Meet the i On Nonprofits Team

Meet the i On Nonprofits contributors, leaders in the association and non-profit software industry.

Robin Fisk
Robin is an expert on the role and use of technology in fundraising. He founded Fisk Brett in the 1990’s, launching the successful ProgressCRM database software.

With over 20 years’ experience bringing technology solutions to more than 250 non-profits, Robin is now the Global Fundraising Product Manager at Advanced Solutions International.

Robin lives with his family, mostly in West Sussex in the UK, and sometimes in the Loire region of France.

Anne Gentle
Anne Gentle works as a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International, embedded on an Agile software development team in Austin Texas.

At ASI, she coordinates volunteer outings such as sorting food at the Capital Area Food Bank and assembling Personal Energy Transports. She’s an active member of the Society for Technical Communication, serving as the chair of the Editorial Advisory Panel for their Intercom magazine as well as on a special Social Media Task Force.

She writes a blog at justwriteclick.com and just finished a book about using social publishing techniques for technical documentation titled Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. As the mom of two young boys, she loves to be busy and on-the-go.

Jay McCormack
Jay is the Solution Architect for Advanced Solutions International. He helps not-for-profit organizations match technology to their needs so that they can run more efficiently, communicate to their members more effectively, raise more funds and do more good.

Jay is not just a man who immerses himself in cutting edge technology and concepts; he actively seeks it out and tries to make it work better for ASI’s customers. Want to know if an iPhone application is appropriate for your business? Need someone to explain the benefits of Twittering for your membership? Jay’s your man.

“My clients are working 12 hour days for a reason. They believe in what they do and I find that inspiring,” says Mr. McCormack.

Jay came to ASI from a background of corporate web development projects as diverse as a Chinese horse racing website and helping build Harvey Norman’s first e-commerce website.

Get the Website Right First

Last week, we caught an item on Twitter by Non-Profit Tech Blog’s Allan Benamer:

WARNING: social media is being oversold to nonprofits — they’d be better off getting their web sites done right

This sparked some dialogue with Anne Gentle of JustWriteClick. Anne’s take is that nonprofit websites need a “job description,” just like employees. “What do you want your website to do, and how do you measure its success at doing those tasks?”

We talked to Sara Hardison, product manager at ASI, to get her thoughts on the essentials of website design and development for nonprofits. Here’s what Sara had to say:

User Experience Strategy versus Technology

To begin with, information architecture/design needs to be framed in the larger context of User Experience Strategy. The best design and navigation elements and even features mean nothing if you don’t also have the content and focus to back it up.

Non-profits and associations often have multiple and not always complementary goals and audiences. Strategically, they have to contend with members, potential members, public education, industry education, groups within membership, press and media, lobbying/outreach, etc. It is very easy to get off track and try to be everything to everyone, and in effect, reach no one.

Because this is something that affects the entire organization, strategy gets lost amid compromised solutions, or the solutions focus on technology – which is much easier to sell internally – rather than coming up with a solid strategy. For example, it’s easier to say “we need a store to sell our publications,” rather than answer the questions “why is our publication relevant to a larger audience, what format should that take, how do we cross-promote?” It’s easier to say “we need social media tools,” rather than sit down and figure out  new ways to foster community and what that community has to offer, how to populate it, and who it would appeal to.

Small, Continual Improvements

Some organizations either want to spend all of their money on the technology, or don’t have a team strong enough to both implement and manage a web presence that has been aligned with a web strategy. Websites are living structures, and must be evaluated and tested regularly to see if they still align with the organization’s goals, and if the flow of navigation, features and content meet user needs as those goals evolve. Even small adjustments can have relatively large impacts – both good and bad – on  the user experience. At a for-profit company like Amazon, for instance, small changes could mean millions in revenue… which is why they iterate by piece and test, test, test.

Many organizations still think of adjustments to the website as a complete overhaul, not something that can be tackled in smaller doses. Iterative changes are usually more cost-effective, less risky, and easier to implement and test.

Where Social Media Comes In

There is definitely a role for non-profits at the forefront of social trends. Organizing and fostering communities and networks is at the core of what they do, after all. Membership associations are about bringing people together, either through events, career services, job leads, or general networking. Fundraising organizations bring people together around a common interest or goal. Within each of these organizations, there are those dynamic people who foster and feed that connectivity: chapter presidents, committee chairs, board members, active volunteers, real germinators if you will (Philip King would call them “sneezers“).  Many are too intimidated by the tools to really think about how they can harness their knowledge to effectively use social media. In this sense, social media is being “oversold” to organizations. Worrying about using new tools and technologies before figuring out the User Experience Strategy in general is like attempting to answer the how of web presence without an adequate understanding of the why.

Do you “chari-tweet”?

We had an interesting conversation recently with ASI’s Anne Gentle, about leveraging Twitter for professional use, particularly in the nonprofit sector. Anne has written a great post at Duo Consulting about potential business uses for Twitter:

Meanwhile, the reigning authority on Twitter for nonprofits is Beth Kanter, who has checked in twice this week on the topic: once to review Twitpay, an integrated payment service for Twitter that could turn it into a truly seamless platform for fundraising, and again to invite readers to nominate charities that are already successfully using Twitter for fundraising.

We’d like to hear from you: any success stories and stumbling blocks with this medium? What advice would you give for nonprofits just getting started on Twitter?

And for those of you with a lunch hour to burn, the Chronicle of Philanthropy is hosting a live chat tomorrow (Tuesday, November 25) at noon EST to discuss how nonprofits can use Twitter. Readers can join here.

Fundraising horror stories

Today’s post comes to us from Anne Gentle, one of ASI’s senior technical writers. We’ve been corresponding via email about “fundraising horror stories,” and thought it might be illuminating to open up this discussion to iOn’s readers…

I’m reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time which is the story of Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber who is building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He’s an ordinary person (well, besides the extraordinary mountain climbing feats) who has gone from night nurse who would type fundraising letters at a rental typewriter to an international hero who has helped build and establish more than sixty schools, according to this recent CNN article, American mountaineer fights Taliban with books, not bombs.

Just last night I read a fundraising horror story in this book. Even though he had become more advanced in his efforts than the hand-typed letters to random celebrities and mountain climbing companions, Greg Mortenson was convinced by a potential donor to go visit her, with the promise of a possible large donation. He was being “entertained” by this potential donor with dinners and tours around town, nothing out of the ordinary, but the worst scene was her having a professional massage therapist give him a massage in her home (small towel on a large man, you get the idea, yipes!). This 70+ year old woman in reality had no intentions of donating to his cause, but was lonely and wanted someone to talk to and entertain – and never did give him any donations. I’m quite “green” and inexperienced about fundraising though, but I was truly taken aback by such a terrible story of the best intentions and faith in people going so badly.

It also got me thinking, how does this type of time-wasting story translate to online fundraising efforts? I was envisioning a Facebook fundraising effort where one of the Facebookers begins harassing you, or was there a time when you crafted a perfectly honed message to your entire email list only to leave out the URL to the donation site. The horror!

Another horror story I found with a Google search was on the Donor Power blog – where an organization decided to stop chasing low-contributing donors. Jeff Brooks writes in The danger of a little knowledge, “Sweetness and Light eventually became aware of the disaster that was happening under their feet. But it took a while, because they were dazzled by the rising performance numbers they saw. It took about two years to realize what the problem was. And it took longer than that to recover. The overall impact was devastating to their mission.” Lesson learned? Don’t go after your donor list with a chainsaw.

With Halloween around the corner in the States, I thought I’d see if anyone else has horror stories to share. What’s your worst fundraising horror story?