This is a guest post from Matt Fikejs, Information & Referral Program Manager at 501 Commons. Matt writes periodically writes for the NPower Northwest blog to share updates from the Statewide Nonprofit Resource Directory.

Whether we work in the nonprofit sector or serve it (as a consultant, bookkeeper, etc.), we’re a “driven” lot. That’s not to suggest that those exclusively in the private sector don’t have aspirations.  But working toward a mission and a sustainable bottom line – versus just the latter – does something to inspire the desire to succeed. Simply put, there’s a “passion” for the cause.

So where does a nonprofit professional or service provider go for learning and networking opportunities – key ingredients for success? Well, if you’re like most people, you could search your “in” and “junk mail” boxes for the endless stream of promos for seminars, conferences, social events, and the like.  Some of these are from groups you know. But others leave you wondering, “Is this a reputable org., one with a record of quality and real understanding of nonprofits?”

Check out all the exciting events coming up this fall!

To help nonprofit professionals find events they can trust, 501 Commons launched the Featured Events calendar last fall. The calendar and its events are:

• Affiliated with individuals and orgs. in 501 Commons' Statewide Nonprofit Resource Directory, so you know there’s a history of successful sector experience and know-how
• Well-organized and quickly skimmable
• Current and updated many times a week
• Numerous and diverse by nature (e.g., social media & computer trainings, fundraising workshops, award events, and more)
• Sometimes free, although they can cost a fee
• From all over the State…and a few beyond Washington’s borders

Google Analytics tells us that this webpage is a very popular one. Find out why and start looking for your next professional development engagement. Then, bookmark the calendar and check back often.  After all, isn’t it time to grow yourself, your network, and your nonprofit?

- Matt Fikejs, Information & Referral Program Manager, 501 Commons

This week marks the end of our team’s time at NPower Northwest, and what a year it’s been. From our first meetings at Pre-Service Orientation in Florida through the trials, tribulations and joys of adjusting to our new home in Seattle, this team has been through a lot during the past year. Initially created as a way to bring tech services to small anti-poverty nonprofits, the HandsOn Tech team experienced a range of successes and struggles during this pilot program. From the struggles of bringing together the expectations and goals of many different partners to the success of training over 150 unique nonprofits, we have experienced a year full of change, challenge and in the end a lot of team bonding. In this blog post we thought we would share a few of the numbers from various parts of this past year.

Nonprofit Tech Trainings

• Facilitated 37 different tech trainings with community partners such as Google, Microsoft, Volunteer Administrators Network, Help Attack, Knowledge as Power and many more.
• Trained 224 individuals representing 170 unique nonprofits from the Seattle area on a range of nonprofit tech topics.
• Created 18 Slideshare presentations that were viewed 4,397 times and downloaded 20 times during the past 8 months. Our 3 most popular topics were Choosing a Database [705 views], Social Media Content Curation [575 views] and Free & Low Cost Tools for Nonprofits [499 views]

Tech Assessments & Strategy Maps

• Worked one-on-one with 13 nonprofits in our cohort model to provide technology assessment and strategy maps.
• Provided 3 hands-on trainings on Social Media, Google programs for nonprofits and Websites for nonprofits, with 36 total attendees.

Figuring out the future

Can you guess which one is from 2011 and which one is from 2012?*

As our team transitions into new things, we thought we would each share a bit about what’s coming up:

Abby - This year ended up being not only a chance to improve my tech training skills, but a crash course in online communications & social media, event planning support and much more. I am excited to be taking those skills on with me to a job at 501 Commons where I will join their Community Engagement team and help shepherd next year’s HandsOn Tech VISTAs in year 2 of this project.

Elissa - My work at HandsOn Tech allowed me to strengthen my training and research skills and reinforced my interest in data management. I am thankful for the opportunities I had to talk with the NPower Northwest consultants, attend classes and webinars on nonprofit technology topics, and connect with the Seattle Salesforce Nonprofit Users Group. I am thrilled to report that I just accepted a job with the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at UW as a data indexer!

Stephen - This year has been a great opportunity to become acquainted with Seattle, learn and work with the nonprofit sector, and teach myself new skills. I’m currently looking at software development positions and perhaps one or two computer science courses at the University of Washington.

Thank you to all the many folks in the nonprofit tech community who have attended our trainings, helped us learn, signed up for our cohort and generally helped us figure out this crazy nonprofit world. We are sure we will see many of you around town in the coming months.

- Abby Nafziger, Elissa Thomas & Stephen Eggers

*Top photo is from our very first day at NPower back in August of 2011 and the bottom was taken just this afternoon (Aug 2012)when we decided to re-create that fateful day

This is a follow-up to our more general re-cap yesterday of NTEN’s Nonprofits + Data Summit last week in Seattle. Elissa attended a morning session entitled, “Taming the Data Monster,” presented by Nam-ho Park, Regional Director for West Coast Operations at Forum One. Here is her recap of what she learned...

Data is playing an ever-increasing importance in how nonprofits tell their stories, demonstrate successes, and provide context for the problems they are solving. Large and complicated data sets can be bulky and unwieldy, however, and many people are apprehensive about approaching them -- especially if they don’t have a technical background -- despite the potential benefit for their organizations.

Nam-ho Park gave a flawless presentation on how to think about data and how beginners can learn to communicate statistics and research findings to create a clear and compelling narrative.

6 ways to tell your story with data:

• Speak with numbers
• Reveal change
• Focus on the story
• Provide context
• Let users explore, discover, and control
• Let users tell your story

charity: water is a nonprofit that is highly effective at telling their story through publishing statistics. Lots of nonprofits are now paying more attention to numbers and highlighting them on their front page to demonstrate a measurable impact of their work. You can see the numbers change over time, too, which can be encouraging for donors who want to see progress.

A good question to ask, especially if your organization’s programs are not so cut-and-dry: “What is the tweetable version of your story?” Park pointed to an example of one of his clients who conducted research on a school system in an under-resourced, rural district of Appalachia. The 30-page report was not very accessible to the public, but the information was important and needed to be understood and communicated. Summing up the results in one sentence and creating infographics that capture the meaning behind the data is a great help in promoting the research. Numbers can be difficult to understand when not presented in context without other visuals to aid in comprehension.

caption: which is easier to understand?

3 simple ways to get started

• Get your staff excited
• Find your story
• Put the players together

For inspiration:

• Information is Beautiful
• Flowing Data

Some tools to check out:

• Pentaho
• IBM Many Eyes
• Tableau

The presentation slides are not yet posted on NTEN’s website, but a similar version can be found on slideshare.

- Elissa Thomas

This was the resounding theme of last week’s NTEN Nonprofit + Data Summit right here in Seattle. This one day event was held in-person but live-streamed out to a wider audience. Our NPower team was in high attendance and thoroughly enjoyed the various panels, the delicious lunch and the chance to meet up with many of our nonprofit friends from across Seattle. Here is my brief re-cap of several of the sessions.

10 Rules of Engagement - Karen Uffleman, Groundwire

Karen spoke eloquently about the process of building engagement and outlined her 10 rules as follows:

1. Understand your theory of change
2. Identify your key audiences
3. Know what you want them to do
4. Know what they want from you
5. Have a plan for what’s next
6. Use an engagement framework
7. Use an engagement platform
8. Don’t forget the middle of your pyramid
9. Love your data
10. Constituents = friends

One highlight from Karen’s talk (in addition to her brilliant Star Trek reference) was her reminder to know what your audience values and would be willing to pay for, even if you currently provide it for free. This can be a helpful reminder in the world of online communications.  For example, if your donor newsletter is only getting a 3% open rate, it is probably not considered valuable by those on the receiving end and most likely needs a re-evaluation. Karen’s session provided an excellent foundation for the following sessions and some keen insights into ways to base engagement decisions on good data.

Making the Case for Going Open Data - Tobias Eigen, Kabissa

The next session was split into a leadership and technical track.  I attended Tobias’s talk about how Kabissa, a nonprofit network in Africa that connects people & organizations for peer-learning and information sharing, went open data. “Open data” is defined as data that “anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it -- subject only, at most, to the requirements to attribute and share-alike.. The benefits to nonprofits are three-fold and include:

• Increased transparency: Supporters often like to know what is going on inside an organization. Allowing access to one’s data helps increase access and build the common good.
• Improved data tools: Others will be able to take your data to places that don’t occur to you or that you can’t afford
• Added scrutiny - More feedback from more people leads to better and more useful data

Tobias also included these 4 steps to opening up data

1. Choose datasets
2. Apply an open license
3. Make data available
4. Make your data discoverable

Donor + Mission Management Data - Cat Monaghan, Idealist Consulting

Cat gave an excellent overview of the process that needs to occur when selecting and implementing a data management system. She also reminded us that there are options beyond just super fancy CRM database or 50 excel spreadsheets. Here were 4 examples she gave of other unified system options:

1. CRM with apps that pull data into the system: donations, volunteer signup, etc. CRM = brain, other systems equal limbs
2. CRM not connected to outside data -- data moved manually into CRM
3. CRM with integrations created for data exchange with other freestanding systems (donor management, accounting, etc.)
4. Dashboard tools connected to freestanding systems that consolidate data into an at-a-glance, visual format.

User Adoption: Building a Culture that embraces Technology - Nicholas Merriam, Building Changes

Nicholas used his experience helping his organization, Building Changes, implement Salesforce with the adoption challenge that many organizations face when trying something new. He reminded us that adoption can’t be thought of in a vacuum but needs to coordinate with all levels of strategy. Here are a few of Nicholas’ adoption philosophies:

• If you build it, they won’t necessarily come
• Consultants help, but they can’t do the internal work for you
• People support what they help create
• Technology is only as good as the process it supports
• Leadership matters, but so does everyone else

Overall, the day was jam-packed with useful information and a great chance to share the joys and tribulations of nonprofit data with peers from the field. Thanks to NTEN for sponsoring this event, John Kenyon for his skillful moderation and all the awesome presenters! Also, coming up tomorrow will be Elissa's recap of her favorite session of the day!

For your added enjoyment, here are some of our favorites from all the live-tweeting that happened during the day:

- Abby Nafziger

With my time at HandsOn Tech winding down -- only 8 days left -- our major projects have been wrapped up and classes for the year are over. I received a thank-you email from Tara Byrne, executive director at West Seattle Helpline, that she wanted me to share. Tara and Nadine from WSH participated in the Tech Assessment Cohort from April through June to learn more about their organization’s technology needs.

West Seattle Helpline is a social service agency that provides information, referrals, and one-time limited financial assistance to help working families in need. Through my tech assessment I learned that West Seattle Helpline has a common challenge experienced by nonprofits of similar size: organizational databases are varied and lack integration. Information is stored in various spreadsheets and databases, and, as a result, it can be difficult to find specific information easily. On the other hand, WSH has embraced social media as a part of its online communications. The nonprofit has a Facebook presence, and social media links are on the organization’s website. The website was recently updated and can be updated by staff.

During the course of the cohort program, Tara and Nadine attended our training workshops to learn more about social media and websites for nonprofits. They learned how to create a simple social media policy and an editorial calendar that encompasses all of WSH’s online communication channels and includes measurable goals and metrics tracking. They are excited to develop greater integration between the Facebook pages, websites, and newsletter would help build a stronger fan base and increase the visibility of West Seattle Helpline’s important work.

Tara had this to say about the Tech Assessment program:

"NPower's Hand's On Tech AmeriCorps team has been extremely beneficial to the West Seattle Helpline. With their guidance and expertise, we have been able to greatly upgrade our technology, creating systems that are more efficient and better serve our clients. Prior to this program we felt lost in regards to many of the opportunities out their to greatly improve our technology. Faced with limited resources ourselves, accessing insights and advice was limited.

This program has helped us answer those questions through workshops, face to face meetings, and over the phone conversations. The Hands On Tech team has helped us get the most out of resources such as Google Apps and Facebook. They have provided great insights on web design and databases.

The Hand's On Tech team created a Technical Assessment and Strategy Map that the West Seattle Helpline uses as a guide to work towards getting the most out of technology to assist the community. We no longer feel lost, but are excited about where this new technology will take us.  Thank you NPower's Hand On Tech AmeriCorps Team!"

Thanks for those kind words, Tara! Our team wishes you and West Seattle Helpline all the best.

- Elissa Thomas