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
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
Security Camera - Photo by Sirius Rust
Beth threw down the gauntlet, and I had to pick it up. I’m sort of surprised I hadn’t written about this before. I think a lot about both of these, not so much for myself, but for organizations that I work with whose work is fairly sensitive.
First off, some definitions – I think that these two terms do get mixed up quite often, and understanding what’s really being meant by them in a technical context is important.
Security, in this context, is the concept that your personal computing resources and data are safe from both prying eyes, as well as hijack by crackers and spammers who will use those resources and data for their nefarious ends. In the case of your computing resources and personal data inside that box you call your laptop, or protecting the whole of your home or office network, security is a matter of using specific tools that prevent unprivileged outsiders from getting in. Wifi passwords, firewalls, password protected fileshares, virus protection software, etc. are the tools of the trade here. Security of your private data that is “in the cloud” is largely at the mercy of the software developers who hold your data. Luckily, most of them take security quite seriously. (That said, your data “in the cloud” can be compromised by lack of security on your network or laptop – someone installs a key logger, for instance, and grabs all of your passwords.)
Privacy, in this context, is that you can control, in a granular sense, what information about you is exposed to whom. Privacy is, as Beth says, primarily a matter of human behavior, but there are very interesting intersections with technology and security. In some instances, services have default privacy settings that are a lot less private than someone might like – and it takes some know-how to figure out how to correct those settings. Privacy is, also, a set of decisions that get made – sometimes in haste, or without much consideration. Your drunken decision to post that picture of you (or a co-worker) dancing in your underwear on a table at a party, the cat is out of the bag, and may never be able to be put back.
Security and privacy in the context of online communities, as Beth points out, are different beasts. The software that drives online communities (such as Drupal, phpBB, and others) have options to allow for varied levels of security. You might need to have a password to see anything. Or you might just need a password to make comments. You might not be able to just register for an account – you might need to go through an admin. These days, most software driving communities have roles you can assign people to, with specific privileges granted per role.
But privacy is made up of policy (the policy of the organization running the community) as well as the behavior of the members – their collective agreement that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”
Tagged as:
nptech,
privacy,
security,
web2.0