There's an interesting discussion going on at the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN for short) email list. In fact, for the past week, they've been talking about money, salaries, getting paid what you're worth vs. getting paid what you need to do what you believe in.

Today, someone asked whether it is better for a technology consultant to be for-profit or non-profit when serving the technology needs of nonprofits. There are a few organizations that manage to be nonprofit-- NetCorps and NPower and TechSoup come to mind. But I spent three years as a nonprofit technology consultant internationally, and now I work for a nonprofit, so I've got a certain insider's perspective on the topic.

I went to Nepal as a student of technology (having gone back to university at 55 after a career as a nonfiction writer) and came back all enthused about starting my own nonprofit to do digital divide work both there and here in the states. I thought all I needed to do was find a grant writer, get a few grants under our belts and we'd be off and running, able to do what we loved and believed in.

My old friend Gilda, an international development veteran and social worker, took me on as a management client, endeavoring to teach me just what I'd gotten myself into. In the years that followed, I have come to understand much more cogently what Robert Weiner calls "managing a board and doing fundraising."

Becoming a nonprofit isn't simply (as I thought) a question of having a noble purpose to serve the public good and then simply filling out a bunch of bureaucratic paperwork before you start to do the work you believe will save the world. It means finding a group of other people who not only believe in YOU and what you want to do, but are willing to spend hours and hours working on YOUR project, giving their money to the project, and asking their friends to give money to the project. You need to find people who HAVE money, who have professional skills you need (a lawyer, an accountant, somebody who can write grants) or who know people who know people. This part of the job is deeply social because you aren't just forging friendships or adding people to a "social network," you're asking them to believe in you and what you're doing enough to dedicate their time, treasure and talent (as they say at the Duke Nonprofit Management school) to YOU.

You can assemble a bunch of seven or ten friends who love you for this job for a little while. But to find the money to support your work takes people with a level of expertise AND a level of social class that you might not generally hang out with.

Which brings us to the topic of fundraising. Robert is right that you've got about five years, once the government gives you the provisional nonprofit status, to bring in a third of your money from somebody besides yourself. What I learned about this is that you aren't just going about the work you love and believe in, you are also speaking to groups, speaking to small gatherings, holding events, getting together a mailing list of supporters, and asking, asking, asking for money. I've watched the executive director of the tiny grassroots nonprofit where I'm a VISTA volunteer work a social gathering, work every social gathering he attends, mesmerize a group of wealthy ladies at their very upscale luncheon at the Country Coub. He's a salesman par excellence, and somebody has got to do this job on your staff and it better be the executive director.

Where does that leave you, the person with the original vision? In the nonprofit management field, they call it the "founders" problem. People start a nonprofit, gather a board, get into fundraising-- and then the work they wanted to do, the tinkering with computers or information systems or even feeding the poor, is either being done by someone else (so you can be the executive director with all THOSE responsibilities), or you, laboring down in the grassroots, have some sort of boss (galling!) over you whose vision might deviate from what you originally had in mind.

Just over a year ago, in despair over the problem of finding funding for Worlds Touch, the international tech consulting organization I'd created, I went to see Gary, my business mentor, a guy who has spent years on the board of his local Boys and Girls Club and also founded a bank. "Turn for-profit," was his advice. At least then, when you are selling yourself, you're selling a specific product: a new web site or database or system to a specific organization. And if you get a contract, at least you are spending your time on the work you love, messing around with information systems and computers.

I balked. Not because I wanted to do the work I'd finally realized was the executive director's job (recruiting and working with a board, raising money from locals so that you can show a foundation you have individuals' support, raising money from foundations and corporations, being the public face and spokesman of the organization). The discussion with Gary clarified my own vision: I want to DO digital divide work, not promote it. But I want to do it in the nonprofit sphere, with the nonprofit ethos above, below and around what I do. I just couldn't turn my organization into a for-profit outfit, even if all it meant was that I was the only one making whatever meager earnings I could find.

My interim solution is to work for Volunteers in Service to America [Americorps-VISTA], making the money to take myself overseas to my clients and prospective clients in India and Nepal. None of THEM have money to pay me, so I work for room and board. It would be nice if THEIR foreign funders saw the value of what I am doing for them, but frankly at this point, I don't care. I have negotiated a deal with VISTA to take two months between assignments to go overseas, something I'd be hard-pressed to get from anybody else, for-profit or non-. When the VISTA job runs out in a couple of years, I'll have a toolkit of skills and experience, a much more extensive track record, and we'll see.

The only way I can do the VISTA job, by the way, is to have a spouse with an income, a luxury not available to most guys.

Tags: nptech

I got a rude email at the end of the day and I've been framing my response. The City of High Point's Department of Housing and Community Development (better known as Weed and Seed) is responsible for the computers in my lab. When I arrived in May, there were three old clunkers, leftovers from Weed and Seed's own much more up-to-date computer lab, and three newish computers. The old ones were running Windows 2000 while the new ones ran XP. Those are Microsoft operating systems, for my dear Luddite friends.

In August of this year, I began to hear talk that we would be getting NEW computers to replace the clunkers. They arrived yesterday. This lag time is typical of Weed and Seed, which I have come to understand is inept, inefficient, and often just plain stupid. Despite lots of cage rattling all fall, we learned about three weeks ago that the computers had NOT been ordered after all. This was already after months of "getting the specs," and "getting IT department approval." Months.

Shortly after I arrived, I bought three copies of XP to put on the old machines, so that my students would all be working with the same screen, so that all the teachers would have the comfort of teaching the same basic interface. So that, in effect, everyone would have the same book. The XP was too big for the machines, I realized later, and so they ran slowly and sluggishly. I had SO looked forward to the new machines.

Which came with Vista installed. Vista. Shit. Every single techie I know in the whole wide world HATES Vista. Many of the techies I don't know hate Vista. I know because they write about this hatred on several of the techie support lists I receive every day. The Weed and Seed people did not consult me about what sort of machine I might want. Did not remember my foray into XP on the older machines.

"Can you put XP on them?" I asked the city IT department. They could, but it would have to be tomorrow, since the XP I had was something like 32 bit and they needed 64. Or something.

Then the Weed and Seed guy took off with the three old computers. Which because they were purchased with grant money, will have to sit in a warehouse for probably close to a year, and then, when they are thoroughly obsolete, be auctioned off. No way to refurbish them and give them to any number of deserving poor people. Oh, no. That would be logical.

Then when our drug dealer custodian sat down to work on his PowerPoint tutorial, he realized too late that it matters which machine you're sitting at and that just because you save your work, it doesn't get saved to the World, only to the computer you're sitting at. So we called the city employee who had hauled the computers off and asked him to bring them back so we could get Jahmare's saved documents off them. I hadn't realized his work was cumulative and that he'd need his old saved documents. When I suggested he re-do them, he was vehement. He was on Lesson 13! He NEEDED his documents. So City Guy came back and then whined to his boss, because I got a rude email about a half an hour later.

Not only did I waste her employee's time (uh, hadn't he been wasting it himself for MONTHS?), but I had the audacity to want something less than the very best and newest technology available. Really, I wish I had a sugar daddy who would swoop in and replace every one of the city's blankety-blank machines with nice, serviceable, XP-running, big, fast but not lightning-footed boxes. Actually, if I had my real druthers, we would be learning Linux, we would all be on open source and thumbing our noses at The Corporation and the way it has handed us this unwieldy but beautiful Vista system.

Oh, the pulls in so many directions! If I truly believed in truth and justice and fighting the good fight, we would be an Open Source shop. That is the truly ethical position today, but the sad fact is that I don't know squat about it, except I spent a semester with it in the High Point University computer lab with a cheat-sheet continually at my side and breathed a sigh of relief when I crossed campus to the Microsoft world of the business school.

Still, we need to get free of the people who order twenty boxes of pizza without consulting me, and bring over an operating system that none of my teachers understands. God, please send me funding. Ha!

Tags: nptech

The Rotary presentation was a smash hit! I was thrilled, when I arrived yesterday, to see that I'd been slated to speak to EVERYBODY in the plenary session. Gimme a whole roomful of folks! ( Read more... )

Tags: blogging, nptech, rotary

Where oh where did the time go this morning? Oh yes...I had a lovely conversation on Skype with my friend James in England. It's a magical world, I must say. He went off to lunch on sausage rolls and it's twenty minutes later. But I've been missing my conversations with him.

I met James and Netta on my trip across the Atlantic Ocean on a sailboat. If you zip off to the flickr account you can reach by clicking on any of yesterday's photos, you will find there is a photo album from that trip. I did a paper journal, of course, but would never have risked taking a computer. Maybe I would today, though. The owner of the boat had one with some kind of satellite connection which he used to get weather reports or something.

Anyhow, James and Netta were tied up beside us in Bermuda. I had a dream in which I asked James what he did for a living, calling across the bows of our boats, and in the dream he said, "I'm a shrink." So the next morning, I repeated the dream, and James said, "I'm in computers."

That was the last gasp of my writing career, that sailboat trip. I actually placed four stories about it in various magazines, but the total money earned was something like a thousand dollars all told, and you can't make a career out of one thousand dollar trip a year. And, as I've said before, it was the rejection that I just couldn't take, finally. I never acquired the thick skin you need to keep going and going in the face of people who don't even bother to answer your query letters along with those who simply slip a form: "Thank you for your submission but we regret to tell you that it doesn't meet our requirements at this time. Good luck in placing it elsewhere." Blah blah blah.

Jame and Netta saved me from a worsening situation on the boat. The two alpha males on it-- one the owner and the other the skipper whom I'd met several years before on a perfectly pleasant sailboat trip with a bunch of teenage girls from the boarding school where I was teaching--- the two males were at each other's throats and taking their animosity out on a poor hapless mate who was leaving the boat in the Azores. I took one look at the situation and you don't have to be a novelist to see that I was going to be the next scapegoat for the two of them. Already there had been skirmishes...

So when James and Netta hailed me from their deck in the marina in the Azores, I fairly leapt into their arms. We agreed to hang out for the next week or so while I waved solemnly to the two departing papa bears, and I took an airplane home from there.

Then the next year, I decided to go back to college when Raf went to college. And decided, rather than do the dabbler faculty wife thing of sampling various departments to "broaden my outlook," I would concentrate in the field of Computer Information Systems. I wrote to James, the guy "in computers," to ask if there would be work for me if I took the courses being offered by JF's university and he said yes. So I plunged in.

The plan of a ten-year job to build up a retirement bank account so that JF could retire relatively early didn't work out. For one thing, the bottom fell out of the Entry Level computer geek boom. As I was finishing my coursework, the salaries were much lower for entry level people and almost all of the ads were for people with 3-5 years' experience. But that wasn't really why I didn't cherry-pick some plum of a job. Essentially, JF proclaimed that he didn't believe in retirement accounts, that we would never see our money if I put it in there, and he planned to use any added income to put a deck on the back of the house and oh, by the way, a pickup truck would be really nice. He was seeing a Great Leap Forward in standard of living. I was not prepared to work for The Corporation for a higher standard of living. My standard of living is just fine, thank you very much. What do I need with a frigging pickup truck and back deck? Working for The Corporation, I wasn't going to have much time to enjoy these vast improvements.

And I went on a job interview. Furniture company with outsourced manufacture in China. Their IT department does inventory and invoicing systems, stuff like that. They were paying $25,000 a year and were so far away from my house, I'd need a new car. Naaaahhhh. Not for a back deck and a pickup truck.

So I emailed a lady I knew in Nepal who runs a nonprofit and wondered if she might have something I could do for her. She emailed back that I should just come to Nepal and we could talk about it. It took me a couple more years to get the money together to make that trip, but when I did, I knew I'd found my calling, Nonprofit Technology. I didn't know then that there is a cool and fairly extensive community of folks like me, that social activism is really alive and well and not at all moribund since the heady days of the 60s.

Of course, I've learned that being "in computers" is a much much bigger job than I had ever realized, and that the more I learn, the more I need to learn. That's the nature of this beast. But what better job can a Lifelong Learner have?

Tags: career, james, nptech

I came to West End Ministries with a job description that included three basic projects: A newsletter, a mailing to potential donors, and a web site update and maintenance.

I've written about the newsletter, so today I'll talk about the database. The web site is the poor neglected step-child I'm hoping to rescue one of these days. But maybe in the NEXT six months of working here!

When I arrived, there was no West End Ministries mailing list. ( But now...? Click here to read the whole story. )

Tags: database, nptech, organizer's database, west end ministries

Before it was an operating system, VISTA was a domestic anti-poverty program. It was started by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson, as many may have forgotten in the storm of criticism of Johnson about the Vietnam War, was a fervent advocate of the War on Poverty. He had a whole slew of domestic programs he wanted to get passed, and so gave in to the hawks about the Vietnam war in order to get his domestic agenda through Congress.

Also, I think he thought that if John F. Kennedy's legacy was going to be the Peace Corps, which sent American young people overseas to work at the level of the locals instead of living in luxury like the diplomatic corps, then Johnson's would be the VISTA program.

A VISTA assignment is a three-year deal, though each volunteer can work one, two or the full three, depending on how they work out. I am employed through the Corporation for National Service (also known as "The Corporation" which causes me to snicker every time) and I get paid a grand total of $398.17 every two weeks. This is 105% of the current poverty level for my part of the world. Scary to think there are people actually living on this princely sum.

Even scarier to realize that the women downstairs in our homeless shelter live on considerably less.

The original VISTA program sent volunteers into poor communities more or less on their own, to start programs, to work in them, to do everything. They ran day care centers, started voter registration projects, everything. Nowadays, with the influence of a more conservative string of presidents, we are charged with what they call "capacity building," which is a big buzzword in international community development too. What it means is that we're here to help the organizations we serve grow and become more effective.

We are only here for three years at the maximum, so there is a sense of urgency about building something that is going to hang around after we leave. No empires or private turfs...we have to get our orgs up to speed as best we can. We are responsible for leaving:

Products: fliers, web sites, databases, newsletter templates, accounting systems, communications systems, policies and procedures manuals

Resources: fund raising programs, grants written, etc.

Relationships: networks of community leaders and movers-and-shakers that we can put together and pass on to our organizations.

As techie for West End Ministries, I have a computer lab with five student computers. I'm starting computer classes in two weeks. I've recruited teachers, volunteer coaches for the classes and I'm beating all bushes for someone who can run this training program. I've got a communications and marketing intern (and every time she goes out to a job interview, I have to hold my breath and pray) who does fliers, posters and enters data into our growing database.

I'm putting on a fund raiser at the end of September. I'm actively recruiting volunteers from the local colleges. And I'm working on a promotion video and the web site. Well, the web site has been sorely neglected lately, mainly because most of our constituency is on the OTHER side of the digital divide.

Here's the link for more information about the VISTA program:
http://www.americorps.org/about/programs/vista.asp

Tags: ctc, nptech, vista, west end ministries

Because one of my tasks at West End Ministries is to create a computer center, public access to the internet and computer courses, I'm spending some time every week visiting people who have successful programs.

Last week, I went to see SeniorNet's director. They do programming for seniors using a company that provides a bunch of perks in return for far too much money. They get the curriculum, the software, and a raft of newsletters, web site space and whatnot. Jean, the director, told me that we probably shouldn't get involved with them. Too expensive for our budget, which at this point is pretty slim.

I learned a lot from her, though, in structuring classes, in having coaches along with classroom teachers, and in wanting to have a plan rather than just a bunch of classes.

Today, I went to see the executive director of WinstonNet, a dynamic woman who oversees a kind of vast county-wide system of many many community technology centers. While Jean at SeniorNet talked to me about the importance of volunteers, Linda at WinstonNet talked about the importance of partners. Find organizations in the community that can supply you with volunteers. Find orgs that can do things you want to get done and then go form partnerships with them.

She also told me that the big bucks for grants can be found when you have the influential people of the city behind you. Get letters of support from the mayor, the city council, the county commissioners. She likes my idea of using the center as a job training center for computer skills, and was interested in the concept of eRiding. Well, so are we. My friend James in England will point out that eRiders aren't really any different from consultants, but the folks who still call themselves eRiders (they are mostly in England, if I'm observing correctly) would disagree.

An eRider is someone who works as a capacity builder for nonprofits in either one geographic area or one nonprofit field, like human services agencies or environmental activists or something like that. The eRider is more concerned with technology planning and helping orgs see what the real return on their investment is with technology, but is also able to move the organization along towards tech maturity. The consultant mainly fixes a problem while the eRider is concerned with the overall approach to technology and the trajectory from startup to maturity.

One of my dreams is to have a functioning eRider business both here in the states and abroad. It is truly a digital divide changemaking job. I'd like to see West End Ministries have a service for the community nonprofits that would bring in support for the organization. I'd like to train local folks to become workers in the eRiding business, thereby furnishing them with employment and helping the whole nonprofit sector in High Point.

Linda at WinstonNet has the same idea, only she's sitting on the kind of organization that can really DO that job. They have a consortium of everybody in town, all working on bridging the digital divide. They are about to install city/county-wide community wireless. Sigh. Maybe I need to go live over there.

Tags: ctc, nptech, vista

http://nchomeless.org/joomla/index.php

I'm personally interested in this topic...the nation's homeless people, and in particular, the women who make their way to the shelter that is housed in the basement of the community center where I am now working.

West End Ministries is supposed to be a part of this system, but seriously, if anyone ever uses this, I'll eat several hats, including a particularly indigestible one I found at the thrift store the other day.

1. No clue what the purpose and function of the system is supposed to be.

2. Try finding something. Three navigation links later, you're still looking at a link, not the article or info you thought you were getting to, finally.

3. No pages, exactly. This is a whole bunch of documents that have been linked to rather than incorporated into a web site.

I think it's a case of, somebody's cousin got the contract to design the database back end of this system. Maybe the database isn't all that bad. I can't get back there to look at it. But the user interface really and truly sucks. Can you imagine how much federal MONEY went to that brain-dead individual? It blows my mind.

Tags: boo hiss, homelessness, nonprofit tech, nptech, ugliness

http://www.dogooder.tv/Contest_result.aspx

The winner of the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network's video contest. Brought tears to my eyes even on the third viewing.

We can talk about some of my reservations about the message later. First check out the incredibly powerful presentation.

Tags: media, nptech, video

What follows is my own personal experience at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, the biggie conference for people in my field. ( ...which, hey, is just the coolest stuff on the planet right now. Though SOME people might not think so, amazing as that may be! )

Tags: 07ntc, dc, nptech