First of all, if you aren’t receiving the NTEN Discuss newsletter as a nonprofit techie, then you should get on that asap. Great conversations and resources from people that know exactly what it’s like to be the accidental techie at a nonprofit organization. Many times, someone will ask for advice about choosing a software tool on a Discuss list and many people will chime in with experience-based recommendations from all over the sector. We here at Social Source Commons like to collect those responses into an SSC toolbox with the hope that those who run across the thread can also find a complete collection of useful tools all in one place. After all, this is what Social Source Commons is all about: easily connecting people to nonprofit software tools.
Various people weighed in and the result was a thread with many different choices of software for managing “digital assets.” Embedded at right, you can see the different tools and if you go to the toolbox page, you can see what was said about each one.
Check the tools out and if you have anything to add, well gee garsh willy Add it!
I recently set up a Facebook Cause for Aspiration, the mama org of Social Source Commons. It was simple and in only a few minutes I had created an Aspiration Cause that I could use to find supporters and receive donations. My motivation wasn’t to start the grand “Help Aspiration Save the World!” fundraising campaign but rather simply to educate myself on Causes for if we ever decide to use it (as the last decision in the fundraising discussion) or to help those who ask about it as a fundraising option.
Experience from Facebook Causes Users
I asked our Facebook followers what they thought about Causes and got some interesting and insightful responses:
The concerns raised from our followers seems to echo a kind of shared attitude toward Facebook Causes in the nonprofit tech world since the initial “This app will raise thousands of dollars for us!!” phase that happened when it first came out:
Fundraising is a funny beast, though. To look at it you’re really looking into human altruistic psychology and let’s face it, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a Rorscach and a Horshack. But for the non-Psych majors among us, we can still look at some basic information to get a better idea of if and when Facebook Causes is effective.
For example, one observable bit of info is that organizations that have done well with Facebook Causes (Save Darfur, Nature Conservancy, Campaign for Cancer Prevention) seem more to do with broad situations like stopping cancer or those removed from the donors like disaster relief. Donors want to feel involved and invested in the cause to which they are giving and donating through the internet allows supporters to easily get involved in a situation that they would otherwise have to simply watch on the news. These organizations with large, broadly-recognized problems to solve seem to do better than those with a more specific audience or purpose.
But let’s assume that small nonprofits and causes can and do still find value in Facebook Causes. What would the motivation be for someone who is donating through Facebook Causes? I think here again we can make a few assumptions: 1. Those who donate through Facebook Causes are probably going to be a small subset of your donors. 2. Those who would donate through Causes are generally tech-savvy, like to take advantage of new trends quickly, tend to be more impulsive givers and interact with the org they are donating to mostly online. Do these characteristics sound right in describing someone who would give through Causes? How do they match up with your donor base?
Analyzing Your Donors
But this removed, looking-down-on-the-world view of your donors can only give you some theoretical data. Similar to our blog post about Nonprofit Social Media Audience Assessment, I am an advocate for talking to your donor base about what they do. Just as you can ask your social media followers why they are following you, you can ask your donors: why do you give? Is it because you make it easy? Have an inspiring mission or projects? Is it because they’ve met you in person and were moved by your story? On top of this, you can analyze when and how your donors give money. What is the percentage given through your website? Is it unprovoked by your organization or in response to a campaign? What is the median age of your donors? All of this donor assessment information becomes the raw material to begin any technology discussion rather than using it as something to compare against when the technology is already implemented. Any technology solution/implementation that your organization is looking at should be an attempt to meet your audience’s needs.
Facebook Causes may have some mixed reviews, but like any other piece of technology, the decision to add it as a piece of your fundraising puzzle should be last after asking yourself why and talking to the people who would actually be using it.
We here at Social Source Commons Blog recently got an email asking us to reconsider our use of reCaptcha for spam management on our blog. reCAPTCHA is a tool that uses the CAPTCHA technique to verify that the person requesting to interact with the site (post a comment, register as a user, etc.) is, in fact, a human and not a spam robot (or “spambot”) looking for places to automatically insert links to Viagra resellers and porn sites.
It works by showing the user an image of a word usually slightly distorted but still readable. The idea here is that bots can’t interpret what’s shown on a picture the same way that humans can so while a human can see that the swirly picture says “following”, the bot just sees an image and can’t pull out the word that is being displayed because it isn’t actual text but rather an image of text. The user then types in the word that she sees in the picture thereby verifying herself as a legitimate human commenter or user. The CAPTCHA system works very well and as of right now (spambots are constantly becoming more effective), it is the go-to security measure for websites. Website administrators can let CAPTCHA catch spambots before they event submit content.
The e-Sullivan, an braille internet device for deaf-blind people
However, CAPTCHA has a big problem. What happens when the user trying to submit a comment is blind and accessing the internet with speech or other accessibility software? The software cannot read the image any better than the spambot so that the user cannot complete the puzzle and thereby verify their human commentor status. The user’s comment is denied even though the comment is valid and from a human. Even if the software was able to speak the CAPTCHA text aloud, this would still exclude those who are deaf-blind who access the internet with braille tools. (see The Equipment for Deafblind People Page for more info).
The person who alerted us to our blog’s default disabled discrimination asked that we reconsider using CAPTCHA programs like reCAPTCHA and instead focus on plug-ins that check comments for spamminess rather than ineffectively screen for humans.
We thought this was a valid concern and a valid alternative so we’ve stopped using reCAPTCHA and are going to see how our spam management and security are affected. Instead of reCAPTCHA, we are using Akismet which looks at comments’ content and searches for specific spam-related terms and users.
If we are to provide a place for Social Source Commons community and nonprofit tech conversations and information, then we need to address accessibility for all of our users as best we can.
What are your thoughts about spam management, security and accessibility? Many sites like Facebook and Twitter rely on CAPTCHA programs for spam security causing social media to discriminate against the disabled. Is there a solution (yet)? Or are those with visual and hearing impairments casualties of the war on spam?
Recently, on the NTEN Discuss List, someone posted a question, looking for platforms that could work as community sites for members to chat, share documents, and just generally connect. This sparked a variety of responses with a variety of tools so we threw them all together in the Community Platforms Toolbox on Social Source Commons.
GroupSite was recommended for its usability while people liked BigTent‘s admin tools for group management. All of the tools seemed at least in theory to be able to meet the needs of the poster so you can tell that the question isn’t “if?” but “which?”
Do you know of any Community Platforms that are missing from the toolbox? Have experience using any of the tools for community collaboration? Tell us what’s up!
Anyone who has been to a large event full of people with laptops has experienced that all-too-familiar scenario: Sitting in chair with laptop, about to send that tweet of Elmo doing the Single Ladies dance and *POOF* your internet connection goes out. You look around and for some reason it looks like EVERYONE ELSE still has a connection. You proceed to continuously refresh your wireless connection hoping that something will result while the people around you start dropping like flies… “Hey, are you connected?” “What wireless network are you on?” “Is ‘Bob’s Apartment Wireless; DON’T USE’ password-protected?” and etc.
Large events can be a wireless lover’s worst enemy. Because the bandwidth of the internet connection is only so big but more and more people make more and more connections, it’s like feeding a single pack of Skittles to 50 people. Sure you can give everyone a single Skittle, but just tasting that lone, small pellet of sugary goodness is going to make them want a whole pack and not be satisfied until then get it. In the same way, because there are so many people wanting to access the internet through the same stream, it becomes split so much that each person’s stream is achingly slow if it’s there at all.
Luckily, our very own Dane, Tomas Krag put together an SSC toolbox full of tools to ease the pain associated with managing your internet connection at a large event. Bandwidth Management for Events pulls together tools that improve connection speeds with techniques like caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages and limiting download speed, while allowing bursts, to eliminate queues. Some of this may seem like voodoo, but these tools are definitely worth checking out for the next wireless-enabled event you hold. Any experience with these tools? What do you think?
Have any horrible “large event wireless FAIL” moments? Let us be your safe space to share. 😉
One thing that I’m interested in (along with 90% of the nonprofit world) is the connection and potential return on investment between social media and the organization. A few great blog posts have been floating around out there that I thought I should share for those of you looking into the same issues as myself. Check ’em out:
Facebook and Nonprofits: Success Stories? ROI? Nonprofit Tech 2.0 asks Is Facebook just overhyped as a communications tool? Where’s that ROI everyone’s talking about? A good conversation going on in the comments about these issues. Interesting to see the different points of view from different organizations.
How to Bring Facebook Fans to Your Nonprofit Blog: Part 1 Rebecca from Wild Apricot Blog looks at the connection between Facebook and your blog showing you some reasons that you might want to make an effort to move your audience between the two and ways in which to do it.
6 Essential Social Media Plug-Ins for Your Blog John Haydon presents a list of plug-ins that you can add to your blog to enhance its connectivity to your social media outlets. You may notice a couple new additions around the blog you’re reading now. 🙂
Micro-Volunteering for the Haiti Earthquake Beth Kanter takes a look at some organizations that allow average Joes and Janes like us to contribute to the Haiti earthquake relief efforts. Only vaguely related to blogs and social media but sweet nonetheless.
These posts are definitely worth a peruse. Hope they help!
Talking to a small nonprofit looking to get started on Social Media recently, the executive director told me that she’s trying her hardest to get comfortable with Flickr because she knew that it was the place for photos and social networking.
Immediately, I thought to myself: “Wait. Is it?” It seems that more and more Facebook is becoming the place for photos. So I began to wonder whether or not Facebook was taking Flickr’s trick and doing it better. I posted the question on Aspiration’s Facebook Wall, got a lil’ conversation flowing and got some insightful responses:
So I thought I’d move the conversation to the blog and see if anyone else has anything to add. What do you think about Facebook vs. Flickr vs. Picasa with regard to nonprofit photos?
What is your experience with these tools?
Do you think that Google is slowly putting together the ultimate “social-network-that-doesn’t-call-itself-a-social-network?”
While every Plone evangelist and WordPress advocate can tell you why their CMS is the bee’s knees, they’ll all agree that it depends on what you’re doing. And while we won’t go into what each one does better today because, well, frankly I want everyone to play in the sandbox nicely, I did want to show you the gold standards for those nonprofits looking to put together a website.
Why go open source in your CMS travails, you ask? The key is community. Because these applications are open source, anybody can see the code and develop extensions, modules, do-hickeys and whozeewhatsits. Plone, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are as good as they are and as popular as they are because their communities are large, dedicated and passionate about the tool. So one of the dangers of using a smaller, less-established CMS is that the community is smaller and therefore the wealth of knowledge (trouble-shooting, forums) and resources (extensions, themes) is smaller. Also, if the CMS never takes hold (no matter how cool it is), you’re stuck with a website built in a CMS that no one works in. Eek. But, that being said, there are definitely some interesting smaller open source content management systems out there that have small but vibrant and dedicated communities. A couple examples include Concrete5 and TikiWIki.
What are your thoughts on Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and Plone vying for FOSS CMS supremacy?
Know any smaller FOSS Content Management Systems that deserve a shoutout?
Let us know! We’re not tools. We’re just tool people.
In light of the recent Facebook privacy settings drama, I thought that this would be a good time to evaluate what control you (or others) have on your online presence. Our very own intern Matthew put together a toolbox of “Circumvention Tools”. Tools for handling online privacy, censorship and getting around online road blocks.
By nature, this can be a sketchy area, so know that none of these tools are perfect by any means when looking at how to address these issues. And just because they’re listed here doesn’t mean we endorse or have tried them, we just want to let folks know what’s available. Security needs vary organization to organization and individual to individual, so we encourage you to vet circumvention and security tools thoroughly before depending on them in any way.
That being said, these are very real problems that a nonprofit or an individual can find themselves having to deal with and there are many reasons why you should at least know what’s up. First of all, anyone can see and track what you’re looking at online. Internet providers, websites, blogs (boo!) can track what you’re looking at. Because every computer is tied to a specific IP address, it’s actually fairly easy for someone to do. Secondly, for some organizations, like Google, it’s a large part of their business model. They track what you search for and look at to give you more relevant search results.
But it’s one thing to track what someone is doing online and a whole other to take action against them based on what they’re doing. Controversial nonprofits and organizations have a legitimate security issue to consider when looking at how they leave a footprint online. For example, if your organization works for freeing political prisoners and your IP address is tracked to a website categorized by the government as “terrorist” don’t think that nothing will happen. While this might sound conspiracy-theory-esque, I just want to use an extreme example to illustrate the point that there can be real dangers when people follow you online and more importantly when you don’t know about it or what you can do. Direct action organizations, protest groups and people advocating for a controversial cause need to know that (just like everyone else), their wanderings and actions online are there for anyone to see.
Tracking where someone goes online isn’t the only way that you can be taken advantage of online. Anyone who followed the protests in Iran over the presidential elections knew that Twitter and YouTube were far richer in content for real-time news than traditional news media. The fact that a government can choose to block sites like this effectively cuts off the vocal cords of a group of people while at the same time stopping others outside of the situation from knowing what is going on. While this also might seem like an extreme example, simply the fact that this is possible must leave you wondering what’s up and what you can do about it.
Luckily, there are tools out there that can help you out. Some tools like Freegate, Gpass and Your Freedom work against these kinds of censorship measures to allow people access to sites they wouldn’t be able to view otherwise. While tools like Tor and UltraSurf work to hide your IP address so your actions are lost in the intertubes. And again, remember that these tools are not perfect. In many ways it’s like an arms race between the tools that work for you and the tools that work against you. It’s only a matter of time before one catches up with the other.
Now that I’ve got you a little paranoid, I say go and check out a few of these tools and see what you think. If all of these online privacy and censorship issues make you a little uncomfortable (as it should!), know that it’s a real issue and that your privacy, identity and access to content online are hot commodities.
What issues have you seen come into play around these issues?
What do you do to protect your control over your online presence?
Recently, I was talking to a few members of a nonprofit who were frustrated with their higher-ups who were pushing major projects on Facebook without having a clear understanding of what they were using Facebook for in the first place. Somewhat ironically, by posting the question to Aspiration’s Facebook Wall, we got some interesting responses including many that mentioned planning out a well thought-out strategy and examining your audience. Many organizations want to get involved with social media but don’t know how they want to take advantage of the tools. It’s important to look at some big questions to develop something of an organizational strategy around social media and I thought this would be a good chance to post some thoughts about assessing your audience online when beginning your social media ventures.
Who are we talking to?
Different organizations have different audiences. Shocking, I know. The National Puppy Lover’s Association of America and the People for the Proliferation of Puppy Loafers are not going to send out the same messages, content or have the same conversations with the same people. This is something that seems simple to the point where many organizations dismiss it as common sense. However, this is a mistake. On a surface level, yes, it is easy to understand, but diving in deeper brings up questions that an organization must come to a consensus about before using a new communications tool to connect with that audience:
Audience Vs. Constituency
Organizations need to make a distinction between their constituency and their audience. Ask “who are you advocating on behalf of?” and “who are you trying to reach?” as separate questions. Both of these groups will be connected to your organization but may want very different things from your communications. How will your organization address the needs of both? For example, if your organization advocates for better prison system public health programs, you may be advocating for prisoners who receive poor healthcare services but you may be trying to reach the general public who have no idea about these conditions who may be able to provide support. Are your social media tools giving a community to those you’re advocating for while informing people who you need to inform? In other words, how can your organization use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to provide continued value to followers as well as outreach to strangers?
Next, ask yourself what each group wants from you as an organization. Do the families of the prisoners that you advocate for want information on upcoming policy meetings? Would they rather a place that simply shows your organization’s progress with these issues? In general, what can you provide your audience if they choose to follow or fan you? Notification of events? Connections to similar organizations? Conversation? Related resources? Tagged photos? If you are asking your followers to do something (even if it is simply to follow you) then you need to give them value in return. Social media is a two way street of give and take. Make sure you’re at least balancing the two out if not providing more.
After asking these questions yourself, another useful thing to do is ask the followers themselves. If you have a few followers that have shown their support, ask them why they’re following you. Ask them what they want to see from you or how you can be more useful for them. Remember that social media is all about personal relationships, so talk to your followers as people. Don’t just drool over the increasing number of fans. These conversations are what social media is built for so take advantage and don’t feel as though you have to have all of the answers right away.
Demographics
Realize that your online audience may vary drastically from your traditional offline audience and that audiences from online network to network also can vary. Traditionally Facebook and Twitter were known as social networks for the younger generation, but that is no longer true according to a recent study put out by Ignite Social Media with middle-aged adults comprising the largest percentage of both networks users (Facebook ages 45-55 and Twitter ages 35-45). Other tools like MySpace and LinkedIn are increasingly becoming niche networks. MySpace is increasingly focused on the music industry and its users tend to have lower incomes than the users of Facebook and Twitter. Members of LinkedIn, focused on business relationships, tend to be of higher incomes, higher education and a similar middle-aged spread to that of Facebook and Twitter (ages 35-55).
After talking through these questions and getting a better sense of who you want to be connecting to, you can start making more informed decisions about the tools that you use. Realize that most of these questions are organizational process questions. As an organization, there needs to be some consensus on who you are talking to, what they’re looking for from you and what you want out of them. Technology should come last.
What do you all think about assessing your social media audience as a nonprofit? What did I forget to include? Do you have any experience looking at these issues? How did you analyze the audience for your organization? Let me know in the comments!
Social Media and Accessibility
By Matt on February 19, 2010We here at Social Source Commons Blog recently got an email asking us to reconsider our use of reCaptcha for spam management on our blog. reCAPTCHA is a tool that uses the CAPTCHA technique to verify that the person requesting to interact with the site (post a comment, register as a user, etc.) is, in fact, a human and not a spam robot (or “spambot”) looking for places to automatically insert links to Viagra resellers and porn sites.
It works by showing the user an image of a word usually slightly distorted but still readable. The idea here is that bots can’t interpret what’s shown on a picture the same way that humans can so while a human can see that the swirly picture says “following”, the bot just sees an image and can’t pull out the word that is being displayed because it isn’t actual text but rather an image of text. The user then types in the word that she sees in the picture thereby verifying herself as a legitimate human commenter or user. The CAPTCHA system works very well and as of right now (spambots are constantly becoming more effective), it is the go-to security measure for websites. Website administrators can let CAPTCHA catch spambots before they event submit content.
However, CAPTCHA has a big problem. What happens when the user trying to submit a comment is blind and accessing the internet with speech or other accessibility software? The software cannot read the image any better than the spambot so that the user cannot complete the puzzle and thereby verify their human commentor status. The user’s comment is denied even though the comment is valid and from a human. Even if the software was able to speak the CAPTCHA text aloud, this would still exclude those who are deaf-blind who access the internet with braille tools. (see The Equipment for Deafblind People Page for more info).
The person who alerted us to our blog’s default disabled discrimination asked that we reconsider using CAPTCHA programs like reCAPTCHA and instead focus on plug-ins that check comments for spamminess rather than ineffectively screen for humans.
We thought this was a valid concern and a valid alternative so we’ve stopped using reCAPTCHA and are going to see how our spam management and security are affected. Instead of reCAPTCHA, we are using Akismet which looks at comments’ content and searches for specific spam-related terms and users.
If we are to provide a place for Social Source Commons community and nonprofit tech conversations and information, then we need to address accessibility for all of our users as best we can.
What are your thoughts about spam management, security and accessibility? Many sites like Facebook and Twitter rely on CAPTCHA programs for spam security causing social media to discriminate against the disabled. Is there a solution (yet)? Or are those with visual and hearing impairments casualties of the war on spam?
Further Reading: