It’s t-minus 8 weeks until the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC). This is one of the highlight events of the year for me.  Over a thousand folks from all over the world gather to share knowledge, break bread, and learn about what’s new in the intersection of nonprofits and technology.  Never a dull moment… This year NTC is in San Francisco (April 26-28). You can learn more on N-TEN’s Web site.

NTEN is raising money to fund up to 57 scholarships to this year’s conference. We’re less than $2,000 from our $10,000 goal — but the campaign ends tomorrow…

Make a donation today and help send someone to NTC 2009!

Just last month the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA) launched another Web site with Beaconfire’s help on Ektron – this one for their London Conference http://iahsa.net/LONDON/index.aspx. Last September, AAHSA launched its handsome new website, aahsa.org, powered by the Ektron content management system (CMS). The main site was designed by Portent Interactive which Beaconfire then implemented in Ektron.

AAHSA invested in replacing their static website with a CMS system to get the IT department out of the content creation process, reduce turn-around time in publishing content to the Web, and help enforce page layout and style. In addition to implementing the design templates, we migrated a number of custom .NET applications into the system, on time for AAHSA’s annual meeting held last year in Philadelphia, PA. So far, AAHSA has successfully migrated two affiliate sites into Ektron, thereby taking advantage of the same template structure and workflows and helping them to enforce organization-wide business processes for content management.

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Here at Beaconfire we tend to pride ourselves on our process. While our approach is highly effective and fairly well defined, there are still gray areas with which we sometimes struggle. Take for instance, our approach to workshops. When we set up workshops, we strive to include a group of stakeholders that represent those portions of the client’s organization whose work will be impacted by the project, key decision makers, those individuals whose buy-in is critical to making the project a success, and sometimes critical third-parties such as audience members or other vendors.

While this collaborative and consensus-building approach is highly effective in the world of not-for-profits in which we work, it can lead to significant delays and complications. There is an inherent conflict between consensus and efficiency. One of the gray areas around our process is deciding with the client core team who to should be included in our various workshops. As much as I would like to say that we have refined this into a science, I cannot. It is an art that we have not been able to formalize.

Determining the proper balance between including all key parties in these collaborative early meetings and keeping a project on time and on budget is tricky. To make this call, we rely on the client core team’s knowledge of how their organization works and them being candid about it. We then work with the client core team to use our best judgment based on past experience to figure out who to invite. Including too many parties can lead to one morass after another as consensus becomes exponentially more difficult with each person added. Omitting key individuals invariably leads to issues farther down the road. Thankfully, as long as the client core team is frank, we can generally find that correct balance, or adapt and evolve the process as soon as it becomes clear that the current mix of stakeholders is not working.

As much as we appreciate process, we have learned that flexibility and adaptability are the best tools to make our process work for each individual project and client.

Copyright, according to the US government is:

a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:

• To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
• To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
• To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
• To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
• To display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and

And it is automatically secured as soon as the work is created in a “fixed form,” whether or not the author formally registers.

Understandably, many people find this a little…confining.

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Does your site scream out, “I haven’t changed my image since 1995!” Or maybe, your pages are plagued by lengthy copy that just keeps going and going… Perhaps your web presence just doesn’t really reflect all the great work your organization does.

If you happen to be in Portland, Oregon next Tuesday night, Feb 24th, and have a website in need of some TLC, come to the NTEN 501Tech Club and Net Squared MeetUp to problem-solve cures for the “common” website. Yours truly, Beaconfire Creative Director Eve Simon, will be leading the discussion. See you there!

Accessibility is always in the front of our minds when we embark on a Web project. But as we start to consider our features, accessibility starts to slip by the way side. “As long as a screen reader can read it, we’ll be fine, right?” Not really.

Disability does not equal blind. “Works in a screen reader” does not equal “accessible,” even for users of screen readers. Designing for a screen reader will help you hit many accessibility points, but you won’t hit them all.

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BF Wire blogger and senior consultant Elizabeth Weaver Engel (aka me) will be heading to ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference in Miami later this month to present with Jason Della Rocca in the Social Media Lab on Wikis:  Collaborative Content at Your Fingertips.

Benefits of coming:

• Miami in February?  Sweet!
• General session speaker Dan Roam speaking on creative problem solving.
• Learning everything you ever wanted to know about wikis and other social media technologies.
• General session speaker Patti Digh speaking on living and working mindfully.
• Hanging with some really smart association types.
• The YAP party.  The parties at ASAE’s annual meeting 2008 and at Tech 2009 were legenedary.  You don’t want to miss another.

It’s not too late to register, and I hope to see you in the Social Media Lab on Sunday, February 22 at 10:45 am for wiki awesomeness.

Another ASAE Technology Conference is in the books.  Last year, the subtitle could have been:  “Social Media.  Huhn.  Good God.  What is it good for?  We have NO idea (but we’d like to find out)!”  This year, SocMed was still the hot topic, but this time around, it was much less about, “What’s this Facebook thing I’m hearing about?” and more about, “Here’s a great case study in how our association is using Facebook to recruit students and young professionals.”

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There is ever growing interest in ways for organizations to aggregate news based on the input of multiple people, then select and push that news feed through their site. The good news is, there are some very slick methods for doing just this. As an example, Jeff C. on ProgressiveExchange, posted what he needed to which I responded and am cross-posting here.