Failure To Launch

Although we are a consulting firm, it’s not uncommon for us to do real work at client sites. Today I arrived early at a Chicago university where I replaced a staff position 8 years ago – I’m actually the senior person in the Development office here now.

For the past 11 months, in addition to managing the software used for Development and Alumni Affairs, I have been filling in for the gift entry operator who retired at the end of May, 2006. I had two free hours this morning, and I was on a mission -- I came in do some gift entry and acknowledgments.

I taxied out of the house on time, got my engines started by booting up my computer, and then…. Failure to launch.

As Murphy’s Law dictates, there has been a power outage in the server room, and the server on which my application resides is down. There is a delicious irony in the fact that when the server has no power, I also am powerless – I can figure out most any software issue that comes my way, but hardware… not my department.

In a university setting, there are generally larger issues that create hardware problems, because there is so much more hardware. But for smaller nonprofits, hardware problems tend to come from lack of planning and budgeting.

When we talk to nonprofit professionals about implementing software solutions, one thing we always encourage them to think about it the issue of ongoing budgeting for technology. When you buy fundraising software, for example, it’s very likely that you will pay annual maintenance in the amount of 20-25% of the purchase price of the software (unless you license software or use an on-line solution, in which case you will pay monthly for the life of the application.)

There is more to consider than just software support, though. It’s the job of software vendors to continue to develop and improve their products. Because it’s likely that this development is taking place using current technology, you need plan to keep up.

The older your hardware gets, the more likely it is that your software performance will be affected. And many nonprofits are just not in a position to suddenly have to replace their entire network of computers.

To avoid this scenario, plan ahead: budget to replace some percentage of your hardware every year. Try to budget to replace your server at least every 3 years.

We work with many software applications, and many of them work perfectly well on older technology. But I don’t think that many of us can afford to count on that, because if we do, when the day arrives that our technology does not support our software, we’re as powerless to be productive as I am with my downed server this morning.

Living Memory

I told myself that I would not post to this blog more than once or twice a month, but I had an experience tonight that changed my mind. I went to see a special performance of The Diary of Anne Frank at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Tonight’s event was a collaboration between Steppenwolf (www.steppenwolf.org), the Ravinia Festival (www.ravinia.org) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (www.ushmm.org). In the playbill, the artistic director’s story of the decision to produce this play included these words:

The people who hold the event of the holocaust in living memory are passing. It becomes attendant upon all of us to remember and to educate our next generation to the memory.

Theater can keep memory alive in a very personal way, and that is invaluable. Having seen tonight’s performance, I want everyone to see it because I don’t know how anyone could see it and not be moved, not be changed by it. But I was struck anew with the little piece of preservation of which I am a very small part.

The living memory of the holocaust will pass, as will the living memory of 9/11… of Apartheid… of every human tragedy. The living memory will pass, inevitably, yet we will remember.

Nonprofits understand the importance of remembering. Here in Chicago, for example, a few weeks after Anne Frank leaves the Steppenwolf stage, James Conlon will lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this summer in the works of Alexander Zemlinsky as part of the “Breaking the Silence” series highlighting music that was suppressed by the Third Reich.

It’s been said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Nearly every Jewish temple I pass has a large sign in front – “Never Again”. We cannot afford to forget.

For those who do not have access to theater or museums or concerts, there is another way.

Technology – seemingly the most impersonal of tools – keeps memory alive.

For many people, software is boring or geeky; technology is alien or geeky; the internet is frightening or… okay, geeky. I’m willing to stipulate that there is a geek component here. I’m even willing to stipulate that there’s really nothing “sexy” about software, unless of course you are a self-described geek. Software is nuts and bolts. And we need nuts and bolts to build on. CJW Consulting is really about making sure you have the right nuts and bolts to do your building.

Building on the nuts and bolts allows you to do so much more. Every web site begins with nuts and bolts. Tonight, a director from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum spoke before the performance, and she mentioned a recent exhibit at the museum about the writings of Anne Frank. And she mentioned that you can still see the exhibit – online.

The internet will keep alive the memory of the horror that was the holocaust, and so much more. Software archives will keep alive Anne Frank’s writings, and allow millions worldwide to see it and be touched… and remember. Imaging software will allow people to see these historical documents and photographs. All from nuts and bolts made up of 1s and 0s.

It’s a lot to take in. I believe that if there is to be an end to the insanities that humans inflict upon one another, it will come about largely from the work of the nonprofit community. And I believe that it will come with the help of technology, bringing us all closer to one another.

By the way – software also allows you to buy tickets or books online. Go to the Amazon.com website for a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, or find a production to see. Do both, if you can.

Never again!

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

May tends to be a period of looking forward and back for me, as it is a month marked by anniversaries. Saturday was my 7th wedding anniversary, and May 15th, 2007 marks the 14th anniversary of the founding of CJW Consulting & Services and the beginning of our 15th year serving the nonprofit community. And it was somewhere around May 1, 1984 that I began working at a nonprofit in Chicago, where I was asked to investigate fundraising software and the journey that led me here began. (I’d love to say I was six years old at that time, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t fly.)

When I started working in a Development office, our fundraising data was maintained on a Texas Instruments mini-computer which had removable 5 megabyte hard drives. It was a common occurrence to have to change drives before you could save a record or document, as the removable drives were forever filling up. We were also using a dot-matrix printer and an Accounts Receivable software application – not exactly custom-made for the needs of fundraisers.

While it was challenging and rewarding for me to make this software do things it was not designed to do, it was far from an ideal situation.

It felt like a dream come true, 18 months later, to have a personal computer with a 10 megabyte hard drive and a daisy wheel printer, along with software that had been designed for fundraisers. Sure, reality occasionally intruded. The daisy wheel printer, for example, was not quite all it could have been.

(Daisy wheel printers were similar to electric typewriters. Instead of the metal ball containing letters and symbols found in typewriters, the printers had a plastic “wheel” – a small circle with spokes attached to it. It used continuous-feed paper which we would load into the printer and arrange so that it would fold neatly as letters were printing.)

I will forever remember the day that I was processing nearly 700 letters to people who had been invited to an event and did not attend. The first sentence of the letter began “We are so sorry that you were not able to attend…”

I queued up the paper, edited the letter text for typos, got the print job started and as soon as I verified that the paper was folding properly as the letters were fed through, I left the room knowing that the printing would take several hours, so I could take care of other things elsewhere.

When I went back to check the print progress 2 hours later, I found that the spoke containing the lower case letter “T” had broken off the daisy wheel, so I had several hundred letters which began, “We are so sorry ha …”

The fundraising software also had a few quirks that I needed to learn as I went along. For example, in my training, I learned that you could assign shortcuts to values for Prefix and Suffix. To save time, I assigned a shortcut value of “1” to the Prefix “Mr. and Mrs.” and manually added that value to over 2000 records. Then I realized that the software had built values for salutation that used the shortcut instead of the translation: “1 Weissman, instead of Mr. and Mrs. Weissman.”

Ah, those were the days…

After all the months I had spent longing for a fundraising software application and a better, faster printer with nicer-looking output, I was thrilled when we got those things… That is, of course, until I wanted more and better, which happened almost immediately.

It’s the technical equivalent of the American Dream.

As soon as you can do more than you could before, you’re going to want to do more than you can now. That’s a given. The only real question is whether or not your software can keep up.

We’d love to hear from you about this issue. Is your software keeping up with your needs? Are there things you’d like to be able to do that seem impossible with your current technology? Things you need to do but can’t, due to software or cost limitations? Do you have software stories – good or bad – that you’d like to share?

To leave your thoughts, click on the “comments” link at the bottom of this post. We’ll publish as many as we can.

Beginning the Blog

Before deciding to start a blog on the CJW website, I did some research – I went to the Wikipedia site (www.wikipedia.com). After reading the “blog” entry, I determined that a CJW blog would be a good thing, but I knew I didn't want a vlog, a linklog, a Phlog, a moblog, and I especially didn't want a Splog.

A visit to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, will tell you what all those things are. When you get to the reference to “phlog”, there will be a link to take you to the definition of Gopher Protocol so that you'll not only know that “phlog” is a type of blog hosted on the gopher protocol, you'll also know what the Gopher Protocol is.

Wikipedia is a great resource. For those who haven't already visited this site, I'll let them introduce themselves:

Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. With rare exceptions, its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites on the Internet.

Here's the part I like best:

Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which has created an entire family of free content projects. On all these projects, you are welcome to be bold and edit articles yourself, contributing knowledge as you see fit in a collaborative way.

This incredible resource, which is increasingly becoming the go-to reference point for millions of people all over the world, one of the top 5 visited websites anywhere, is supported by a non-profit organization.

The Wikimedia Foundation (www.wikimedia.org) website home page begins this way:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Is there a better example of the concept of Philanthropy as Community?

I recently joined the board of AFP Chicago, the local chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. Our vision statement embraces the idea that philanthropy builds community:

The Association of Fundraising Professionals—Chicago Chapter will be valued as the indispensable professional development resource for fundraisers, and by the broader public as Chicagoland's leading champion of philanthropy as a force for building community.

Lest you think that this is a concept unique to AFP, a Wikipedia article on Philanthropy contains this paragraph:

Some believe that philanthropy can be a means to build community by growing community funds and giving vehicles. When communities see themselves as being resource rich instead of asset poor, the community is in a better position to solve community problems.

Nonprofits build, strengthen and support communities large and small, and philanthropy provides the resources for them to do it. Philanthropy as community? Definitely!

Software as community? Maybe not so much. But software is a hugely valuable tool. You can't build a house without a hammer, and you can't build a development program without information about donors and prospective donors. I've always contended that there is a natural marriage between software and fundraisers, despite the reality that fundraising is extremely personal and the perception that software is completely impersonal.

And again – software runs Wikipedia, a website operated by a nonprofit that wants every single human to be able to share in the sum of all knowledge.

If you haven't already, take a spin through Wikipedia. Type in pretty much anything in the search box and see what comes up. As I have been writing this, I've looked up the name of the town in which I grew up (Skokie, Illinois), my high school (Evanston Township High School), the Chicago neighborhood which contained the hospital in which I was born (Edgewater), the name of Agatha Christie's first book (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), and Matthew Garber, the 8-year-old who played Michael Banks in the film version of Mary Poppins in 1964 (sadly, I learned that he died at age 21 of hepatitis.)

Here are some things that I couldn't find in Wikipedia:

DonorPerfect or the company that sells it, Softerware
Results/plus or the company that sells it, Metafile Information Systems Exceed or the company that sells it, Telosa Software, eTapestry, Tessitura (there is a listing for Tessitura, which is a musical term, but it does not reference the software), Donor2, … any listings for fundraising software or the companies that provide them except Blackbaud.

The information is out there, of course. You can Google fundraising software and get 4,150,000 hits (I just did that). You can visit sites like TechSoup and see if there is a forum for whatever product you are interested in. If not, you can start one.

Or you can come here.

Your comments will direct this blog to a large extent. Let us know what you’d like to find here, and as long as it relates in some way to software and nonprofits, we’ll do our best to get it to you.