After about a half hour of debugging, I figured out that if you’re calling a method from an inputText VisualForce element, a la
<apex:inputText value=”{!BiteMe}” />
And if that method’s setter is private, exempli gratia
public String BiteMe { get { return ‘gnash snarl’; } private set; }
Then SalesForce will give you an Internal Server Error. Way to go.
This is my second post in a very short series about technical volunteers. This topic has been capably covered before, so really, these are just my thoughts on the matter. Jayne Cravens has some thoughtful content on the subject, among others.
So, how do you make the best use of your technical volunteers and keep them engaged in the long term? It’s like any other relationship you’re trying to cultivate, more akin to growing a whole orange tree than to peeling an orange. The thing you need help with now will take 5 minutes, but it will take you some hours of effort and a few weeks or months of back and forth to get them hooked. You want to build relationships with a few, dependable people who over time invest more of themselves with you and your technology. It’s going to take time to learn how to communicate with them, how to describe what you need in their language, and how to manage them.
The biggest hurdle, in some cases, is the learning curve of your technology setup. Do they need FTP access? Is there a document describing how your website is organized? How many new accounts need to be created? Try creating a document – a private Wiki, perhaps – describing ALL the necessary steps to give someone the same access you have. You want to make this process smooth so they can help you as soon as possible…and also so you don’t terrify them with your disorganization.
You should at least discuss, if not formally document with signatures, your privacy policy with the volunteer. They need to agree that they are now responsible for protecting and securing the data and access you share with them. On a similar note, if your administrator password to a donor database is ‘password’ or anything else dumb (like ‘admin’, ’1′, ‘test’…I’ve seen some doozies), change it. If you have strong passwords the technical person may respect your organization a little bit more.
Let’s be honest, you probably have thousands of hours of project ideas floating around on your desk and in your head. There’s little chance you’ll find a capable person who has that much time to devote immediately. There’s nothing wrong with engaging several specialized technical volunteers to help distribute the workload and protect you from a single points of failure. There’s also nothing wrong with, at first, showing them a very narrow slice of your setup in order to make sure they’re up to the task and reliable.
When working with (paid) contractors, I try to start them on a new project with a very simple, straightforward task. I know that 90% of their time will go towards setup and learning, but the 10% gives them a quick feeling of accomplishment. Similarly, if you feed your technical volunteers a few, smaller tasks each week, they’ll start to feel that with you, they can actually get stuff done and make a difference…that may not be easy to come by in their day jobs.
Even though they’re working for free, or perhaps at a steep discount, you should conduct the relationship as if they are, in fact, being paid. Discuss each task in detail – to save both of you time and confusion – and be clear and fairly strict about deadlines. Someone who offers to install WordPress for you and takes 3 months to do it isn’t really helping. Ask for, and expect, frequent updates on progress and any decisions that they’re making as they work. If you don’t see progress, find someone else.
Phrase your requests as specifically as possible, including your deadline and other terms for the work. Write everything down, maybe in that Wiki, so you can find it again without digging through your email. If you have a lot of stuff going on, you might want to use Google Docs, Redmine, Trac, Basecamp, or another light project management web app. Heck, you could probably use those to improve the way you run your organization if you’re still e-mailing 5MB word documents back and forth with Track Changes enabled.
I think technical volunteers have a few, simple reasons for helping you. One, they care about your cause or generally want to do good. Two, their day job sucks and they want to use their skills and actually make a difference. The more organized you are, the easier it will be for both of you to get what you want out of the relationship.
Sometimes I feel like I have one foot each in two canoes. The nonprofit community and technology community are both seaworthy vessels, but when trying to bring the two together there are a lot of ways to fall in a lake. Also, I like to stretch my metaphors.
These two posts (next one soon) are directed at nonprofit/NGO people who are trying to find good technical volunteers, or even technical staff. There have been posts on this topic before. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Since civilization is collapsing, now is a very good time to find (underemployed) technical people to get deeply involved with your cause. It helps them stay sharp, feel good, and fill gaps on their resume, and it helps you get things done.
These are their natural habitats.
Each major acronym / jargon nugget / buzzword is usually accompanied (in a moderately large metropolitan area) by a regular meeting of people interested in that topic. To wit, I’ve attended Austin’s PHP, Social Media, and 501 Tech meetings, and I’ve heard of groups for Linux, Ruby on Rails, Python, MySQL, Java, and Javascript. There may even be user groups for a product you’re using: WordPress, Blackbaud, Drupal, Joomla, etc. Plug ‘Your City’ + ‘Thing You Need Help With’ into a search engine.
If you contact the group’s organizers ahead of time, they might have some tips or send you some contacts right off the bat. You should attend at least one meeting. Even if you don’t stay for all the gobblety-gook and just announce yourself at the beginning, it’s far easier to curry favor when you show up in person.
For folks who can’t meet regularly in meatspace, there are plenty of online groups, sometimes hosted at a technology specific site, sometimes on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Groups, or other. Again, search engines should have no trouble finding these. Make yourself an account, e-mail the administrator, read their FAQ, and post your intentions. If you fire off a bunch of newbie questions you might brusquely be told to RTFM, which stands for “Read the Gosh Darn Manual’. If you instead ask doe-eyed and innocent for general, introductory help, people may trip over themselves to demonstrate their ability to help you.
Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and other services usually have some searchable component. Friendfeed and Twitter particularly are built in such a way that it’s OK for a strangers to connect. Let’s say you’re a newly minted, wobbly-kneed Joomla administrator. Follow 50 people on Twitter who seem to know what they’re doing. Some of them will follow you back. Tweet out questions when you need help. You’ll get answers.
If you don’t want to clutter up your personal or organization’s account, you can always create a separate one for specific communities.
Even if your entire constituency hunts-and-pecks at their keyboards with a frown whenever they are forced to use computers, they might have daughters, sons, friends, relatives who do “You know, things with the internets to make the websites talk to my email.” Hit them up with the message “We’re looking for help with {frightening technology term} at the head office. We’d love to hear from you or anyone who might know about it.”
Using a platform or enterprise system? Sign up for, search through, and then post in the main developer/administrator bulletin boards of your platform (SalesForce, Convio, SAP, etc). Find people who seem to be exceptionally active and message them directly.
Just like fundraising, it’s all about the ask.
I’m going to bloom into a perfect old dude someday, because even now, I only adopt new things with a fair measure of grumbling and wariness. To wit, I made fun of Twitter for months – mainly with references to ‘Twits’ instead of Tweets – before being shamed into accepting it at my first Austin Social Media Club meeting. I really didn’t see the point of a service which restricted you to 140 characters in a world already suffering from a short attention I should really cash that check that’s been sitting on my desk.
Even now, I only kind of get it. I haven’t set up the kinds of automated searches, auto-follows, and other twaintenance tools that the pros use. I’m barely proficient at using #tags. I explain it to the still wary as “Like your Facebook wall, but public, and that’s it.” But, what I’ve seen so far reminds me of Conway’s Game of Life. From a simple set of rules, fairly complex behaviors and structures result. By swapping private profile data for an open, and seemingly backwards, method of connecting with others, Twitter has become an amazing tool and service which is only starting to get awkward attention from the mainstream press. I still don’t like the habit of adding ‘tw’ to everything twitter related (Tweeps, etc), but OK FINE, it’s actually an effective way to label concepts and services as being within the Twitter sphere.
A lot of people in the non-profit community use it to network, exchange notes, share links, to do the kinds of informal relationship building that used to only happen with people in your office. A few adventuresome causes have made a splash by raising surprising sums in a short amount of time. It seems like the time is ripe for some big, awesome, stuff to happen.
Along comes the Twestival, complete with Austin branch, to try and deliver. There have been Tweet-Ups and Tweet-Mobs and Tweetootenannys before, but I haven’t heard of anything quite on this scale. What I like about this is that while the internet has promised to bring people together, it really hasn’t been a worthy competitor to the town diner, the church, the school, the local bar, and other community institutions where you make new friends. Even with Facebook, you usually have to meet someone first, judge them silently, and then pretend to be friends with them. Half the people I ‘know’ on Twitter I’ve never met, and may never meet. Some of them are stellar people in Austin that I never would have run across otherwise, mainly because I rarely leave my house.
I also like that the Twestival has chosen a universal, sort of random, and completely unobjectionable cause: Water. Earth and Wind don’t really get people excited, and Fire is too controvercial. Water’s great, and I’d be kind of a jerk if I didn’t want everyone to have some.
I fret a little bit that this will come off as a bunch of hipsters patting each other on the back, but it’s not often that the Beauty Bar manages to fund two wells in Africa in a night. Besides, it’s up to the young and fashionable to lead the @unfollowed masses into an orgiastic future, right?
It’ll be the first few events like this that determine how mass events are run through Twitter (and similar services) in the future, or whether or not. It will determine if big organizations like the American Cancer Society and the Red Cross will need to continue to spend millions of dollars on marketing and organizing (and not research or relief), or if they can transition sooner to a cheaper, more powerful method.
If you read this far, and live in Austin or any other city where this is happening, go get a ticket and meet me there.
From my researcher’s TweetBlind ™ I was able to watch as Britt Bravo sent out the call to her followers for examples of non-profit iPhone apps. She published the results which were picked up and commented on by various luminaries in the NPTech community. All this happened in a very social, viral way as a great example of how social media is supposed to work.
The iPhone is a very popular mobile platform for the Twitter set, but I wish she had expanded her search for great non-profit mobile apps. Or great non-profit social apps. Remember, there’s still a few billion people using beat-up phones with tiny screens. Design for them! Also, read what Jan Chipchase has to say about it.
People who are excited about the mobile giving and social actions revolution (happening real soon now?) should remember that to do the most good and have the greatest impact, your technology needs to be architected in such a way that it is flexible and applicable to all the platforms that exist now and all the platforms that will exist next year.
How? Publish a well documented, well designed, and open interface. Examples of these include Google Maps, Twitter, and Social Actions. Developing a worthwhile, stable service is hard enough. Do you also want to become an iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and web developer? Sure you do, maybe just for the fun of it. But in the interest of getting your great idea to market quickly and widely, leave the specific implementations up to the platform experts.
Britt’s post, in fact, broadened towards the end to include a few of the non-iPhone things going on in the bleeding edge right now, among them the Extraordinaries and the Change The Web challenge. She also uncovered some iPhone apps I wasn’t aware of that are built on great ideas. Turn every workout into a fundraiser? My cause would probably wither from lack of funding given my exercise patterns lately, but there are a lot of triatheletes in Austin alone whose 200+ training sessions per year could be harnessed for good! And also probably to produce electricity!
In summary, think beyond the iPhone. Build the foundation and the service and then let the open source, open interface model carry your idea to the far reaches. An Extrarodinaries app for pagers. Volunteer Match in Lynx. Micro-donations from your gambling card in Vegas (“This pull is for diabetes!”).
Remember, I’m a grumpy gus who has a G1 Android phone from TMobile. I’m part of the unwashed, non iPhone having masses. And I usually have 20 minutes of $5 to spare.
