This free full-day event will be geared toward IT decision makers who either currently manage, or are considering, the Drupal content management system. The day will conclude with a keynote presentation on the future of Drupal in nonprofit technology and its next iteration, Drupal 8.
This event is a hands-on opportunity for Drupal users in the NTEN Community to:
• Participate in the dialogue within the national community of Drupal professionals and IT decision makers serving the nonprofit sector
• Make connections between nonprofit IT professionals interested in different technical and process conversations who are active in the wider Drupal community
• Expose the nonprofit IT community to the latest techniques, tools, and trends in Drupal development and site management, presented by Drupal experts
Schedule: Subject to change, visit http://myntc.nten.org/drupal for the most updated information.
Breakfast and lunch will be provided to attendees.
8:30am–9:00am Registration & Check–in
9:00am–9:20am Welcome and Introduction to Drupal Day
9:20am–9:40am Nonprofit Case Study
9:40am– 10:30am Breakout Sessions & Trainings
10:30am–10:50am Coffee Break
10:50am–11:10am Nonprofit Case Study
11:10am–12:00pm Breakout Session and Trainings
12:00pm–1:00pm Onsite Lunch
1:00pm–1:20pm Nonprofit Case Study
1:20pm–2:10:pm Breakout Sessions & Trainings
2:10pm–2:30pm Nonprofit Case Study
2:30pm–3:20pm Breakout Sessions & Trainings
3:20pm–3:50pm Keynote on the Future of Drupal in Nonprofit Tech
3:50pm–4:00pm Closing Remarks
5:00pm–8:00pm Happy Hour
Special thanks to ThinkShout for being the primary Drupal Day organizer.
To learn more about future Drupal Day sponsorship or speaking opportunities, contact Stephanie Gutowski at ThinkShout: stephanie@thinkshout.com.For inquiries about this workshops, please contact events@nten.org.
The first annual WordPress Day for Nonprofit Professionals will be a full day of content geared toward developers, power users, content managers, community organizers, and IT decision makers who either currently use, or are considering WordPress.
We will start the day with a brief introduction to WordPress. Then we’ll break into groups to enjoy project showcases and breakout sessions, where WordPress experts will expose you to new ideas, best practices, timesaving tools, and more. Throughout the day, and especially during lunch, you will have a chance to network with other WordPress professionals from the nonprofit sector. We will wrap things up with a look at the future of WordPress and where we think it can help take the nonprofit community.
Schedule: Subject to change, visit myntc.nten.org/wpday for the most updated information. Breakfast and lunch will be provided to attendees.
8:30am–9:00am Registration & Check–in
9:00am–9:25am Welcome, Introductions, Opening Remarks, and Introduction to WordPress 9:30am–9:55am Project Showcase
10:00am–10:25am Project Showcase
10:30am–10:45am Coffee Break
10:50am–11:50am Project Showcase
11:20am–11:45am Project Showcase
11:45am–1:00pm Lunch with “Birds of a Feather” Groups
1:00pm–2:00pm Breakout Sessions
2:00pm–3:00pm Breakout Sessions
3:00pm–4:00pm Breakout Sessions
4:00pm–4:30pm Future of WordPress and Closing Remarks
Special thanks to Pongos for being the primary WordPress Day organizer.
To learn more about future WordPress Day sponsorship or speaking opportunities, contact Chrissy Rey at Pongos: chrissy@pongos.com
Will tomorrow’s Internet be controlled by large corporations like Facebook and Google? Or by governments? Or network operators? Will you have to ask permission before people can see your new video? Will you have to add to your budget to pay Internet service providers to let their customers see your website? Or will tomorrow’s Internet enable you to reach even greater numbers of supporters? And raise more funds? Or will you, as a nonprofit, be stuck in the slow lane of the Internet? We are at a critical point in the evolution of the Internet where the choices we make today will determine whether we continue to have an Internet that enables great opportunities, or one in which it is difficult for nonprofits to communicate and serve their mission.
The Internet Society’s Dan York will walk through different scenarios for the future of the Internet, and cover topics including the rise of mobile devices and apps, social networks, security and privacy, network neutrality, Internet governance, and more. Please bring your questions and join this interactive session. You’ll leave with a solid understanding of how the Internet may evolve, and what actions YOU and your organization can take today to help ensure tomorrow’s Internet works for you!
Social media is changing and if you’re like most nonprofit professionals, it’s hard to keep up! This training is for anyone in need of the latest trends for visual media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Vine. Learn how to use these tools on a shoestring budget whether you work in social change, nonprofits, foundations, or for-profit. We will examine how leaders in the field are successful at using these visual media platforms to advance a mission, a vision, or a cause. This session will be formatted as a lecture with a portion devoted to audience interaction, participation, and questions.
Takeaways:
1) Three new things you can do immediately to enhance your organization’s visual media platforms;
2) Practical help in setting up these channels for your organization in a strategic way;
3) How to create content using visual media tools that supports your organizational goals.
What is a B Corp and why should you care? Learn how many businesses are using this vehicle to support charity partners rather than stockholders. This is just one way that nonprofits are looking at innovative ways to raise funds. However, many nonprofits today are struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing expectations of their constituents. Donors and volunteers want to engage in new ways, but true innovation is not easy and declining revenues can put even greater strain on the resources needed to reinvent organizations and programs. In this “connect” session, we will discuss your experiences and ideas against this backdrop of significant change.
NTCjews is a group of Jewish professionals, those working with or for Jewish organizations, and Jews at NTC who gather at each NTC for learning, sharing, and socializing. All are welcome!
This year we’ll be exploring modes of storytelling and cultural transmission throughout our tradition, from oral to written to digital, across canonized and creative personal narratives. Learning from a diverse group of storytelling experts, we’ll explore how we connect our individual stories to our collective narrative. We’ll explore what this means for your work, outline the role of technology in making it possible, and share what’s happening in your work and personal life.
This session will feature guests Michael Hebb (DeathOverDinner.com and Seder 2015) and Jonathan Eisen (Director of Networking Building and Communications at StartUp Shabbat), as well as others.
Join this whirlwind tour of the nonprofit world in a statistical journey. We’ll cover everything from the size of the sector from a global perspective, to how organizations stack up in the United States. Then it’s a jump to giving trends for the past few years, including the real truth about online giving. Quick scene change to donor acquisition, retention, and the statistical evidence of what really motivates donors. Then we’ll put the statistics machine on shuffle and cover some truly fascinating statistics about the nonprofit sector.
Creating an online community to mobilize your supporters and further your nonprofit’s mission might seem like a big task. What to do? Where to start? A simple way is to look at what your peers are doing. Learn how American Cancer Society, NTEN, and Small World Labs have created purpose-driven online communities that increase loyalty, fundraising, engagement, and return on mission.
Takeaways:
1) An insider’s “look under the hood” into how leading nonprofit organizations use online communities to achieve ROI results;
2) How communities that are fundraising, membership, advocacy, volunteer, and support based can achieve strong results despite their focus on different core audiences;
3) Tips to successfully integrate online community into your organization’s broader communication and social media efforts;
4) A road map for evaluating which programs are and are not good candidates for achieving successful community results.
This is a must-attend session to gather ideas for growing your monthly giving program, as well as strategies for retention, stewardship, and upgrades once your sustainer file is built. We’ll outline Share Our Strength’s month long, multichannel promotion to boost the size of its monthly giving club The Hunger Core, with efforts spanning email, web, online ads, social media, and offline fundraising. We’ll also describe year-round efforts to improve stewardship, how to create a special communications calendar for monthly donors, and ways you can use online tools to alert donors to expired membership. We’ll describe how a monthly donor upsell lightbox on the donation form works and show examples.
Share Our Strength and Donordigital have worked together over three years to build The Hunger Core, providing the sustained support necessary to aggressively pursue its goal of eliminating childhood hunger in America. This program has grown exponentially through acquisition and advertising, as well as through multi-channel efforts.
For many nonprofit organizations, moving their work to the cloud makes programmatic and financial sense. The availability of Google Apps and Office 365 has made cloud-based email especially attractive. The next step is moving files from on-premise servers to the cloud. There are many ways to do this, many obstacles to avoid, and an obligation to your staff to make the transition easy and the implementation effective. Join us for a discussion of these issues.
Bring your stories, ideas, and opinions!
There’s no question that it’s important to keep staff updated and ready to make the most of the technology available to them. However, for smaller organizations working with limited staff capacity, it can be hard to find the time to do effective technology training.
At this session, we’ll share methods for identifying the right kinds of training for your organization, informing your trainings by efficiently collecting staff input across the organization, and ultimately crafting trainings that are the right fit for your organization.
Participants will leave with simple principles of adult education they can put into use right away within their own organizations.
We all know the traditional meaning behind an IT Help Desk: something breaks, you call, we fix. Moving to an IT Service Desk can add further meaning: we also work with you on the goal. But, with both of these, we still have a problem. IT has to wait for the organization to have a specific request to react to, we become a store where the customer is always right. Well guess what? The customer in this case is not always right, and IT should not be managed in a way that forces it to only fill requests and fix things. We will talk about how to manage a help desk while still allowing IT to be a partner to the organization.
Do you love gardening, but time and time again find your plants near death as you’ve worked late every night, so haven’t watered them? Or perhaps you’re mostly the mom, dad, friend, or pet owner you want to be, but aren’t comfortable with the feeling you’re just sliding by in your marketing job. Sigh. We’ve all been there.
Join us as we talk balance, productivity, satisfaction, and what’s good enough. We’ll quickly move to small groups where you’ll join peers in brainstorming methods and challenges, then share the “best of” with us all. We’ll finish with a few folks bringing their balance challenges to the panel for an on-the-fly strategy session. Looking forward to sharing challenges and frustrations, but most importantly, methods to making them better. To the possible!
Takeaways:
1) You’ll learn how other people balance personal and marketing agendas, at various stages of both personal and work life cycles;
2) You’ll learn how to assess your own strengths and leverage them to do your job (and your personal life) better;
3) You’ll engage with peers, hear their stories, and gather ideas. you can take back to home and office.
When you sign a contract for software or software services without negotiating it first, you often agree to some bizarre things, such as huge penalties should you break the contract for any reasons that aren’t specifically allowed, court jurisdictions in states where neither you nor the vendor reside, and one-sided arrangements where the vendor can drop their service without warning or penalty at any time, but you can’t. In this session, we’ll discuss the types of things you need to negotiate, with a focus on equal protection for both parties and the new contracting considerations for cloud services.
Takeaways:
1) A good sense of what can and should be negotiated
2) Tips and tactics for getting your way
3) A sense of what has changed, and how we can take advantage of it in this new, cloud-based world.
Did you know that McKinsey estimates open data can contribute $3 to $5 trillion to the economy, while personal-location data could capture $600 billion?
Globally, institutions are using open and big data for commercial benefit, but it is increasingly being used for social benefit too. Emphasis has moved from simply opening up data, to improving standards and reusing data to build better services and provide new ones. The Open Data Barometer and Open Data Index mapped open data reuse around the world, while the Open Data 500 project studies sustainable use of open data by US companies. The Human Face of Data also investigated the unique ways that big data can help us all.
Through multimedia, expert panelist insight, as well as group discussions, this session will highlight new open and big data services, and delve into the unique and vital role that nonprofits and citizens must play to realize big and open data’s promise for good.
We will also discuss some of the steps that nonprofits can start to take to use their data and other publicly available datasets to provide more sustainable products and services.
Your organization has a social presence, but what percentage of them can be counted on to take action on your behalf when asked? Will they step up to the plate and donate, show up for a real world event, or commit themselves to an action? Test interest, loyalty, and relationships with an online engagement campaign. Online engagement campaigns are a test for the organization and its fans, a learning moment, and a check/balance to test whether you are crafting meaningful ties with your stakeholders.
In the first part of this interactive, hands-on workshop, we will profile successful online engagement campaigns, breaking down the essential ingredients of preparation, design, execution, and measurement. The second half of the session is all workshop: we’ll divide into small groups to accelerate creative ideas for successful campaigns and test them through collaborative and interactive methods.
Takeaways:
1) Tips for understanding when you are organizationally ready to launch an engagement campaign
2) Organizational resources and assets needed to develop an engagement campaign
3) Critical elements of successful online engagement campaigns
4) A roadmap for developing an online engagement campaign.
NTEN and Mobile Citizen have partnered to create a new research report to better understand the digital adoption landscape facing nonprofits and the communities they serve. Organizations already making headway relative to closing the digital divide—EveryoneOn, PCs for People, and Google Fiber—will share their best practices for getting America’s disconnected online.
These organizations will provide specific examples for addressing access, equipment, training, and local partnerships in order to improve digital adoption across the country.
"Failure Is Success In Progress" - - - Albert Einstein
"I Hate To Fail, But I Love To Learn" - - - @NickInSFO at #SMoP14
Failure, and the fear of it, not only constrains the open hearts of non-profit technologists everywhere, it stifles creative potential for success. The word "fail" is so much in our current pop lexicon that it inspired the website www.epicFAIL.com, and TheFailcon, a whole conference about failure!
Risking to fail is a critical part of the learning process. Join NTEN Leading Change Award 2014 winner, SFGMC'S Jim Nickerson, with colleagues, Frank Strona and Yee Won Chong as they host, present and facilitate this 90-minute interactive workshop to explore "Fail"ing For The Win.
Attendees will:
Stories have the power to spark movements, raise armies of volunteers, and even change the world. But stories with impact don’t just happen—they require intention and heart. So once you have the right story, how can you make the most of it across social media, web, and email?
In this session, we’ll explore how to use your organization’s best stories across channels for better outreach, fundraising, and funder impact reporting.
Takeaways:
1) What makes a good story, and who’s the right storyteller?
2) How to and why you should spend more time leveraging good content to the right audience
3) Ways to measure what’s working or what’s not
4) Tools and resources to help transform your nonprofit into a storytelling organization.
Say it with us, in your best, most gravelly Cookie Monster voice: ME WANT COOOOOKIEEEEEES! In this session, learn how to use cookies (the HTTP kind) and a whole bunch of other sweet tactics like custom audiences and targeting on your web ads to bake up a big batch of increased revenue from existing and prospective donors. We’ll give you a baker’s dozen of ideas to kickstart your web marketing and reveal some fascinating tests we ran with PETA and other organizations to optimize display, social, and search ads. Ginger snap to attention and get ready for some sweet morsels of knowledge. And, yes, we’ll be serving actual cookies along with all the useful information, test results, and delicious puns.
Takeaways:
1) See results from a diverse group of organizations who tested and piloted new web marketing tactics
2) Learn which strategies you should prioritize to grow your digital program
3) Get ideas for tests you can run to measure the true lift from your web marketing investments.
This session will help attendees understand hackathons and code sprints, and how to use them effectively. We will run the session as an unconference. In an unconference, we build new solutions or adapt existing ones to solve real-world challenges while we grow peer-to-peer relationships. Unconferences use Open Space Technology to facilitate a completely participant-driven work session that leverages all the skills in the room.
Join this session if you are completely new to agile development/Scrum/code sprints/hackathons, or if you have heaps of experience to share, or if you are anywhere in between! We will use the unconference format to set up and practice some methods of co-design and agile development. The session will be entirely participatory.
Takeaways:
Attendees will adopt the role of facilitators and share best practices while discussing topics posed by the session attendees themselves. You’ll leave ready to implement these techniques for development and decision making back home and in the field. Yeah!
This fun, interactive session will help you examine how to craft donation appeals that tap into the “emotional” brain of donors. Research has yielded surprising results about what does, and does not, motivate people to give when they receive an email from a nonprofit. Attendees will learn easy-to-implement strategies to optimize both the look and language of fundraising e-campaigns to leverage the unintuitive insights yielded by research on how people think and behave online. Fundraisers, advocates, and anyone trying to inspire people to take action online will enjoy this research-based discussion.
This session will also touch on the moral and ethical considerations of using emotionally-charged content to persuade audiences.
Feeling brave? Email your campaign to cary@gocopilot.org in advance for possible use in a “live dissection” of how it can be optimized for success.
With the explosion of technology, the world is becoming more accessible to all. Yet how many educators and employers know how to address accessibility issues in the classroom and in the boardroom? How can colleges and universities provide a variety of accessible formats of materials to students who are more auditory learners (includes blind, low vision), visual learners (includes Deaf, Deafblind), those students who prefer physical hands-on experiences (includes braille), non-verbal (includes the minimal use of spoken language, the socially quiet, and sign language users), non-vocal (includes the inability to utter words with the voice, nervousness in social settings, and possibly the Deaf, and the Deaf-blind), and how can mobility or immobility affect learning (also includes the aging).
This presentation will focus on inclusive learning in the academic and nonprofit environment, and on assistive technology.
Five key areas will be addressed using a sharing, listening, and learning approach:
1) Learning environment in development
2) Environmental considerations (visual and auditory considerations and tips)
3) Adaptive software (screen reading programs, screen magnification programs, etc.)
4) Hardware (scanners, Smart everything technology, and ergonomic devices)
5) A sense of community at the group, institutional, and broader support levels.
As a result of this presentation, participants will have an awareness of how assistive technology and other devices can be used to help meet the learning needs of individuals based on their learning preferences that may exist because of a disability, and how to address them.
Thursday Awards
We'll kick off Day 2 by announcing winners of the NTENny Awards, and the 2015 DoGooder Video Awards. These awards will recognize compelling cause–based videos that aim to advance social change and create real impact. Organized in collaboration with See3 Communications and YouTube, we are wowed every year by the changemakers using this powerful medium to tellstories, raise awareness about critical issues, and inspire action.
Thursday Plenary
Following the awards, we'll jump into the Day 2 Plenary: Momentum for Change: Addressing Diversity in Nonprofit Tech.
The nonprofit sector has been criticized as much as the technology sector for lack of diversity in both technology and leadership roles. The nptech (nonprofit technology) community, and all of us at the NTC, sit at the intersection of those sectors with a unique opportunity to set a path forward.
This participatory plenary intends to engage everyone in the room–when we all participate in the conversation, we can all start participating in the solutions. The panelists will share their unique perspectives, offer ideas, and pose questions for all of us to discuss. Attendees will engage in dialogue at their tables throughout the session. We will actively monitor Twitter for questions, highlights, and ideas to share with the panel and full room.
We are excited to create a stage–literally and figuratively–to elevate this conversation, and thank our panelists and attendees for participating in a productive, forward-looking session. This is only the beginning, of course, and we look forward to continuing with the momentum we build together.
We want to hear from you! Tweet your questions and comments: #15NTcmomentum
After over 2 days of intense learning, time to let loose! Free for attendees, No RSVP required. Stay for the fun and networking at the Geek Games.
Food, drinks, and coffee will be available.