1) Cells will save lives

One of the things you will surely see more of is the creative use of cell phones in conflict areas to bring aid.  Earlier this year, Poland pulled off evacuating its citizens from Georgia via cell phone. You can expect more cell use for governments to communicate with civilians in a hurry, and also cell phone use by civilians in areas with poor communication to map out violence, food, medicine and to share information about what’s going on in their areas. You can check out tools like Ushahidi and see how cell phone mapping has already been used to save lives during outbreaks of violence.  Finally, while it’s a bit early yet to assess the sustainability of cell phone hacks that let you do life-saving blood tests using only your trusty Sony Ericsson, expect more of these multi-use hacks, especially in developing countries.

2) You will learn to fix it yourself

Times are tougher. Non-profits and individuals will learn to fix their own computers, cell phones, mp3 players and bikes, and other people will donate to you to teach them to do this. If you’re in charge of a community non-profit and looking for fundraising ideas that are sure to be a hit in 2009, plan to host a skills fair where your volunteers’ practical smarts will be donated on behalf of your non-profit to eager bidders.

3) We will all get more competitive

Nothing brings out ingenuity like an economic crisis - the 1930’s saw a flowering of competitions in both Europe and North America as people got motivated to get creative - and earn some rewards for doing so. Expect more small scale and local competitions that will be used to get individuals involved in big organizations through collaborative and creative problem solving.  There will also be more competitions that reward individuals for activities like commenting on blogs or for mash ups of material - and you can expect more non-profits to hack these concepts for fundraising purposes. We also predict that this is the year that it will become main-stream to get small but motivating rewards from businesses for simply being tops in your online social group. So naturally, this is also the first year that non-profits will start asking you to help by donating these rewards, along with building on your social networking power to build their strategy and funding bases.

4) European non-profits will have to learn to fundraise

In North America, most non-profits don’t rely on government grants because the government is neither a reliable nor plentiful source of funding. But the EU is a different matter - any one of the EU grants available through their funding programs can easily triple your organization’s budget,  and their calls for proposals go out consistently and often. For this reason, a number of European non-profits have fallen into the trap of chasing funding by creating special projects tailored to funding calls, while disguising administrative costs inside these special projects in order to keep their doors open.

You can expect European non-profits based on this approach to funding to crash over the next year for two reasons: the EU is pulling back on the number of grants they issue, and at the same time they are raising the amounts these grants go for to co-funding levels that are absolutely inappropriate for the budgets of most non-profits.

The European non-profits that won’t crash are the ones who are systematically embracing fundraising and building individual donations as their core support. Expect North American non-profits to lead the way in improvising new and diverse ways to fundraise using connective technology - Europeans, get set to learn to fundraise.

5) Your board will finally go online

And when your board finally discovers collaborative and project management platforms for networking, planning, writing grants together and making funding databases (we recommend Comindwork)- they will wonder why they resisted going online for so long. One of the reasons your board will go online is that most non-profits are about to experience a near-complete board turnover, courtesy the economic crisis. Specifically: people will get frustrated at the notion that board fundraising will be key to your non-profit’s survival and they will leave; people will move; people will believe they need to work more and volunteer less, older board members will go back to work part time. Your board may look a lot younger after the turnover.

And if you’re trying to break into the non-profit job market in 2009?

Here are the skills that will be hot:

- hard business skills (accounting, marketing) and obviously any kind of funding development experience. Personal fundraising on platforms like Facebook will count on your resume, so get started now.

- soft internet skills - social networking, the ability to set up collaborative platforms for donors to get involved with your non-profits, searching/selecting info that non-profits need and figuring out how to get this information across to coordinators in a usable format. Example: most coordinators don’t have time to read all the new studies that come out in a given field during the year. If you’ve got ideas on how to make this info available, accessible and summarized for coordinators, you’ve got yourself some new best friends.

- any experience or knowledge you have that’s connected to alleviating poverty, the hot topic for 2009 because of how it aligns environmental and health issues with concrete actions people will be paying a lot more attention to in their own communities, such as food security.

What’s a budget for?

Your organization functions on at least two kinds, a budget that covers your organization as a whole, and smaller program or project budgets.  If you’re writing a grant, the most convincing part of it is likely to be the budget because it shows your donor who’s in there with them, and exactly what you plan to do with the money.

Our last post talked about taking on doing a quarterly budget as your non-profit New Year’s resolution – but we discovered there’s a bit of a dearth of resources on the internet on how to actually go about making a budget in the first place. So here’s the best advice we can offer, heavily influenced by Kim Klein and npguides.org, and years of staring moodily down into our coffee in the gentle glow of an Excel spreadsheet.

Don’t Panic About Numbers

The first step is: don’t panic about numbers.  Just start by making a list of everything you need for your non-profit or program to function.  Seriously: lights, heat, telephones, internet, rent, water, office supplies, printing costs  –  the basics.  You need, obviously, people in there. Put down their job title. If you need special supplies (for example, a health program needs condoms) or travel expenses, put those down on the list.  Show the list to a trusted co-worker (preferably the office coordinator/secretary, who has arcane knowledge about the reality of your non-profit’s operating needs) and ask if you missed anything.

…But Find Out What Things Actually Cost

Ok, you have a list. Title it “Expenses”. Here is the tricky part – and it is the most important.  Do not guess what these things cost. Find out what they actually cost, and write the price next to them.  If you are estimating electricity costs for your whole non-profit, call the electric company. If you are doing estimating for a program, take a percent of your non-profits last electricity bill and put that in. If you are looking at printing costs, call the printer and ask them.  If you put in someone’s pay, put in tax and vacation costs - check your government website or ask your non-profit’s accountant for help). Add all of these together. That’s how much money you’re going to spend. Take a sip of coffee.

For income, make a second list - on this one you put down all your sources of income - foundations, sponsors, grants, donors. An easy way to do this is to look at your last financial statement or annual report. Just remember - do not guess here, either. Find out what money you can count on, and which you can’t. If you are doing a budget for your whole non-profit, make sure you know what date your grants end, and whether they’re renewable. If you are doing a project budget and you have no idea about how to make this bit work because the truth is you have no income yet, and no idea where it’s coming from - take a lesson on grantwriting and what a grant budget looks like from npguides.org.  Add up the numbers. If you have a team of volunteers involved in fundraising, you can put your fundraising goal in here (hint: your fundraising goal likely resembles the amount you need to make your income match up with your expenses). 

Preliminary budget, you are finished.  If you did this as part of a team, start slapping each other on the back. If you did this on your own, start shipping it around to co-workers to see if they can spot problems.  You will probably find the income part of your budget shows you need to attract new donors or grants. This is how funding developers set up their goals for the year - by starting with a budget.

You’re on your way to surviving 2009!

One last thing. Budgets are fluid - this is why we talked in our last post about checking them on a monthly or quarterly basis to avoid nasty surprises. The budget you’ve just done is a first step to getting on top of your finances, but expect it to change fast as you plan fundraising, discover new costs and get feedback from the rest of your non-profit. In this spirit, Kim Klein teaches a really useful exercise on budget making in Fundraising for Social Change that involves making three budgets: a dream budget (super ambitious), a worst case scenario budget (where only the bare essentials needed to keep your non-profit open are included) and an average budget, which merges these two. This exercise lets you practice predicting income, and lets you get comfortable with the kinds and amounts of money your non-profit is dealing with. You can access some of her work online here, in our last post.  

“New Year’s Resolutions” Original Photo by Flickr user Ian Turton, CC Licensed

1) I will back up my computer every two weeks.

Computers crash, even in the new year. Back them up.

2) I will label my grant drafts systematically.

Can’t find the latest version of your grant? Try looking under “Important Grant Final”. Sorry, make that ”SuperExtraFinal2″…

Alternatively, promise yourself that this year, you’re setting up your file system so that anyone can understand it, including you. Label your drafts by name and date (Rockefeller 12.12.2008) or by number (Rockefeller 1). Save the final draft to a file marked “Final”  and save your future you the hassle of hours plowing through superextrafantasticfinal…

3) While I’m at it, I will give the computers on our non-profit server names that make sense. 

Quick, is your foundations database on “Bob”, “Hotty” or “F102″? Consider renaming all the computers in your non-profit’s network for the purpose they serve or the files they hold - it’s a lot easier to go looking for information when you can see what you’re looking at. To do this, go into your network and right-click for renaming options and assign your computer its new easy-to-understand name. (You’ll be glad to know the foundations database is now on Fundraiser, formerly known as Bob)

4) I will have a funding folder.

In it, you will put photocopies or copies of the items grants commonly request from non-profits. That is; a copy of your most recent Annual Report, an audited financial statement, a list of your board members, proof that you are indeed a non profit (for example, your charter and registration number),  a program summary and budget that illustrates clearly who your project’s partners are, and one or two well chosen examples of press attention. Staple an envelope to this file containing a cd of all of these items.  This way, you can print or photocopy them when you need them, as opposed to discovering at the last, panicky second that there are no more annual reports…

5) I will do a quarterly review of our non-profit’s/my program’s financial situation

If you are the executive director, funding director or you’re on the board you should know exactly how much money your non profit has and how much it needs. A quarterly budget for 2009 will help you stay on track and avoid nasty surprises. (I have worked at two non-profits where the nasty surprise after the first quarterly budget was that we were over ten thousand dollars in debt. Surprise!) Program directors are responsible for smaller sums, but you still should strive for a quarterly budget - for one thing, it allows you to illustrate clearly to donors, volunteers or board members exactly where the money is going. For another, it lets you know how much funding your program needs for the end of the year. 

If you aren’t doing budgeting because you don’t know how to, the best guide I have ever seen to making a budget (and checking it on a quarterly basis) is in “Fundraising For Social Change” by Kim Klein - page 99 in the above book link gives you a taste of how to make an event budget, but the real budget advice isn’t available on Google Books’ version. So pony up and turn to p 349 when your copy arrives, and enjoy knocking this resolution off your list.

Happy New Year from Social Ch@nge!

The Rasterbator!
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized, pixelated pictures from any of your jpgs. Upload an image to the website, print the resulting multi-page pdf file, and assemble the pages into a massive poster. The final product can be up to 20 meters in size! Just imagine - Obama across your living room wall! Or Sarah Palin - whatever works.

http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

Wordle
Wordle is a toy that creates “word clouds” from text that you enter - copy and paste your latest manifesto, for example. The clouds are formatted to give greater emphasis to words that appear more frequently in the original text. Then you can tweak your clouds to make them pretty - different fonts, layouts, color schemes.  Your can share the final cloud with others, and it’s oddly fascinating to see what others have created.

http://www.wordle.net/

Website Maps

This site creates a beautiful map of any website that you enter.  Like Wordle, this verges on the edge of being useful - but mainly creates great geek art for your cubicle.

http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

I don’t know, but I came across a job posting the other day that seemed to sum it up for me: a non-profit was looking for a “social media curator.”

Now, I’m a big fan of museums so the idea of “curator” resonates with me. A curator, in the traditional sense, is someone who is responsible for both preserving and promoting a collection of physical artifacts. The artifacts were brought together from a broad range of places - and no artifact was created by the museum itself.

A social media curator assembles pieces of information from across the web and presents it to an audience. Of course, you could call also label this job as an “online editor” - but I don’t think so.

It used to be that an editor composed a whole out of a bunch of disparate pieces - but usually using content that was proprietary. So the editor of the New York Times would only use stories by their reporters, (or purchased through a service like Reuters.)

In the age of the internet, this has gone sideways. A senior VP of the New York Times, in fact, recently commented that “the role of the online editor is changing from someone who curates the content of his/her particular vehicle to curating all of the content on the web that is of interest to his audience and making that content readily accessible.”

Note her use of the word “curate” - which brings us back to my original point. Facebook goddesses, extreme bloggers, mad tweeters: your next job might be as a social media curator.

As a Warsaw resident, I got super excited about this. I thought - hurray, a chance for Poland to access all of the issues around climate change. Take recycling. This is a concept that has not really taken off in Warsaw: public bins are available everywhere, but only to recycle glass and not for other basic elements like paper. What’s more, few Gen Xers or baby boomers recycle because it’s seen as dirty and a pain in the butt - which it is since you have to lug your recycling for blocks to the bins after the one door-to-door program was shut down earlier this year. Now, before you imagine that this is because Poland is somehow underdeveloped or uninformed - consider that nearly the entire population listens to the radio and buys at least one paper every day, that we are all on the internet and that there are two cell phones for every person. If you want to get a message out, UN, now is your chance!

And they are trying.

Conference websites have to be clear, pretty, interactive and  - unlike a normal non-profit website which caters to a target audience - useful to thousands of stakeholders with radically different needs.  To this end, the UN Climate Change conference website has some really good elements for members of the public looking to get informed about climate change. For example, they’ve organized very complex issues into the category of ‘Essential Background’ and an ‘Issues Quickfinder’ that makes it easy to get up to speed. They also include background on recent climate change conferences and set out their priorities clearly on the homepage.

Unsurprisingly, their efforts to make all of these issues intelligible are interspersed with glacier-sized chunks of jargon and a labyrinthine ring of links.  Worse, they’re using social media only as a transmitter, not for interactivity: this means that you’re welcome to watch a press release hosted by Youtube, but no discussion is invited.

It doesn’t have to be like this - for the last few years a main feature of the International AIDS conference websites (the latest was in Mexico) has been a ‘Global Village‘ part of the site for citizen organizing, as well as extensive site for youth to organize together.  Still, the Climate Change conference has just started, and so far I’m mostly impressed with how the UN has coordinated with the media to get their message out over Polish radio, media and the internet.

The shocker is that week’s loser is the usually web-savvy social change organisation Avaaz.  Two weeks before the climate change conference they sent out a message to all their Polish members, asking for help with logistics in Poznan. We offered to volunteer translate over the internet, or to translate in person in Poznan. No response. We went on their website to see what they were doing around the conference and what other activities we could get involved in online. No response! All the climate change info they have up right now is about their work in 2007. Where’s the community discussion, the petition, the outreach between countries, the face on a global problem?  Since when is the UN doing a better job of getting personal online than Avaaz?

A nice story, but according to a study of his campaign finances, not exactly true. And the truth is more interesting.

The reality is that an estimated 2.5 million donors gave contributions with an average amount of about $62 each. This is significant - no denying. But these small donors were active in the last campaign as well. Part of what made Obama different was the scale of the operation - he managed to reach about the same number of small donors as all of the 2004 candidates combined (2.0 to 2.8 million.)

But what’s really interesting to us is the way that a particular group of donors behaved, called “mid-range repeaters.” These donors were part of the online community created by the Obama campaign - they were engaged, plugged in. They started off with small contributions, but then kept giving repeatedly over the course of the campaign. Obama’s team was able to use the internet to reach out to this same group of about 200,000 supporters again and again, both for volunteer help and financial contributions. These “repeaters” made a difference - about 27% of Obama’s funds came from donors in a middle range ($201-$999), and more than half of these started out small and kept giving.

Mind you, very few of this group ended up in the top group of givers - only about 13,000 of them gave more than $1,000 in their cumulative contributions to become “large donors.” And large donors were critical. About 47% of Obama’s money came from large donors. McCain, on the other hand, relied on large donors for 60% of his money. But because Obama’s 47% was based on a larger total, he raised more money in absolute terms. Size does matter.

What’s the lesson for non-profit fundraisers? EVen if you have a base of small donors, you should consider how to turn them into mid-range repeaters. How? Clearly, engagement using some form of internet strategy is a key. It helps if you have a clear campaign, and an urgent call to action. For one approach, check out the rapid donor cultivation strategy from Common Knowledge.

And now we promise - no more Obama posts. At least for a little while.