Be heard! This is your chance to tell us what you need.  Take our survey – it’s short, only 10 minutes, and intended for anyone who has responsibility for recommending, purchasing or managing IT products or services at an NGO including nonprofits, charities, libraries, foundations or similar organizations. All ranges of IT influencers are invited — from accidental techies to IT directors.

By better understanding the tools you currently use and your future plans, we can work with our partners around the world to provide nonprofits like yours the technology resources they need to operate at their full potential.

The survey closes March 23 so please don’t miss out on your chance to tell us about your IT needs.

What are we doing with the results?

In late spring, we’ll publish a white paper with the survey results detailing the responses of nonprofits based in the United States and in 37 countries around the world. The results will support organisations like yours in making informed IT decisions. They will provide insights into how your peers are using technology and into the currents needs and issues around adopting cloud technologies.

If you’re interested in receiving a report on the survey findings, be sure to provide your email address at the end of the survey. We’ll send you the white paper when it’s finished in late spring and it’ll be available for free on our site.

Register today as space is limited!

SAP and Business Objects BI OnDemand

During this free, one-hour webinar, we will be hearing from SAP’s Steve Williams and Saurabh Abhyankar about issues surrounding data and reporting. We will talk about possible solutions, culminating in a closer look at SAP’s product, Business Objects BI OnDemand.

What is Business Objects BI OnDemand? It is a cloud-based business intelligence application which supports multiple data formats to help you understand how your organization is performing.

Nonprofit Questions About Data Reporting

Want to hear concerns that real nonprofits have about implementing data reporting tools? In preparation for this webinar, we have reached out to organizations using BI OnDemand. These organizations have shared their concerns with us, and we will in turn be addressing them during the webinar.

If you have questions of your own, feel free to email those questions to khunt@techsoupglobal.org or post them in the comments below. You will also have additional opportunities to ask questions during the webinar.

This free one-hour webinar is presented in cooperation with SAP, a donor partner of TechSoup Global, and is appropriate for technology decision makers in nonprofits.

We will be having a follow-up webinar on this topic specificially geared to our international audiences. That registration information will be available in April.

This challenge is open to all social benefit organisations regardless of registered status or location.

How to get involved this year

• Submit a one-minute video or five-photo slideshow to win prizes
• Register for our upcoming free webinar on post-production (2/16) with David J. Neff of Lights. Camera. Help.
• Join us for a tweet chat (2/14) about social sharing to learn how to get your video in front of the eyeballs that matter most to your org
• Encourage everyone you know to participate! Spread the word: www.tsdigs.org
• Subscribe to our Google group to stay up to date on all of these exciting happenings

Remember that video is the content people are spending the most time with online these days, and digital stories are a powerful way to share the passion and hard work your organization has for its mission! The video is yours to keep and use after the challenge is over.

What’s your organization’s story? Share it now!

‘Open Data’ has become the way we refer to data that is easily accessible in the public domain and free for anyone to use in whatever way they want. This open data is most valuable however, when it is not only easy to access but also when it is reused. This post that I wrote for the TechSoup Global blog talks about if using the term open data can actually sometimes discourage rather than encourage reuse of this data by community service organisations and the wider public. Read the post.

Exhibiting at NGO India is FREE for all NGOs that meet UBM India’s eligibility criteria which will be verified by GuideStar India. At this 3 day event, 150-200 NGOs would be showcasing their work to over 4000 visitors from corporates, grant makers & NGOs and 5000 visitors from the general public. There would be conferences on good governance, fundraising, PR & communications free of cost for NGOs to connect with experts in these areas.

• Raise awareness of NGOs and their work
• Create opportunities to showcase the good work of NGOs among the public, to facilitate volunteering, fundraising and other positive action
• Facilitate NGOs of different sizes serving varied communities to network with each other
• Connect NGOs with experts in good governance, PR & communications and fundraising
• Provide a platform that will allow NGOs to engage with government and corporate stakeholders

Please go to the GuideStar India website  for details and updates.

By Keisha Taylor

This was originally posted on the TechSoup Global blog

‘The open data revolution has come to aid’ writes open data advocate Owen Barder (known for his work on development policy), and yet while the US is the world’s largest bilateral donor, Publish What You Fund’s Aid Transparency Index states that five of six US aid agencies are not very transparent. Why does this matter? Because the quality as well as the quantity of international aid is critical to the fate of the developing world (and the developed world’s as well!) and there are significant questions about whether aid is accomplishing its purposes. For example, aid may even be creating dependency rather than development in Africa, according to Dambiso Moyo’s book Dead Aid.

Thus, it is good news that the USA has now agreed to join the International Transparency Initiative (IATI) since that now means 80% of global development finance will be open, shareable, standardized, and transparent. This also complements the US foreign assistance dashboard, which is now available (but still in development).  US government agencies, partner country governments, CSOs and citizens can use it to research and track US foreign assistance investment.

IATI is the result of a conversation started among governments and bi-lateral/multilateral donors at the Paris High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, which resulted in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005. The Accra Agenda for Action was subsequently formulated to help implement the Declaration, and IATI was established in 2008 to provide support for the Agenda. But an IATI standard for publishing aid was only agreed upon in February 2011. Then, towards the end of last year, the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation provided an updated framework that the world’s donors, developing country governments, CSOs, and other aid stakeholders have agreed upon.

Now that America has joined IATI, it could possibly encourage Brazil, Russia, India and China (the “BRIC countries”) and other non-governmental US donors, donor countries, and aid recipient countries to do the same. Indeed BRIC countries, while not IATI signatories, have contributed to the Busan Partnership document.

As the world’s largest bilateral donor ($30 billion annually!), US participation in the movement towards open data, which includes open aid data, may be a gamechanger but only if they really start publishing much more data. On the other hand, open data is in no way an end in itself. If it is not used — and reused — it loses impact.

In my next post, I’ll explain why.

Consul General Peter Haas and others listening to GuideStar India CEO, Pushpa Aman Singh speaking at the Roundtable

This was first posted on the GuideStar India blog

GuideStar India and the U.S. Department of State held a “Philanthropy in India Roundtable” on December 21 in Mumbai. Over 40 leaders from the Indian philanthropy sector discussed the creation of a new online portal that will assist private donors seeking to support Indian NGOs.

GuideStar India is an existing portal of fully searchable information on over 1400 registered NGOs in India, and will serve as the platform for the new portal which is designed to connect private U.S. donors with Indian NGOs and organizations. The group agreed that such a portal should also help address two critical needs:
(1) empowering and educating donors by introducing more information and transparency into the sector; and (2) strengthening capacity-building amongst Indian NGOs.

The new portal will aggregate NGO certifications provided by independent third parties and present the information in a format easily searchable and accessible by potential donors. Neither GuideStar nor the U.S. Government will rate or certify NGOs. The portal will empower donors and allow them to make better informed decisions. Indian NGOs, intermediaries, facilitators, foundations and other organizations and individuals involved in philanthropy in India will benefit through enhanced visibility.

The roundtable participants provided input on the design of the portal to GuideStar representatives. The diverse group of leaders gathered at the roundtable reflected the shared desire of the private sector, civil society and the U.S. State Department to explore new and creative ways to support Indian NGOs.

As data visualisation becomes mainstream, foundations are also looking at ways to use the data that they have to visually demonstrate their impact. The European Foundation Centre (EFC), in collaboration with TechSoup, held a webinar on Foundations & practice in data visualisation (on 16th November 2011) thanks to a grant by Microsoft Community Affairs.

Cole Nussbaumer, of StorytellingwithData.com covered the basics of infographics and data visualisation concepts. She touched on some key points that not just designers but all interested in using data to communicate should consider when creating and using data visualisations.

The webinar was open to European foundations only. However, it was a great webinar and I’d suggest you look at the video online.

This was originally posted on the TechSoup Global blog

(Portland, OR) — “Data is the new oil.” In an otherwise humdrum Closing Keynote address by Nike’s VP of Sustainable Business and Innovation, Hannah Jones, this struck me as rather a provocative statement. She’s trying to incite a hotel lobby full of nonprofiters, philanthropists, MBA students, CSR practioners and other business-minded social entrepreneurs “to be disruptive, to innovate and to create a sustainable new world.”  She wants us to get smarter about how we work for social impact – with data.

Three very full days with 2,600 attendees and 395 speakers at the 2011 Net Impact  (NI) conference – against the über-eco backdrop of Portland, OR – and this is my main take-away:

Data is the sexiest new thing at the intersection of business and social impact.

OK, OK, I concede that data is neither new nor sexy. But it is being leveraged by the social sector in innovative and forward-thinking ways that are grabbing attention on a national scale. Here’s an NI-inspired look at three different objectives and examples of how do-gooders  “do data”:

1.      To efficiently deliver needed products and services

…for instance, in the chaotic aftermath of a natural disaster. Consider NetSquared Mashup Challenge winner Patrick Meir, Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi, who crowdsourced and mapped needs in the critical hours and days after the devastating Haiti earthquake, using free and opensource software developed by his organization.

Or Mercy Corps, which is using a mobile app to get food to people in need in Haiti and Kenya through a mobile money (m-wallet) product. By giving recipients electronic food coupons instead of food, they also drive economic development among local food producers – and they pair the funds with financial literacy training. Phil Oldham, Country Director, is quick to emphasize the double bottom line: in addition to a critical social benefit, the tool streamlines distribution, saving the organization precious time and money.

2.  To crowdsource funding and social innovation

Crowdsourcing actually is kinda sexy – or at least it’s the much-touted “big thing” in technology for social good. To borrow a phrase from X-Prize, the goal is nothing less than “revolution through competition.” Ooh, la la.

Less sexily put, crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model used to source both solutions to social problems and cash to underwrite promising projects.  Examples include Groupon and Facebook Causes  (respectively represented by Kyle Klatt, Manager of Development and Matt Mahan, COO at Net Impact), but also Kickstarter, The Hoop Fund, Global Giving, Citizen Effect, Kiva, our own NetSquared, and the exuberant onrushing player in the tech space, Campus Party, with their Hacking for Something Better (H4SB) initiative… I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

3.  To measure impact for smarter iterations and social enterprise field-building

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, cautions a well-worn business adage. Today, organizations have access to more data than ever, from program results and survey data to site traffic and donations. Yet these mountains of information are really only useful if they spark improvements that further the mission. A panel at Net Impact called “Data-Do-Gooders: Organizations Using Metrics to Rock their Missions” shared how to select the right data, how to share it (with the right people), and how to incorporate it into new and better iterations of the programs using  free tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.

From a 30,000-foot view, data is also used in spades by social investors and philanthropists for proof-of-concept and to demonstrate social and financial ROI, which has positive spillover for thought leadership in the field. Social investing and social enterprise have rapidly gained traction in the investment landscape, largely because the data has been used to tell a compelling story (i.e. doing well by doing good). The need to facilitate due diligence and provide 501c3 equivalency data for international philanthropy came up repeatedly at NI – thank goodness for initiatives like Great Nonprofits, Charity Navigator, and TSG’s NGOsource and  Guide Star International programs.

Let us now turn our attention back to the green-catered, LEED-certified hotel lobby and Nike’s views on sustainability and innovation. Using a soccer analogy, as is fitting for an exec at the world’s leading sports apparel company, Ms. Jones recounted that Brazilian mega-star Pelé once famously said, “I don’t go where the ball is, I go where the ball is going.”

And I wonder:  is data the ball, or does data point up where the ball is going? Or both?