Barbara Moratek of the Ivete Foundation – beware
Last week I received an email from Barbara Moratek of the Ivete Foundation with a very simple and seemingly genuine email. The subject line was "Information for prospective donors" and the content said:
"Would you have additional information for prospective donors or volunteers other than what is on your website? Thank you in advance.
Warm regards,
Barb
Barbara Moratek
Vice President, Director of Grant Programs
Ivete Foundation
Phone-
Fax- 800.397.7205
Web- www.ivetefoundation.org"
Now, the lack of a phone number should have been an indicator. My work email is hardly out there, either, and certainly not in a development capacity. But I passed it onto our development staff to see if they could help her. Fortunately, several other random people in our org got the same email. So, development smartly did some research and it turns out it was a scam. I was surprised and frankly, bothered, by the fact that someone would specifically target nonprofits. Gross.
Good help and software is hard to find and assess
My head has been spinning this past week. I've been on a mission to help my org sort out a technology problem. Can we get a one-stop-shop hosted, yet fully customizable (i.e. template mods and form field additions) transaction platform that includes event registration, donations (one-time and recurring, preferably) and a store? Oh, yeah, and it should be affordable and not lock us into a contract. We're a nonprofit, so we can demand these things... right?
Well, the good news is that there are options, but it's been so difficult to find. GiftTool seems to do what we want, but I'm nervous that there hasn't been much use and we can't play with it ourselves before signing on the dotted line (only remote demo from a sales dude). There's Click and Pledge, Shopify (doesn't really do events), NEON, MemberClicks and some others. But how are we supposed to know who to trust? What's good? What have others used? It's an incredibly labor-intensive process.
Well, I've got a few thoughts on the matter and am hoping to help implement something that will solve this problem, so I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you've got any thoughts on these tools, they're welcome!
Oh, and one more thing. After sending out feelers about this problem to some tech listservs, I also sent out a feeler for a freelance developer. Surprisingly, no one responded to this call either. I'm wondering if my delivery's off, I haven't hit the right group of people, or there's just a lack of flash developer freelancers out there. The hunt continues!
Public domain photos in Flickr
Thank you Berkman Center for pointing me to a most excellent collection of archival photos from the Smithsonian brought to us by the good folks at public.resource.org. What a great resource for nonprofits!
Life is good when you’re early
I'm at the airport. It's 9:44am. My flight doesn't leave until 11am. I've already been here for 45 minutes. I have time issues. I can't help but be early. Thank you infrastructure.
I'm going to the NTEN conference in DC. It's purported to be a massive nonprofit geek session, which should be interesting. I've attended web conferences before, some veering more toward the tech, others more toward design and usability. I've attended a web conference for UN organizations, too, which probably most closely resembles this one.
I can't help but feel that this one's different though. There's something about grouping a bunch of professionals who would normally be paid exorbitant sums of money for what they do, but choose the nobler path for ethical reasons. And the financial cost isn't the only risk in being in the nonprofit tech world. Because there's still a lot of catch-up for nonprofits in this sphere, often we are lone evangelists, struggling to get our voice heard over the (also very important) programming and development needs. Fortunately, the gain is so huge.
But I digress... this is my first wireless-blogging-in-an-airport post. I'm excited that it took me less time than I thought to get to the airport from where I was through a pleasant trip on public transportation during rush hour. I'm excited that it took me no time and very little money to hop online and type away. I'm excited that security was even painless. I'm excited because there was a 5 year old girl who came up to my computer to bang on the keyboard (I believe these kids have computer programming wired into their DNA now). And I'm excited that Wordpress has a Save and Continue Editing button so I didn't lose any of my changes.
Life is good... and now I can hop offline just as easily, hop on the plane, and be in DC in no time. Life isn't just good. Life is too good. Which is why for me, working for a nonprofit is important. It should be this good for everyone.