Musings from our ED - The birth of NPower NW

Are you digging our new logo? Have you explored our new website? We can hardly contain our
excitement over the launch of our new identity as NPower Northwest with service in Washington and Oregon, and are thrilled to be able to debut this revamped monthly publication for nonprofit organizations. Over the last year we’ve been hard at work putting our strategic plan in motion and with the launch of our website we’ve taken another step toward our aspiration of creating a high-performing nonprofit community.

Not only have we been working hard to expand our service area and make ourselves look fancy, but we've remained focused on serving our clients. Over the last year, we’ve helped over 300 nonprofit organizations work toward meeting their missions by: building databases to track donors, volunteers and clients; maintaining their PCs and firewalls; revolutionizing online communications with updated websites and social media strategy; and helping their senior leaders align their strategic plans with their technology strategy. And this is just our starting point.

We’ve also stretched ourselves by hosting our first ever Discovery Blitz. We put our belief in innovation and creativity as a catalyst for community change into action. Our teams worked on a variety of projects: creating a cloud readiness assessment with an ROI calculator; developing a plan for expanding our services to include business continuity planning; and creating an integrated mapping function on a Plone website using data pulled from a Salesforce database and Google Maps. It was an amazing couple of days that showed the potential of our team to find creative solutions for unmet sector needs, and was a great opportunity for us to collaborate across internal teams.

We're happy to report a groundswell of support for our work. We're thankful for the investment from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation to create a technology theory of change that will help our nonprofit clients make the case for technology investment. Our partnership with Microsoft will provide important financial investment in our infrastructure. They'll also join us in thought leadership to develop tools like the Dynamics CRM Nonprofit Accelerator and the Silverlight Story Wall. We’ve also assembled a team of CIO’s and nonprofit tech leaders to help us develop a set of nonprofit IT best practices so every nonprofit in the community has a road map for strategic technology investment.

We’re inspired and encouraged by your mission, and we know it’s a good time to be involved in technology and nonprofits. The tech space is undergoing another transformation, making technology an increasingly accessible and integral part of our daily lives. As I look around and see budget cuts coming from the Federal and State levels, I hold onto the belief that the answer to solving our most pressing community issues is NOT going to be found in dollars, but in opportunities for us to create a different way of doing our work. I know many of you have squeezed out every bit of efficiency from your teams, so this isn’t about doing more with less (that’s so 2007) but, rather, it’s about creatively aligning our resources with new ways of delivering our work. Technology can and must play a pivotal role in this work. NPower Northwest stands ready to lead this charge.

Thank you for doing your part to make this community vibrant and healthy. Together, I know we’ll do even more great things.

- Alison Carl White