Social Media, WorkingPhilanthropy.com

I am off to the first ofÂ seven conferences, and one bootcamp, where I will be speaking between now and early August. Lori will be joining me for three of the events which makes the whole experience a lot more fun. As I look at the topics a couple of things are clear: Big data is lumbering its way into philanthropy; and social media is moving into the mainstream of fundraising. Even subjects like private company research are now incomplete without acknowledging the value Big Data and social media bring to the table. The noise of social media and the thumps of Big Data coming to life can drown out a topic that seems so yesterday - Cloud Computing. This is where all data will converge. This is where data becomes Big. This is what connects the internal and external social worlds. Not surprising to see Salesforce out in front of this with their moves into social analytics. Yesterday Blackbaud announced its...

When it comes to data most fundraisers would just like their queries to be faster and their reports on time.Â Sadly they are often disappointed on both fronts so it's no wonder they are not asking the most important question: "Are my queries and reports accessing all of our data?" The answer is â€œNo!â€ Before you send this to your intrepid database administrator let's take a quick trip in the tech time machine to when donor management systems started to proliferate. It is the 80's and entrepreneurs are beginning to use relational databases to create software to store information on donors. Contact information and gifts are the first to be digitized and fundraisers comment that this is not much better than the 3x5 cards that had served them so well before the Jobs/Gates era. Over the next 25 years data fields grew like kudzu and so did the size of our databases. It is understandable then that users assume when they ask a...