Salsa Scoop

VTVigils Honors Virginia Tech Victims

 In the aftermath of Monday's horror at Virginia Tech, DemocracyInAction was approached by a few folks who wanted to find some way of helping their own communities grieve and remember outside the typical online parameters of list-building and fundraising. Small as it is in the face of such enormity, we're humbled to have collaborated together to donate VTVigils, organizing nationwide vigils in commemoration over the days ahead. Please feel welcome to participate or share it with others. There is absolutely no upsell -- no participant's information will be used in any way for anything except this event -- and it's completely agenda-free in every respect beyond the agenda of being human. 

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09:32 PM Apr 18, 2007 - 1 comments permalink

NetSquared Awards -- Announcement and Controversy

 Balloting for the NetSquared Innovation Fund has been completed and winners will apparently be named within hours. Let me state at the outset that I didn't feel I had sufficient knowledge of even a decently representative span of the projects and proposing organizations, nor time to acquire it, in order to cast a ballot in good faith -- only so many hours in a day, and all that. Since we're also neither a nominee nor a donor organization, there's no ox of ours being even remotely gored. The affair has stirred up a couple of potentially divisive-but-elucidating points of controversy. I was grateful to see David Geilhufe's commentary on the "high school popularity contest" nature of the voting on Monday. Having received a number of "vote for me" pitches from some of the organizations in question who obviously mass-mailed their e-mail lists -- and far from subverting the process, "get out the vote" was an explicit stage of the granting procedure -- I'd been a little troubled by the inherent conflict between "everyone votes" (and the concomitant promotional/member-building function for NetSquared) and the stated object of the fund to identify disruptive, innovative edge projects. Far be it from me to entrust for allocations of charitable capital my unalloyed faith to the inborn sagacity of fourth-generation descendants of robber barons. But we're dealing with the medium that spawned the verb "to Freep".  

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01:00 PM Apr 18, 2007 - 1 comments permalink

Tuesday Tips: The God of Small Gifts

 I referred the other day to the rising importance of small-dollar fundraising online. So how important are they? Can nonprofits really adopt smallball as a development strategy? More than one might think. A breakdown of online contributions received by all our organizations in 2006 by gift range reveals, unsurprisingly, that smaller gifts are by far the most frequent -- with gifts of exactly $50 (the most frequent donation amount) or less accounting for over two-thirds of all contributions.  

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08:38 PM Apr 17, 2007 - 63 comments permalink

After NTC

 There's nowhere like the nation's capital for turning out nonprofiteers in record numbers, and NTC had the scale of, like, Battlestar Galactica or something: a minor metropolis afloat in the stars. The number 1,200 was murmured, which would be enough bodies to outvote Vatican City. People talked about going the whole 2-3 days without the serendipitous run-in with someone they were hoping to meet. Almost any thematic takeaway for the NTC would be a plausible one, simply because there were just so many different ways to look into the kaleidoscope. My personal version of the theme -- having hit sessions on screencasting, mobile, and radio both online and off -- was multi-channel engagement. It feels to me that the sector is straining against this membrane, looking for the next ah-ha moment, the next breakout into open country. Can we get Internet everywhere? Can we mate it with television, telephones, voice, thought, shoe leather? Can the multiplying tools and gizmos combine and connect? Can it get from niftiness and even effectiveness to really game-changing? We catch glimmers. A citizen video flips control of the Senate -- hybridized data sets present the occasional but isolated dazzling perspective -- rumors circulate of flash mobs on distant shores. The Twitter froth, I suspect, emerges fundamentally from its hint of gathering blogging, texting and social networking into a bridge tenuously connecting meatspace and cyberspace identities. It -- whatever it is -- just isn't quite there yet, and some days it seems it's on the next train after Godot. But the hope for the Next Big Thing might be one of those cases of generals fighting the last war.  

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02:27 PM Apr 15, 2007 - 14 comments permalink

The Elemental Pleasure of Fresh Hardware

 New computer today. Whoooooooooooooosh. I'm a rocketman. A rocket, man.  

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11:11 AM Apr 10, 2007 - 10 comments permalink

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