Join us for the San Francisco Net Tuesday on September 9:
Involver: How Nonprofits Can Create Video Campaigns for Social Networks.
NetSquared is an initiative of TechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
- Home
- Grassroots.org
Grassroots.org
Interview with Angela Siefer of Grassroots.org (N2Y2 Featured Project)
"One organization over in Africa that we were assisting, they were so excited with the assistance that they actually went so far as to say, 'Your assistance has meant that our staff was able to provide more assistance to the children here, so that we weren't working on the technology. We were working with the kids that we intended to serve.'"
Grassroots.org's Toolbox was a Featured Project at the NetSquared Conference (N2Y2) in May 2007. You can be a Toolbox tester by emailing Grassroots' Executive Director, Angela Siefer at angela AT grassroots DOT org. For more information about Grassroots.org, listen to an interview with Angela on the NetSquared Podcast, hear their five-minute pitch at the NetSquared Conference, and read a transcript of the interview below.
Angela Siefer: My name is Angela Siefer. I'm the Executive Director of Grassroots.org. We are a national nonprofit; we serve a few nonprofits in the Canada region and a few internationally, but most of our clients are in the United States.
We focus upon the use of technology as a tool for social change.
Reporting Back on Net2
I just posted my Net2 Report to the Grassroots.org Blog. What we gained, what I would change...
Net2Con: Feedback Session 1: Social Impact
Liveblogging from the social impact track of feedback session 1:
- evaluators
- Tesse (I may have spelled this incorrectly - I can't find it on the attendee list)
- Jonathan Peizer
- Haney Armstrong
- projects
- Maps 2.0
- Grassroots.org
- Family Farm
- TakingITGLobal
Grassroots.org Toolbox
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
The Grassroots.org Toolbox will empower nonprofit organizations by granting free access to a suite of fully configured & hosted online tools, including content management, online event registration software, and CRM.
Technology Vision:
Many of the tools we are integrating into the Grassroots.org Toolbox are open source, and thus have been freely downloadable for years. However, “Free” though they may be, these tools cost thousands of dollars to install, learn, configure and support. In short, these tools may have no list price, but they are far from free to implement. The result? They're not empowering as many nonprofits as they could be.
- The Toolbox will automatically:
- provision and install these technology tools,
- configure them correctly for immediate use,
- host them permanently,
- -provide comprehensive training and support resources (both in traditional text and in new media, such as screencasts and training videos)
All for free.
To achieve this, we'll build an integrated user interface to manage Toolbox applications and services, under which we'll develop a flexible and scalable automatic provisioning system. We are assigning multiple staff members to develop exhaustive training and support materials in response to the needs of incoming clients and creating a publicly-available end-user guide for each of the tools we offer. The goal is the technological empowerment of nonprofit organizations everywhere.
