My 2014 Nonprofit Technology Conference Experience

I attended the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) two weeks ago. I enjoyed seeing my nptech friends and meeting new people.

I started my NTC experience a day earlier when I volunteered for the conference. It was so much fun being with the staff and other volunteers while we stuffed bags.

This year I gained more out of the science fair. I went to most of the booths and talked more to the exhibitors.

The first session I went to was the NTCJews session. Three presenters from three different organizations shared technology projects. Two of them talked about a problem the organization had internally, how technology was used to help them solve the problem, the challenges they faced, and how this new technology helped them do their job better. After each presentation, session participants got a chance to ask the presenters questions about their project.  I thought this was a great example of a type of session that could happen at a future NTC in the IT track.

The next session I went to was the blogging session I led. Here are a few things that came up that were interesting:

• One organization measures success of their blog if it gets picked up by blogs and journalists. 
• One organization shared that their most successful blog post was a a guest post.
• It was interesting to me that no one was using Pinterest for their blog and very few were using LinkedIn for blog promotion. 
• I had shared information about Blog Action Day (which is held in October) and I was surprised that nobody was familiar with it.
• Organizations are not looking at their web content for blog ideas.

I attended uX secrets and community organizers connect on the second day of the conference. The uX Secrets session was about donation forms, which is a topic many nonprofit bloggers have written about in the past year.  The community organizers session was a place for organizers to share their successes with others. I liked the idea that was shared about making a screenshot of a good conversation in an online community.

On the last day of the conference, I attended the session on holiday digital campaigns in the morning. I really enjoyed this session since I like seeing the examples of these types of campaigns and content. One thing I learned is that if an organization has a successful campaign one year, they should do the same campaign the next year.

The last session I attended was digital marketing that gets results, which was my favorite session.  Here are a few things I learned:

• Organizations need to start tracking engagement
• Donations can be compared to e-commerce
• Organizations need to get visual on social media
• Organizations need to participate more in conversations 
• Not many organizations have a presence on LinkedIn

I ended NTC by going to geek games where I played bingo and won one of the rounds.

I came back from NTC with topics to write about in this blog and ideas to improve NTEN's Nonprofit Blogging Group.