Charity Leaders Discuss Computer Privacy and Other Technology Issues

Information technology is creating a new economic system, a change that will have a profound effect on the role of nonprofit organizations in society, Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, in Washington, told participants here at a joint session of several nonprofit technology conferences.

Market economies, based on the exchange of goods and services between buyers and sellers, cannot accommodate the increasing speed of transactions allowed by new technologies, said Mr. Rifkin, who has written extensively on the effect of science and technology on the economy and culture. In the future, he explained, the dominant economic model will be a network in which suppliers lease access to their products and services rather than selling them.

As economies around the world become increasingly networked and dependent on one another, the biggest drawback is the danger that people will lose a sense of place and individuality, Mr. Rifkin told the audience.

“What we’ll get on the other end is the sense that we’re losing our stories, we’re losing our identities, we’re losing our communities, we’re losing our locality, we’re losing our cultural diversity,” he said.

Because nonprofit groups exist to maximize relationships between people, rather than to maximize economic outputs, they are particularly well-qualified to serve as “guardians of culture, of locality and geography and the story,” he said. “Why do people become involved in your organizations?” asked Mr. Rifkin. “Comradeship, collegiality, connecting with another human being, another creature, and the community that we live in.”

More than 600 people attended the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network Roundup, the e-Philanthropy Conference, the United Way e-Business Forum, and the TechFunders Summit, which were held together here last week.

A recurring theme throughout the meetings was the importance of protecting the security and the privacy of the data charities maintain on donors, clients, volunteers, and staff members.

Threats to security and privacy can be both technological and physical, Greg Beuthin, a senior associate at CompuMentor, a San Francisco charity that provides technology assistance to other nonprofit organizations, reminded conference participants.

“A lot of people will either think of one or the other,” said Mr. Beuthin. “They’ll think about security, and they’ll say, Is my door locked? But their network is completely open. Or they’ll make sure that they’ve got a security firewall and all the great passwords, but somebody can walk into their server room, and there’s no lock on the door.”

Sharon Meyers, who advises schools on technology issues through her work at NPC Consulting, in San Jose, Calif., cautioned that technological fixes are not enough to protect a charity’s data. Employees, she said, have to be conviced that keeping donor information private is a high priority that requires daily attention.

“Any actions that an organization takes to improve security and privacy has to be an integral part of how they do business,” said Ms. Meyers. “You can put all the wonderful gizmos in place — you can have firewalls and paper shredders — but if the culture doesn’t buy in then you’re going to still have issues.”

In a separate session, California State Senator Jackie Speier, a Democrat who represents San Francisco and San Mateo County, spoke about a bill she is introducing that would give California residents greater control over when companies can share or sell their personal financial information.

During a question-and-answer exchange after the talk, she advised charities not to use rented e-mail lists in their fund-raising efforts. “You will end up turning off more people than you will engender support from,” she said.

Fund raisers have to remember that, when it comes to e-mail, donors’ privacy expectations are different from what they are with direct mail or telemarketing, said Debra Erenberg, deputy director of constituency development at Naral Pro-Choice America. “The people who care about e-mail privacy care about it a lot, and they will go after you,” she said.

Ms. Erenberg explained that some companies now offer a service — often called e-mail appending — in which they run the names of an organization’s donors against their master databases of names and e-mail addresses. The company then sends an e-mail message to those people for whom they’ve found an e-mail address letting them know that the charity would like to contact them. It then provides the organization with the e-mail addresses of those people who agree to receive messages.

If the company seeks permission by sending an “opt-out” e-mail message — organization X would like to contact you; please let us know if you don’t want to hear from them — organizations can expect to receive e-mail addresses for 8 to 12 percent of the donors they had only postal addresses or phone numbers for, and pay the company 15 to 50 cents per e-mail address, said Ms. Erenberg. She said the problem is that the matching process isn’t 100-percent accurate, so charities send e-mail messages to people who are not actually donors.

Naral experimented with e-mail appending, and the results were disastrous, said Ms. Erenberg. People who were not affiliated with the organization received the group’s e-mail messages, and reported the unwanted e-mails to their Internet service providers, which landed Naral on several e-mail filter lists of organizations whose messages should be blocked.

Ms. Erenberg said that the organization was temporarily unable to send e-mail to some of its affiliates because the affiliates got their Internet access from companies that were blocking the national organization’s messages as spam.

To remedy the situation, Naral sent a message to the people whose e-mail addresses they received from the company, apologizing for what the organization had done, and explaining to recipients that if they did want to receive information from Naral, they could respond to the message; otherwise, they told the recipients, they wouldn’t hear from the organization again.

Naral’s solution assuaged the e-mail filter companies, which removed the group from their blocking lists. But Ms. Erenberg said the experience was a painful and expensive lesson for the organization.

“We wound up throwing out thousands of e-mail addresses,” said Ms. Erenberg, “and the price went from 50 cents per e-mail to somewhere over $10, plus a huge nightmare of headaches.”

The AOL Time Warner Foundation, in New York — a longtime supporter of nonprofit technology projects and one of the primary sponsors of the e-Philanthropy Conference — is shifting its giving focus. Instead of supporting a wide range of technology efforts, the foundation now plans to award most of its grants to programs that help teenagers bolster their reading, writing, and math skills, and teach them about technology.

In a February 28 letter to colleagues in the nonprofit world, Kathy Bushkin, president of the foundation, wrote that decisions on future nonprofit-technology grants would be based, at least in part, on how well the proposals fit the new emphasis on education.

The shift in focus will be accompanied by a reduction in staff. The foundation will be closing its Dulles, Va., office by June 30. Some staff members will continue to work for the foundation in New York, while others will be reassigned to different areas of the company or laid off.

The foundation’s grant making will remain steady at about $10-million this year. Ms. Bushkin will remain the foundation’s president, while David Eisner, senior vice president of the foundation, will be stepping down at the end of June.

Several organizations announced technology news at the conferences.

• The Microsoft Corporation, in Redmond, Wash., is expanding the software-donation program it runs through TechSoup, a nonprofit technology site operated by CompuMentor.

  The company now offers a larger selection of its products on the site, which now includes Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server and Microsoft Office XP. In addition, qualified nonprofit organizations can request up to six software titles and up to 50 licenses of each of those products. Charities may make one donation request every two years.

• A new report discusses different types of technology grant making, advises foundations on how to be effective in their technology grant making, and describes the challenges grant makers face in this field. The report, “From Obstacles to Opportunities, Version 1.0,” is based on an online survey of 38 grant makers, an online survey of 55 people who work at nonprofit organizations that provide technology assistance to other charities, and telephone interviews with grant makers.

The report was written by Marc Osten, Jillaine Smith, and Rob Stuart, of Summit Collaborative, a consulting company in Amherst, Mass. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich., provided financial support for the study. The report is available online at http://www.summitcollaborative.com.

Charities that are working to extend access to technology in poor neighborhoods can’t assume that the people they are trying to help already see the relevance of technology to their lives, Randal D. Pinkett, president of Building Community Technology Partners, in Plainfield, N.J., told conference participants.

As part of his doctoral research, Mr. Pinkett helped organize a community technology project that established a computer laboratory at Canfield Estates, a Roxbury, Mass., housing development for low-income to moderate-income people, and brought computers and high-speed Internet access to residents in their homes.

Half the families at Canfield — 33 out of 66 — signed up for the project’s first round of classes. The second time around, however, only 8 of the 47 eligible families at Canfield — 14 new families had moved into the development — signed up.

When Mr. Pinkett and others working on the project met with the people who hadn’t signed up to find out why, they learned that the biggest reason was that residents didn’t think technology had much to offer them.

The meetings, said Mr. Pinkett, provided project organizers with a way to explain how residents were using their computers and to describe some of the other potential functions. By the end of the process, the number of families that had signed up as part of the second round increased to 27.

Details on the conferences can be found at: http://www.nten.org and http://www.e-philanthropy.org.