NCTech4Good

where tech meets social change

where tech meets social change

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Hunter Kenny / Design Hammer Team

What’s Next? Emerging Technologies and What Nonprofits Should Know

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With today’s hyper-connected, on-demand consumers, there is no such thing as meeting expectations. You either exceed expectations or you fall short. This never-ending uphill battle can leave even the best organizations stuck in neutral and not sure how to move forward. That ends here.

With today’s hyper-connected, on-demand consumers, there is no such thing as meeting expectations. You either exceed expectations or you fall short. This never-ending uphill battle can leave even the best organizations stuck in neutral and not sure how to move forward. That ends here.

In this program, Evan Carroll and Jeanne Allen will break down emerging technologies into real ideas for nonprofit innovation.

During this interactive experience, Evan and Jeanne offer the audience multiple technologies to choose from and explore each with explanations, ideas and case studies—if they happen to exist yet. Frequently requested technologies include:

  • Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
  • Internet of Things
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Blockchain
  • Biometrics and Wearable Technology

Evan Carroll
Evan Carroll, veteran technologist, IBM Futurist, and author, is a professional keynote speaker and workshop facilitator who inspires companies to leverage technology, data, and analytics to drive customer loyalty and advocacy. The results? Engaged employees, inspired to use technology to create world-class customer experiences.

Evan is the co-author of Blue Goldfish, which highlights businesses leveraging technology, data, and analytics to improve the experience for their customers and co-author of the book, Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter Are Your Estate, What’s Your Legacy? Evan was recognized by the American Marketing Association as its 2017 National Volunteer of the Year.

Jeanne Allen
Jeanne Allen, a nonprofit consultant, is an expert in board and leadership development, strategic planning, change management, volunteer management, and social media strategy.

Additionally, Jeanne is an Instructor in the Duke University Nonprofit Management Certificate Program, she is a Newswire Contributor for Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ) daily online journal and on the Editorial Board for Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN). Jeanne is a BoardSource Certified Governance Trainer with expert knowledge of effective governance principles and a Certified Instructor in the Service Enterprise Program, sponsored by Points of Light Foundation. As a volunteer, she is a local organizer for NC Tech4Good.

Creative Crowdfunding

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Rebekah Miel, otherwise known as Durham’s Lunch Lady, has successfully crowdfunded almost $100k in less than a year for various causes including Durham’s School Lunch Debt Pay Down. Come find out some of her tips and tricks about how to run a successful campaign, how to keep donors engaged, and which tools help make the process go more smoothly. There will be practical tips, a handout of resources, and she’ll walk you through a successful case study. You’ll also learn how she translated her skills as a graphic designer and marketer into her role as a fundraiser.

Rebekah Miel
Rebekah Miel is that lone pair of headlights driving in the opposite direction during a hurricane evacuation. You’ll no longer find her sweating through a Tyvek suit in the lower 9th or eating curry in a refugee camp in Unawatuna, but that doesn’t mean she’s any less risk adverse. These days she’s balancing the death defying feat of raising twins with the act of listening hard for how to be a good citizen in her adopted hometown of Durham, NC. Her current job title is Creative Director of her own shop, Miel Design Studio where she spends most of her time trying to make beautiful sense out of a complex world. Ask her what that means, but don’t be surprised if the answer has something to do with books or school lunch.

Unlock Your Content & Increase Engagement

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There’s a lot of brilliance locked in PDFs right now. Often, organizations spend countless hours working on content for an annual report, policy briefing, or toolkit for their audiences and simply upload it to their website or send as an email attachment when they’re done. But when their audience sees or receives it, they’re stuck and can’t do anything with it.

In this session, I’ll walk through the benefits of unlocking your content to increase engagement and social sharing opportunities, improve SEO and tracking, make your outreach more accessible, and create a seamless and integrated digital experience for supporters.

You’ll walk away with tips, free resources, and examples of organizations that have done this really well in recent years.

Shannon Ritchie
Shannon is a policy wonk, tech lover, and social justice advocate. As a strategy consultant, she collaborates with nonprofit organizations to make it easier to understand, navigate, and communicate in digital spaces. Her work prioritizes lifting up expertise in online public discourse, especially from directly affected people, researchers, and hub organizations that all have a critical roles in advancing policy and social change. Previously, Shannon was the Director of Digital and Innovation for AJ Fletcher Foundation where she created a strong online presence, led digital projects for many of the foundation's’ grantees, and founded SpeakUp NC. She has also co-founded The Vote Against Project and has worked at City Year and Harvard Law School. Her master’s degree is from Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and she served as student body president while attending Wake Forest University. When she takes a break from the laptop, you’ll find Shannon savoring the outdoors, drinking copious amounts of coffee around Durham, and wrangling two spirited and wonderful children. www.shannonritchie.me @shannon_ritchie

Get Your Automation On!

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Do any of these questions keep you up at night?

  • Are all these emails we send out actually advancing our organization’s goals?
  • What content on our site do people really care about enough to become more engaged?
  • Are we investing our time and money in the right digital areas?
  • How do people find us online … and do they care once they do?

If any of these questions are on your mind, your organization could benefit from marketing automation. Automation helps you get more valuable contacts through your digital channels, convert more contacts into passionate advocates, and optimize your ROI for digital marketing efforts, all while minimizing the demand on your staff’s time and attention.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn:

  • Why automation is a critical component of a modern engagement strategy
  • Where automation software fits in with your current engagement stack (website, CRM, email, social)
  • How to create a roadmap for researching, purchasing and deploying automation software
  • Who in your organization should own and support automation efforts

Participants will walk away with a clear understanding of how automation could best serve their own organizations, and practical first steps to identifying the right automation solution.

Adam Good
Adam Good has been helping mission-driven organizations connect with their audiences online for over 13 years, leading engagement efforts for advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, think-tanks such as Brookings, and member-driven associations such as the Urban Land Institute. His current passion is helping organizations reframe their use of digital tools (email, CRM, automation, analytics and social media) into a cohesive and intentional platform for engagement.

Leveraging Voice Recognition Technology for Nonprofits

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Thanks to products like the Amazon Alexa and Google Home,  voice recognition technology is becoming easier to access and enjoy like never before.

In this session, we’ll discuss ways to leverage voice recognition technology to engage your supporters. We’ll draw on data collected in one pilot program at a local nonprofit, in which a community utilized Amazon’s Alexa to increase accessibility to technology tools for users with visual, cognitive and mobility challenges. We’ll also review how other nonprofits, like NPR, the American Heart Association, and Unicef are using Alexa to increase visibility. 

Caroline Stroud
Caroline Stroud has been with Senior Portal since 2015. Caroline collaborates with a number of LifePlan communities across the nation to facilitate successful technology implementations. Caroline most recently worked with a LifePlan community in Pittsboro, NC, to launch an application allowing residents to communicate with their community by way of the Amazon Echo’s voice command assistant, Alexa.

Use Quality Data and Analytics To Identify Donors, Clients and Community

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Free information resources available through your local public library can help you learn more about the community you serve and connect with your stakeholders.  Attendees will learn to use SimplyAnalytics to visualize data with color-coded maps, generate tabular reports, and develop more accurate quantitative pictures of counties, cities and towns, ZIP codes, and even local neighborhoods.  We’ll also show you how to identify potential donors and clients among the 24 million organizations and 235 million U.S. residents indexed in ReferenceUSA.  These resources are just 2 of the dozens of free information resources available online through NC LIVE — giving you access to research tools to get the reliable data you need to make sound, well-informed decisions.

Betty Garrison
Betty Garrison is Business Research Librarian at Elon University in Elon, NC.  She is the liaison to the Love School of Business at Elon and works with students and faculty to research topics and analyze data in business, economics, marketing, entrepreneurship and sales.

John Raynor
John Raynor is Business Research Services Librarian at the High Point Public Library.  He works both with business and entrepreneurial customers and with customers from the local nonprofit sector, and takes a particular interest in providing quantitative data to help people make well-informed decisions.

Caroline Hallam
Caroline Hallam is Instruction Librarian at NC LIVE, a service to all North Carolinians through North Carolina libraries to provide equitable access to a core selection of digital content and services.

Do you want to save time and money on your training? Go Virtual!

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We’ll cover the basics of using virtual live training tools to:

  • Define what is virtual live training
  • Explain why companies are going virtual
  • Discuss how to save time and money when training employees
  • Highlight how to get started in the virtual training space

This will be a great introduction to virtual live training covering real world successes, failures, and tips on how you can get started. It will be an open discussion where you can get your questions answered by someone who’s lived through it.

Daniel Beckius
Dan’s been in the learning and development field in one capacity or another for quite a while. He’s gone from carting around a van full of monitors and desktops 20 years ago for face to face training to working remotely from his home in Durham NC as a virtual training advocate. Times they have changed and Dan’s been lucky, or unlucky enough to be on the bleeding edge for many of those transitions. In his current role with AirClass he assists organizations with building strategies and identifying tools to help them obtain their virtual live learning objectives.

Turn Your Data into Insights and Your Insights into Stories

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Nonprofit organizations are run by passionate and dedicated individuals who often do not have the time or resources to dive into and analyze data that help them communicate to their constituents. Often these organizations have a wealth of data, but a lack of resources in which to analyze and communicate their insights gleaned with that data. This session will explore using available free tools to analyze and visualize data to share your stories.

Karen Patch
Karen Patch is a Sr. Technical Manager in Education Division at SAS. She has been with SAS for 18 years in roles ranging from presales engineering to developing and managing a technology enablement and development group. Karen has been focused on Education for the past 9 years, where she works with SAS education collaboration partners to help develop new technology solutions to achieve analytic insight for all ranges of SAS learners. In this role she has helped local non-profits find analytic insights to help tell their stories. Karen has a Masters of Science in Analytics from Capella University where she is now an adjunct faculty member in the Masters in Analytics program. She currently teaches Foundations in Analytics and Data Sources in Analytics. Karen received her BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Karen is a native North Carolinian who currently lives in Durham, NC with her two daughters and 3 rescue dogs.

Innovate to Elevate: The Importance of the Data-Driven Strategy

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It’s a simple concept: innovate to elevate. Nonprofits today must innovate to grow. At the essence of innovation is a solid enterprise data-driven strategy. It’s no secret that data and analytics have grown to the top of an organization’s agenda. As case studies continue to build and executed data-driven strategies accomplish business objectives, organizations must understand the why’s before they confront the how’s to drive innovation efforts and design data-driven strategies for continued growth.

Leveraging Tableau and Alteryx Self-Service Analytics platforms, participants will be able to identify methods using data to create key strategies that disrupt standard thinking-supporting or debunking organizational myths. Participants will be able to identify key points for building a successful and sustainable data strategy. Lastly, participants will learn opportunities for creating buy-in and a culture that empowers organizations to foster data directed innovation for long-term growth.

Bryce Gartner
Bryce is a proven leader in creating data-driven organizations. He blends his expertise in both marketing and technology to build solutions that leverage data as the strategic foundation of organizational growth. Over the past 20 years, Bryce's career has crossed over several industries including non-profit, association, banking, e-commerce, technology, sports and entertainment. He has architected and managed development of new products and partnerships guided teams into new marketing spaces and technologies, launched company brands and expanded market reach. In his strategic leadership roles as CMO, CIO and CTO, Bryce has merged marketing and technology to create strategies with direct impact on the bottom line, growth and ultimate success of the company.

Member Site or Facebook Group – Which is Right for Your Community?

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In this session, we’ll review the pros and cons of membership websites and private Facebook groups for engaging with your community. While Facebook may be easy to set up, is it the right platform for your community building goals? Janet has used paid sites, WordPress plugins and Facebook to create online communities. We’ll discuss the differences in terms of cost, time and effort. Are you thinking of creating an online community? Bring your challenge and we’ll talk it through.

Janet Kennedy
Janet Kennedy is a 25-year marketing and social media consultant for healthcare supporting healthcare practices. Janet is the Host of the Get Social Health podcast sharing best practice stories and interviews about social media in healthcare. She is the co-founder of the Healthcare Marketing Network, a vibrant global community of freelance healthcare writers, authors, and communications creatives and is a member of the External Advisory Board of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network.

Captivate, Communicate, Convince: How an Impact Video Can Transform Your Next Fundraising Event

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For many nonprofits, hosting a fundraising dinner, gala, or auction is a key way to generate income. Because organizing special events can be costly, getting a healthy return on investment is critical. Showing a video at your event is a way to engage your audience and convey your organization’s impact in an emotional way. During this session, we’ll share how we worked with the nonprofit Families Moving Forward to create videos for their 2017 dinner series—and how these videos helped quadruple donations. We’ll share the most important things we learned, from finding the best stories to how and when to make the ask. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your next fundraising event to help raise your profile, cultivate relationships, and increase donations.

Liza Hoos and Rachel Healy
Liza Hoos and Rachel Healy believe in the power of video to change the world. They run Open Eye Creative, a Durham-based marketing firm that helps organizations increase donations, gain visibility, and connect with their community through video. Together they have more than 15 years' experience in video production and have completed documentary projects all over the world, from coastal communities in Mexico to the island of Palau.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Redesigning a Nonprofit Website

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In this interactive session, we will discuss the 2013 redesign of a large nonprofit association’s website, database, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). By attending this session, you will:

  1. Understand which aspects of the redesign were successful.
  2. Gain insights about processes that should have been handled differently.
  3. Learn about the association’s plans for another website redesign to address members’ concerns, fix design flaws, and account for our changing demographics.

The presentation will include recommendations for nonprofit association staff who are interested in updating their websites and databases, and it will also provide IT workers with insights about nonprofit association leaders’ priorities and needs.

Stephen Kennedy
Dr. Stephen D. Kennedy earned a master’s degree in school counseling at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2008, and he worked as a professional school counselor at Northeast Guilford High School for three years. In 2014, he completed a Ph.D. in Counseling and Counselor Education at North Carolina State University. Currently, Dr. Kennedy is the Chief Operating Officer at Chi Sigma Iota, an international honor society for counselors that includes more than 300 active chapters and 120,000 initiated members. In that role, he serves as CSI’s volunteer coordinator, oversees the association’s committees and review panels, and supervises CSI’s professional development activities and annual programs. Dr. Kennedy has presented at national and state conferences on topics such as the relationship between technology use and wellness, using technology as a counselor, career development, and professional advocacy.

Web Accessibility for Everyone

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Many people think website accessibility is a “nice to have” feature when in reality it’s a “must have” feature. We’ll demystify the WCAG 2.1 guidelines and show how when you make websites accessible it benefits everyone. You’ll leave this session with new tools to add to your toolkit and be well on your way to being an accessibility ally!

Alisa Herr
Alisa is a multidisciplinarian who loves flexing her skills in strategy, data analysis, writing, empathy, design, and web development. She found her calling to lift up those who use their talents as a force for good and established Unity in 2016 to connect mission-driven technologists, designers, and strategists to the organizations who need them the most. A North Carolinian to the bone, Alisa was born and raised in the Triangle, has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Appalachian State University, a master’s degree in library and information science from UNC-Chapel Hill, and ardently defends her preference for Lexington style bbq. She is a mom, wife, public speaker, open source evangelist, and serves on the community board of AIGA Raleigh as the chair of the Women Lead Initiative.

Growth Hacking Strategies for Nonprofits

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Ever hear the terms “growth hacking” or “marketing funnel”? These are terms popular technology companies use to describe their growth strategies. What if you could apply those same strategies to grow your non-profit. This bootcamp will outline strategies and tactics high-growth companies use to build awareness, engagement and revenue, then apply them directly to your organization to grow your audience and donors. These are the exact strategies I applied as Director of Marketing Communications at UNC-TV, one of the largest nonprofit member organizations in North Carolina. Leave knowing how to combine digital marketing and growth hacking strategies to create an army of supporters for your business.

Tivi Jones
Tivi - rhymes with 'privy' - has been a professional marketer since 2004. She currently serves as a marketing, branding and communications consultant and has worked with a wide array of brands including Carolina Parent magazine, Cisco, UNC-TV, NC State and more. Her work for her clients has gained the attention of Publisher's Weekly, PBS Blog, NBC17, ABC11 and more. She loves the brand and community building opportunities marketing presents. While she enjoys working with big brands, she also likes helping small companies and non-profits use effective media, awesome marketing and contagious moxie to create sustainable businesses.

Google Data Studio, The Best Free Tool You’re Not Using

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Google released Data Studio in 2017 with little fanfare. This reporting tool offers interactive reports and dashboards that can be easily shared with your staff, board and other stakeholders. This intuitive and easy to use tool can visualize your website and other data with a few simple clicks. In this session I will demonstrate how to build custom reports and dashboard that can be shared with anyone. Don’t spend hundreds of dollars on high end reporting solutions when you can do it for free!

Brian McDonald
A technical marketer with a passion for design and communication, I have been designing and managing digital marketing campaigns for 15+ years. During this time I've created strategy and implemented websites, SEO/SEM/social media campaigns, as well as video and mobile applications. For the past several years I volunteered with the Triangle Chapter of the American Marketing Association to create one of the leading chapters in the nation. I had the opportunity to create the chapter's initial social media and content marketing presence and was the 2011-2012 chapter president. Speaker/Moderator at Ignite Raleigh, Converge South, Internet Summit and Digital Marketing For Business Conference.

How to Survive (and Thrive) in Your #NPTech Career

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In my career, I’ve been honored to grow within my profession, from a Level-1 Help Desk Support Assistant to Vice President of Information Technology. Through this experience, I’ve gathered so many resources that may help other tech professionals, as well. In this workshop, let’s discuss some of the tips, strategies and tools for finding success in an #NPTech career. I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with you!

Rebecca Beck
Rebecca, a native of Fayetteville, North Carolina, is a technology professional, training facilitator and leader in the public sector. She began her career with the Partnership for Children of Cumberland County in 2000. Her strengths include; technology infrastructure planning and development, organizational leadership and social media strategy. Most recently, Rebecca has hosted speaking engagements on technical and business topics at the NC Tech4Good Conference, as well as, the National Smart Start Conference, held annually in North Carolina for the enrichment of non-profit, early education professionals. As an active member of the local community, Rebecca has received Citizen’s Academy certificates from Cumberland County, the City of Fayetteville, and is now serving on the Institute for Community Leadership. She upholds her commitment to serving her local community by participating in municipal boards and through volunteer work with other human service organizations. Rebecca shares advice on a variety of technology topics via Twitter and her blog, IfItHasButtons. Rebecca has also written articles for the of the nationwide online publication, NTEN (Non-Profit Technology Network).

NCTech4Good, an affiliate of NTEN and TechSoup’s NetSquared, is the local resource for nonprofit technology information. Join the sharing and networking at monthly meetings on the third Wednesday of the month, 6:30-8:30 p.m. usually at UNC-TV, and our annual conference, https://www.nct4g.org/. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @nctech4good, and with the hashtag #nct4g.