The Aspiration 2007 Non-Profit Development Summit was held in February. Their wiki with conference notes is available online.
Non-Profit Development Summit
Leave a reply
Non-profit Databases
Some months ago I created a four page introduction to databases, Database 101 which explains basic database terminology. I found this was useful as background for discussion. But I think it is perhaps even more useful to take a longer view and think about the number and role of databases within an organization.
Perhaps we should even dispense with the word “database”, and replace it with something a little less nerdy like “knowledge”. We could ask several questions:
- What are all the nuggets of information that we need on a daily basis to run the organization?
- Who needs to know these things internally? (managers, clerical staff, service providers, your clients)
- Who needs to know these things externally (funders, state and federal agencies, auditors, your accountant)
- How are we going to get this knowledge on an ongoing basis?
- How are we going to disseminate this knowledge?
- How are we going to deal with confidentiality and “need-to-know”?
Data systems are usually built with one of two aims, either to report statistics from existing data, or to give real-time assistance in the daily running of a business (management information). Although funders and regulators have a myriad of reporting requirements, these may not be useful or helpful in the day-to-day running of your agency. Management information is not the same as statistical reporting. And yet the data system is often driven by the regulators and funders to the detriment of management information.
Three kinds of data
There are at least three kinds of data which are useful in managing an organization:
Financial: Income and expense accounts, grant and fund accounting, payroll, and purchasing
Donor and Constituent Management: These systems track friends and contributors outside the organization. Of course donations eventually are fed back into the accounting system…somehow…automatically, one would hope.
Service: Information on your service delivery is vital to understand and track the evidence of your effectiveness as an agency. This area is the weakest in terms of available low-cost and open source systems, partly because of the diversity of agencies, practices, and clients. While you may choose from several offerings that cover both the financial and fundraising areas, a service database may be more difficult to locate.
Subsets of the above
Do you provide training? Then you will want to have a training database which covers courses or seminars and which allows you to track instructors and students.You may need a registration function which tracks payments, and can accept credit cards.
Do you sell merchandise? Perhaps you need a web storefront.
Do you provide health care or counseling? You’ll need a patient management and case management system.
Do you host events? You’ll need to register participants, set up workshops, create “packages” which include combinations of paid and free sessions, prints schedules and account for the VIP luncheons, the gala banquet, and everyone’s dietary restrictions and their hotel assignments.
Do you have equipment? You may need an inventory system which allows you to lend equipment to staff or clients.
Do you provide affordable housing? You may need to track housing projects, local grantors, real-estate and land transactions, easements abatements, and federal and funds which is being channeled through your organization to your grantors and builders.
Most of these ideas feed back into the service classification above, but all of them will have funds attached, and so they eventually feed into the financial system.
Since donor management and accounting systems are well represented by commercial offerings, we’ll take a look at a few service applications in the upcoming weeks.
Daylight Savings Time Change: Aftermath
With a stunningly cavalier attitude, my preparation for the daylight savings time issue consisted of checking the Microsoft web site, which led me to believe that as as long as everything was updated with patches, the change would be automatic. Today, checking for daylight savings issues, I had mixed results.
- Unless you update and patch your Windows XP and Server 2003 machines, all bets are off. Even once they are updated, you may find yourself an hour later or early.
- Workstations may take the time from a domain server, but if they don’t, you can reset them from the Time application in Control Panel, or by right-clicking the displayed time in the system tray.
- Jeff Duntemann has a note about a free program that will do the update, and explains a bit more how the daylight-savings changes are stored in the registry.
- As long as the Grandstream IP phones were set to account for daylight savings, they all flipped over without intervention. They update themselves from NIST.
Chron This Week
If you ever wanted to see how a Geographic Information System (GIS) works, this week’s Chron technology section cites a “mash-up” of statistics and maps, provided by a coalition of groups in Boston. This site, is the MetroBoston Data Common.
Living in the Third World of Telecom
Rich Tehrani, has written a terrific commentary on the folly of a Verizon (old-line re-integration of the Baby Bells) suit against Vonage (innovative VoIP alternative).
Excerpts:
If you haven’t heard, a court decided Vonage needs to pay Verizon $58 million in past damages for patent infringement in the following areas:
* Technology used to bridge Internet calls to the traditional phone systems
* Features such as call-waiting and voice-mail
* Wireless Internet phone calls[T]he question worth posing however is how is the consumer benefiting from this lawsuit?
My concern is with the government and the various agencies who are supposed to be protecting me, my family and friends from monopolistic practices such as this.
When I learn about large companies using the legal and regulatory systems, to flush their competitors down the toilet I have to stop and remember what country I am living in.
I am a US citizen. I was born in the US and I am proud of it. I want consumers to have the best of everything. Lower prices, better quality – the best of everything.
VoIP has afforded consumers many benefits. FCC Chairman Michael Powell realized this and used Vonage as a poster child for competition that was pro consumer.
Unfortunately the massive amount of telco consolidation leaves a few large service providers with war chests full of cash and patents they will use to wipe out any and all competition in the market.
The system is so broken it is tough to imagine it can be called a system. How could the FCC feel good about this sort of decision? How could it ever be argued that a huge patent portfolio wielded like nuclear weapons can benefit consumers?
Merger after merger gets approved and no one puts an end to it.
If you had to design a communications infrastructure, the U.S. model is upside down and ass-backwards. Even the Iraqis resisted our cell-phone system.
1. I checked yesterday to see if DSL was available in my neck of the woods. It isn’t, and we have a single choice, Comcast cable, which provides internet connectivity for $57.00 a month. I feel lucky about this, there are still many pockets in surrounding towns which have nothing more than dial-up internet access. Several of these towns have agreed to look into providing municipal fiber networks.
2. In Germany last summer, I was able to buy an unlocked Nokia cell phone and choose from a half-dozen providers of cell phone service. Each of these had a confusing array of plans to be sure, many of them weren’t directly comparable, but even during the course of a three-week stay I switched providers once, and lowered my per-minute charges back to the states, and within Europe by almost 90%. So there is indeed some competition. The hardware isn’t “locked” to a single provider. Imagine if you bought a Ford Explorer, and you were only able to drive it on Ford’s roads, and if you wanted to tranfer passengers to Chevy’s roads, you’d have to pay a premium. Europe has a single mobile standard, GSM. We have three competing technical standards, which are not directly interoperable.
Read the full commentary here.
Utilities
Almeza offers an unattended installer which will install Windows and applications without user intervention. 30-day free trial at their web site.
Pensuites are open source and free software utility bundles that can be downloaded and installed on to a USB drive.
Found both of these in CRNTech magazine. They have a web site full of animations and ads which, nothwithstanding those issues usually has some good tech tidbits and white papers for systems managers.
Automating the To-Do List
Like many people, I use lists to try to keep myself oriented. I’ve been trying a host of list keeping and time tracking tools in the past couple of months, and I’ve landed on my current favorite: Visual Mind.
VM works like an outliner. I create top branches to include everything that I’m trying to keep on my radar on any given day. As I work on a particular project, I can expand the branches of a particular project. Since I use VM for project mangement, system analysis, and illustration anyway, I can integrate the latter functions into my todo list if I need to.
VM also allows you to post maps to the web. These run in a java runtime application, so anyone with a modern web browser can take a look at your masterpiece.
Alternatives
Web Based Tools
Todoist does a nice hierarchy, that allows you to snap open a single project while keeping the other projects visible but closed. Free.
Ta-da Lists, from the people who brought us Basecamp. Free
Nozbe is a “strict” implementation of the Getting Things Done methodology. It allows you to view your items by project, “next action”, and context. Free for 6 projects, $4.95/month for 30 projects.
Applications
TraxTime – still the best for time tracking. Allows you to track time by projects and it creates a nice set of reports at the end of the month or reporting period which I use as the basis for invoicing. I have this running on my laptop all the time. (In fact, I think this is the main reason for keeping the laptop running.) $39.95 for the single user version, a networkable multi-user version is also available, but it isn’t a web-based application, so, as far as I know it will only work when all the users are on the LAN.
My Timeboxing uses the Timebox model. More about this in last month’s archive.
So, what I think I really want, is the visual appeal of Visual Mind, the ability to track time as well as TraxTime, with a timeboxing option from My Timeboxing, with the simplicity and zero cost of Todoist, or Ta-da Lists. In the meantime, I’ll continue using VM with help from a couple Yahoo widgets, a countdown timer, and a counting ‘up’ timer, as well as the lovely station clock.
Monthly Introduction March 2007
Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and half-baked ideas that we run across as we provide software and database development, network support, and R&D for a growing list of clients in education, health care and non-profit organizations.
Ongoing projects this month include finishing up a couple Access 2007 applications and working on another round of grant funding for EPSCoR and SBIR.
Regular features include Tech Friday, which may include code(!), our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide, Stuff That Works for hardware and software items that have passed the Five Minute Test, and Chron This Week, which is synopsis of technology articles of interest in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Topics on grantwritng and fundraising appear as we seem to have one or more grant application in progress most of the time.
Comments and suggestions are welcome. They are moderated, so they may not show up immediatly.
Books for Microsoft Access 2007 and earlier
I was going to do a list of my favorite Access books…but Erik Rucker already posted one. His blog, “What’s new in Access 2007” has been going since late 2005. Erik is the program manager for Access 12.0 (aka 2007) at Microsoft. I expect when the runtime is announced it will appear here first. (To paraphrase the late-nite tele-marketing shill..”Programmers Are Standing By!)
Erik’s annotation consists only of the publisher’s blurb, not any kind of comments or review. Several of the books have publishing dates for April and later.
My own favorite books, which cover Access 2003 include:
Grover Park George On Access This book is especially good for those with limited database experience. GPG is a regular on the Utter Access forum, and even answers eMail questions.
Fixing Access Annoyances I wrote about this book previously, it is full of workarounds to pesky problems in Access 2003 and earlier.
Microsoft Access Data Analysis
Finally, the other day I picked up VBA for Dummies, hoping for a little more detail about Visual Basic for Applications, the version of BASIC which is used when programming the Microsoft Office programs. The 5th edition actually deals with Office 2007, (i.e. The Ribbon), and I found several good tips.
VBA works for Outlook, Word and Excel, too, of course, and is especially helpful when you want to glue the applications together, by sending eMail from Access for example or using Word to create reports from Access.
Simulate Access 2007 runtime
Clint Covington has a hint to allow us to get a preview of what a project will look like when running under the Access 2007 runtime:
I know, the runtime hasn’t shipped yet. If you are looking for a simple way to share a database with co-workers and you don’t want them messing around with things… Try renaming the file to ACCDR. This is the equivalent of running the database with the /runtime switch. Basically the ribbon and nav pane get turned off.
I found a comment on a German blog quoting somebody who was quoting somebody that the runtime would ship “sometime in the March timeframe”. Let’s hope so.
tfnp 