry. Not gonna happen.
If popular entertainment such as South Park hasn't able to find a sustainable fee-based model, I don't see how higher education--which is far less funny--is going to draw a critical mass of paying customers. Sure, a few places on the margins might be able to make a few bucks that way--a Phoenix for non-traditional students and elites like Harvard or Stanford for folks who want to backdoor into the brand names--but for the majority of academic institutions the returns just won't be there. People aren't going to pay to watch or listen to most lectures, and your average professor--myself included--doesn't have the time to transform forty-five hours of a real-world seminar into professional-quality ten-minute instructables, particularly ones for which you'd be willing to shell out twenty-grand a year.
Instead, I see online education primarily as a marketing tool. Professors and, yes, students give information away for free, and maybe, if we're bit lucky, folks will want to join the real-world community themselves by paying tuition. It's a gambit, sure, but it's also 'liberal" education in the truest sense of the word--and it may be the key to the survival of the university itself.
As my web design class students know, I've been thinking a lot about the all too common disconnect between producer and consumer. Of course, it's not always the best thing for a designer to follow the consumers' wishes to a t.
Pictured above: one of several cool keyboards designed by elementary school children in Amy Tiemann's Laptop Club. If the girl who designed this keyboard had her wish, every computer would have a hotkey for Harry Potter trivia! Still, it's quite a revelatory document: note how the letters are scrunched up to the top, while the primary interface focuses on shopping, pets, shopping, entertainment, shopping, and email. Not to mention shopping. There's also the truly wonderful key in the center that's so evocative of childhood: "Private Code."
For more, check out the slideshow at the top of this interview.
If you're using video to promote your enterprise, it never hurts to feature a celebrity model--or a bizarro celebrity!
For more info on Gelila's cause, check out Charity: Water
If you don't get the reference in the "bizarro" link, watch the original version on which the Dr. Pepper parody is based. What's so fascinating for me about artist Tay Zonday's trajectory is the speed with which social consciousness metamorphosed into viral comedy and now ironic marketing. Used to be that sort of thing took thirty years!
Transparency is one of the watchwords of corporate ethics in the charitable community. The assumption is the more we know, the less we allow bad things to thrive--"sunlight is the universal disinfectant" and all that.
Yet as we've seen time and time again, transparency only works if people understand what they see. Enron provides a telling example: their instability was laid out for all to see in their quarterly reports . . . if you had the expertise and patience to parse through the details.
The same is true when it comes to nonprofit tech. Convio, a firm that provides nonprofit donation management services, is getting hit for their handling of a security breach in which someone obtained its clients passwords, email addresses and other personal information. But as Allen Benamer observes in his Nonprofit Tech Blog--which, as the New York Times indicates, has become a hub of information and insight re l' affaire Convio--the potential for exposure to a security breach was in plain sight all along.
The telltale part: the ability to retrieve your password. Key passages below:
What is distressing is a defense of Convio by a marketer on the progressive exchange e-mail list who is claiming “that GA was using… state of the art anti-hacking tactics.” We really don’t know that yet and unencrypted passwords are truly NOT state of the art anti-hacking tactics. . . . And those of you who have survived this breach with not having to contact constituents, should immediately rescind the “privilege” of e-mailing members with their old passwords if they forget them and just create a random new password for them to login with instead.
Basically, in order to make sure that single sign-on was possible, GetActive gave users the ability to dump unencrypted passwords en masse from the system so that a nonprofit’s GetActive users could be synched with a “foreign” system. . . .The idea that there are text files out there with my username and unencrypted password on them is really annoying. This practice has to end now for all vendors selling nonprofit solutions.
My fellow nerds, geeks, and accidental techies, please be sure to tell your not-so-technical co-workers that they can no longer expect to be e-mailed their old passwords just because it’s more convenient. It was always bad practice and in a case where sometimes we can pressure vendors to accoomodate us, it was a doubly bad idea.
Crunchgear raises an intriguing question about online charity and privacy:
In discussing several things with my brother this Thanksgiving weekend . . . he brought up something Facebook-releated. See, he doesn’t join groups promoting a cause (”FreeRice,” for example) because he doesn’t want to be seen leaving the group later on, privacy settings@ notwithstanding.
What, you don’t support feeding starving people anymore, you jerk?
@It’s a social phenomenon. How do you show your support for a cause on Facebook without later being seen retracting your support? @It’s something I think needs addressing, along with the pocket veto, a term I coined some time ago describing friend/group/whatever rejection without rejection.
Yesterday in my web design class we talked about Swedish torrent site The Pirate Bay as an example of a popular nonprofit venture. The question was raised: is what they are doing illegal?
The language in U.S. is broad enough to include torrent trackers, which point to information about where material can be found. I don't know anything about Swedish law, but it's clear that the recording industry is not going to stop trying to shut The Pirate Bay down. Here's the latest from Sweden:
Prosecutor Håkan Roswall announced that he plans to press charges against 5 people involved with The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008. The 5 are suspected of facilitating copyright infringement.
The Pirate Bay team does not believe that Roswall will be successful in his attempt to take down The Pirate Bay. They keep repeating that they are just running a search engine and did not store any copyrighted material on their servers.
On top of that, information that leaked earlier this year showed that the Swedish police couldn’t find any usable evidence on the servers they confiscated during the raid last year.
Talk about serendipity. I'd planned to write a post today for my web design class on one of the most successful socially entrepreneurial podcasts out there: The Midwest Teen Sex Show (50,000 subscribers and growing!), et voila, this morning there's a feature on the show in the Wall Street Journal.
As the WSJ notes, frank advice making with teh funny has proven to be a sure-fire recipe for getting a huge online audience:
Episode No. 4 of "The Midwest Teen Sex Show," a new video podcast, opens with a shot of a young woman holding a crying baby. Nearby, two young boys are noisily scuffling and trading noogies. Looking into the camera, the obviously stressed-out mother of three says nothing, but her expression says: How did I get into this mess?
Seconds later, the episode's title, "Birth Control," flashes on the screen.
That sort of wry, pointed presentation has helped the show lure thousands of viewers since its debut this past summer. Some may have been attracted by the provocative title, but this isn't pornography. Instead, it aims to teach teenagers about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators -- host Nikol Hasler, the aforementioned woman, and Guy Clark, an aspiring filmmaker.
The two felt that existing sexual-education efforts were far too prim -- and boring -- to be useful to teens. Their podcast focuses less on birds-and-bees basics and more on real-life scenarios teens are likely to face.
Unless you're offended by uncensored discussions of human bodily functions, be sure to check out the site. For those of you looking to build a career that blends personal success and public service, note how the producers leverage their educational mission to promote their own talents in filmmaking and comedy. They've also adopted a tres 2.0 strategy, not merely making videos themselves but encouraging others to follow their lead, most notably in this contest for dogooder.tv.
Submerged in class prep today.
Tonight's nonprofit law class: donations (thanks, WSJ), the dreaded Sarbanes Oxley and whatever else pops into my head (like waffles!).
Pictured above: railway museum "stock certificate" (i.e., donation receipt)
And in this afternoon's web design class: more on usability & design (including this essential article by Jason Hudnall), an overview of tech resources + an introduction to shopping carts--hopefully without another fire alarm.
Above: "Fire drill!"
Above: the banner for Tokyo design firm Power-Graffixx, aptly summarizing why most organizations who can afford it hire a designer instead of doing it themselves.
I mentioned to my students last week that while I'd like to do cool screencasts (such as the one below) for every last thing I teach in my classes, but the production time is a serious hurdle, especially for me working alone.
Here's a blog post that raises this issue and offers some tips for improving production efficiency. For much more, here's a detailed how-to.
Google Adwords dominates web marketing. Salesforce: Customer Relationship Management.
Here's a screencast from Beth Kanter on how to integrate the two to maximize return:
| Add Beth's Blog: Screencasts to your page |
Look carefully at the ways people do to feel good about themselves and to make others feel good about them, and you'll see a few things again and again.
Perhaps the most prominent: children.
Protecting kids is hardwired in our genes. They're vulnerable little critters, and their cute soft burbling li'l selves trigger self-sacrificing protective behaviors that go way, way back, apparently from before we were human.
Dogs picked up on this long ago, which is one big reason they evolved from nasty bitey S(andD)OBs into adorable puppies whose lives are little more than a prolonged pre-adolesence. To see the benefit of this, we need only look back to the Ellen dog adoption dust-up from earlier this week, which highlights how we have come to equate dogs with kids.
Like dogs, people have evolved their own adaptive strategies leveraging children for their own personal advantage. The charitable strippers controversy is a Russian nesting doll in this regard: puppeteers cast themselves as a children's charity and hold their annual fundraiser at a middle school, and a strip club tries to rehabilitate its own image by sending its employees to serve as volunteers. We see a similar dynamic in the viral spread of blogger support for DonorsChoose, a charity that connects donors to unmet needs in schools.
And here's another one. The BitTorrent community has come under a lot of fire for turning a blind eye to illegal file sharing. A popular counter-strategy has been to highlight the instances in which copyright enforcers file suit against children, but now, as the ever informative TorrentFreak reports, the community is raising the stakes:
Together with p2pnet, TorrentFreak adopted 29 little children who are in desperate need for food, clothing and a decent place to sleep. The Child Orphanage is for kids in Nepal whose parents were killed by Maoists demanding the abolition of the country’s monarchy.
Banning torrents hurts orphans. Now that's a powerful argument!
For more info, check out p2pkids.org.
Student journalist Carla Babb's videos didn't get much attention . . . until presidential candidate John Edwards tried to get her to take one down. Here it is:
In my web design class this week I talked about what social enterprise can learn by examining the traits of videos that go viral on Youtube. A few things we discussed: time play, coordinated action, DIY, mashups, instructables and parody.
I'll leave the ponderous yet oh-so-astute academic commentary for another day. For now, enjoy the videos!
Microsoft logos and sounds
Crank dat Soulja Boy
Soulja Boy instructable
Soulja Boy Spongebob & Barney
Soulja Boy lyrics (a literary parody)
The history of dance
LonelyGirl15
I've been spending a bit of time this semester thinking about web video and why charity videos . . . um, how to put this politely . . . aren't exactly compelling. As an experiment (and trying not to tip my hand too much) I asked a couple students in my nonprofit web design class to give their assessment of Youtube's new nonprofit program.
They were . . . polite, but also refreshingly honest--which I know can be a risky thing for students, especially in a Lake Wobegon field such as social enterprise where Every Venture Is Above Average. Their main points: it seems to work OK as an archive, but why would anyone watch these things? And the donation button is nice and all, but what's there to motivate people to give?
Excellent questions, methinks. As my students noticed, except for spikes during PR moments (e.g., Clinton Initiative press conferences; Oprah), charity vids tend to wither on the vine. Same thing with educational videos, another thing I've been tinkering with a bit over the past few months. Occasionally there's a breakout hit, but they're the exceptions that proves the rule. For example, the KSU web 2.0 vids are nifty to look at and provide a basic introduction to what folks are saying about the social networks . . .
but when it comes to adding new insight, well, they're more self-congratulatory rah-rah than analysis with any value-added [not unlike most nonprofit scholarship!]. Then there's the tongue-in-cheek web philologist Hot for Words . . .
HfW is actually more Web 2.0 than the KSU vids--note how her videos incorporate questions from previous commenters--but I'm pretty sure that subjecting students to videos of me in revealing underwear would violate international law.
So what's a charity-minded educator to do?
Not sure yet, actually. I've been playing with podcasts and vids of my own that basically put my lectures in web form, but following the reciprocity principle--do unto others--I can't bring myself to require students to listen to or watch things that I personally don't find engaging. A classroom is not the web, and vice versa--they are radically different media environments, as evidenced by reports that online courses are flatlining once again.
What I want to do is stuff like String Ducky . . .
but here's the thing, the tragic choice: time is a scarce resource. In the time it would take me (or most professors) to prep a stylish and contentful 2-5 minute vid, I could prep and deliver 2-5 real-world lectures stuffed with playful yakkity-yak and whiteboarding. (Yes, I've tried online whiteboard voiceover, but unfortunately I haven't gotten skilled enough with my Graphire to produce more than rudimentary scrawl. Sigh.)
Over the next week or so I hope to start posting my own experiments with audio and video, but I have no illusions that they'll be as cool as Wallstrip.
Someday when I have a production team and quality video equipment . . .
NTen, one of the world's leading organizations specializing in social enterprise, has added its voice to the outcry against Comcast's now confirmed practice of throttling BitTorrent seeders. NTen comes down on the side of the Net Neutrality movement, which is citing Comcast's actions as a sign of things to come should broadband providers be allowed to discriminate in favor (and against) various nodes on the web.
The movement faces substantial (and well-moneyed) opposition, but that's not the only challenge it has to overcome. The elephant in the room is the nature of the practices that the movement seeks to protect. The calls for action focus on blogging and benign torrenting, such as open-source software distributions. In fact, the Comcast torrent controversy hit the mainstream news when reporters testing rumors of the Comcast throttling tried to torrent the King James Bible, which in the U.S. (but not in England!) is in public domain.
Sounds inspirational, but are telecom companies truly hunkering down to squelch bloggers and Linux distros? Or are they more concerned with the massive bandwidth consumed by the illegal sharing of music, movies, software and porn?
Pretending that the latter isn't an issue renders the arguments made in favor of net neutrality far less compelling than they seem within the movement. Case in point: the question raised at the end of the NTen post:
While it's most likely that Comcast has instituted the measures as a means of controlling traffic and server load, it raises a fine point: Why are movie downloads from iTunes ok, but not file sharing via BitTorrent?
You don't have to be a Yale-trained lawyer to guess that the answer lies somewhere in the fact the iTunes downloads are legal and can factor bandwidth costs into the price.
Would the Net Neutrality movement be more credible if it also called for file-sharing communities--many of which are nonprofit in practice if not formally under the law--to crack down on illegal file-sharing--including bootleg Bibles in Britain?
The video above is a promo for Pangaea Day in May 2008. The hook: Can Your Film Change the World? The event: Make a world-changing video, and bazillions of people will watch it on that day, and the world will be a better place.
Uh, sure.
Now I know I'm supposed to buy into all of this. I mean, that's the thing about being a professor of nonprofits or social enterprise or sustainability or whatever. You meet a professor who studies the history of human sacrifice and you don't automatically hide the knives, because you know it's possible for someone to study ancient societies without agreeing with everything they did. But when I go to a shindig the assumption is that I endorse every damn fool thing done in the name of what I study.
Which is part of much bigger problem. Social enterprise is looping back into the same mistake that it ostensibly set out to correct: assuming that something is good because it tries to do good.
Not me, bucko. Pangaea Day? C'mon, Pangaea Day????? Have the melting polar ice caps opened up a timeslip back to 1968?
And the #$%&?! sombre violins. It's like the music in previews for pretentious indie films about people who wake up to realize that they are morally pure while the rest of society is corrupt and filled with secrets. I know that as a Serious Person with degrees from Yale and Duke I'm supposed to chill my chardonnay in anticipation of the first showing at Film Forum, but shoot, what I'm really thinking is that I wish my Junior Mints were cyanide capsules.
Yes, there is tragedy in the world. There is evil and injustice and someone needs to fix it. But uploading a cartload of short fill-ums rife with portentious and precious observations about what everyone else is doing wrong won't "catalyze" a frackin' "revolution." All it serves to do is assure the videomakers and their viewers of their own superior virtue.
Which, when you get right down to it, is the root of most of the problems that we're trying to solve.