Monthly Archives: May 2011

accessibility training May 17-19, 2011 in Austin

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John Slatin AccessU, a web accessibility training institute by Knowbility.org, is next week. AccessU “allows attendees to engage with world renowned accessibility experts to improve design skills and to understand both the need and the techniques for inclusive IT design. From the basics to the bleeding edge, AccessU will provide the resources you need.”

John Slatin AccessU
May 17 – 19, 2011
St. Edward’s University
3001 South Congress Avenue
Austin, Texa

Courses include:
Introduction to Accessible CSS
Advanced CSS for Accessibility
Social Media with Accessibility in Mind
Web Accessibility from the UX/Usability Perspective
Establishing a Corporate Accessibility Initiative: A Case Study
Planning a Usability Test with Disabled Users
Video Captioning
HTML5 and Accessibility
iPhone/iPad Web and App Accessibility
PDF Accessibility: Seeing the Forest Through the Tag Trees
Accessible WordPress Theme Development
Web Access: Legal Update
DreamWeaver Accessibility
Rebirth of Slick: Why Design Is Cool and Why It Will Make People Love Your Company
Accessible Office 2007
Everything You Know about JavaScript and Accessibility is Wrong
Success in an Accessible E-Learning Environment

 

Complete list of courses and presenters, and all info, here.

Is your organization a buzz kill?

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Is your organization a buzz kill to new ideas? Does your organization cry “It’s against our policies/It’s not in our policies!” when an employee member or volunteer suggests an activity – and the response isn’t because what’s proposed isn’t good idea, but because somone at the organization is afraid of… well, something?

Stephen Colbert has been trying to start a political action committee (PAC). At first, his parent company, Viacom, said it was illegal. So Colbert consulted with a lawyer and came up with a way to make creating a PAC legal. But the parent company for his show, The Colbert Report, still said no, sent Colbert a letter explaining why, and asking him not to read the letter on his show. So Colbert paraphrased the letter thusly:

We are stupid lawyers who hate fun. If you do this, we’re all scared because people might get mad at us. I think we just peed a little. So, even though we know it is totally legal and everything, and everybody wants you to do it, we’re not going to let you.

Sincerely,
Admiral John Q. Buzzshackler, Esq.

I laughed and laughed and laughed. I have gotten this message myself, not from lawyers, but from colleagues at organizations where I’ve worked or where I’ve volunteered – one fairly recently, when I made a very simple suggestion regarding a one-time social media activity to a very well-known nonprofit organization I won’t name now, but will be happy to if you buy me a beer. The emails I’ve gotten over the years, including most recently, can be paraphrased similarly:

“We are stuffy nonprofit/NGO/international development agency senior managers who hate fun and new ideas. If you do this, we’re all scared because people might get mad at us or someone somewhere may say something negative about it or we might have to work differently. Or we might have to actually work. I think we just peed a little. So, even though we know it is totally legal and that thousands and thousands of organizations are doing this successfully and it could lead to more volunteers and more support, and most everybody wants you to do it, we’re not going to let you.

Sincerely,
Secretary General John Q. Buzzkill

Happy Friday, everyone!

Putting it all on the Cloud

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The media and various consultants are breathless again with another new tech term. What’s gotten them all aflutter? THE CLOUD. Everyone’s talking about THE CLOUD. Everyone’s asking, Are you working in THE CLOUD?!

What’s THE CLOUD?

The Internet. Instead of saying the Internet, we’re now saying The Cloud.

Don’t you dare write me and say, no! no! The cloud is different!

When someone is talking about cloud computing, they are talking about information and software tools residing somewhere out on the Internet, on a server that may be across town or across the country or across the world, rather than on your desktop or a hard drive in your office. When you read and respond to email on a web site rather than your desk top, such as YahooMail or GoogleMail? That’s cloud computing. Also known as the Internet.

It’s not just email: more and more database software for nonprofits is cloud-based software, meaning that some or all of the software is online, and some or all of the information the software tracks – information about donors, volunteers, clients, etc. – reside on a server that isn’t at your office. You access and manage the information by going online.

Wikipedia has a good graphic that illustrates what working on the Cloud looks like.

Cloud computing is terrific – until it’s not. It’s great to read and respond to your email no matter what device you are using and no matter where you are – your laptop at work, your friend’s laptop in Barbados, your smart phone on a city bus – until you find yourself in a place where you have only a window of time for Internet access. Some airports give users just 30 minutes of free Internet access – that’s enough to download my mail to my laptop, but not enough to time to read and respond to it online.

Cloud computing is great for volunteer-tracking and volunteer-scheduling software, if volunteers can log in from anywhere and input their own information. It’s not so great when the Internet goes down and you need that information. And even in the USA, the Internet DOES go down…

Lack of consistent access isn’t the only concern: people and organizations have lost all of the information they have put out on the Cloud. GoogleMail and Flickr have deleted people’s ENTIRE accounts. Imagine losing ALL of your emails. Imagine losing ALL of your photos (with all those notes and tags and descriptions and what not).

Yesterday, I spent two hours editing a document on Google Docs – out on the Cloud. Google Docs supposedly saves your document every few seconds. After all of that work, when I closed the document, it disappeared. I logged in every hour for the rest of the day, hoping it would show up. 24 hours later, I logged back in and, yes, now the document is there – with none of my edits. Two hours of work gone forever. Someone recently made fun of me for always saving my Google Docs offline, and so I had stopped. I’ll be going back to doing that immediately…

And consider this: software vendors go out of business. I was contacted by a small nonprofit a few years ago that was frantic because the company they had used for a few years for all of their event registration was going under, and the company was not only not offering a refund on the nonprofit’s yearly subscription (which had JUST been renewed), but also, was going to take the systems offline before the nonprofit could find a way to transfer their information elsewhere. Their situation was heart-wrenching!

So, should your nonprofit or NGO go with the Cloud? Yes and no…

For your organization’s database that tracks donors, volunteers, clients and other vital information, Cloud-based systems are fine – as long as you have an offline backup of all of the information physically in your office, ready to access in case of emergency. Daily backups would be best, but even just a monthly backup would protect against disaster. When you are purchasing/subscribing to such software, ask the vendor how you will do these offline backups. If they say, “Oh, there’s no need for them!”, look for a new software vendor, especially if you are a mid-size or small nonprofit (such organizations have little recourse in cases of data loss, where as a large nonprofit may have the political clout to pressure a software vendor into spending the resources necessary to retrieve lost information – or to financially-compensate them for the data loss).

For your organization’s email, using the cloud is fine so long it also provides a way for individuals to also download their email when needed, write their responses offline, queue the email to be sent, and then send all the email at once when they get online access again. This is how my email works, and it’s proven essential for being able to work while traveling. For instance, I download my mail just before I get on the plane, I spend the ride reading and responding, and I send all that mail I’ve written (and download more) once I land. It was particularly essential while in Australia, where Internet access is surprisingly bad.

For organizations AND individuals: do online and offline backups of all your computer-based information. I use Mozy to backup my laptop information online once a week (in the middle of the night, while I’m sleeping). The first time you do an online backup, it’s going to take a looooooong time. But subsequent backups should be shorter, because only updated or new information will be backed up. I also have a hard drive that I use for my once-a-month onsite backups. And I sometimes burn my information onto a DVD or two, and give that DVD to a family member for safe keeping.

Don’t forget to back up your cell phone or smart phone.

So, in short: the Cloud is GREAT… until it’s not. Just like having all of your information on your laptop is GREAT… until it’s not.

 

Handling a social media faux pax

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I love this! Not the faux pax (actually, the faux pax is hilarious), but the brilliant way it was handled:

In February 2011, someone mistakenly tweeted from the American Red Cross account something that was meant to come from that person’s personal Twitter account. The tweet involved beer.

The American Red Cross said in their blog about the event:

We realized our honest mistake (the Tweeter was not drunk) and deleted the above Tweet. We all know that it’s impossible to really delete a tweet like this, so we acknowledged our mistake

And they acknowledged it with both a humorous tweet and this blog.

And here’s the kicker: the Twittersphere immediately embraced the mix-up and many pledged donations to the Red Cross! The beer brand that was named in the accidental tweet, as well as the micro brew community, jumped on board and further encouraged donations to the Red Cross.

Kudos to the American Red Cross for not putting together a crisis communications response committee, spending hours / days in meetings on developing a response strategy and then issuing formal apologies written in corporate-ease. No, instead, you handled it immediately, with humor and common sense, and knowing your supporters would do the same. You have cultivated meaningful relationships with the public and supporters for many years, and that cultivation paid off. That’s the kind of resilient, responsive, dynamic approach that will keep the American Red Cross around for another 130 or so years.

Other national organizations… they aren’t even reading this blog right now but, instead, are in a communications meeting to discuss if, perhaps, they might want to start posting to Facebook, or if, instead, they want to ban on use of such by their employees and volunteers – their fourth meeting about such in the last 12 months…

Red Cross – you are full of win!

With Volunteers, See No Evil?

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There are a lot of people out there who are offended at the idea of standards or policies for volunteers – like asking a candidate for volunteering to go through a screening interview or to make a work plan to show how many hours a new volunteer will commit each week or month. Or requiring volunteers to submit a progress report each week or month. Or having rules for volunteers and suspending volunteers who violate those rules.

But you should accept anyone who wants to help! they tell me in my workshops or on online message boards. I’m a volunteer & you should just be GRATEFUL I’m here!

Or they say something along the lines of this that I heard from someone I asked about how safety is maintained at their community computer center: Our patrons are all members-of-a-certain-religion-I-won’t-name-here, so we can trust them and there is no need to worry they will do something inappropriate. Yeah, because members of a religion are super-trustworthy, especially around children…

One volunteer manager told me that she would never have standards for the volunteers at her agency: our volunteers would be offended and leave if you gave them rules to follow – and really, they are working for free, shouldn’t that be enough?

Volunteers are not super-human. They are not automatically good, without any bad intentions or temptations. They may, indeed, have wonderful hearts and want to help people – and they may also be really tempted by that cash box you leave open on the bottom shelf. Volunteers are merely human, no matter what their age, no matter what their professed value system, and therefore, volunteers come with all the usual human short-comings.

If you involve volunteers, you owe it to your nonprofit organization, your NGO, your agency, your program — whatever — as well as your clients and your fellow staff members, to ensure that everyone is focused on the mission of your organization and that you have procedures in place to keep everyone safe and resources in place. Should your organization or program — and your clients — settle for anything less?!

I was reminded of this while listening to an episode of This American Life this weekend: it’s called See No Evil, and you can listen to it for free on the This American Life web site. The description for the episode says,

When things are awkward or uncomfortable or distressing, a lot of times it’s easier to not think about it. This week we have stories of people pretending that everything is okay and ignoring the awful stuff that’s staring them straight in the face. Including a story of deceit and intrigue involving commemorative spoons from the Kennedy Center.

The story that got my attention in particular was Act Three: “I Worked at the Kennedy Center and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.” The description says:

In the 1970s, Dave Kestenbaum’s cousin Dan Weiss got promoted from stocker to gift shop manager at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. It was a good job… except for the fact that the place was bleeding cash because of apparent embezzlement. The gift shop staff? Almost all senior citizen volunteers.

Listen to the story, and then offer comments below here on my blog. And, no, I’m not singling out senior citizen volunteers, and I’ll delete any comment that implies or says that I am. Those volunteers could have been ANY age and the results would have been the same.

Twitter, confidentiality, nonprofits & more

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Nonprofits, NGOs, government agencies and other mission-based organizations: learn how to use Twitter… via Twitter! Today, May 9, at 9 am USA Pacific time, follow #nptwitter on Twitter. Much more detailed info at the TechSoup Community Forum. If you can’t participate at the time, you can view the discussion later by doing a search on #nptwitter.

But wait – there’s more! Last month, TechSoup hosted a free webinar to discuss ways to use social media to find, communicate with and build community among volunteers, lead by myself and Erin Barnhart. One of the questions that came in but that we didn’t answer to the asker’s satisfaction (our answer was all-too-brief) was:

As a nonprofit law firm for kids, I’m concerned about confidentiality with social media, especially Facebook. What are the hazards in this area?

Offer your answer, and read my own, on the TechSoup Community Forum.

I hope volunteer managers / volunteer coordinators in particular will view these resources. Too many of you think social media is something to be used by those working in your marketing or public relations department. You need to be using online tools to engage with volunteers and potential volunteers yourselves! I’ve been saying this since 1994 – you’re 17 years overdue! Here’s my own advice regarding online social media specifically.

Mothers/women facing dire times worldwide

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Mother’s Day is Sunday here in the USA, so here’s some stories that have gotten my attention recently about the condition of women and girls in various places:

    • The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers. “Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II.” More in this article by The New York Times.
    • “Women cry when they have girls”: Despite economic growth, Indian families let its girls die. A deep-rooted cultural preference for sons remains in India. Even the government has accepted that it has failed to save millions of little girls. “Whatever measures that have been put in over the last 40 years have not had any impact,” India’s Home Secretary G.K. Pillai said last month.
    • Jamie Henry, 24, is enrolled at South Texas College, has two children and gets by on government assistance and a $540 disability check her husband, a veteran of the Marines and National Guard, receives every month. “I have a 7-year-old boy and a 4-month-old girl, and I probably would have had 10 kids in between that if I didn’t come here and get my (contraceptive) shot,” Henry said Tuesday morning as she waited for her appointment at Planned Parenthood’s McAllen clinic. Henry, who gave birth to a baby girl four months ago and does not want any more children in the near future, is the type of woman Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County is fighting to protect from an onslaught of legislative attempts to cut basic family planning services at the state and federal level. Here’s the story from Texas, as well as breakdowns of numbers from Minnesota and New Jersey that explain just how devestating to women – including mothers and mothers-to-be – cuts to Planned Parenthood will be.

Also see: Empowering Women Everywhere – Essential to Development Success, a list of research and articles that confirm that empowering women is essential to development success and highlight the very particular challenges to women’s access to education, health care, safety and economic prosperity.

Tags: moms, women, woman, wives, wife, gender, female, value, worth, funding, MDGs

Corporations: here’s what nonprofits really need

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It turns out I’m not the only one who mocks the business community when they decide to “save” the nonprofit community: Kelly Kleiman does too! She goes after some of Silicon Valley’s business elite (the latest is the the “Palindrome Advisors group”) who are planning “to disrupt the nonprofit space”  with their business genius. And she could not be funnier – or more accurate – in her blog! As she states so well, the breathless accounts of these business efforts “ignore the fact that what nonprofits need isn’t more advice, it’s more money. When business people are ready to provide that—when they’re ready to serve on boards, not as agents of disruption but as securers of resources, and when they’re ready to advocate for a tax system that will underwrite the necessary work done by the voluntary sector—well, that will be news.”

Over the last 20 years, I have seen so many of these business movements come and go. I’ve sat in audiences of nonprofit conferences while the featured speakers – business leaders, often paid to give us their wisdom while the nonprofit trainers are expected to volunteer their training time – tell nonprofits, with great contempt, all that they are doing wrong and how they need to act more like businesses. Nevermind that, a year or two later, their businesses have gone under with the bursting of the latest tech bubbles, while all the nonprofits they scorned are still around.

Yes, we need businesses to partner with nonprofits. But how about this:

  • Businesses sit down with nonprofits and LISTEN to what they need.
  • Volunteer not just on an advisory board but on the front lines, for several weeks: go through the volunteer orientation and get some time with the clients served by the nonprofit.
  • Sit in on some staff and volunteer meetings, and listen, don’t talk, a few times.

Learn about nonprofits first. Then talk.

I still dream of nonprofits waking up and marching into the corporate world and saying, “You need to do things differently. Let us help. Let us disrupt your for-profit space. Let us show you what it’s like to be driven by a mission rather than your profit. Let us show you how to do so much with so little resources. Let us show you what it’s like to use old computers to try to access your fancy tech tools, because you refuse to fund our ‘administrative costs.’ Let us show you how to balance the whims of donors with the very real needs of our clients. You could learn so much from us!”

Also see:

(note: most of these URLs no longer work, as my former blog host is now defunct and archive.org got rid of their archives for some reason)

 

Improving Lives in Rural Communities with ICTs?

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May 17 will mark World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD). To celebrate, NetSquared is using this year’s theme, “Better Life in Rural Communities with ICTs,” to guide the Net2 Think Tank question for May!

NetSquared (Net2) is gathering examples of and ideas for communications technologies – phones, smart phones, computers, Internet, etc. – improving lives in rural communities. Entries will get pulled together for the next Net2 Think Tank Round-Up.

How is your initiative bridging the information divide and what are your tips for others? What are your tactics and best practices for helping rural communities using computer, Internet and mobile technology? And which projects are already doing this well? Share your projects and ideas with the NetSquared Community! Deadline: Saturday, May 21, 2001.

How to contribute:

The roundup of contributions will be posted on the NetSquared blog on Monday, May 23rd.

Net2 Think Tank is an initiative of TechSoup Global. It is a monthly blogging/social networking event open to anyone and is a great way to participate in an exchange of ideas. Net2 posts a question or topic to the NetSquared community and participants submit responses either on their own blogs, the NetSquared Community Blog, or using social media.  Tag your post with “net2thinktank” and email a link to Net2 to be included. At the end of the month, the entries get pulled together in the Net2 Think Tank Round-Up.

Some things I’ve written related to the subject of phones, smart phones, computers, Internet, etc. – improving lives in rural communities:

Tags: ICT4D, net2thinktank, NetSquared, access

Talking to Reps from NGOs & other orgs from all over the world

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Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting to a “class” of the US Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program. This was the third time I’ve presented to such a group since the mid 1990s – and this time, I got to spend more time with them than ever before!

These visitors represent NGOs and government agencies from all over the world, and are invited to the USA by arrangement of the Institute of International Education (IIE). The focus of the visit this year was how different organizations in the USA engage with volunteers, and I joined colleagues here in Portland to do a workshop on using social media to recruit and engage with volunteers (a very shortened version of the webinar for TechSoup, which is still available online). I was joined by Erin Barnhart and Martin Cowling (who just happened to be visiting from Australia!).

As you can see from this photo, I was thrilled to find an Afghan amid the group – Mr. Khir Mohammad Pazhwok of Ghori, the Program Officer with Integrity Watch Afghanistan. He seemed happy to meet someone who has been to his country (he was impressed that I still knew the Dari words for “Right”, “Left,” “Forward,” “Why not?” and “Thank you!”).

I presented to the 2010 group last year, leading an all-to-brief 30-minute panel of Portland agencies to talk about different models of volunteer engagement (long-term, episodic, diversity-focused, etc.). I presented to the group for the first time back in the 1990s in Austin, Texas – another all-too-brief talk about online volunteering (got into some trouble at that one when I started talking about Austin’s famous live music scene, which the group realized their State Department hosts would not be showing to them at all during the visit).

These representatives are highly focused on gathering as much knowledge as possible to take back to their respective countries. And they ask some of the best questions of any group I present to. What I love about presenting to this group is that they are ready to experiment – they do not fear new practices. They also never say what I hear too often by audiences in North America, Europe and even Australia: that’s not how we do things; I’m not sure we can change. If they hear a good idea, they are going to run with it!

I’m ready to do a workshop for YOU. I can also do workshops online. My schedule fills up quickly, so contact me soon with your idea!