Anticipation

My Bayer Center colleagues make fun of my love of data.  They remind me of the time when Giant Eagle’s advantage cards and the consumer data they collect came up in conversation and I said “I’d love to get my hands on that data”.

Blank surveys waiting for lovely data.

We’re just ramping up the data collection for 2010, and I have this familiar feeling of anticipation.  I can’t wait to see what this year’s survey shows us about the progress/regress of technology in local nonprofits.  Look at all those blank surveys just waiting to be completed.

Thanks to all who provide the raw material that I get the pleasure of turning into findings.  Check the bottom of the home page for two ways you could do it right now.

Communication Tools – Frequency

Following up on a tease I put out before we revealed the full technology survey results last week: I told you back in September that new media tools were being adopted, and the percentage rates of adoption were large. With a few more surveys in after that, we ended up here:

A few noteworthy things:

• Email has caught up to print and phone in the number of agencies that say they used it. It had trailed
• Even if web 2.0 tools (Social networking, blogs, podcasting, RSS feeds) are growing rapidly, they’re growing rapidly to very minority positions. The vast majority of nonprofits in the region are not using them.

There’s been a discussion over on Beth Kanter’s blog about when not to use social networking tools. Among other things, someone expressed shock that Faxes are still being used in 80% of organizations. With fax and with other communication tools, it’s worth digging down into the frequency numbers:

Yes, 80% of organizations have fax machines, but only 28% of those say they use them frequently. Email, on the other hand, is above 70% using it frequently. That beats print by a significant amount, which quantifies how email is clearly replacing print. The frequency rates of the newer communication tools are dominated by the “Rarely” response. Yes, more people are Podcasting, but none of them are doing it frequently. Other web 2.0 tools show similarly rare use even in the small minorities of organizations that are using the tools.

Tech Survey debuted at TechNow

We had a grand time unveiling the Tech Survey results yesterday at TechNow, the Bayer Center’s nonprofit technology conference. Over 100 people joined us and shared in a great day of learning, networking and fun. We call people who attend TechNow “TechNovians”. You should join us next year. Become a TechNovian. It will change you.

Check out the TechNow site.

The Five-timers Club

Every survey we do attracts organizations that haven’t participated before. We need that new blood, and we’re grateful for it. There has been, though, a faithful group that has participated in all five tech surveys. That elite club is:

Affordable Comfort, Inc.

Allegheny Regional Asset District

FISA Foundation

Flying Mammal Wildlife Rehabilitation Center

Gateway to the Arts

Mental Health America – Allegheny County

Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern PA

Mon Valley Initiative

Pittsburgh Action Against Rape

Southwestern PA Human Services

The Emmaus Community of Pittsburgh, Inc.

Thanks, five timers!

Data Glimpse: Communication Tools

Here is some hoped-for-but-not-necessarily-expected news: nonprofits in the region are using “new” interactive IT tools more in 2008 than in 2006. The survey collects data on the use of a whole menu of communication tools from the fax (remember that? charming device) to print and phone and blogs and podcasting and text messages. The data for this year shows increased adoption of newer tools. The rates of increase over 2006 for selected modes of communication:

• Podcasting up 170%
• Text messaging up 96%
• Managed email systems up 20%
• Interactive or e-commerce web pages up 56%

Plus, in what may be a nod to higher fuel prices:

• Video conferencing up 74%

Many of these increases are offset by declines:

• Managed email systems may be eating away at the use of direct email, which is down nominally by 5%
• Interactive web sites outpaced the growth of “regular old” web sites by 50 percentage points

The nuance in this data comes in how frequently organizations use the various tools. You’ll have to wait for that nuance until the full debut of the data at TechNow. In the meantime, get back to recording your podcast.

Video Camera Winner

You may be wondering who won the digital video camera in this year’s tech survey drawing.  We’re happy to report that it is Kristin Peorschke of the Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor.  We thank all participants and wish everyone could win.

Kristin won our hearts by identifying her title on her survey as “Bookeeper/Office Manger/TechNovian”.  If you weren’t able to join us at TechNow last year, you won’t know what a TechNovian is.  To find out, join us at TechNow 2008.  Register today!

Data Glimpse: Technology Dreams

One of the few open-ended questions we ask on the survey is:

What is your orgnization’s technology dream or next big step?

The answers cover a large spectrum of ambition, but many of them target simple steps or states of technology that one would have thought (oh, 8 years ago in the summer of the first survey) that we would have solved by now. A sampling:

• new hardware, better software, ample website and tech troubleshooting support
• Getting a better computer network, getting more training for staff
• Our own website
• New client management database

These responses, in fact, overlap with the kinds of responses we got in 2002, the first time we asked the question. A besetting problem – e.g. no centralized information system – may be solved by one agency but still loom as a barrier for 10 others. The final report will include a more quantitative analysis of the technology dream responses, but the theme of prosaic, enduring “dreams” definitely persists.

As long as the basic tools – PCs, network infrastructure, databases, web sites – are the next thing, nonprofits will continue to lag in adopting other technologies that create opportunities to reach more people and make change now.

285. This and better might do.

We are so very close to one of our internal goals for this project: 300 survey responses. In prior surveys, we have received as many as 286 responses, and we really want to break that 300 barrier. So if you’re a Western PA nonprofit that hasn’t responded yet, please help us make our goal by responding online or in PDF form now!

Life online: unexpected survey traffic

My coworkers will tell you this: I neurotically check all of the avenues by which surveys are received during this project. I sweat the mail delivery every day. I looked at the stats of visits to our survey blog page, oh, hourly. I look at our online survey site multiple times a day, hoping to see that total number of surveys received climb.

Imagine my surprise yesterday when the blog hits started climbing, for no apparent reason. Yesterday and today represent the second argest 2-day volume of visits during the project. The only larger 2-day volume followed an intimate email blast to 1100 of our closest friends. Imagine my excitement when the online surveys started rolling in at a surprising rate. I stalked the office trying to figure out if someone had sent a message that would drive new traffic. I inspected the incoming surveys to make sure they were legit. They were. And there was no discernible pattern among respondents; they work in every mission category and around the region.

Clearly, someone linked to us somewhere. The blog stats don’t tell me which site is responsible for all the new traffic, but we’ll take it. If you can explain our sudden burst of traffic, please leave a comment.

Data Glimpse: Job Descriptions

The data analysis purist in me hates to put out early information on a data set that is not even fully collected, let alone checked and cleansed. Still, I thought I would toss data junkies a bone in the form of an early finding for 2008. It appears that the number of nonprofit job descriptions containing tech skills is growing.

Question: For what percentage of staff positions are technology skills listed in job descriptions and included in employee evaluations?

__None __1-33% __34-66% __67-100%

Answer: (early returns, n ~ 200 for 2008 )

The number of organizations with tech skills in no job descriptions has decreased from 19% in 2006 to 15% this year. That continues a downward trend from a quarter of organizations in 2004. Most of the decline in that bracket is balanced by an increase in organizations that include tech skills in 34-66% of their job descriptions.

From these figures, we estimate that the overall rate of tech skills in nonprofit jobs has increased from 36% in 2006 to 43% in 2008.

All of these figures are subject to change before the final report, but the law of large numbers would predict that the final numbers will hew close to these.