NFP sector Technology Trends 2009

My colleagues at Iris hosted a workshop to discuss Technology Trends for 2009 in the NFP sector. Delegates came from charities, associations, membership organisations as well as consultants specialising in NFP technology and fundraising. Sadly I could not be there as it looked like a good lunch, but thankfully Howard Lake covered it on UK Fundraising so I got to see the top six trends agreed on the day which were as follows:

1. Social networking/blogging will continue to increase and become more relevant to the NFP community


2. More demand for data integration – "what we have already must work better together"


3. Software as a Service (SaaS) will become more prominent


4. Virtualisation and hardware will need to support 24/7 working


5. @ Home - more work and leisure time will be spent at home which will pose technological challenges and business opportunities


6. People will want 'more for less' from their software vendors

If I had written my own list it would surely have contained items 1, 3, and 5. The unspoken slogan of the Obama campaign was after all 'It's the Internet, stupid' and now charities and their consultants everywhere are playing catchup, as nptech blogs bear witness every day.

Virtualisation is a good way to make your hardware budget go even further but let's not think about 24/7 working. I see a lot of Twitter posts from the wee small hours and think, really people, come on, you should be asleep or you will be no good in the morning. Home working is definitely on the up and if it means the motorways are clearer on the days when we do travel than I am all for saving expenses budgets and the planet.

Its the remaining two items that interest me most and on reflection they are even more closely linked than 1,3 and 5. The sentence "People will want 'more for less' from their software vendors" would surely never have come from the pen of a supplier, but it is a fact of life that those of us in the software business have recognised for some time. As an increasing number of sophisticated software tools are made available to one and all online for free, we have to keep providing services that you cannot just download.

One such area is data migration and data integration. This has always been an issue and the fact that data can now be captured through Facebook, Twitter and the rest just gives us a whole load of new variations. The reasons for doing it are the same as the old ones: Data quality, avoiding duplicate effort, avoiding duplicate contacts, understanding the donor in the round, co-ordinating fundraising approaches, exploiting cross marketing opportunities. Its time-consuming getting this stuff right though, so the technical challenge for us is how to enrich and simplify the integration tools so that users can do more of it without recourse to consultancy.

Was there anything missing from the list? Well I was surprised not to see the word 'mobile'. Increasingly we interact with donors as they are out and about, face to face or on the phone. Hand held devises for fundraisers, Twitter on your mobile, text appeals and responses, - its all about the technology in your pocket and finding imaginative ways to use it. One example I saw recently was from Woodland Trust. In this pilot experiment, a post at the entrance to the wood tells you to send a text to a given number. In reply you get a number to dial. When you dial the number you get a guided tour of the woodland on your phone. The text from the visitor opens up all sorts of opportunities for the Trust such as asking for a text donation or even comparing the number with those on its database to get a picture of member activities. It's the kind of example that should make us question whether there are other ways we haven't though of to use technology to interact with supporters.

Well, that's enough of my reactions to the list. What do you think?