Choose the Right Technology: Goals, Tools, and Match

I try not to use over­wrought, hyper­bolic drama-words too often in my writing.

Okay, so maybe I don’t try very hard.

But there’s no other way to say this: the time peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions have wasted by using the wrong tech­nol­ogy is utterly tragic.

It can hap­pen so eas­ily, espe­cially for non­prof­its who often need to rely on well-meaning vol­un­teers for tech­ni­cal help. But it’s not hard to prevent.

A sad, sad story

Is any­thing in this story familiar?

1. Non­profit seeks help for tech­nol­ogy prob­lem X.
2. Well-intentioned intern or vol­un­teer (WIIoV) offers to solve X.
3. WIIoV picks the tech­nol­ogy that he or she knows best, or likes best, or would most like to learn.
4. WIIoV sets it up and maybe even pro­vides some doc­u­men­ta­tion or training.
5. Non­profit staff are happy. They appre­ci­ate the help, and it all seems so rea­son­able and intuitive.
6. WIIoV leaves.
7. A few weeks go by. It no longer seems so rea­son­able or intuitive.
8. Non­profit staff are less happy. Either they keep using it, fudg­ing around the prob­lems until they can’t stand it any more, or it grad­u­ally dies from neglect.
9. Non­profit seeks help for tech­nol­ogy prob­lem X.

Of course it’s not always that bad… but often it’s partly that bad.

What went wrong?

That par­tic­u­lar story is a litany of lit­tle tragedies. But you know what I think is the most impor­tant, most pre­ventable, and most… well… tragic tragedy?

3. WIIoV picks the tech­nol­ogy that he or she knows best, or likes best, or would most like to learn.

Too often tech­nol­ogy gets cho­sen because it’s what the vol­un­teer (or con­sul­tant) hap­pens to know, or because it’s what your Board or other con­stituents are ask­ing about, or because you know some­one who was happy with it in a fairly dif­fer­ent situation.

Some­times that comes out just fine.

Some­times.

A tech­nol­ogy selec­tion method

I believe, and have seen, that the secret to good tech­nol­ogy selec­tion is as sim­ple as Goals, Tools, and Match.

Goals: As spe­cific as possible

Our first step, and one that gets skipped sur­pris­ingly often, is to clearly define our goals.

Clearly defin­ing goals means going as deep as pos­si­ble, artic­u­lat­ing specif­i­cally what we want to accomplish.

Don’t be mis­lead: even though our goal is to get nar­row and spe­cific, this isn’t a closed-minded process. In fact we’re talk­ing about brain­storm­ing here, so it’s impor­tant to get inter­ested par­ties involved. If at all pos­si­ble it’s also impor­tant to involve the per­son who will help with choos­ing and imple­ment­ing your technology.

So what’s a spe­cific goal? Not this:

That goal isn’t deep or spe­cific. In fact, it’s not a goal at all.

Face­book isn’t a goal. Face­book is a tool.

The ques­tion is: Why do you want to set up a Face­book page? Until you know that, or have at least thought about it some­what, you shouldn’t be set­ting one up.

Let’s go deeper.

“Face­book” has no busi­ness here (yet).

Again, Face­book is a tool, not a goal. Let’s not assume it’s the right tool too early. So now we have:

We’re get­ting there, but we can cer­tainly get deeper and more spe­cific. Our goal so far has answered what but could be more spe­cific. How about this?

Very nice. If that’s as far as we think about it, we’ve thought fur­ther than peo­ple often do, and we can start the next step of con­sid­er­ing tools.

But wait. We can do even bet­ter than that, can’t we?

We’ve talked about what we want to accom­plish. How about why we want to accom­plish it?

Now we know not only what we hope to do, but also why we’re doing it—in other words, we know what we want to accomplish.

And in yet other words: we have some­thing we can mea­sure to gauge our suc­cess.

Tools: As broad as possible

Great. Now we’ve fin­ished the most impor­tant step, and the one that’s so often over­looked: decid­ing what we actu­ally want to accomplish.

Next comes the fun part—or else the part where you enlist the help of some­one who con­sid­ers it fun.

For goals, we were try­ing to brain­storm as deep and spe­cific a list of goals as pos­si­ble. Now we’re going to broaden out, bring­ing in as many can­di­date tech­nolo­gies as possible.

Let’s make a first attempt.

Get cre­ative. This is brain­storm­ing in a purer sense than when we did goals. We want to encour­age a big list, which means don’t rule any­thing out initially.

Maybe we get this far.

If you don’t feel able to brain­storm a list like this, ask staff and vol­un­teers whether they can, or whether they know peo­ple who can.

Match: Just right

We started nar­row, with some deep and spe­cific goals, and then went broad with a big list of tools that might meet the goal.

We fin­ish by get­ting nar­row again.

To do that we take the bucket full of can­di­date tools we’ve col­lected, and we pour them into the nar­row Require­ments sieve of our goals. What we’re left with is…

Okay, I’m out of ideas for this metaphor. Let’s just say we’re left with our match, the list of one or more tools that have a rea­son­ably good chance of meet­ing our goals rea­son­ably well.

How to know which tools meet the goals?

A knowl­edge of the tools is prefer­able, so if pos­si­ble find some­one who’s used them and get their opin­ion on the match.

Lack­ing that, though, you have a few ways to get the infor­ma­tion yourself.

Ques­tions

There are sev­eral you can ask for any tool, and a lit­tle email­ing or cre­ative Googling will answer them. See the side­bar “7 Crit­i­cal Ques­tions” to the right.

Experts

There’s a lot of help on the web, whether in arti­cles like this one or forums with advice from peers and experts.

Here are some of my favorites in the non­profit IT world:

• Ide­al­ware
• John Hay­don
• Non­profit Tech 2.0
• NTEN
• SocialBrite
• Tech­Soup
• Wild Apri­cot Blog

And a few from the IT world at large:

• LifeHacker
• Mash­able
• Read­WriteWeb

Loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion (aka “Audience”)

For any tech­nol­ogy that’s meant to reach con­stituents (vol­un­teers, staff, Board mem­bers, grant fun­ders, ser­vice recip­i­ents, etc.) you need to ask whether they already use the tool you’re con­sid­er­ing, and if not, whether they’ll be moti­vated enough to learn a new tool.

In gen­eral, go where your audi­ence already is. Don’t assume they’ll start reg­u­larly using a new tech­nol­ogy just because you’re there wait­ing for them.

Want to send a last-minute request for vol­un­teer help? On the sur­face that sounds like a good job for Twit­ter. Bam, you’re done.

Assum­ing your vol­un­teers use Twitter.

And that they con­sis­tently keep an eye on your Twit­ter feed.

But maybe you know 75% of your vol­un­teers use Face­book reg­u­larly. (A great way to find this out: ask them.) In that case Face­book might be a bet­ter approach.

And it’s a good bet that many or most of your vol­un­teers have email accounts and tele­phones. That’s a lot less sexy, but if it’s a tool they use reg­u­larly, it’s a good tool.

Rocket sci­ence, not

In no way do I think this frame­work is mys­te­ri­ous, pro­found, or paradigm-shifting.

What I do think is that, even though it’s not espe­cially hard, it does take a lit­tle dis­ci­pline. Why?

• It takes time (though not much).
• It’s less fun for the ser­vice provider than just pick­ing a tool he or she knows and/or likes.
• It’s less easy for the ser­vice recip­i­ent than just let­ting the ser­vice provider use his or her best judgment.
• Peo­ple have to sit down, take a cleans­ing breath, and think.

But the results are so much bet­ter that it’s worth invest­ing a lit­tle willpower to do it.

In fact, the con­ver­sa­tion is usu­ally pretty fun and edu­ca­tional. Much more so than grip­ing six months later about a tool that doesn’t quite meet your needs.

All it takes is think­ing before geeking.

P.S. Up in the goals sec­tion we came up with a good list of things, prob­a­bly mea­sur­able things, that you wanted to accom­plish. Remem­ber to go back and mea­sure your suc­cess later, adjust­ing as needed from there.