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If you’re involved in marketing, fundraising, advocacy, or communications with nonprofits, be sure to attend the American Marketing Association’s annual Nonprofit Conference. This year it’s in Washington, DC July 9-11th. I may be partial, given that I’m on the Conference Committee, but we’ve got a great line up of speakers and topics. Our own Michael Cervino and Eric Eckl have put together two great sessions:

• Viral Campaigning Through the Ages with Julie Witsken, Sr. Manager Engagement Marketing at AARP and Steve Daigneault, Director of Internet Communications at Amnesty International.
• Web 2.0 Beyond the Buzz with Dave Patterson, Director of New Media at Heifer International, and Josh Peck, Internet Director at The One Campaign

In addition, you’ll find speakers from Network for Good, The Nature Conservancy, MercyCorps, Teach for America, Red Cross, America’s Second Harvest, American Heart Association, and more!

Check out the AMA Nonprofit Conference agenda at www.marketingpower.com/nonprofit.

New Organizing Institute is conducting jam-packed three day training for non profits on online organizing and technology. The training is at the American Institute of Architects building. I am doing a session there this afternoon (shortly, actually :)) on data integration.

So, I walk in, register, and am told that the session is at the Bethune room. As I put my laptop bag down I realize that I am in the room that commemorates a historical moment. The conference room is named after Louise Bethune. If you are wondering, as I did, who Louise Bethune was, here is a short timeline of her life.

Louise Bethune FAIA

• 1881 Announced the opening of her office at the Convention of the Womenâ??s Congress, Buffalo, New York
• 1885 First woman admitted into the Western Association of Architects
• 1888 First woman admitted into the American Institute of Architects
• 1889 First woman fellow of the American Institute of Architects

This situation is rife with symbolism for me since today also happens to be International Womenâ??s Day. How cool is it to be doing a technology session in a room dedicated to Louise Bethune? So, I decide to blog about this and look for her on Wikipedia so I can link. But I find no references there. An inspiring but at the same time slightly disheartening symbolism alright. Thankfully Wikipedia had something on International Women’s Day.

With that note, here are some women in technology links for your reading pleasure on this International Womenâ??s Day:

• Louise Blanchard Bethune: Buffalo Feminist and America’s First Woman Architect (Buffalo Freenet)
• A Short History of Women in Technology (Linux Journal)
• Powering the Electrical Revolution (IEEE Virtual Museum on Women and Technology)
• From plugboards to petaflops: The evolving role of women at IBM (IBM Women in technology archive)

I salute the many, many women who blazed the trail for all of us to travel on. Happy International Womenâ??s Day everyone.

The countdown begins - one more month ’til NTC. If you haven’t already, sign up for this fabulous conference at www.nten.org/ntc. This year close to 1,000 folks from all corners of the nonprofit/technology space will gather to network, learn and share experiences. You’ll meet nonprofit staffers from CIO’s to IT Directors to Webmasters, developers, program staff, fundraisers, advocacy professionals, and more. Circuit riders, consultants and software providers round out a very vibrant mix. The sessions will cover all things tech in the nonprofit space including leadership, specific technologies, communications & marketing, integration, the list just goes on. I guarantee you’ll be spoiled for choice. This is probably the 4th or 5th year Beaconfire has attended and every year our commitment to NTEN and the conference grows — we truly value the programs and conference. This year it’s on our home turf, so expect to see quite a few Beaconfire staffers there. I’ll certainly be there from beginning to end — and not just because I’m the Board Chair of NTEN — because it’s the best opportunity I have all year to meet colleagues in the field in-person and learn about all the great work going on. Sign up today — you’re crazy not to!

Another great NetSquared Net Tuesday meetup onâ?¦Tuesday this time. Side story: Too many people, including me, wondered about Net Tuesday being on a Wednesday. After an informal survey, the organizers decided to move it to Tuesday, saving themselves quite a few questions in the process.

Katya Andersen (VP of Marketing at Network for Good & author of Robin Hood Marketing) presented on www.sixdegrees.org, a social networking site with a celebrity twist. The celebrity involved is Kevin Bacon who is somehow or the other connected to this six degrees of separation concept. My ignorance of most of the American pop culture or sports references put me at a disadvantage there, but I am guessing the above sentence makes sense to all of you.

Kevin Bacon approached Network for Good wanting to do something with the sixdegrees.org URL that he had reserved. They decided to create a site where users can sign up to create web badges or widgets to fundraise for their causes from their social network. sixdegrees.org will also create “celebrity badges” where celebrities can fundraise for their favorite causes.

The original idea was that people will give in droves to their favorite celebrity’s badge. Katya mentioned that the week their site launched, a Cone study came out with a survey result that said that only 15% of those surveyed said they would give because a celebrity asked them to. In contrast, a whopping 76% said that they were influenced by friends and family. This did not bode well for their site, but they are working their way through.

They went live in January 2007. In 4 week about 3,000 people created badges. Of these, only 12% have at least one donation and this smaller sub group had raised a total of $150,000 in that time frame. They are currently having a contest of sorts where Kevin Bacon is going to donate $10,000 dollars each to the cause of five of the largest social networkers (I know, MS Word already told me that there is no such word. But it sounds so appropriate!). This being defined as the badge creators who get the most number of donations before March 31. (The donor with the most number of donations is Ali E with 200 donors giving a total of $6,105. Kevin Bacon’s badge has 10 donors who gave $50,260.)

Lessons Learned:

• A promotion they did with AOL that involved users creating their own AIM pages (similar to MySpace pages) was not very successful. They sent out an email message to 16 million users with almost no noticeable response from them. (Raise your hand if you knew about AIM pages.)
• Their technical execution was not as good as it could have been because of time constraints. The entire site is Flash-based and the widget was hard to create for some users. The badge did not work across all external social networking sites. It still does not work on WordPress or MySpace.
• And finally, this application does not tell the user who gave to their badge. They made this decision because they were concerned about the privacy of the donors. (Aside - I thought this was a really bad decision. I ask my friends to give to my badge and have no way of checking or acknowledging those who responded? Hello??)

They are working on fixing this and a few other technical issues in their next release. Like every other Web 2.0 application world, this is still a “learn as you go” experiment in its early stages. However, Katya seems to understand the new donor-powered world better than anyone. So, expect to hear more about www.sixdegrees.org.

For the latest IA Podcast, Jeff Parks and I talked about Beaconfire’s participation in World Usability Day on November 14. Specifically, we discussed the challenges non-profit organizations have in creating user friendly Web sites. We discussed brand, navigation, screen allocation, and calls to action.

• Listen to the podcast or subscribe through iTunes
• Download the World Usability Day Event Post-event Notes document (PDF - 718 KB)

As many of you know, Beaconfire participated in World Usability Day on Nov 14. Our event — Usability Make-over for Nonprofits — saw nineteen nonprofit organizations and some professional information architects. The discussion entailed issues that many nonprofits need to think through when re-designing their Web sites, including the use of brand space, call to action strategy, navigation, and labeling.

We’ve drafted a post-event document available for download here — World Usability Day Post-event Notes (PDF - 718 KB).

Tim Arnold and I, the presenters, are happy to answer any questions you may have:

• Olga Howard — olga.howard [at] beaconfire.com
• Tim Arnold — tim.arnold [at] beaconfire.com

Stay tuned for an upcoming podcast!

It’s time to review the bright spots of last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle.

1. The future of email delivery:  This featured a round table discussion on the new Goodmail program, which — to somewhat oversimplify the controversy somewhat — has been denounced by EFF and others as an "email tax" on political speech. AOL and the Red Cross are experimenting with the service, which aims to combat spamming and phishing by adding a "certified" icon to emails and guaranteeing delivery for those senders willing to pay a tithe on each message. Representatives from Goodmail, AOL, EFF, FreePress, GetActive, and the Red Cross made for a heated and engaging discussion. Video and audio of the session is now available on the NTC conference site.

2. Conference SMS Messages: The conference organizers sent text updates during the conference  including secret instructions on where to report for a free drink coupon. My collegue Jeff Herron commented, "I can see how that can be a powerful way to touch constituents, but seems like the circumstances would be limited to times when constituents are able to immediately take some action. Seems like it would be great during a march or protest." I’m fairly certain that Jeff is talking about the immediate reach aspect of text messaging, not the free drink coupon!

3. Mobile Fundraising: Mobile Accord demonstrated its mGive product through which nonprofits can enable people can give small donations via text messaging. In this model, a mobile phone user can consent, via SMS, to a donation of up to $10 to be added to their phone bill. The model here is Bono beseaching thousands of concert attendees to text a donation from the arena floor. Good: It’s a promising new tactic for recruiting new young donors. Bad: Phone companies currently suck out 50 cents of every dollar raised.

4. Managing technology projects: Alan Gunn, Sean Dewitt and Jeremy Wallace took a dry topic and created an engaging fun and collaborative session. They had the audience shout out project management tips, issues, and tools while live blogging them in a Basecamp topic list. A  neat discussion. Well, perhaps you had to be there.

5. Guy Kawasaki: His plenary session on innovation was the bomb. Read the notes.

Next year’s conference is in our hometown of Washington, DC. Look forward to seeing everyone there!

My Birds of a Feather (BoF) session was a success!

IA Summit BoF sessions are created for attendees who need one on one support or conversations with others interested in the same IA process or subject of discussion — BoF sessions are small and are led by Experience Design professionals.

This year Beaconfire led a session — Connecting Content Inventories to Site Architecture and Content Strategy. We had a great session!

Cheers to all.

Guy Kawasaki, gave the opening Plenary at the 2006 Nonprofit Technology Conference yesterday. It was titled, ""The
Art of Innovation." Guy’s
speech was inspiring and funny. More notes are in the second part of this post.

Technorati tag: ntc06

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Six of us BF-ers — Jeff Herron, Kristina Kohler, Andrew Cohen, Lynn Labieniec, Usha Venkatachallam, and Michael Cervino — are off to the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle today. Beaconfire is sponsoring a contest where if you find all six of us and
give us each your business card, we’ll enter you in a drawing for a
free iPod. If you’re attending, we hope to see you there!