"One organization over in Africa that we were assisting, they were so excited with the assistance that they actually went so far as to say, 'Your assistance has meant that our staff was able to provide more assistance to the children here, so that we weren't working on the technology. We were working with the kids that we intended to serve.'"

Grassroots.org's Toolbox was a Featured Project at the NetSquared Conference (N2Y2) in May 2007. You can be a Toolbox tester by emailing Grassroots' Executive Director, Angela Siefer at angela AT grassroots DOT org. For more information about Grassroots.org, listen to an interview with Angela on the NetSquared Podcast, hear their five-minute pitch at the NetSquared Conference, and read a transcript of the interview below.

Angela Siefer: My name is Angela Siefer. I'm the Executive Director of Grassroots.org. We are a national nonprofit; we serve a few nonprofits in the Canada region and a few internationally, but most of our clients are in the United States.

We focus upon the use of technology as a tool for social change." What that means is that we believe very much in the power of the Internet and online applications, and that it doesn't seem quite right that only the big nonprofits and the big corporations, and the small corporations, have access to all of these amazing online applications that are out there. Promoting themselves online and organizing themselves online, whereas the folks who are maybe a little bit less tech savvy, or don't have the funds to hire technology folks on staff to be able to use those tools, don't.

We are really focused on creating free tools, and also getting individuals involved in the efforts of other nonprofit organizations. What this means, in a very real way, is free online applications: free web hosting, free first year domain registration, free search engine optimization advice, and matching up volunteers to create websites. Those are all things that we do right now.

What is in development, and the reason that we were at NetSquared, is what we are calling our toolbox, the Grassroots Toolbox. It has more tools, like what I just mentioned, including a content management system created out of Drupal, that will allow these grassroots nonprofits to create their own websites, and not rely upon volunteers.

There are other content management systems out there, but we are doing a lot of education, and we are creating an amazing help site to really get folks to believe that they can do this themselves and use all these tools themselves and know that it's not outside of their reach.

Britt Bravo: Where did the idea for grassroots.org come from?

AS: Grassroots.org is four years old. We were founded by Michael Mann. He is an Internet entrepreneur. He was one of the first individuals to realize the value in domain names, and has since then been involved in a variety of businesses and entrepreneurial activities.

He's the one who recognized that if more folks had access to all of these tools,astounding advances could be made for those organizations. He also recognizes that he has access to resources that a lot of the smaller nonprofits do not have access to. That is how he founded it four years ago, and we're basing everything we do upon that same vision today.

BB: What are the next steps for Grassroots.org? What are some of your goals for the future?

AS: We are in development on the toolbox right now. It's very exciting. It's very stressful. We have a software company that we're working with that gave us a tremendous deal. That's how we do everything around here. We either get it for free, or get somebody to donate their time and their energy towards it. We're working a lot on that Toolbox. We expect to be able to do an alpha in November. So that's our big thing right now is the Toolbox.

Other services that we have are a mentor program with the University of Maryland's Dingman Center. One of the things we've also been working on is the idea of spreading that particular program. We have nonprofits that we match up with the MBA students at the Dingman Center. They work on specific areas that those nonprofits need assistance with. That project has been so tremendously successful that we'd love to expand that also. It's not as tech focused, it focuses more on the idea of having nonprofits get access to business resources, but that again comes through the connections that we have through the Board and being able to make use of those.

The other thing is our Search Engine Optimization program. We have recently rolled that out and are doing a lot of marketing on that right now. Most of the folks in small to medium-sized nonprofits understand the idea of getting to the top of a Google hit list. They think that would be a good idea. They've often never heard the term "Search Engine Optimization", nor do they understand that they can actually make some changes to their own website in order to increase their chances of getting higher on that list without any cost involved at all.

BB: What are some of Grassroots.org's challenges?

AS: I think one of our challenges is one that most nonprofits face, and that's the financial challenge, keeping everything funded. At this point, we are funded almost entirely through private donors. We have one foundation grant. Keeping that going is a constant struggle.

I spend a good amount of my time on fundraising. The rest of the staff focuses more on programs and development of the programs, and the technology, but I end up spending a lot of it on fundraising.

The other challenge is more technical; it has to do with the actual technology itself and managing the development of a tech system. It has proven to be a pretty huge challenge for us. We want to be able to look forward, and look ahead, and make sure that we're considering every eventuality. We're trying to do as much of this open source as we can, and we're working with different software development shops, that aren't necessarily open source, but they understand where we're coming from, so they're happy to oblige, but then there are challenges with that.

I would say our two biggest challenges are financial, and these can go hand in hand. We often get things donated to us that are technological and we have to figure out how to make them work within our system, because they were donated. For example, TierraNet is a company that provides free web hosting. They provide it free to any Grassroots.org client. We have to have all of the technology interact between their systems and our systems so that everything is seamless for our folks. It's great that they're providing it for free, but then we have to work out the back-end of all that stuff. I would definitely say that some of it's connected, and some of it is just general.

BB: Can you tell a story or give an example of how Grassroots.org has created positive change?

AS: We have been really fortunate that many of our clients have sent us nice quotes, really great quotes. So when we go out asking for them to send us positive stories, they will send us back stories that explain how they were able to either save money, by not having to pay somebody for hosting that website, or that they love their volunteer who has set up their website, or even that they were able to promote themselves.

Some of them, like one organization over in Africa that we were assisting, they were so excited with the assistance that they actually went so far as to say, "Your assistance has meant that our staff was able to provide more assistance to the children here, so that we weren't working on the technology. We were working with the kids that we intended to serve."

And that's the exact kind of message that we want to hear back. That's our whole purpose, is that the folks that we're serving can have more time towards their actual programs and are spending less time on the tech, because that's not serving their purpose. It's not getting them closer to their mission.

BB: What was the positive impact for Grassroots.org of going to the NetSquared Conference?

AS: It was an interesting exercise for us to put together the materials. Up to that point, all of the Toolbox stuff that we had been doing was internal. Everybody inside Grassroots knew what we were doing, and they knew what it looked like, because we put it on the whiteboard. We had it on big flip chart paper, and that kind of thing. But we hadn't really communicated it in any other manner.

NetSquared forced us to put it into a nice little pamphlet, so that we actually created a flowchart, which we've used in multiple circumstances since then. When folks want to know about the Toolbox, we're like, "Oh, we've got this flowchart that we created for NetSquared. We'll show you that."

Probably the one potential partnership that looks like it might be the most interesting is with Kabissa. We talked to them just a tiny bit at NetSquared. Now that NetSquared is over, we're talking to them much more intensely about a potential partnership.

BB: How can listeners help to move your work forward?

AS: The Toolbox should be out in November. There will at least be an internal version out in November. If they're seriously interested in it, and they want to help test it, and give us some honest feedback, then that would be awesome. They're welcome to contact me at Angela AT grassroots DOT org. If there are additional tools that they think should be in the Toolbox, of course we would love to hear that also. And you know the most obvious ones are the tech expertise and the ongoing financial support.

There was one interesting conversation that occurred at NetSquared, and it's actually an ongoing conversation, probably for many organizations, is the sustainability question of whether we should be charging for this Toolbox. There will be some upgrade types of items that folks will end up wanting to pay for. For example, with the content management system, there will be some designs that come for free. If they want something that's more custom, then that's something that they would need to hire one of the developers for.

But you could do everything you needed to for free, and that's really what we're focusing on. Our mission is to serve the really small nonprofits that have either no money, or close to no money. If we start charging for these services, we are then not serving the folks that we wanted to serve.

If you want to feed the hungry, and you decide that you're going to start charging them for it, but they couldn't afford it in the first place, you're then not serving your mission anymore.

We are very focused on how to raise money from donors and foundations, and from some fee-for-service, as a multiple income strategy. We are not at all looking at having the majority of our online services be a fee-based strategy.