Does Your Reach Exceed Your Grasp?

Most nonprofits start with one person's vision of a better world. But to carry that vision into the public sphere, you need more than just a megaphone and a podium. Technology provides the tools to reach out to millions. It's a way to share information and ideas. It's a way to collaborate with people from around the world. It’s a way to band together for the sake of a common goal.

To many people’s dismay, technology doesn’t just spring forth and start working. Using technology to achieve your organization’s mission requires hard work, vision, resources, funding, and the people to help you get off the ground. Before you can get to the really exciting applications, you’ll first need to lay the foundation, or the infrastructure layer: the wires, systems, network, a simple Web site.

On top of your foundation are the administrative and back office applications: databases, fundraising, a content management system. After that, you'll need to set up programmatic applications, those that directly serve the mission by facilitating groups of constituents –- for instance listservs, interactive Web sites, and an RSS feed (more on those later). And if you manage to set up all of that unscathed, then your organization may venture into cutting-edge, early-adopter applications that directly enhance your mission.

Moving smoothly from one layer to the next means having all the pieces in place. It means your servers are running without crashing, your site isn’t held together with pins and glue, and your databases don’t spit out cryptic error messages. But getting to that point is another matter entirely. There are plenty of resources out there for building a healthy, solid technology infrastructure. But the following stories from nonprofits doing amazing things with technology may inspire you to shore up your infrastructure so you can work to achieve a goal that might seem unreachable today.

Diamond in the Rough

From 1990 through 1995, Amnesty International USA didn't invest in its infrastructure and as a result, offices struggled with Internet connections, sending e-mail, and even printing files. Often employees were sent home to work because of poor connectivity in the office.

"When I first started there, it was one modem shared among five people," said Joe Baker, previous Director of Internet Communications at Amnesty International. "When we wanted to sync our database, we would send a floppy."

But then something happened. When volunteer programs weren't running right and the organization couldn't fulfill its mission because of shoddy computers and lack of bandwidth, it decided to invest in technology.

"[At that point, we were] still fairly constrained, considering the size of the organization, said Baker. "The Web stuff was really looked at as an extension of IT stuff. It was not mission-driven."

One of the key lessons, according to Baker, is to structure a plan to show a clear payoff and document success along the way. Amnesty International needed to show why this wasn't just one more good program looking for funds. It wasn't until the year 2000 that the organization decided to hold a summit to look at how it was using the Internet to achieve its mission.

After this organization-wide meeting, Baker changed positions to take over the Internet operations, and the upgrading process began. The nonprofit formed a task force to lay out strategic plans to identify its audience and key areas in which to move forward. It took the next several years to figure that out and decide on next steps.

Often it takes funds to get funds, and as Amnesty International invested in technology, it increased its online fundraising and membership recruitment. Slowly, the investment in the Internet was paying off across the organization. While the constant struggle of balancing investments in technology versus investments in people continues, the organization now has enough staff to make things work and enough training to know how to use the technology.

With the tech investments in place, the organization employed some cutting-edge technologies to help achieve its mission. In 2001, Amnesty International used a Flash animation ad during its "conflict diamond" campaign, which highlighted the violent war in Sierra Leone being partially funded with diamond profits.

To illustrate the issue, Amnesty International created a Flash animation that would coincide with a diamond industry conference. The animation, a parody of a De Beers commercial, was released on Amnesty International's site the day before the conference. The campaign was deemed a success: the organization gained 30,000 new e-mail subscribers and the parody was seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

"We received reports that people at the conference were watching it,” said Baker. "The spot, connecting diamonds to blood and death, created a split between the diamond extractors and jewelers. The jewelers said, "We can't associate our product with people getting their hands cut off."

From the attention the spot created, people started asking about tracking diamond origins so they wouldn't be supporting conflict in Africa. "It almost didn't matter how many people saw it," said Baker. "It was about potential. It made us look bigger than we were. We showed the potential for very bad publicity and at the time of the release, we organized our activists to visit jewelry stores and ask about conflict diamonds."

Many techniques that are really effective at first, however, will get tired and old over time. So Amnesty International thought of new ways to convey its message to as many people as it could. An opportunity to do this came in 2003 when a Nigerian woman was sentenced to death by stoning after being convicted of adultery. To bring attention to the case, Amnesty International stepped in and collaborated with "The Oprah Show" to host an online action.

"It was interesting to see what happens when your wildest dreams are achieved," said Baker. "We were featured on her show, we had worked closely with the people running Oprah's site, where they were hosting an online action. Oprah got on the show, looked into the camera, and ordered her viewers to go to oprah.com."

What Amnesty International wasn't prepared for was such an overwhelming success. First, the influx of visitors took down the Oprah site (a massive commercial site with banks of servers) and when that site came back up, visitors took down Amnesty International's site, which had just moved to a new host two days prior. But luckily, the new host was incredibly responsive and in the end, 1.7 million people took action in a very short period of time.

"It was briefly a nightmare," Baker recalled. "We had people who were very concerned about the case and wanted to take action. It was the kind of massive load you can’t plan for, but you need to have a plan. What do you do if you have a huge success? Sometimes you need to plan for both success and disaster."

The media attention put a spotlight on an area of the world that isn't often seen in the West, and the sentence was overturned. The public attention forced the Nigerian Federal government to step in, according to Baker. But one of the challenges with the Web is that people are used to things happening quickly. It took almost two years until the conviction was formally overturned –- a very long time in Internet time.

"A challenge with mobilizing people on the Internet is that they want an update every day," Baker says. Moving forward, Amnesty International will continue its investment in technology and plans to evolve its Web presence and campaigns to serve its mission.

The Petition Heard 'Round the World

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd had never been involved in politics, but they we re sick of a system that ignored them. Troubled by the amount of resources the government was spending on the Clinton impeachment, the two circulated a petition to 100 friends urging them to, "Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation." Only a few days after sending the petition, friends had forwarded it to other friends, and hundreds of thousands had responded, hoping to find an outlet that would hear their voices.

Congress ignored the initial petition, but Boyd and Blades weren't going to give up so easily. They set up a Web site called MoveOn.org and used the e-mail addresses they had collected from the last petition to ask supporters to visit Congressional offices throughout the US. Their first few efforts went unnoticed in Washington but, undaunted, MoveOn invited supporters to pledge to support candidates that ran against those representatives that had voted to impeach.

Long before the Iraq war began, MoveOn.org asked supporters to contribute money toward an anti-war ad in the New York Times to argue that the reasons the government had given for going to war were not truthful. Ironically, the organization that started in a home office with no funding broke current online fundraising records by collecting more than $400,000 in just five days -– in donations that averaged less than $50 per person. The contribution total was so large that they used the money to fund a television advertising campaign as well.

Part social network, part online fundraising site, MoveOn builds electronic advocacy groups around political issues. There are groups for campaign finance, environmental and energy issues, media consolidation, and the Iraq war. Once a group is formed, MoveOn provides information and tools to help members make an impact. MoveOn's organizers also let members know when opportunities arise so they can have an impact.

MoveOn's tactics have been a wild success, engaging disenfranchised people and stirring up interest in politics among the masses. Through the efforts of individuals, MoveOn amassed more than $3.5 million in funds for the 2002 election. And during the 2004 election, the three distinct entities that comprise MoveOn yielded $60 million through fundraising. Though the MoveOn.org Voter Fund received a handful of large contributions, the vast majority of the grassroots fundraising efforts came from 500,000 unique donors who contributed less than $100 each.

MoveOn hopes to change the face of American politics -– and it's doing so by providing tools to help give every citizen a voice.