Financing Technology Projects Is a Struggle, Charities Say

A year and a half after Katrina showed how vital technology is to nonprofit organizations’ survival, money to pay for those much-needed systems is still hard to come by, Melissa S. Flournoy, president of the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations, in Baton Rouge, told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference here.

The annual meeting, organized by the Nonprofit Technology Network, in San Francisco, drew more than 1,200 charity technology officials, consultants, and company representatives.

“Technology is the fundamental building block of organizational resiliency,” said Ms. Flournoy.

A lot of nonprofit organizations that relied on paper files or that didn’t have back-up copies of their data off-site are no longer in business, she said. Others are still trying to reconstruct their organizations’ basic information 18 months after the storm.

Yet, she said, charities — both on the Gulf Coast and elsewhere in the country — still struggle to find the money to pay for technology systems.

“You put your money on your mission, on delivering the services,” said Ms. Flournoy. “This whole technology conversation gets put into some box called ‘general and administrative,’ and nobody wants to fund general and administrative.”

Nonprofit leaders, she said, have to do a better job explaining to foundations and government agencies that technology is critical to the mission work that charities do.

Said Ms. Flournoy: “The technology infrastructure of an organization is what is going to help that group have scale, substance, and sustainability.”

Activists urged charities to pay attention to a still-simmering debate over how the Internet is regulated, saying it could have a serious effect on their ability to use the Internet to raise money and get the word out about their causes.

Proponents of so-called network neutrality argue that all data traveling over the Internet should be treated the same way, no matter which companies’ networks deliver it. They say phone and cable companies should not offer better service — faster speeds or dominant Web placement, for example — to companies that they are affiliated with or that are willing to pay extra. Many communications companies, however, argue that a federal law requiring network neutrality would impede their ability to attract financial investors for expansion of Internet services.

If companies were allowed to make deals to provide preferential treatment, nonprofit organizations would be at a severe disadvantage, said Jeannine Kenney, a senior policy analyst at Consumers Union, in Washington.

“If you’re a nonprofit and can’t afford access to the fast lane or you’re denied access to the fast lane, how will consumers look at your material” if it’s slow to open? she asked. Will they even wait, she wondered, or will they “close it out and go somewhere else.”

For an advocacy group like Consumers Union, which often goes up against well-heeled corporate adversaries, the problem would be particularly acute, she said.

Tom Maguire, a senior vice president at Verizon, said that telecommunications companies would not provide such preferential treatment because of the ill will it would create with consumers.

“Making your customers mad at you isn’t a sustainable business strategy,” he said.

The reason companies oppose legislation that would make net neutrality law is that regulations of any kind make an industry less attractive to investors, said Mr. Maguire, and telecommunications companies need a steady flow of capital to continue to extend broadband services nationwide.

In January, Sen. Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, and Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, introduced a bill that would require Internet service providers to operate their broadband networks in a nondiscriminatory manner. And last month, the Federal Communications Commission opened an inquiry into broadband market practices and whether its Internet Policy Statement needs to be amended to include “a new principle of nondiscrimination.”

Information about a campaign by nonprofit organizations, small-business groups, and bloggers calling for network-neutrality protections is available at http://www.savetheinternet.com. Information about a competing campaign by opponents of neutrality, including major telecommunications companies, is available at http://handsoff.org.

The widespread adoption of broadband opens up new possibilities for charities to use video to communicate with supporters, but for charities to make the most of those opportunities, they need to break out of the “video project” mind-set, said Michael Hoffman, chief executive officer of See3, a consulting company in Chicago.

Most charities’ only experience with making videos has been creating them for a special event, like an annual fund-raising dinner, he said.

“You may have four days of shooting in that budget, but those four days are random days, so what can you get?” asked Mr. Hoffman. “You can get talking heads talking about your program.”

A more effective strategy, he said, is to start building an archive that documents what your organization does every day. That archive could include video — shot either by professionals or trained staff members, photographs, and audio recordings of speeches and lectures. The information could be used and reused for different purposes.

“We were making the dinner video,” said Susan Rosenberg, director of communications at American Jewish World Service, in New York. “We had one video that we had made six years ago that we showed three times, and spent a lot of money making it.”

But the organization has begun taking a new approach.

American Jewish World Service provides grants to organizations that fight poverty, hunger, and disease in developing countries and offers its supporters volunteer opportunities working with the groups. Late last year, the charity, working with a professional camera crew, filmed 20 groups that it supports in El Salvador, India, and Uganda.

The organization plans to use the footage for a video it will show at its annual dinner, but also to create short informational pieces for its Web site, fund-raising appeals, and grantee profiles that the groups can use to promote their work.

Just before the Passover holiday this month, American Jewish World Service sent donors a fund-raising appeal featuring a young girl in Uganda who lost her parents to AIDS and now receives services from one of the groups the organization supports, along with volunteers talking about what their service has meant to them.

It was the first solicitation created with the new footage. Ms. Rosenberg said that it’s too soon to know how much money the video brought in, and that the eventual figure might not be the most important measure of its success.

“Whether we raise a lot of money from these first videos is not the test for me,” she said.

“We are hoping that this is an engagement tool, that this is a way of talking with our supporters much more directly and bringing the work that we’re involved in much closer to home.”