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Lori Halley
12 December 2006
As a company providing products and services to the not-for-profit sector, it seems to us that one of the challenges in running a non-profit organization is slow decision-making. You often need to consult with so many different types of stakeholders:...
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Dmitriy Buterin
04 December 2006
Allan Benamer runs a "Confessions of a non-profit IT director" blog He is the IT director for a medium-size non-profit and built his blog as a ”safe” space for harried non-profit IT directors/sysadmins/developers to share experiences and wisdom regarding...
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Lori Halley
30 November 2006
Many years ago, I worked for the local telephone company, and was responsible for setting up all of the local and toll-free lines for telethons. There were so many back then, raising money for everything from childhood diseases to adult medical conditions...
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Dmitriy Buterin
28 November 2006
Release 2.8 for November 29th, 2006, Wednesday. One great advantage of hosted web software (Wild Apricot being an example of such a service focused on non-profits) is that you do not have to bother with system upgrades. We take care of that for you....
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Dmitriy Buterin
27 November 2006
As discussed in an earlier post on Trends and Best Practices , "scrimping" (cost-cutting) is a harsh reality for associations - and all other non-profits There are smart ways to "scrimp" - for example using web technologies to reduce your communication,...
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Dmitriy Buterin
23 November 2006
Warm wishes from Wild Apricot team - Happy Thanksgiving!
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Dmitriy Buterin
15 November 2006
I greatly enjoyed the recent CSAE seminar on Trends and Best Practices for Associations (and many of them apply to other kinds of non-profit organizations).
The world is changing and we all have to adapt - or deal with (unpleasant) consequences!
The 7 measures of success study done with Jim Collins as the advisor (author of famous business bestseller Good to Great) was also quite interesting, I will probably do a separate post on that one.
Here is a short recap of 8 Super Trends discussed:
1. Demassification (break-up of the mass market).
(And this word sounds made-up to me. I prefer "mass customization")
The mass market is breaking into smaller pieces, as differences in lifestyles, preferences, and priorities further segment the population. Members and prospective members alike are interested in focused efforts to meet the needs of their smaller, more specialized groups, not in a one- size-fits-all package of association products and services.
(I am definitely seeing this trend. One very cool idea we are working on in our Wild Apricot system which will help to support this notion is a tagging concept - to let people "tag" member records and events just like they tag pictures on Flickr or bookmarks on Del.icio.us)
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Dmitriy Buterin
09 November 2006
Your non-profit organization probably has a large database of contacts - your members, donors, volunteers. How do you quickly find one record among many thousands? Especially if you only vaguely recall things like 'his name is probably Bill', 'his...
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Dmitriy Buterin
02 November 2006
Member-only webpages Many organizations find that one important way to attract and keep members is to provide them with valuable content. Industry research, whitepapers, how-to guides, checklists, electronic versions of presentations from their events...
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Dmitriy Buterin
23 October 2006
Happy Halloween! For the next 7 days or so we will be replacing our regular Wild Apricot logo with a Halloween variation - though we will stay short of renaming into Wild Pumpkin. Do not be (too) scared! Have a great Halloween and we hope that by using...
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Dmitriy Buterin
16 October 2006
Everything went as planned and a number of important new features were released on October 18th. These included multi-level pages, dashboard, getting started checklist, spellchecker, email members feature - and many minor tweaks. We have also totally...
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Dmitriy Buterin
09 October 2006
As you might know from our previous news posts, we use so-called Agile development methodology for our ongoing enhancements of Wild Apricot. Enhancements are planned in regular releases. Each release is two or three weeks, followed by 1-1.5 weeks of...
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Dmitriy Buterin
25 September 2006
Des Traynor is based in Ireland and writes a blog on usability and related topics . What is cool about his blog is that he is frequently using video - many usability issues are much easier to explain and discuss in this way. We just found out that...
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Dmitriy Buterin
20 September 2006
Last week we have completed development work on our latest release and will be updating Wild Apricot system in the next few days! Here are the major changes: Donations module. You will notice a new menu item in the administration menu - Donations -...
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Dmitriy Buterin
14 September 2006
We had a chance to attend a CSAE (Canadian Society of Association Executives) Trillium chapter workshop on HR issues for associations . These kind of events are always an interesting first-hand source on what current issues are important for associations....
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