London Region ICT Champion

Over the last few posts I’ve been talking about blogs, flickr, etc and how the voluntary sector might use this so-called Web 2.0 technology to get its message out to funders, supporters, people using its services and beyond.

In his book, Flipping the Funnel, Seth Grodin, describes a  process whereby Web 2.0 tools might be used to empower your service users - and turn them into fans and supporters of your organisation.

Seth tends to use some marketing jargon that may not be familiar to UK readers, but nonetheless, he has a message worth hearing: that the people using your services are potentially you’re biggest supporters - and that the new tools make it easier than ever to include them in your promotion to funders.
One way or another, Web 2.0 will make organisations more accountable - not just to traditional funders and supporters, but also to service users - and this is an area that the NCVO ICT Foresight panel is looking at in relation to the UK voluntary sector.
As I’ve said before, if organisations want to survive and prosper, they will need to understand and embrace new technology.  Try Seth’s book and let me know what you think.

A quick 2 minute riff for those of you who haven’t yet caught up with the latest ICT research published by the venerable ICT Hub.

As ever, if you have ICT research findings of your own, wherever it’s from in the world, I’m always keen to hear about it and what lessons could be applied to the voluntary sector in London.

ICT Hub / WCIT Funding Research (2006)

In Feb 2006 the Information Technologists’ Livery Company and the ICT Hub undertook a survey of voluntary and community sector organisations to gain a fuller understanding of the sector’s experience of seeking funding for ICT. Essential reading if you would like to find out more about funding and ICT.
(download WCIT funding research .pdf 2.15 MB)

Charity Finance 2006 IT survey

Provides invaluable comparative data on IT budgets and budget allocations, staffing levels, software packages, outsourcing issues, governance concerns and security.
(download Charity Finance IT survey .pdf 968 KB)

ICT Hub’s State of the eNation report

Analysis of the accessibility of charity websites.
(download State of the eNation report .doc 309 KB)

ICT Hub Accessibility Research (2006)

Invaluable reading if you are concerned about accessibility and want to know what is happening in the sector.
(download accessibility research .pdf 413 KB)

A report from the US non-profit, Dot Organize, finds that over half of the 400 organisations they surveyed, report being frustrated or really struggling with the complexity of the technology they use.

Watchers of voluntary sector ICT issues in the UK will no doubt be familiar with Dot Organize’s findings, since ICT problems tend to be fairly universal:

To grossly summarise, the report also finds that:

• Most organizations, whether three-person start-ups or 3 million-person coalitions, are struggling to keep their constituent databases in order, and as a result have difficulty embracing new and emerging technologies (such as, blogs, social networking, SMS/text messaging, GIS mapping, and wikis).

• 59% report being frustrated or really struggling with the complexity of technology.

• Many lack the capacity to use some of the most basic online organising techniques; 39% do not use email newsletters and 47% do not accept online donations.

• Regardless of the organisation’s size, money (57%), time (45%) and staff expertise (34%) prevent their organisation from fully exploiting databases and online tools.

• Inadequate data management emerged as a major impediment to effective organizing. More than half the respondents report using slips of paper, Excel spreadsheets, and personal address books to manage organizational data.

• Organisations across the budget spectrum experienced a similar lack of data integration in their systems. The ability to share data across platforms and between applications, such as contact databases and Web content management systems, reduces data duplication and errors, as well as time spent on manual data entry and manually synching data repositories. Only 7% of respondents reported that their current systems share data easily.

• Organisers also stress the significance of data integration in their daily operations. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 representing the importance of data integration to their work, nearly 70% of respondents chose ratings between 7-10, signifying that a vast majority consider integration to be both a key obstacle and solution.

As London ICT Champion, what I’m really interested in here is the similar struggle of the UK VCS (voluntary & community sector) to fully exploit existing technology and embrace new tools.

I’m seeing some early promoters of new technology - RuralNet’s I-See_T project which is exploring ICT for collaboration, and the Media Trust’s seminars on the benefits and ease of deploying a Blog or a Wiki to raise the profile of your charity - and the approach here is very much the ’show and tell’ model I talked about in an earlier post. As ever, if you have a project looking into new technology, let me know as it’s good to share.

The Dot Organize report compiles insights from more than 400 US social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders, examining the needs of organisers working to utilize new technologies, and offering recommendations for how to meet those needs more effectively.

You can download the report from here.

The Organizer’s Tool Crib is a participatory directory which allows people interested in organising communities to share, review and rate online tools and resources.
The directory currently lists over 110 online tools, including users ratings on favourites like flickr, Wordpress, Skype, HiveLive, and Drupal. Users can also add their own tags to categorise the various tools.

The Organizer’s Tool Crib is a project of the folks at dot Organize.

I know we have the UKRiders email list and Volresource - which both function as useful repositories of information on technology used by the sector - but could a model like the Organizer’s Tool Crib work in the UK as a vehicle for exploring and promoting new technology?

In ‘Cool Web Tools’ I’ll be taking a brief look at services provided over the internet - things like RSS, video, podcasting and blogging - and showing how a small community organisation might use them to better share information and work more effectively.

I’ve chosen the Google Calendar - the calendar or diary being the first thing that many people check when planning their working day. Google’s web based calendar integrates with Google’s Mail and Map services, offering a tidy calendar solution for a mobile worker or team of mobile workers needing to access their diary from outside the office.

Getting started:
To get started with Google Calendar you’ll need a Google email address - you can get one by signing up at Google Mail or emailing me for a Google Mail invite.

Ease of use:
The Google Calendar is remarkably easy to use - adding new events requires just a click on the calendar. Editing an event on the calendar brings up a box reassuringly familiar to anyone who has used computer based calendar systems - there are options for inviting guests, setting the event as public or private, adding descriptions, and so on.

This kind of usability is key to attracting and keeping users who value time and simplicity above all else - the chances are that if you can’t figure out how to use a web service within 5 minutes, then you’ll not bother at all. Many writers have identified technological factors as barrier to the voluntary/non-profit sector adopting new technology - which we’ll cover in later posts.

Importing calendars:
Importing events from Outlook is also easy - it took me less than 2 minutes to export the Outlook calendar file and import in to Google Calendar. Remember that Google’s calendar doesn’t synchronise with Outlook - any changes you make in Outlook will have to be exported and re-imported to Google calendar.

Create and share calendars:
The Google calendar also makes it easy to create new calendars - and share them. This is particularly useful if you want to create a separate calendar for different teams or different team members. You can share your calendars with contacts in your Google Mail contacts.

There are two main ways of sharing Google calendar.  The first and safest is to share your Google calendar by adding the email addresses of office colleagues/collaborators needing to see your availability for meetings, etc.  You can also set the level of access they have to the Google calendar.  the second method is to give colleagues a private URL to your Google calendar in either XML, iCal or HTML format. The forthcoming Microsoft Office 2007 is set to offer the ability to import or export calendar files in the iCal standard.
You may also want to make the calendar ‘public’ - this is useful if you want the public to see events, workshops or training you’re hosting. Different calendars can also be colour-coded.

Integration:
Calendar events are also integrated with Google Mail - a nice feature if you want to invite people in your Google address book to a meeting. Calendar events also integrate with Google Maps - making events easy to locate. I’d like to see calendar integration with Google Mobile - your diary available on your mobile phone, just like the Blackberry toting dudes, at a fraction of the cost.

Overall:
Google calendar has all the basic diary functions that mobile workers or a small community group might need. I’m not suggesting that it’s a replacement for web access to Microsoft Exchange Server. But Google calendar is free, easy to use and could form part of a web-based suite of tools for those needing to access their diary, documents and mail from anywhere with an internet connection.

There are plenty of other web calendars specialising in group collaboration - like Planzo and HipCal, but none currently offers Google’s integration with other web services.

As always, don’t take my word for it - try these tools as well and let me know what you think about using them as part of a virtual office.

Part of the ICT Champion’s role is to educate the voluntary sector and funders about new technology. With that in mind, readers of this blog will be wondering just what this web 2.0 stuff is that myself and other writers keep referring to.

According to Wikipedia, which is itself a web 2.0 tool:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since 2004 it has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword amongst certain technical and marketing communities.

Examples of web 2.0 applications include:

• Flickr - online photo gallery
• Skype - internet phonecalls
• Wikipedia - online encyclopedia
• Youtube - online video service
• RSS - system for subscribing to favourite web sites
• Tagging - using your own labels to ‘tag’ or categorise web pages, images, music, etc
• Blogging - online journal or diary
• Myspace - online community space for people to share similar interests, ie music
• Basecamp - group project collaboration
• Google documents and spreadsheet
• Google calendar

The idea with web 2.0 is very simple - instead of installing bits of software onto your computer - applications now run on the web.

All these tools have several things in common:

• you can potentially access these tools from almost anywhere in the world. And all you need is a computer, an Internet connection and email account;
• they’re all either, free, low cost, easy to use and sustainable;
• they’re about sharing knowledge, forming like-minded communities and collaborating on projects

Web 2.0 isn’t necessarily making the world smalller, just a better connected.

Looking at the list of web 2.0 tools (it’s a small sample), it does throw up all sorts of questions about the people and technical barriers between the sector and widespread adoption of online tools - which I’ll return to in a future post.
Right now, as an ICT Champion and evangelist of new technology I’m recommending that you check these out and think about how they might be applied to helping your organisation communicate with its clients and funders.

To get you started, check out the NSPCC’s use of videos posted to Youtube and think how many people beyond their normal audience are now aware of the NSPCC’s message.

Clearly the need for a ‘champion’ or ‘Buzz Director’ as Steve Bridger calls it, to promote technology to the community sector is one that many commentators - including David Wilcox, Nancy White and Beth Kanter (amongst others) - have been talking about.

As Steve Bridger says:

It’s a particular crusade of mine to encourage not-for-profits to identify an internal champion (or recruit a virtual volunteer) to take on this role. Call it what you will, and David Wilcox and Beth Kanter, have both had a go at (re)inventing job labels. I like Beth Kanter’s “Social Media Coach”. But how about “Cause Evangelist”?

Personally I quite like London ICT Evangelist. Maybe it’ll catch on and I’ll have to get my business stationery re-done.

There’s also been an interesting discussion about the qualities needed for a “buzz director” and technology initiatives that such a person might promote. Steve Bridger writes:

• Talk to everybody. Listen. Make it easy for colleagues to find you, or manufacture the conditions by which serendipity is more likely to occur.
• Your role is to create a buzz around your cause (and secondarily, your not-for-profit ‘brand’). But resist any desire (or pressure) to “own” the cause. Far better to identify the communities where your supporters and activists are already and join in the conversation.
• Explore ways to keep in touch and to share ideas and insights and share links to new developments. Embrace opportunities for collaboration.

Naturally such a person needs to be easy to find and offer easy interactivity with social bookmarking tools like Digg, , Technorati, Del.icio.us. Nancy E. Schwartz points us in the direction of Shift Communications and their new template for online . Nancy writes:

…you’ll see the following elements that enable online release readers (who include many traditional journalists, as well as bloggers and your audiences) to easily take action:

• Full contact information with email, blog and instant messenger addresses.
• Succinct, news facts bullet points — easier to digest than traditional narrative.
• Delicious page with links to related sources, updated regularly and available as a feed to your RSS reader, so updates come to you. In this case, SHIFT uses this page to link readers to coverage of their template release, and the agency itself.
• Downloads — in the sample a photo, logo and the press release template.
• Links to spokesperson’s LinkedIn profile.
• One-click buttons to add the press release to the readers Delicious bookmarks or to rate it via Digg.
• Technorati tags to improve search access via Technorati (mostly a blog-focused search engine).

As with everything in life, this blog is very much a work in progress, but so far, the early signs are encouraging. I’ll let you know how I get on with Shift’s new template.

Since this project started, I’ve been evangelising blogs as tool for enabling voluntary sector organisations to communicate with their audience and each other.

Whenever I’ve asked people about using a blog to promote their work to a wider audience, the reception I’ve got has usually been an expression of polite indifference. And then people start edging off towards the buffet.

Part of the problem with the low adoption rate of blogs in the UK voluntary sector is that many people have only vaguely heard about blogging, are too busy with day to day ‘fire-fighting’ and don’t really understand why they should invest time in an activity seen as ‘geeky’.

If you’ve ever wanted to know why blogging in the voluntary sector can be a good thing, Tom Murphy sums it up perfectly:

Advocacy: Blogs are the perfect medium for creating platforms where passionate and articulate individuals and organizations can clearly communicate their views on issues and drive the debate.

Accountability: When people give to charity, often the most powerful means of keeping them involved is to show them how their donation is being used. Blogs provide the perfect platform for demonstrating the results of fundraising.

Show and Tell: Can you think of a more powerful tool for charities that using blogs to showcase the issues they’re facing or trying to solve on a daily basis? Whether it’s aid workers blogging in a foreign country or homeless people sharing accounts of their lives.

Every other benefit of blogs: Blogs promise organizations many benefits, and alongside the first three points, they offer charities exactly the same benefits. Whether it’s about conversations, knowledge sharing, search engine optimization etc. blogs can help.

Blogging in the UK charity sector gets an occasional mention in Third Sector, usually with a nod to major players like Greenpeace and Oxfam.

However, if you want to read other voluntary sector blogs with a more local voice, check out VolResource - which lists UK blogs.

Reporting on all this comment and opinion can also be a full-time job. Personally, I subscribe to Bloglines. Instead of trying to get my ‘news’ fix from 10-15 different web sites - which can take all morning, especially if I’ve lost a link - Bloglines lets me know when there’s new content on web sites I’ve asked it to monitor.

Bloglines updates regularly and gives me a digest of new stories which I can either ignore or click on for more information. Bloglines is also web-based, which means you can check your ‘Bloglines’ from any computer connected to the Internet. Believe me, it’s easier staying up to date this way.

Elsewhere,Charityblogs - aggregates the latest posts from voluntary sector posts.

So yes, blogging in the voluntary sector can be a good thing when done right, and in later posts I’ll be showing innovative examples of blogging used by non-profits/charities to egt their message out.

The Bright Ideas: Using technology to support and involve conference in Newham was my first ‘official engagement’ as London ICT Champion.

The event featured a number of voluntary/statutory sector projects show-casing innovative uses of technology to improve the quality of life and give a voice to communities often marginalised from mainstream society.

• Newham Advanced Telecare (NeAT)
• Regen TV
• The Rix Centre

Whilst there, I got chatting to David Wilcox, who writes about using technology to enable community engagement and cross-sector partnerships. As a way of bringing conferences to life, David video-blogs speakers and particpants.  David says that most people are more than happy to talk about their project for 2 minutes or so - and it certainly a more accessible way of getting a message over without having to plough through yards of text.

You can catch David’s video-blog of myself and Microsoft’s Chris Yapp at Bright Ideas here.  I’m sorry to say that when confronted with a camera, my elevator pitch about the London ICT Champion quickly evaporated and I ended up waffling rather desperately.  I don’t know if it made any sense, but there you are.

The London Regional ChangeUp Consortium has secured £2m for London’s 39 Consortia to 2008.

Consortia projects are located in every borough and sub-region. Your very own London Region ICT Champion is set to be joined by ‘pan-London champions’ for Equalities and Workforce Development.

Projects cover:

• Equalities
• Volunteering
• Social Enterprise
• Community Development
• Workforce Development
• Local Area Agreements
• ICT
• Premises
• 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games

You can get the full list of grants here.