This is the second massive article in an ongoing series on uncharted technologies for nonprofits. It’s a mix of new Web technology and websites that will give a nonprofit some new capabilities that it may never had before. There are no examples of how other nonprofits use this as most nonprofits and dare I say, most nonprofit managers, have never heard of half of these technologies. However, I do show a typical nonprofit scenario that can be used with these technologies. Unless otherwise described, all the web sites listed here can be used immediately.
Working with your stakeholders
If there was a world where nonprofits would use crowdsourcing on a daily basis, the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) would be at the center of it. This is especially critical for nonprofits that engage in massive document searches. The AMT gets its name from a chess playing machine called the Turk that was built in the 1700s. It defeated all comers and seemed to be an incredible demonstration of early artificial intelligence. That is, until a person was found hiding in the works of the machine.
By using collaboration tools and distributing to a potential crowd of thousands, AMT endeavors to produce what Amazon calls “artificial artificial intelligence”. Think of a HAL 9000 that is seemingly created by the actions of users around the globe.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
You set up a simple task that can be accomplished in a couple of minutes. This task is what the AMT staff calls a HIT (Human Intelligence Task). You then set up a price for each HIT (usually less than 10 cents apiece and more likely 1 cent).
Let’s say you run a nonprofit that has a task that is labor-intensive but the task itself can be broken down into little chunks. For instance, the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack is a well-known task that the AMT is used for. In fact, a few search and rescue operations are handled in this way. Digital pictures of the search area are submitted to the AMT. A HIT is made asking users to look at one picture and to click if they find anything of interest. All these HITs are aggregated into a report. It’s as if an entire image feed was handed to a computer and it spit back a result.
Other tasks like looking through a treasure trove of documentation can be handled this way. If you are running a social services agency, you could use this to go through old data (once it has been scanned into digital format) and eventually create a history of the performance of your social services agency. After all, only humans can do the appropriate scanning of handwritten data. You would just have to make sure the appropriate data was redacted in order to preserve any HIPAA requirements. Think of AMT as a huge OCR that would be way more accurate than a typical OCR scan.
Foneshow allows organizations to push their podcasts out to cell phones. This may not be so obvious but everyone has the ability to listen to audio via their cellphone. At their web site, they have hundreds of podcasts that you can subscribe to on your phone. You give them your cell number and they will text your phone. You call the number in the text message and voila! The podcast
starts streaming to your phone.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
If you run a nonprofit that has even a little bit of earned media, you’ll find that you’ll have archives of audio footage that’s just sitting there gathering dust. Why not digitize it and have it available on the Web? Sure, you can leave audio files on the Web but why stop there? Why not have it available on people’s cell phones? Indeed, you may want to go even further and create podcasts that your clients could use via their cell phones.
You can prearrange it so that all your pledges get texted every time with an audio thank you from your nonprofit’s local celebrity. There’s a new technology that’s coming out that will even let you pay via mobile phone but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Meebo, meebo, meebo – I love you Meebo. I’ve covered Meebo before but it still needs some introduction. What is it? It’s a Web site you can visit that allows you to unify all the instant message services you use. What? You don’t use instant messaging (IM)? Get on board with meebo. It’s the easiest way to get started instant messaging. Sign up for an instant messaging service with AOL, MSN, Yahoo, or Gmail. Make sure you remember your username and password and enter it into Meebo’s web site. Instantly, you can send your chats through your favorite IM service. The amazing thing about Meebo is that they also allow for applications called Meebo Apps to run within Meebo. You can do some pretty amazing things — one of them is to link up to live video streams via Ustream.TV which I will mention later.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
You’ve got workers at a social services agency who need to talk to each other quickly while their client is in front of them. They can’t use the phone for obvious reasons but the information is urgent. If they’re all on Meebo, they can quickly IM each other with minimum fuss. Believe it or not, IM is the future of social services. The infrastructure is already there and unlike many of the other services listed here, it’s actually being used in a social services setting. Google “instant messaging psychotherapy” and you’ll find plenty of links to therapists and counselors that use instant messaging in their practice. It’s only a matter of time before this hits nonprofits.
Or better yet, informal knowledge gathering by case workers with one another across agencies would be an excellent use of this tool. This isn’t my idea — an ex-coworker who manages a team of case workers in New York City is already doing this to manage referrals from one agency to another. It’s quicker than picking up a phone and asking for availability status at the other nonprofit.
Hat tip to Beth Kanter for this link. We played around with it months ago but it has improved a lot since then. Ustream is another Web site where you can view live video from other users. Yes, you can use the Internet to create a TV station for your nonprofit. Even better, Ustream.TV offers a way for people to chat with the broadcaster in real-time so users can watch your video AND communicate with you at the same time. Think of it as Meebo on video steroids. All you need is a Webcam or a DV Cam with a USB driver and you’re ready to broadcast. It’s pretty darn impressive. I admit that I’ve used it for pretty silly things like broadcasting myself washing dishes. (Shout out if you watched “Allan Washing Dishes 1.0″!)
You can not just run chats, but you can ask users to leave comments and answer polls while the broadcasting is happening in real-time. I think the uses of this technology for advocacy is pretty clear.
Look, Ma, no wiresOne very interesting thing about Ustream.TV is that the stream you create can be mobile. I just tested it with a Sprint cellphone (the HTC Mogul) that has been modified to receive the latest speediest Sprint 3G signal (EVDO Rev A). You then hook up the phone’s connection to the Web to your notebook via Bluetooth and Windows Mobile’s Internet Connection Sharing. That’s all you need to start pushing out video. Alternatively, you could simply buy an EVDO Rev A card from Sprint and not have to worry about any Internet sharing connections or even Bluetooth.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
Your nonprofit does a rally or protests and wants to create a digital archive as well as show it on the web. You would either record it on a video camera and then stream it through Ustream.TV once you get back to the office or do it in real-time with an EVDO Rev A wireless card on the laptop. Here’s an example of an Obama rally on Ustream.TV.
Ego surfing
Alltop.com is Guy Kawasaki’s new entry into the Web 2.0 space. Nedra Weinreich helped to build the list of URLs used at alltop.com. This is just a huge page of many nonprofit related sites and their RSS feeds. You can set your home page to this and basically, it’s just a smorgasbord of nonprofit links. It’s not that different from other sites out there but I think if you’re looking to find out more about the nonprofit blogosphere it’s a good place to start especially if you don’t like or don’t know how to use RSS feeds.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
Give this to your ED and Development Director. Get them used to reading these links. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom and some humor there.
Ok, if you took your local geek and combined them with a newspaper reporter, you’d end up with this Silobreaker. This site is INTENSE! Billing itself as a “graphical news search”, it goes through traditional news sites and the blogosphere to search for articles on the search term you enter. It also shows some pretty wicked charts on media attention for the term you entered. If you decide to sign in, you can create your own news page a la Netvibe or Pageflakes but due to silobreaker’s unique tools it’s much more news-oriented that your typical “make your own newspaper” site.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
This is the ultimate ego surfing tool. Type in the name of your organization or your issue area and see what comes up. There’s a lot of serendipity involved with this tool as on the right hand side you will see a computer-generated network chart of your search term and other issues that may be related to it.
Let’s face it – sometimes you need to prevent spammers from getting onto your site and spamming a whole bunch of links that have nothing to do with your nonprofit. I’m faced with it every day on my Kikono site and here on Non-Profit Tech Blog. Many of these spams are created by spamming software which send little robots across the Web posting ads for breast enlargement or yet another mortgage on your house. To stop these ‘bots from messing up your site, software has been deployed to force the ‘bots to read a graphic in order to post their spam. These are the little CAPTCHA images that you see that make you look at some weird-looking image to enter some cryptic alphanumeric code in order to make a comment. Anyway, recaptcha is unique in that those little CAPTCHA images are actually lifted from books that are in need of scanning. Quite literally, when you type in the letters you see in a RECAPTCHA image, you are actually helping to digitize a book by reading something that the scanning software couldn’t read.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
Your website has been spammed and want to stop it. Recaptcha is available in a lot of different languages and works quite well with Drupal and Joomla.
The Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library is definitely something you should ask your local website development nerd to look into. It’s so nerdy that it doesn’t even have its own logo and has to borrow its branding from the Yahoo! Developer Network. It’s basically a way to create web sites that will look pretty much the same way in Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer and even Opera across many different versions. Why is this necessary? Many users of nonprofit websites access the web come from local libraries that never update their version of the Web browser installed on their Internet workstations. This is a huge security problem but given the funding problems endemic to libraries quite understandable.
Also, many nonprofits themselves never update their browsers. The great thing about the YUI is that a site designed with it won’t ever break down badly when used with older browsers. The YUI developers have a philosophy of making a site degrade gracefully if the browser isn’t state of the art.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
Building a new website and don’t have the time to hire a designer to make sure your website has a consistent look across all browsers? Use YUI. It also has some super cool Javascript objects in it that will make your website look really great.
Technologies to look out for…This section are for technologies so new that I can’t really vouch for their stability yet but there’s an incredible upside to these new technologies. It’s worth it to take a look and see if you can work with these technologies. At this stage, you can probably contact the principals of Heroku and Mpayy and get real close to their process. This may or may not be too good for you but I believe that smaller nonprofits should take advantage of this while these organizations are small.
Heroku is a hosted Ruby on Rails programming environment. Basically, it’s a one stop shop to start creating custom web applications without having to buy a server or even setting up a development environment (which can take hours to do right, trust me on this).
If your nonprofit wants to get started developing code for a web application but is still exploring the option of custom code, try Heroku. This will allow you to have a developer up and coding with no setup time. It’s as if someone had taken the Rails development environment and set it up on a web site. It’s like using the Web to program the Web. It’s very elegant that way. However, Heroku is very new and I would suggest that you wait a few more months before developing code on it.
Mpayy is another electronic payment service akin to Paypal or Google Checkout for Non-Profits. However, Mpayy works by tying a donor’s checking account to their Mpayy account thus making it possible to send electronic checks. Even better, Mpayy can do this via mobile phone via SMS text messaging.
Full disclosure on this though: We’re considering using it for socialmarkets.org not as a replacement for Google Checkout but because bigger donors would rather use their checking account instead of their credit cards. They can also used as an ACH (electronic checking) backend instead of just a mobile payment service.
Your typical nonprofit scenario…
Charity ball and your donors are pleasantly buzzed and going strong. One of them has just won an auction and now wants to pay for the art they just bought. Knowing your donors, they have a cell phone that can access the web and receives SMS. They go to Mpayy’s site and they’ll see something like this on their cell phone:
It’s not yet the most elegant interface but you can guess what’s happening. Mobile payments for mobile donors. I’ve talked to the Mpayy folks — they definitely want nonprofits on board and are willing process transactions for free. Trace Johnson, their product VP says:
For now, charities/non-profits can just fill out our Retail Application https://www.mpayy.com/info/requestRetailMerchant.do?_path=retailMerchantRequest and specify they are a non-profit in the business profile section for business type. We’ll follow up with them, check in Guidestar, and change the fee amount on the back end.
Whew! I’m done!But wait! there’s more. One more new technology to preview today too… Check back after 5 PM ET for more!
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