Organizations - Actions/Activities List
Access Privileges
PUBLIC ONE-TIME SHORT EVENTS. Examples: "An evening with _(famous person)__"; Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream symposiums; movie nights
NEEDS:
- online registration;
- ability to collect registration fees for paid events;
- ability to communicate with others who have signed up for the event
- ability for meeting host to communicate with registrants
- carpooling organizer
- ability for organizational sponsors to collaborate on event logistics (when there's a good speaker in town, organize several events around his/her appearance)
- ability to view events for many organizations within a specified geographical area; ability for each organization to enter in event data without a central manager
PLANNING MEETINGS. Examples: gathering of planners for Sustainable World Summit; monthly gathering of Symposium facilitators in a local area
CONFERENCES. Examples: Sonoma county Smart Growth conference; Sustainable Enterprise conference at Sonoma State University
[Dave's note: I don't think wiserearth.org should be used as the primary IT platform for conferences... just my thought]
- Day long events with multiple speakers
- Plenaries with break out groups; sometimes just plenaries
NEEDS:
- Need to find ways to get those not "in the know" to come
- Need more effective marketing
- Conflicting events: what else is going on so were not scheduling a conflict with other good events
CLASS SERIES. Examples: Nine-month (one day a month) "Leadership Training for a Sustainable Future" class series; weekly classes in activism
Needs:
- ability for class leaders to communicate with participants
- ability for participants to organize carpools
- ability for participants to collaborate on class projects
GROUP COLLABORATION. Example: LIFEE wants to be able to make Fellows accomplishments more visible -- what they've done and what projects they are working on (to collaborate and connect (I can get help from them), be more transparent (break out of silos), inspire others (I can do in my town what they did in their town), get acknowledgement); Symposium facilitators want to discuss different aspects of the Symposium (content, logistics, etc.); Directory of people interested in a particular organization or event
Needs:
- Profile content that is not static, and is updated by each individual (rather than having staff calling everyone to update their info). Issue: Paper directory is static, quickly out of date,
- Forum (Issue: need to have someone moderate topics so that the forum doesn't get cluttered and difficult to navigate)
- Privacy: each person needs to be able to control who sees what
- Connected to Planning Meetings (above): ability to set up planning meetings and work groups around a particular task or event
PROMOTION.
Needs:
- Allow people to sign up to be informed when a particular organization or group posts a new event (regardless of locale)
- Allow people to sign up to be informed about all events happening within a particular locale
-- What keeps people engaged? What can be done so that people aren't required to "check in" periodically to find out what's going on (the data is "pushed" out to people)?
-- Marketing/filling seats: want to more effectively communicate, promote, and get people to come to public events
-- Individual keeping informed: Fellow of nine-month program kept hearing about events that had already happened, and they would have liked to have gone
- Want centralized place to find out what everyone's doing
- Make it as local as possible (I define local -- e.g. distance from zip code?)
- Calendar of events - easily updated, but effective at marketing
-- Levels of event coordination
- If you want to know what's going on in your area, go here
- Offer links that let people go deeper into a particular event
- In depth 1: Volunteer detail, be able to volunteer for specific area, where the person in charge will be alerted
- In depth 2: Post event follow-on, recap of workshops; pay a fee to see/hear what happened; Create community behind event - people connect & want to be informed about who's doing what next (often people come up to me after a conference and they want to help, but time moves on; helpful to have some kind of automatic reminder when events happen.
-- Would like to be able to collaborate across multiple organizations - each organization has goals, some of which are similar
- Some cases there are opportuniteis to collaborate that we can't see
- Would be great to have some kind of "Sonoma County Sustainable Council" - coordinating and facilitating all of what's happening, helping create and nourish alliances and partnerships
-- Would like to spread ideas on and getting support for policy issues. Need a way of sharing an idea that people can collaborate on; help to create stronger proposals and action plans, stronger because more people are involved
-- Need ability to have non-techies use IT: withough knowing how to "Yahoo" or "Wiki"
- have collaborative documents go through refinement process to get to a point where it's good
- start own workgroups on own initiative
-- IT Issues for nonprofits:
-- Big issue: things don't talk to one another: spreadsheet of constituents doesn't connect with database of constituents and donors doesn't connect with Word document list of constituents. Multiple places to update data, big headache. Islands of automation.
- Systems are cobbled together, multiple databases, hard to keep website up to date w/ latest info
- How maintain data, even with perfect system? Staffing is a problem. How to "push out" responsibility for updating data to constituencies
-- Getting people engaged and into action
- takes a lot of time for me to get my information in
- takes a lot of time to review information of others
- ease of use is huge -- needs to be as easy as online shopping (no training required)
- big concern: risk of creating more isolation -- people behind computers too much already?
-- Too many tools, websites - clutter, cost, implementaion, learning curves, server/equipment cost
- what are the best tools for the money? Is facebook/myspace/etc. good umbrella tool to use?
- how do I streamline IT
-- Planning/Staffing
- need IT consulting and tech plan -- problem is that it's costly, and *nothing* in budget.
- don't have the staff to do IT properly;
- volunteers cause more problems when working on databases; end up having duplicates, incomplete data, gobbledygook. Systems must either be well designed and documented for volunteer work, otherwise has to be done in house and kept under control.
