Strategic Online Communication for Nonprofits

The Upleaf Blog

We speak so much about “nonprofits” and all the great work done by the sector, but few of us pause to reflect on the nature of the term we’re using– and how it might even be undermining our work!

I was reminded of this in a recent meeting with the Executive Director of the Albuquerque Community Foundation, Randy Royster, who corrected my use of the term “nonprofit” and urged me to replace it with “social profit”.

But of course!!!  I had never even stopped to think about it.  How can we call the tireless, dedicated work of this sector “nonprofit” when so many people ultimately benefit from it?

In many other countries this same sector is referred to as “organizaciones sin fines de lucro” or “organisations sans but lucratif” (literally “organizations without lucrative goals/ends”) which somehow seems to do a bit more justice to the nature of the work by setting it apart from the many who seek to profit financially from their work.

By contrast “nonprofit” simply sounds like no one benefits.

After working for years with international social profit organizations outside the U.S. I had never even heard of the “nonprofit” vs “social profit” debate.

I did a google search of “social profit” and found an excellent article by Claire Gaudiani in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, that does justice to the issue.  She outlines the implications of such a name change for the sector, as well as for the “social investors” who support it.

I also saw that several organizations have adopted the term, but unfortunately those are few and far between– most of the sector continues to use “nonprofit”.

Great food for thought.  Let’s start making the transition to “social profit” and give our sector a boost!

Posted by Elizabeth Beachy, Upleaf Co-Founder

New technologies are revolutionizing the way nonprofits do business.  Constituent relationship management systems, interactive websites, mass email applications, online giving forms and many other tools are helping nonprofits become more efficient and reach more people.

A good example of this is Acceso Hispano, an initiative of the nonprofit Self Reliance Foundation.  For years Acceso Hispano had been relying on a Microsoft Access database to store service provider contact information and field calls to its toll-free bilingual information and referral services.  Email lists were kept separately to maintain communication with key constituencies, and the project was producing a regular printed newsletter.

Acceso Hispano’s Director, Maite Arce, wanted to better engage constituent communities, expand the database of Hispanic-serving providers, and create networks to directly reach Latino communities across the country.  But her budget was limited and her small team was already overloaded trying to respond to a high volume of calls to the toll-free bilingual hotline.

Maite enlisted Upleaf to come up with a cost-effective strategy that would help Acceso Hispano reach more people without requiring additional staff.

Upleaf’s response was to:

1) Build an educational online platform (http://www.accesohispano.org) to inform and engage (a) Acceso Hispano’s target population; (b) stakeholders; (c) service providers; and (d) community-based promoters.  The interactive website shares news, resources, community stories and testimonies, and drives exchange with communities through a discussion forum, text messaging capacity, and social media mashups.

2) Create a user-friendly searchable online community service directory (http://recursos.accesohispano.org) so that people in need across the country can locate nearby Hispanic-serving providers.  The scalable community service directory lets providers to create their own listings by filling out a simple, standardized online form, thereby significantly reducing the amount of staff time required to maintain the directory.

3) Customize a constituent relationship management (CRM) system (Salesforce nonprofit edition) to administer all of Acceso Hispano’s projects, campaigns, newsletters and contracts.  The CRM helps organize, automate, track and evaluate interactions with service providers, partners, donors, media, and the Hispanic community.  All calls to the toll-free hotline are now documented through the system, which captures caller information, tracks referrals, and generates automatic follow-up emails.  The CRM system also streamlines project management by helping coordinate and supervise tasks across the team.

These three tools have boosted Acceso Hispano’s capacity to serve the public and enabled the small team to engage more community service providers and other partners. Individuals and organizations are now reaching out from across the country to collaborate with Acceso Hispano. The directory of service providers is growing by itself, and the volume of people served per week has increased.

All of this was made possible by using new open source technologies and by taking advantage of an array of discounts and in-kind donations of software licenses and services available to 501c3 organizations. Thanks to these the total implementation cost was less than that of an administrative assistant’s salary.  Better yet, these technologies are designed to accommodate growth and will require little to no new investments as Acceso Hispano continues to expand.

Web-based technologies are revolutionizing the way nonprofits do business.  We can now communicate instantaneously with beneficiaries through content management systems and social media.  We can manage stakeholder relations more efficiently with CRM tools; access new tools and best practices through listservs; and even raise money online.

But until recently one of the greatest weaknesses of our sector had not yet been addressed by technology in any comprehensive way: Impact Evaluation.

Some technologies (Salesforce and others) have helped nonprofits streamline process evaluation measures and track progress against key benchmarks.  But few tools that address the three key components of project evaluation (performance measures, outcome measures and impact evaluation) have made their way into the mainstream nonprofit circuit.

A recent study funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and implemented by FSG Social Impact Advisors entitled Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact, reviewed several interesting technology initiatives with evaluation implications for the entire nonprofit sector.

Often donors fund specific projects, request a report from the grantee, and the process of tracking social change stops there.  According to the report, “The most fundamental concern is that this focus on individual grants and isolated nonprofit initiatives undercuts the sector’s ability to solve complex social problems.”

The study looks at three types of platforms that have recently been developed to address that concern:

1. Shared Measurement Platforms – allow organizations to choose from a set of measures within their fields and use web-based tools to inexpensively collect, analyze and report on their performance or outcomes;
2. Comparative Performance Systems – require all participants within a field to report on the same measures using identical definitions and methodologies;
3. Adaptive Learning Systems – engage a large number of organizations working on different aspects of a single complex issue in an ongoing, facilitated process that establishes comparative performance metrics. These systems also help coordinate efforts and enable participants to learn from each other.

Each type of system has its advantages and is more adapted to small nonprofits, donors, or community stakeholders respectively.  But all of these systems have the capacity to transform the nonprofit sector because they pool data to better understand the big picture. Each system helps collectively share field-specific lessons learned, and allows donors to reward programs with good results.  They also help allign goals among different organizations and create a collaborative approach to problem solving that enriches the work of every participant.

The great news is that some of these systems are now available for nonprofits to adopt, or for entire communities to tailor to their needs.  One of them, Pulse, will even become available through the Salesforce.com AppExchange near the end of 2009.

The following list includes some of the systems featured in the report:

• The Cultural Data Project (www.culturaldata.org)
• Success Measures Data System (www.successmeasures.org)

• Strive (www.strivetogether.org)
• IRIS (www.iris-standards.org)
• MERIT from NPOKI (www.npoki.org)

To learn more about the various web-based evaluation systems and their benefits, please read the full report:

Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact

Posted by Elizabeth Beachy, Upleaf Co-Founder