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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!

It’s less than two weeks until this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference (of which Beaconfire is a sponsor). The organizers of the conference have set up several ways for attendees to connect with one another.

Attendees can:

• Add a Technorati Tag (as I am doing here) to their own blogs. Now, anyone looking up the tag "06NTC" on Technorati will see the aforementioned page listing all participant’s blogs.
• See who else is coming by looking at this Frapper map.
• Share favorite links by tagging them with "06NTC" on del.icio.us.
• Share photos by tagging them with "06NTC" on Flickr.

These examples are all free and should be adopted by any smart nonprofit interested in building community among its constituents.

06NTC

Recently, Beaconfire staff held a volunteer event for the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project.

The HCPP operates a play and recreatational program for children at Washington, DC’s largest emergency homeless shelter. Each week, volunteers arrive at the shelter with toys, sports equipment and snacks for the children.

At our event, we raised over $600 and created nearly 50 playkits for the volunteers to deliver to the children. Our kids contained toys, art supplies, snacks and bottled water.

We were spurred to action after reading this column by Courtland Milloy and talking with organization co-founder Jamila Larson.

Photos of the event.

Beaconfire is once again co-sponsoring NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference. This year, the keynote speaker is Guy Kawasaki, a well-known Silicon Valley innovator.

With plenty of time before the conference, Guy has helpfully blogged tips for conference presenters. Here is his advice on How to Kick Butt On a Panel, How to Get a Standing Ovation and How to Be a Demo God.

This week, Beaconfire co-sponsored N-TEN’s Washington DC Regional Conference, and as N-TEN’s former Executive Director, it was interesting to be there wearing a different hat (mainly because I got to spend the day in sessions and conversations, rather than worrying about whether everything was running smoothly.) A few take-aways:

• Good turnout–around 200 people, I was told. (We had something like 120 at the first DC Regional in 2003.) This despite a conference theme (”Data Integration”) sure to scare off any techno-phobes. Nice to see some large orgs there, too. (Giving Beaconfire a little pat on the back, we invited the folks from the American Federation of Teachers, Goodwill International and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.)
• Marty Kearns of Green Media Toolshed hasn’t lost his touch. Killer presenter with a great message about how the Internet is enabling collaborative grassroots campaigns. He has a concise list of the five elements that make this possible:
  • Strong Social Ties: People need to be bound together by something more than the campaign at hand. If they’re not, you need to create those conditions. Think fun. All work and no play makes campaigns boring and sucky.
  • Dense Network: People need to be active participants in a rich communications grid.
  • Common Story: People need to share in the narrative that runs through the campaign. This is more grassroots-y way of saying that everyone involved needs to have a set of talking points, an elevator pitch, that they can deliver without thinking. The difference, of course, is that they really mean it.
  • Shared Resources: People, computers, you name it. Forget traditional command-and-control structures. Think distributed networks. Think swarms of pajamahadeen.
  • Clarity of Purpose: KISS.