Technology Conference Highlights Internet Tools and Spam Headaches

The Internet has transformed the way that political candidates raise money and mobilize supporters, and charities can draw some important lessons from those changes, Mike McCurry told 650 participants here at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

With technology, “you can ask people to do certain things: to give money, to take action, to write a member of Congress,” said Mr. McCurry, who served as White House press secretary in the Clinton administration from 1995 to 1998. “But when you bring them together in a group and get them to sit down with each other, you can then leverage the power they have collectively.”

As an example Mr. McCurry pointed to the way that Howard Dean’s campaign used the Web site Meetup, which allows people with similar interests to plan face-to-face gatherings, to organize meetings at which volunteers completed particular tasks, such as writing personalized letters to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire explaining why they supported the candidate.

Such a use of the Internet is important, said Mr. McCurry, because when people meet in person and talk about the actions they’re going to take, they feel a sense of responsibility to the others in the group to follow through on their commitment to act.

Nonprofit organizations, in addition to using such sites in their own advocacy activities, also might consider using them to share ideas and trade advice with other charity leaders, Mr. McCurry said in an interview after his speech.

Too often, he said, charities that have found a solution to a pressing social problem don’t have the infrastructure to take their program to other cities. An Internet tool like Meetup could help identify like-minded groups across the country that could reproduce a successful program.

While Mr. McCurry believes that the Internet has the potential to spur greater civic participation and bring in people who traditionally have been left out of the political process, he cautioned that technology can also be misused to further fracture a nation already divided on many political issues.

“We all have some responsibility on how we use this technology to communicate,” Mr. McCurry told conference participants.

“If we don’t do it in a way that brings people together to solve problems and resolve the differences that they have,” he said, “if we only use it in a narrow way to agitate the communities that we work with — but don’t reach out to try to figure out, ‘How do I connect with people who don’t agree with me?’ — then we’re going to end up in a place where we marginalize the very audiences that we are trying to empower.”

Two popular technology meetings, the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network Roundup and the e-Philanthropy Conference, were combined this year to create the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Three organizations jointly sponsored the event: the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, a national organization for individuals, charities, and businesses that provide technology assistance to nonprofit groups; Network for Good, an organization that runs an online-giving site; and United Way of America.

Among the hot topics discussed at the meeting: the mounting frustrations created by junk e-mail or spam. Participants said they were increasingly seeing their e-mail newsletters and advocacy alerts misidentified as spam by so-called spam-filter software, preventing the mailings from reaching the supporters who signed up to receive them.

E-mail users are so overwhelmed by the onslaught of messages in their inboxes that their very understanding of what spam is has changed, said Charles E. Stiles, AOL’s postmaster, at a conference session.

While the legal definition of spam is unsolicited commercial e-mail, many e-mail users have come to think of spam as any e-mail they don’t want, said Mr. Stiles. “That’s where we get into customers saying, ‘I don’t want this. I don’t care if I signed up for it last week or last year. I don’t want it.’”

The key to avoiding the spam-blocking measures that Internet service providers have put in place is to follow the best practices for mass e-mailing, Mr. Stiles told session participants. He stressed the importance of good network design, security measures that protect systems from being compromised by spammers, clear and concise subject lines, and a quick response to people who ask to unsubscribe.

“A lot of this is don’t do what the people who are getting caught are doing,” Mr. Stiles said. “If you walk into a bank with a ski mask on, you’re probably going to the floor,” he quipped.

Bill Pease, chief technology officer at GetActive Software, also emphasized following the rules, but he cautioned that doing so is not a foolproof defense against having e-mail messages blocked.

“Spam has to evolve to look more and more like legitimate e-mail if it’s going to have any chance of getting through,” he said. “That increases the probability that legitimate e-mail gets labeled as spam, and therefore becomes collateral damage.”

For example, in an effort to look more like legitimate e-mail, many spam messages now include a link — usually one that doesn’t work — that purportedly allows the recipient to unsubscribe from the e-mail list. So many spammers have taken this tack, said Mr. Pease, that including an unsubscribe link will actually trigger some of the spam-detection programs used by Internet service providers.

And sometimes getting onto a list of banned e-mail senders isn’t accidental, Mr. Pease told session participants. Several advocacy groups, including MoveOn.org and reproductive-rights organizations, have had their messages reported as spam to Internet service providers and to independent spam-monitoring services, such as Spam Cop, by people who disagree with them on the issues, said Mr. Pease.

“What’s an easy way to disrupt the communications campaigns of your enemies?” asked Mr. Pease. “Well, it’s to subscribe to Planned Parenthood’s list and report every message that Planned Parenthood sends you as spam, and basically just pound away on them.”

To try to cut down on the amount of spam in their customers’ inboxes, some Internet service providers have instituted so-called challenge-response systems.

These systems bounce back e-mail sent from anyone who is not in a customer’s personal address book with instructions on steps the sender must take before the message is delivered.

The instructions might be as simple as asking the sender to hit reply and type a specified word at the beginning of the message. In other cases, the sender might have to fill out a form on a Web site. The systems are designed to make sure that a person is sending the e-mail message, rather than an automated system blasting out spam.

Each week the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sends its e-mail newsletter to 245,000 subscribers, and each week the nonprofit organization receives more than 1,000 messages from challenge-response systems, said Garth Moore, the group’s director of Internet communications.

He said that it takes him hours to respond to the messages one by one, but that his organization believes those supporters are too valuable not to try to keep them in the fold.

Said Mr. Moore: “If we lose these people, we may never get them back.”

Part of the conference highlighted new ways charities are looking to integrate technology into their programs.

Efforts by the United Way of New York City provided a key case in point. The nonprofit group has worked with nine social-service charities and three government agencies to build a new food-stamp eligibility calculator, which it hopes will increase enrollment in the government program. According to Stephanie Copelin, director of work-force development at the United Way, an estimated 800,000 New Yorkers who qualify for food stamps have not applied to receive them.

The offline calculator has been loaded onto laptop computers, which nonprofit employees who are encouraging people to apply for food stamps can use as they conduct one-on-one interviews at food pantries, soup kitchens, health clinics, and grocery stores. After a person’s information is entered, the calculator assesses whether the client is eligible for food stamps and estimates the amount of assistance for which he or she would qualify.

Then, rather than just telling clients where to go to apply for food stamps, said Ms. Copelin, outreach workers are able to print out completed application forms using the information they have entered in the calculator.

In addition, the workers set up an appointment for the client at the local food-stamp office, explain what they will need to take with them when they go, and then follow up after the scheduled appointment to ask how it went and to see if there is any other assistance they need.

At the end of the day, employees upload the information they gathered to the central Food Card Access Project database. Employees at the United Way and participating charities have varying degrees of access to the data to protect clients’ privacy.

Since June, outreach workers have used the calculator with more than 9,000 people in five neighborhoods selected because they have high levels of eligibility but low participation rates. The United Way has started to screen those names against the New York City Human Resources Administration’s database so it can track how many of the people they talk to enroll in the food-stamps program.

Several organizations announced technology news at the conference:

• AT&T Wireless will award $125,000 to nonprofit organizations through its new Community Connections Award.

The company plans to make five to seven grants, up to $25,000 each, to nonprofit groups for innovative projects that use wireless technology to enhance public safety and increase communications among family members.

AT&T Wireless will also hold a series of workshops with NPower, a network of organizations that provide technology assistance to other nonprofit groups, to discuss the possible applications of wireless technology in the nonprofit world.

The deadline for applications is May 28. More information about the awards workshops is available at http://www.attwscommunityconnectionsaward.org.

A new online directory, TechFinder, is now available to help nonprofit organizations identify individuals, charities, and companies that provide technology assistance.

Users can search the more than 600 listings by category, keyword, or ZIP code.

The directory was created by the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network and by the nonprofit group TechSoup.org, a technology Web site that is run by CompuMentor, a San Francisco charity that provides technology assistance to other nonprofit organizations.

The directory is available at http://www.techfinder.org.