Ramping up on Africa

Last Updated on Friday, 25 December 2009 09:51 Written by Steve Thursday, 10 December 2009 10:54

A few weeks ago I felt a change in the force that drives me to do my work. It was a good and welcome change, one of renewed energy and focus. I wrote about how Africa has leapt back to the forefront of my mind, back to a position of prominence it held long ago. I have much to learn and catch up on as try to get reconnected to Africa. It’s an exciting time!

I’ve started connecting with interesting NGOs and entrepreneurs working in Africa. Through my contacts at work, I’ve been learning about some of the work being done in some of the countries in Africa. These conversations have been very interesting and helpful. I wrote a bit a while back about the cloud and the stack of infrastructure it relies on. This resetting of the landscape is an excellent process to undergo for me. It’s a process of understanding new constraints. Feeling out those constraints is key to critically thinking and solving problems. Knowledge workers who don’t understand the constraints they work under are doomed to come up with solutions that will not work.

And it’s been amazing to know those constraints but to keep in mind that boxes need to be broken out of. While constraints make you think creatively, blindly accepting those constraints is unacceptable if we want to bring about transformative change. Last week I changed my status message on IM from “constraints breed creativity” to “constraints are for suckers” to try to get at this duality. Understand, but do not accept the binds you feel!

A great place to get grounded in some of the newest thinking about Africa is to watch Africa-themed TED talks. So many of these talks are mind-blowing. In 2007, TED Global went to Tanzania and there are many amazing talks from that conference. If you’ve ever talked with me for more than 20 minutes, I’ve probably recommended a TED talk to you. I recommend watching them all! Stories about leadership, entrepreneurship, the economy, banking, the list goes on.

I’ve found a great way to follow what’s going on in Africa is to find the amazing folks on Twitter interested in the topics. I’ve created a list of Africa-related Twitter accounts I follow. Many are technology related, but not all. Feel free to peruse or follow the list if you want daily info on what’s happening in Africa from some amazing people.

Following Twitter will point you to all these blogs eventually. They’re all great:

• Afrigadget – making in Africa
• Appfrica – TED Senior Fellow Jonathan Gosier’s blog
• naijablog – Jeremy Weate with great stuff out of Nigeria
• Texas in Africa – Laura Seay, a professor at Morehouse
• White African – Founder of Afrigadget and Ushahidi Director of Operations, Erik Hersman

Deep article about Ominfocus for GTD

Last Updated on Wednesday, 9 December 2009 01:27 Written by Steve Wednesday, 9 December 2009 01:27

Ryan Norbauer just published a really deep article about one of my favorite pieces of software, Omnifocus. It’s a great tutorial on how to use the program, but I think it’s real value is as a description of what Getting Things Done (GTD) really is.

The great achievement of David Allen’s framework has more to do with relieving stress about work than organizing your lists, a fact that is seemingly lost on most of the GTD-professing masses who spend all day twittering about lifehacks and Moleskine list-management. GTD is about psychology, not “productivity” per se. Moreover, the system pays most of its psychological benefits when it’s implemented fully, and I mean really nitty-gritty, every-little-thing-in-your-head fully. The difference between 99% and 100% implementation is truly vast, as anyone who has made it to 100% readily attests (David himself included).

Add a Donor Status Funnel to the Nonprofit Starter Pack

Last Updated on Wednesday, 9 December 2009 10:01 Written by Steve Wednesday, 9 December 2009 09:18

The vision of the Nonprofit Starter Pack has always been that it would be a starting place for nonprofits. It’s not a “application” so much as it’s a “platform.” We’ve tried to architect it in a way that gives some immediate benefit, while not precluding the change and extension that I feel is necessary for successful use. In that spirit, I want to show how to add some donor segmentation you might find interesting if you’re using the One-to-one Account model.

The image on the right is from a Dashboard showing all Contacts in an instance with the Nonprofit Starter Pack installed. All Contacts have been categorized by something called “Donor Status.” We’re looking at their giving and putting them in one of four categories–never a donor, a donor previous to last year, a donor last year, or a donor this year. Here’s how I created it.

First, we need to have 2 rollup summary fields on Account that calculate the Opportunity values over this year and last year. You could also add a third rollup to get the value from two years back:

• Total Giving Year To Date – (Won EQUALS true) AND (Close Date GREATER THAN 12/31/2008) AND (Close Date LESS THAN 1/1/2010)
• Total Giving Last Year – (Won EQUALS true) AND (Close Date GREATER THAN 12/31/2007) AND (Close Date LESS THAN 1/1/2009)
• Total Giving 2 Years Previous – (Won EQUALS true) AND (Close Date GREATER THAN 12/31/2006) AND (Close Date LESS THAN 1/1/2008)

These dates need to be hard-coded for the rollup summaries to work. On Jan 1, you’ll need to add a year to all the dates. Don’t worry, all the rollups will then recalculate for you.

Now you want to show these Account fields on the Contact. Create three formulas that just show the Account field value:

• YTD Giving Total – Account.Total_Giving_Year_To_Date__c
• Last Year Giving Total – Account.Total_Giving_Last_Year__c
• 2 Years Previous Giving Total – Account.Total_Giving_2_Years_Previous__c

Once you have these summary values, you can use them in another Formula, our Donor Status formula:

IF( npe01__Lifetime_Giving_History_Amount__c >0, IF( YTD_Giving_Total__c =0, IF( Previous_Year_Giving_Total__c =0, "2. SYBUNT" , "3. LYBUNT") , "4. Current Donor") , "1. Not Donor")

Note that the npe01__Lifetime_Giving_History_Amount__c field is included in the Nonprofit Starter Pack. The others are fields you just created, so make sure the names match.

Now that you’ve got the formula field built, create a Contact and Organizations report that takes all Contacts and groups by Donor Status. Variations on this report can easily be used to send a letter to everyone who gave in the past but not this year. Once you save this report, you can build a funnel dashboard based on it and you’re done! You’ve now segmented your donors based on when they last gave.