BY: Amanda Grainger-Munday

You may have noticed, we recently redesigned Timeraiser.ca. We moved to a Weebly site to address some internal operating needs related to agency and artist applications, content management, and ticket sales. Specifically, our registration/ticket software was built a number of years ago before the age of Eventbrite, GuestList App, Meetup, etc. With the new version of our site, we’re able to take advantage of third party apps like Eventbrite, and the significant time saving advantages are quickly apparent. The one time-saver that had me literally jumping out of my chair this morning is the back-end management of registrations using EventBrite.

First, let me setup the old way:
The day of the Timeraiser (usually less than 6 hours before doors open) we generate a CSV/Excel report with all the ticket purchaser information collected at the time of the transaction. Since there isn’t an automatic way to edit out the fields not required for name badges/registration cards, we would take approximately 1 - 2 hours custom editing an Excel document to prep for our registration needs. Time is spent creating three documents; two separate mail merge files and one for import into Salesforce.com. We custom create a mail merge template for Timeraiser participants and a second template for Special Guest name badges. All this printing / label prep would take a lot of precious time on Timeraiser setup day.

The new way: 
Put simply, Eventbrite has a print name badges feature  that will save us all that custom formatting time. Now, instead of taking the time to download a file, edit the file, format the file, then create a new file, we’ll just give Eventbrite the fields needed and Voila! - a custom name badge or registration file with the specific Avery labels, ready to print.

This is just one example of how we’re constantly evolving our technology strategy to help the team work smarter - this simple upgrade will not just save us a couple hours on a busy day (x8-10 cities), but we’re specifically looking at how we execute Timeraisers efficiently in a way others can replicate. You can see our Registration Redesign process documented here. There are few things more fun in my job than discovering a new technology tool that solves an existing problem and makes the work we do easier. It’s magic.

BY ANIL PATEL, EDITED BY TEAM FRAMEWORK

On June 27th/2011, the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration announced a $3 million round of funding available to eligible non-profit organizations. You can read about the funding criteria here. The primary applicant has to engage two other official collaborators on the project and submissions are due July 29th/2011. You can see the entire proposal, budget and research online here. (Essentially, we were seeking up to $280K to hire a shared service in Information Communication Technology (ICT) Systems Administration plus related costs for 10 organizations over three years.)

In early July, a number of organizations contacted Framework stating interest in working alongside our team as collaborators (and vice versa). Being summer, many people were on holidays, making it a tricky time to pull something together quickly and more importantly, well.

As of yesterday, we were 97% done. The logic model is amazing. The ‘need’ well documented. A significant amount of pre-work was complete on the ICT planning amongst the organizations that we were collaborating with us  (via our Open Architecture model).

Sadly, there was one small technical glitch that brought the submission to a halt, one of little significance, not worth commenting on. As a result, we’ve dropped out of this proposal. #fail.

What is important is what we learned from this process.  I spoke to nearly 30 organizations, most of which were leading or sponsoring a submission, making this a very competitive round.  The submission required technology planning as part of the application, so there was a strong possibility that many of the applications would be applying for funding to support very similar ideas.  Finally, the one-month submission window left little time to develop innovative ideas and identify partnership/collaboration opportunities.  

So here is how we are moving forward:

• All of our major proposals that are being submitted to a public granting body or foundation/corporation interested in collaboration/transparency will be posted online, even while in development;
  
• We will actively solicit feedback from our trusted colleagues about the logic model, activities/impact, budget and reporting methodology;
• All successful and unsuccessful proposals will be visibly made available;
• As the number of proposals grow, we want to engage funders to see how this level of transparency can augment their reporting regimes for better collective learning amongst other funders and grantees

Sharing this failed proposal online verifies our belief that we are working faster and smarter, not harder and in circles. This proposal write-up and dissemination was approximately 3x faster than similar proposals we’ve applied to in the past. If we were successful, reporting would be 10x faster and easier than our old methods.

What do you think? This proposal sharing is in beta: what do you like about our plan? What concerns you? would you be willing to share proposals, ready or not? Why, or why not? Feedback is most welcome. In our next post, we will discuss the above with respect to Canada’s Grants Economy1.

Note #1: The Grants Economy is the number of fundraising professionals who help raise money or act as consultants to foundations and corporations about where donations should go.

BY TEAM FRAMEWORK (Anil, Amanda, Emily, Nicole, Noorin)

We've been cooped up at a cottage for most of the week at our annual staff retreat. As a team we set an ambitious agenda. One of our goals was to re-vamp Timeraiser.ca so it was easier for our team to make changes to the site as we added more Timeraiser events. 

Another aspect was revisiting our online volunteer opportunity platform. Back in 2007, we built a very elegant submission-voting-posting system. This was back when social media was still relatively new and 'aggregation' software seemed like a good idea. 

A lot has changed since then. We received a lot of feedback about the process of applying to the Timeraiser, especially for non-profit organizations. The first challenge was that continually going back to update organizational profiles and out-dated volunteer opportunities throughout the year is problematic for a number of participating charities.

Staff/volunteer turnover was one problem we faced with applicants, since the admin panel only allowed one user-name/password combination. There were also a few bugs in the system; we only had so much money for Q/A and ongoing development. A third issue relates to all the places that charities can post engagement opportunities; resulting in duplicated data (e.g. Volunteer Centres, LinkedIn, Facebook, IdeaList, GetInvolved, GoVolunteer, etc). The duplicated data ultimately makes it harder for coordinators of volunteers to manage their inventory of opportunities.

The illustration below is our answer to these compounding problems. Now we will be directing all inquires about an organization who attends the Timeraiser directly to that organization's website. For instance, if Meal Exchange* wishes to attend the Timeraiser, they just need to submit a much simpler application to participate (powered by SmartSheet). Once selected, Framework staff can now quickly add the organization's logo and brief description to Timeraiser.ca. The 'view opportunities' link now direct's users directly to Meal Exchanges 'Get Involved' section - instead of publishing the opportunities on our site when it already exists elsewhere. Our rough math is that this simplified process will be about 5x faster and 10x cheaper to maintain and scale.

We're also upping the value to organization's who join the Timeraiser program. Once the agencies have been published on Timeraiser.ca, we'll build our marketing/social media strategy to promote all of Meal Exchange's programming over the year, beyond what what was promoted at the Timeraiser. 

What do you think of our new process? Is it harder for you to maintain volunteer opportunities across multiple platforms and social media channels? How do you deal with so many user names & passwords?

By Nicole McPhail
It’s 11am, and I’m energized for the day.

On the way to work this morning, I stopped at Starbucks to pick up a chai latte and a breakfast wrap. I quickly realized that I had forgotten my wallet. A line of impatient eyes watched me as I apologized to the cashier, when a man standing behind me jumped in and insisted he’d cover it. Happy Friday! I’ll be sure to pass that forward.

The positive energy continues.  This afternoon I’ll be checking out the Outdoor Art Exhibit at David Pecault Square to meet some of Toronto’s emerging artists, check out the work and maybe chat a little about Timeraiser.  I’m sure there will be some familiar faces; artists who already participate in the Timeraiser - and I’ll be sure to let them know that we have increased our ‘art buy’ limit to $1000.  For those who haven’t participated before, I’m looking forward to seeing new  work, and encouraging some new artists to apply. We’re very fortunate to be surrounded by such great talent, and it certainly makes our job easy when there’s a lot of quality artwork to auction off.

We’re also  in the process of selecting art for our fall Timeraiser cities: Vancouver, Hamilton, Ottawa and Edmonton. We’ve seen a range of mediums and styles which will make our fall Timeraiser collection  well- rounded and interesting. Our juries were blown away this year  by the quality of artwork submitted.  Take a sneak peek at the artwork selected for the 4th Annual Ottawa Timeraiser to see for yourself.

Posted by Noorin Ladhani

We updated our ICT  planning tips with the help of our friend Andrew Simpson take a look and let us know what you think!

Posted by Noorin Ladhani
Salesforce released a new feature in their calendar which enables users to propose meeting times eliminating the email back-and-forth that is often associated with meeting planning.  Check out our screenshots and short summary here. 

August 30th to September 2nd is the 2011 Dreamforce Conference at the Moscone Centre, San Franciso. Over 30,000 people are predicted to attend this year, making it one of the largest cloud computing conferences in the world. Salesforce.com has done a lot to promote the value of the cloud. Faster. Safer. Cheaper.

Our team has been using Salesforce.com since 2005, shortly after the Salesforce.com Foundation was established. We have spent some time to understand their strategy, especially the Salesforce.com App Exchange. Following the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who building complementary software has been on the most interesting aspects of following the cloud computing ecosystem development.

My team and I will be presenting again this year. While the syllabus is still being finalized, here is how it currently reads:

“Looking to expand your reach, automate processes, or beef up your analytics? Join us to learn how nonprofit organizations everywhere are using the AppExchange to expand their use and adoption of Salesforce. Find out what apps are most popular and how they can best benefit you.”

Here is an example of a demo that we did recent at the Business and Community Partnership Forum (click here). It is a @prezi.

he illustration sums up our approach to using low-cost and highly-scalable software. It is part of our Create Information Once/Distribute Widely/Accessible Multiple Places methodology.

Are you going to Dreamforce? What are you hoping to learn? Who are you hoping to met? We’d like to hear more about what sessions you’ll be attending or what you hope to get out of the conference.

Starting next Monday, the Framework team is spending nearly the entire week strategizing about 2012 and beyond. We are super excited about completing the following five things:

• Revising our Case for Support & Theory of Engagement
• Updating our Sponsorship/Donation Package to scale our programming
• Migrating Timeraiser.ca to a newer, simpler content management system
• Landing on our 2012/13 strategy
• Integrating Platformation into the Timeraiser programming

And we are asking for your input. We have published what our team hopes to accomplish online (click here). There are two unique features of this approach.

• Changes and updates will be shared in real-time. There is no need to constantly update the link or file to share our progress.
• We are looking to reference your feedback throughout the retreat.  If you scroll to the bottom of the document, you'll see a widget called Disqus that will enable us to read your comments, opinions, and evaluations of our progress.

So here is the call to action: What do you think of our approach? Are we discussing the right things? How do you structure your staff retreats? What do like about the schedule? Are there items that we are missing?

Thanks in advance of the feedback!

Posted by Noorin Ladhani

Managing an online community has its challenges but its the tools you use that can propel you from barely keeping up to creating a vibrant online community.  We had a chance to attend Jive's launch of their latest release Jive 5 and hear from a user using Jive technology to manage and learn from his online community.  Learn more about our experience at the Jive launch here.