webclass: December 2007 Archives
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.Â
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. Â Here's a set of free video lessons providing a basic overview of Dreamweaver; you can also find free instructions on specific tasks online. Â 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.