There’s an App for That – Ticketing gets Social

JCA, Inc. teamed with seven partner organizations and the Tessitura Network with the vision of building a social media ticketing app. The resulting app, TN Social Ticketing, allows for a seamless Tessitura-based purchase path and social ticketing experience from within Facebook. Allison Fippinger served as the JCA Project Manager for the development phase of the app.

There is a running joke in my circles: if it’s on Facebook, it must be true. Like the best of jokes, it includes a kernel of truth, a nod at our own weaknesses, and a bit of cheek. The truism of the joke, however, has grown with the ever-increasing ubiquity of Facebook. Legitimacy used to come with a website; now you need a fan page.

For a forward-thinking arts organization, Facebook presents a wealth of opportunity.

Listen in: Hot Technology Topics Nonprofits Are Talking About in 2012

Now that we are one month into 2012, I wanted to take a moment to share the top technology trends and topics we are hearing about from the CFOs, CIOs and CEOs of leading nonprofit organizations.

Unblocking the Enterprise project backlog: As a result of the 2008/2009 recession and the subsequent funding uncertainties, many nonprofits put off investing in core technology projects. However, in 2011, we began to see more and more organizations giving the green light for major enterprise-wide projects that had been stalled since the recession.  We predict that this trend will continue to gain steam in 2012.  As a sense of stability has gradually returned, the backlog of critical projects has begun to loosen.  For example,

Make your website perform!

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s website accounts for more than half of the organization’s revenue, and 85% of new patron interactions start on the web site. Clearly, the web site is crucial to OSF’s revenue and success. OSF’s web site was hosted and maintained by a long-time vendor who controlled the web site programming and server environment. OSF’s IT Director, Bruce Wand, made a strategic decision to empower OSF with more ownership and accountability for their site. As a result, Bruce was on the hunt for a new vendor who could act as a true development partner; someone who could coordinate and collaborate with his in-house development team.

The web site had been stable for four years and had not been significantly changed or moved since its launch. Any changes had been handled by the vendor. Though the web site was reliable, this meant that no one at OSF had intimate knowledge of the web site’s configuration or programming. There was some uncertainty about what was ‘under the hood,’ which presented a unique challenge.

Go Noles? No Goes?

This post describes 15 hours of my life between Dec. 13 at 7:30 p.m. and Dec. 14 at 10:30 a.m.

Let me start by saying I am a Florida State Seminole.  My mother was a Seminole.  And last night my firstborn son was accepted into the Florida State University Honors College.  Go Noles.

I am extremely disappointed with my Alma Mater — with the treatment my son and I, and all the other hopeful applicants and their families, received at the hands of FSU’s website over the last 12+ hours.  I hope as I tell the story we can all take away some lessons. 

Estate Attorney’s on the Phone… Now What?

We all have gotten those calls to our offices – the attorney letting us know our organization is a named beneficiary of someone’s estate, now in probate.  It is a time of profound gratitude, knowing someone has included us in their final acts of generosity.  And it is also often the only time to get some important information from the probate attorney.  Once they have notified our organization in the most basic way, they move on, and getting a return phone call can be tricky.  And then we wait in the dark for a check to arrive, often a year or more later.

So, to make the most of that call, I find it helpful to have a quick checklist list of questions pre-printed and in a handy spot.  Here are the questions I always ask:

“A Room with a View… of Everything” Giving power users tools to relate sets of data across the organization with JCA Answers for The Raiser’s Edge™

A few days ago I wrote about the creative use of JCA Answers by one of our clients, National CASA. Another clever use of Answers for The Raiser’s Edge comes from the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. Like National CASA, Perkins uses The Raiser’s Edge not only for fundraising, but as a complete CRM to house additional education-related information. Raiser’s Edge has powerful and flexible query tools in RE:Query and RE:Export, and for most users, these modules satisfy their ad hoc query needs. But one group of more data-savvy users finds these tools limiting in their ad hoc report writing needs. These users need all of the fields in Raiser’s Edge, not just most of them.

“Easy as Google” – How one organization got key info out of RE and into users’ hands

One of the best parts of my job is taking time out to chat with the users of JCA Answers. We obviously keep in touch during the implementation process and subsequent support and upgrade conversations, but we also make it a point to check in from time to time, just to see how things are going. These calls typically result in suggestions for future functionality and reviews of past projects. Along the way, I often hear about interesting ways that organizations are using Answers. I am frequently surprised to hear about usages we’d never really considered when we were developing Answers. Over the next few days I thought I’d share two such examples of JCA Answers for The Raiser’s Edge users who have leveraged Answers in unique ways for their businesses.

What To Do When Your Software Is Purchased by Another Vendor

Acquisition is a fact of life in the software marketplace, and in the 23 years that JCA has been providing strategic technology consulting to nonprofits, we’ve seen a lot of software companies be acquired. Has your software provider been acquired? If so, should you be concerned? Perhaps. But before you enter crisis mode, I’d suggest taking stock of a few key considerations:

First, how well does the software currently serve your organization’s needs? Is this a system that you’ve been unhappy with for years or have outgrown significantly? Or is it a pretty serviceable system, meeting your business needs at the current time? Either way, it’s time to take a critical look at the system and defining what your needs are (or soon will be) to see if there’s a gap.

Why Projects Fail, Part 3

This is the third and final installment of Why Projects Fail. So far, we’ve covered two important points. First, sometimes projects fail simply because they are hard and people underestimate them. You need to assume a level of difficulty when entering a project that affects an entire organization. Second: plan. Many projects fail because the organization didn’t invest in a plan that was thorough and realistic. Optimism is great, but don’t let it get in the way of making realistic decisions. The remaining reasons that projects fail include:

Project failure is expected
It’s pretty well accepted that most projects fail.  You can find studies that estimate 30% to 80% of projects fail. Isn’t that incredible? Is that okay? Would you be okay if your organization failed at fulfilling its mission 80% of the time?  Let’s face it, this project is part of your mission. Geneca, a software consulting firm, surveyed 600 business and IT executives as part of a study of why project teams struggle. You can guess the outcome based on the name of the report: “Doomed from the start.”  Geneca’s finding was that “75% of respondents admit that their projects are either always or usually doomed right from the start.”

Why Projects Fail, Part 2

Last time, we ended with the question: “Why don’t people plan enough?” For one, planning requires a healthy dose of pessimism, and who likes a pessimist? I’ve experienced this situation many times.  The project team is sitting around the table planning what you are going to accomplish and how.  Everyone is excited and has high expectations for the project.  The team discusses the project objectives: “Fundraisers have instant access to reports and solicitation plans,” “we have a single source of information – the website, ticketing system, finance system, call center, registrar’s system (you name it), are all integrated,” “a policy and procedure manual is actively maintained and used by staff.”  These are all great objectives.  The next step is to talk about how the team will accomplish them.  You create deliverables – the stuff the project will create – to fulfill objectives. 

Let’s use the policy manual as an example. A good manual takes time. We estimate how long it will take and then assign resources (i.e., the people that will do it). Often, these resources are client staff. Sally, the head of Development Operations (she is great and really excited about implementing the new system and totally gets the importance of the manual) is the obvious resource for this and she wants to do it. She will need to invest 100 hours over the life of the year-long project. She understands and is on board. But Sally has a fulltime job already as the DevOps Director.