Rick Cohen is the Membership and Communications Associate for the National Council of Nonprofit Associations (NCNA) and is in charge of web strategy for the Nonprofit Congress. The Congress is an effort to build a grass-roots directed and unified front for the non profit sector to gain strength on the national scale. It is a new two year initiative of NCNA and the DC Central Kitchen.

Rick and I discussed the aims of the Nonprofit Congress, open source software and where the organizing cultures of both intersect.

The Non Profit Congress is utilizing "viral marketing as occurs nowhere but on the web," Rick says.  The first phase of the Congress is building support for the Nonprofit Declaration. The Declaration has received 1,000 signatures, including signatures from all 50 states, after being online for only 3 weeks. "It's been amazing how fast word has spread," he says. " Forwarding emails has been huge - it really speaks to the power of the web."

I asked Rick what the National Association's strategy was regarding its online organizing and conference in D.C. in October. He emphasized that both are intended for groups of all sizes and budgets. "A group as small as 5 people can get together and talk about same issues and get their voices heard," he said. " Not everybody has time and money to travel to conferences so we're offering as many virtual and online ways to participate as possible. Even if there's not a local group nearby you can plug in to the discussion through the web site. It's open and we're aiming to make it as grass roots as possible."

Rick says the organization is not committed to taking the agenda in a certain direction, but to letting participants decide how it evolves.

He acknowledges that this can be challenging for planning purposes but believes it will pay off in terms of relevance to participants and appeal for possible attendees of the national conference. "Even if people are critical of the movement we want to hear that," Rick says. "We are like an open source movement, letting people drive it according to what they are excited about."

As the conference approaches conference calls and online voting based on nationwide Town Hall Meetings (already underway) and online input will determine the priorities and agenda. Rick says that this can be challenging for some people who want to know what will be on an agenda well in advance of an event before deciding to attend, but he believes that the balancing of needs is important. Listening to what people want is too often under prioritized in favor of telling people what is going to happen.

On the day of the meeting the online forums will be open, there will be live updates, blog postings and podcasts from the event. Rick says, "we don't want this to be a one shot deal where people just sign on to the Declaration." After the conference, he hopes that the web site will continue to be a place to bring people together. Judging by the use of the site so far, success in that seems likely.

Site Design and Open Source

The Congress web site was built with the open source software Drupal. This allows for several avenues of input from users: the site uses forms, forums (state and theme focused) and is launching an open public blog that visitors will be able to write on in addition to reading.

I asked Rick for some specific thoughts on web design and site stickiness, making the site one that people would want to return to.

He emphasized that it's important to recognize the different amounts of web savvy that different people have and says that a good community site must be multi faceted because of this. "Some people want all the bells and whistles," he said. "But others don't have their own email access, reliable internet or are on dial up. It's hard to take advantage of the most up to date web tools while still being compatible with outdated computers and browsers." Because of this the declaration is both signable online and printable. Printed and mailed copies will be counted. "Some people will invest a lot of time, some will sign the declaration or respond to one post on the site and move on with their lives. We want to give people as many entry points as possible and as many ways to contribute as possible."

I asked Rick how he likes Drupal and he said he loves it. "We're using Bryght's hosted version and that makes it even easier. It's very flexible and easy to use." He says that even if he hadn't done any web design in the past he could probably learn to use the Drupal system. "The Drupal community is wonderful," Rick says. "When I've posted a question on the Drupal community - within 30 minutes 5 people had posted a line of code I can use to do what I need. That's the great thing about open source. It's also constantly updating and constantly getting better."

He acknowledged that users of Open Source have to move their existing infrastructure over into free software, that many organizations are so busy providing services that they can't stay up to date and that this does mean the Total Cost of Ownership in Open Source isn't ultimately free.

Rick also gives credit to Microsoft for developing some of the best products on the market, but also says that he loves how the community of Open Source software takes ownership over its software. "It's a large community of people invested in the technology who want to move it forward," he says.

When I asked him what would help him do his work better, he came back to the Drupal community. "Constant improvements of modules in Drupal," he said. "Bryght gives a finite number, but every few days there new themes, modules, functionality added on the main Drupal website. Many of these we couldn't have imagined a need for. There was a laundry list of things people have come up with that opened new possibilities for our site."

Conference Suggestions 

Finally, I asked Rick for his thoughts on how we could make the Net Squared conference as valuable as possible. "'Often the announcements for conferences sound good but the session topics are less exciting," he said. "Ask people to suggest topics and speakers - that way people feel ownership of the conference itself." In addition to discussing best practices, he also said that focusing on "low hanging fruit" for how non profits can incorporate technology into their every day practices would be valuable.

Interviewee Rick Cohen is the Membership and Communications Associate for the National Council of Nonprofit Associations (NCNA) and is in charge of web strategy for the Nonprofit Congress.

You can learn more about the National Nonprofit Congress and sign the Declaration at http://nonprofitcongress.org and the National Council of Nonprofit Associations at http://www.ncna.org/.