Most days, data is pretty straightforward to us here at
OpenIssue headquarters. Names, addresses, email addresses, the pesky notes field (today’s bane of our existence.) But sometimes, data is political. Or, I guess more accurately, data models.
In most CRM systems, especially older ones, and ones that are less flexible, some fields can be points of contention for some of us. Gender is one, marital status is another.
CiviCRM, to it’s credit, allows for an arbitrary number of genders – you can define them however you like. My bet (although I could be wrong) is that it’s one of the few out there that allow that. Gender is not a standard field in Salesforce.com contact records, so if you want to add your own, you can customize it however you’d like. There was a very interesting and lively discussion about the gender field in Drupal profiles. Of course, one can always customize these things in Drupal.
For a couple of projects we’ve been working on, we’ve been getting very interested in putting together a really expanded and fleshed out data model for gender, sexual orientation, and marital status. Here’s the first draft. We’d love feedback on this (besides “this is silly/too radical/dangerous/from the antichrist/etc.”). And we also know that even for those who agree that sex and gender are different things, people will differ on how to divide these categories and make sense of it.
- Sex: Male, Female, FTM, MTF, Intersex
- Gender: Male, Female, Genderqueer
- Sexuality: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, Straight
- Marital Status: Straight Marriage, MA, DC, IA, VT Domestic, CA-SF 2004, CA 2008, Canada
- Relationship Status: Single, Partnered, Divorced, Dating, Poly (There probably could be some field dependencies of Marital Status on Relationship Status)
And if you maybe thought that OpenIssue headquarters was in San Francisco, I’m sure this list made you sure. (Yes, we are.)
Tagged as:
Data
I became sold on version control fairly far back in my programming life. Back when CVS (C0ncurrent Version System) was the standard. I learned it, although there were varied gaps in my use of it, so it never became second nature. As I learned more about newer version control systems, I tried them out. For a while, I was using SVN (Subversion), which is similar enough to CVS, but has some nice improvements. More and more folks are moving to distributed version control systems. I began to understand the great advantages of those systems, and decided to pick one to standardize on. Git stood out from the others in terms of popularity and resources. And, I figured anything Linus Torvalds wrote was good enough for me. That was last year. This year. drupal.org is moving to Git, making my life oh so much easier.
In my daily life, Git has 2 major advantages: version control and comparison of versions even when I’m not connected to the internet (you have your own actual repository, not just a working copy), and its speed. It takes less time to clone a whole repository of code than it does to check out a working copy using CVS or SVN! It’s really worth checking out.
I imagine Git will become the new CVS – the new standard, until something better comes along to supplant it.
Tagged as:
code,
Software,
tools
I’ve been working with nonprofit organizations on technology issues (strategy, implementation) for about 15 years now. I remember the heady days, when most nonprofits didn’t even have networks, and some of them still didn’t have internet access. In those days, most nonprofit techies were progressive, and we were sure that what we were doing was going to change the world for the better.
Now, 15 years later, I’m pretty sure I’m not changing the world. You’re still more likely to find a progressive nonprofit techie than a conservative one, but there are plenty of conservative ones now. Conservative causes of all sorts have discovered the power of the kinds of technologies I’ve been helping nonprofits with, and are au courant. Plenty of conservative organizations use Drupal, Salesforce, online fundraising, Facebook and Twitter – using those technologies to push for ends that I am far from interested in seeing come to reality. You can bet that the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections will not be a repeat of the 2008 election with such a massive differential in use of technology and social networks.
I remember also, from those heady days, the idea that we could help nonprofits be more effective by encouraging them to be more proactive around replacing their hardware. Come to find out not so much later, that the massive production (and disposal) of computer hardware fuels deadly conflicts, and causes serious environmental damage.
And then there is the fundamental – what is all this technology really for, anyway? I was reminded of this when listening to Marketplace on radio a while ago. It’s worth remembering that one of the two motive forces around all of this technology change is that business (and nonprofits, too) can squeeze more work out of fewer people. That would be fine if we had a great safety net where people who were unemployed could be supported, and perhaps get free education so they could create art, music, or new and interesting things, but that’s not how the system works, is it? The second motive force is simply to empty your wallet so you can get shiny.
I still think I’m doing good. I still think that working with nonprofits to help them grapple with communications and data is good work, helps people, and is right livelihood. But I’m pretty sure I’m not changing the world by doing it.
I’m reminded, of course, by the famous Audre Lorde quote: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
There may be other ways I’m helping to change the world, though, but you’ll have to read my other blog for that.
Tagged as:
nptech,
web2.0
I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in the last couple of years learning to code in a new way. It reminds me of a transition I made in coding from having written stand-alone applications for varied computers, to writing code for the web. When I was in college, grad school and early in my academic career (this dates me – from the early 80s to early 90s), I spent a lot of time writing stand-alone applications, mostly in Pascal and C. The shift from that kind of code, to writing for the web was a lesson in protocols, constraints, and different ways of troubleshooting.
The transition from writing free-form web applications, to writing modules for Drupal, or APEX customizations for Salesforce, is another set of lessons in protocols and constraints. First, it’s not enough to understand the syntax and form of the language (this is especially true for APEX – and beware the required test coverage!) One has to understand how the surrounding application works – what APIs or methods one can use, and how. And unlike long standing languages, there aren’t lots of detailed cookbooks and that sort of thing lying around – a lot of it is learning from other folks, as well as just learning by trial and error.
And, in my small forays into learning frameworks like CakePHP, Ruby On Rails, and others, it seems like these days, coding for the web is many lessons in constraints – which is a good thing, I think. Even though it feels like beating my head against a wall, it’s nice to know that I won’t “dump core” and break Salesforce (although I for sure have broken Drupal on occasion!)
Tagged as:
apex,
code,
drupal,
salesforce
I’ve been getting to know Amazon S3 lately, and there are some great things about it. I think it is one of the long list of unpredicted successes that resulted from the near-ubiquitousness of open source software on the server side. We’ve been using it for “offsite” backup for drupal sites for a while now. We have a script going which runs by cron daily to do the backups.
There are a number of ways to do this. We started using S3fs as a way to mount an S3 bucket in the filesystem, then just copy the files to S3. One of the scripts we’ve use is here. (We also use rsync.) However, S3fs isn’t very actively supported or in development. So we’re thinking of moving to use S3cmd, which works really well, and is still under active development.
Tagged as:
amazon,
aws,
backup,
drupal,
s3
Again, a little peak at what I’ve been up to, reading, and thinking about. You can also see what I’ve been reading by looking at my shared items on my google profile.
So while I’ve been off twitter, I’ve had time to research social CRM (funny, that.) And what I’ve found is pretty interesting.
CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” (not to be confused with “Cause Related Marketing”- it came from the for-profit space. In the nonprofit world we use this acronym to mean “Constituent Relationship Management”, generally. From Wikipedia:
Customer relationship management is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.
Now we could easily translate that into “managing and nurturing an organizations’ interactions with donors and constituents.” and “overall goals are to find, attract and win new donors, nurture and retain those donors the organization already has, entice former donors back into the fold, and reduce the costs of fundraising.” (I’ve never been convinced that CRM and Donation management are very different beasts, even though many argue differently.)
Anyway, you all know this stuff, and know the tools we all use to do this – Salesforce, CiviCRM, Raiser’s Edge, etc. And these tools are great at doing CRM with the standard communications methods – email, phone, snail mail, in person contact. But what about social media as another form of communication? That was the question I cam to this issue with.
There are good arguments for why social media will radically change standard CRM practices. You should definitely read the report I mentioned in my earlier post. But in the Social CRM space, there seems to be a lot more attention paid to what I would call “metrics” - useful for attracting new donors, and understanding the “emotional state of conversations” rather than relationships that are trackable to “nurture and retain those donors the organization already has.”
I don’t mean to downplay metrics – metrics are hugely important – but I think mixing up metrics and CRM might make it harder to really do either well.
Example – in Jeremiah Owyang’s report, of the 18 use cases for Social CRM he uses, 7 or 8 of them are really use cases for metrics. Example “Social Campaign Tracking” and “Social Sales Insights.”
In this series, I’m going to talk a fair bit about both, although I’m going to lean more heavily on the CRM side of things than the Metrics side, since that’s more my bailiwick anyway. And I welcome any comments.
Tagged as:
CRM,
web2.0
Countless nonprofits flocked to Ning to create social networks. Since I’m not a social media guru, I’ve generally kept my opinions about this to myself. But now that Ning isn’t free anymore, I’m going to carp some.
I think over the course of lo this last few years, I have blogged or tweeted about this very phenomenon what feels like countless times. Nonprofits find services for free. They start depending on them. The free services disappear, for business reasons. The nonprofit community gets up in arms. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There is nothing wrong with software or services that don’t cost anything. Nothing at all. But if you are going to bet the farm, make sure you know what the risks are. Using free services is fine, but know why they are free. Are they free because the company behind them is an ad revenue machine and uber profitable (Google)? Is it free because it’s open source (Drupal, Elgg, Word Press)? Is it free because it is a profitable company that has a clear and well defined donation program (Salesforce.com)? Or is it free because it is a start up in search for a business model (Ning)?
There is an effort afloat (and a petition) to get Ning to make nonprofit and educational accounts free. I’m not holding my breath. They eliminated 40% of their staff. They are feeling pinched, and need to stop their burn rate. I don’t know how charitable this will make them feel. And even if they do, there is no guarantee that Ning will even survive.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a great social network management system that won’t get pulled out from under you, try Elgg. It’s open source, and out of the box, it does just about everything Ning does, without the need for the deep setup required to set up Drupal like Ning. It has an active developer community, and is growing.
Or, if you look for another free service, make sure you understand the risks, and be prepared for possible disaster if it’s a startup in search of a business model.
Tagged as:
nptech,
opensource,
socialmedia