npT Labs

President Obama's new budget for 2010 will see big funding increases for HIV/STI prevention...with a focus on technology including electronic health records. 

Right now, the NIH spends about $2.9 billion on HIV, with the new increases, I hope to see that double to keep pace with the 40% increase in HIV incidence (CDC 2008).

We'll be closely following the funding priorities over the coming quarter.

We've been in the deep south interviewing young people across four cities in South Carolina.  Since last Saturday, we've interviewed about 67 young adults, 18 to 24, about their MySpace, Facebook, twitter, cell, sexting, etc habits....and not surprisingly, it's been totally overwhelming at how integrated technology is in the culture of dating, sex and the hook up for young America.

In Greenville, we interviewed 20ish black teens about their myspace and facebook use...before the focus groups even started, five of them were heckling each other over using the computers in the lobby outside the room.  They all wanted to check and play with their myspace accounts...five guys, only four computers...lol, you can imagine the chaos.

What was apparent through this particular set of groups was the plain fact that brochures about health do not work...nor does the WebMd or Google search and "find all" approach.  They want short txt messages and content with quick access to care and pricing information.  They are information overloaded just like the rest of us...who has time to sort through 3,000 results on HIV in WebMd?

This week, the City of Kansas City, MO announced that they successfully challenged the US Census to return 25k in population to the city.  We estimate about $2200 per household (about 11k in total hhs) in missed federal and state grants.  With the new additions, this should add about $20 million to the city's bottom line, and potentially more as the stimulus packages start hitting in the later part of the year.

Unfortunately, the press office cut out npT Labs as a partner, even though we were integral to the whole process.  But, being good natured, we understood that things get left out.  Its the impact on the city that we care about.

 We're traveling to DC in March to meet with all kinds of organizations about taking the Urbata process to the next level in 2010 as a potential alternative to Us Census...wish us luck!

I'm very excited to announce a partnership with Advocates for Youth to develop a New Media campaign for South Carolina to educate and empower teens to prevent teen pregnancy, STDs, sexual assault and HIV. 

We're working together to create a MySpace/Facebook game similar to the PlayFish flash games that are fun, creative and use viral startegies to spread public health.  FluidPixel Studios and ElectricShoes Productions will work with us to make the game happen.  In addition, we'll be developing a 'sexting'text message line that will give information about stds,contraception and sexual assault services in the state.  TextCaster will provide the shortcode and backend programming.

We plan to focus group the game and text line in February and then have a preliminary campaign up and running in June. 

Great news. After four months of intense data analysis, we've completed the initial DrillDown Results! Thank you to Chris Green, Heather Starzynski, Joe Zhao, Sam Newby, Doug Bowles, Peter Eaton, Robyne Turner and Kate Bender for your help.

We will post our report here after review by the City of Kansas City, MO City Manager's Team and comments by our KCUMA advisory team.

In the next two months, we'll be touring Kansas City with the results and plan to hold two web conferences to overview the data. If you'd like the KCUMA team to present to your organization, please email dmelton@nonprofittechnologies.com

Upcoming events include:

A new clone of twitter launched called Revou (A reviewed by Tech Crunch). You can check them out at Revou.com. Twitter is a micro-blogging service meets social networking platform. You can update your friends with the mundane via short quips sent in via the twitter site, email, or cell (or other websites that use the API).

Conferences use the service to update attendees about program changes or perhaps jazz people up about an event. However, this is all hosted on twitter.com meaning you need to utilize all of twitter's features, not create your own and style however you want. Revou gives you the source code to run on your own service. This is particularly attractive for nonprofits who run closed support groups or want to create one-time custom made social network without requiring users to have a twitter account.

I think this service would work well for support groups that require a degree of peer accountability. For instance, an AA group could use this as way to obtain peer support on the spot. ie...I'm considering drinking, despite my promise, and I know that I can send a text message to the support group where my peers are waiting to give me moral support. Or, maybe it would be great for a business network for resources, ie...send a query to the network and people respond with a quick resource. The best thing about this service is its customization features for your own server...they give you the code and you determine the rest.The downside...you have to code :).�

We've been corresponding back and forth with Allan Benamer about Google's Donation Checkout. Essentially, Google gives their checkout system to nonprofits for free with a 501c3 letter fax/email verification process. This is great for nonprofits, because currently, EVERYONE charges per transaction for donations (with the exception of a select few nonprofits). I've pasted the comments going back and forth below, or you can check out the conversation by viewing Allan's blog http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/google-for-non-profits-just-launched.

Us:

Sounds good to me. See what you come up with...I use Google for everything and am working on an OpenSocial Google Checkout application for nonprofits for widgets and the iphone....I love their products. While you're asking, (:0)), we need a way to verify that a nonprofit has been screened by Google...a simple api query (rest based) to ascertain whether or not the Google Checkout email is indeed a match for the registered 501c3 organization would super helpful!

Google has offered services for free or low cost to nonprofits since nearly its inception. Last week, they announced a new portal, similar to their business services portal, that lists all the nonprofit services they offer http://www.google.com/nonprofits/.

The new portal contains links to a grant program for their Adwords service. Essentially, they are offering free adwords (their paid-for sidebar or topbar search and keyword advertising platform) to nonprofits who 'apply for a grant'. The grants are awarded quarterly. Its a nice step, but frankly, not scalable. A single group of persons at Google will review thousands and thousands of applications, and one-by-one approve them for not-for-profit status and advertising? Part of the process includes submission of ad copy and a detailed description of how the nonprofit will use it.

Are they worried about abuse? As long as you have a 501c3 (and google already has a process to determine if you do), then let the nonprofit have full access to the system...don't use a grant model that will give those organizations with grant staff the edge versus those that are trying to have a high impact on zero dollars.

Google should be the great leveling force, where content and message are more important than budget size and who can get a better grant in the door. It should also be about timeliness, to match the need for social campaigns when events, health outbreaks or new problems arise...not 6 to 12 months later when Google gets around to approving an AdWords grant.

It's not often I get super excited about web 2.0 tools. My eyes tend to gloss over when the next new social aggregator, fluffy bunny maker or rate-my cause, type of service pops up. But when a great tool emerges and its free or low cost for nonprofits, I can hardly contain my excitement (I just ran a 5k at the gym to help).

The service is called Mobile Datanow and I read about it on TechCrunch. You can watch the video on how to use the service here and how to administer it here. The first nonprofit to leave a comment, will get a free consultation with me to implement this service.

Essentially, the service enables your clients, volunteers, donors, etc to send a message to a number and receive a reply back, customized for that message. Examples:

• Volunteer: you could put flyers around a college campus about fighting hunger with a number and a list of options. They could text "volunteer" and get a list of volunteer opportunities. They could text "donate" and get a response asking for their paypal account email. They could text "I'm hungry" and get a list of pizzaz places around their location (furnished by google).


• Political: You need support for a petition. Place a flyer on the street, cars, whatever, and people can text "sign" which responds with a request for their email, zipcode, and phone.


• Education: You could create a series of story lines, advertise them via flyers in transportation hubs, about say, teen pregnancy. At each step in the story line, the individual responds back with a decision-point, like, "wear condom" or "no abortion."

Leave a comment, and lets build something!