Work Stuff

Wow. So I failed pretty miserably at this “return to blogging” thing, huh? I had good intentions, really! When I have interesting things to write about, life is moving too fast to find the time or energy to blog. And when life is slow, well, there’s nothing interesting to write about. I have new respect for those professional bloggers who faithfully produce for the rest of us. And I’ve been a little…distracted…with most of my free time. 

I haven’t really written anything about work since my trip to Indonesia, and that’s a fairly easy thing for me to ramble on about, so let’s start there. Things at MTI have been good, but we’re certainly feeling pressure from the economy. We’re completely dependent on people’s generosity, and when they’re worried for their own well-being, it’s (understandably) harder to give, especially substantially.  It’s different than for a “normal” company, where we could sell more widgets or raise prices or something. The consumers of our services are not the ones paying for it, and there’s no fixed price. And the people most likely to support us in a big way are also the ones who stood to lose the most in the meltdown. So things have been tight. Budgets have been slashed, and it doesn’t appear to be over. They say markets always jump after an election, so hopefully we’re only a couple weeks away from a major turnaround. Of course it will probably crash hard again once that new president starts enacting Marxist programs, but that’s a post for another day. 

Here are updates on some of the key projects I’m involved in: 

Website Migration
This is the big one right now. We’re moving our website off Convio and to a platform we will be hosting in-house. This is a big deal for a number of reasons. One, bringing it in-house means we’re responsible for keeping it up now. As a major fundraising tool, that’s a little stressful. Two, it means every single page has to be re-created inside our new platform. There are over 500 pages on the current site. That’s a massive undertaking. Three, our webmaster left at the start of this project. Three of us have taken on the migration (one of whom was just named the new webmaster), but that also means we’re changing a lot of things. It’s good because none of us have the personal attachment to certain things on the site, but there’s so much we want to change we have to be careful about taking on too much work. Four, the new site will be a major improvement for our constituents. A major impetus for this change is to improve the donor experience on the web. This new platform (Blackbaud’s NetCommunity) integrates with our CRM (Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge) so we can link more information to the web. This will be a MAJOR plus to our donors. And finally, there are technical challenges. We chose to use another CMS along with NetCommunity, a product named Sitefinity. We found NetCommunity to be lacking in a lot of basic content management areas, and didn’t want to put undue burden on our content managers. So we’re building the bulk of the site in this other tool and all the CRM-integrated functions in NetCommunity. But it means we have multiple products to juggle and manage.

I spend my time serving as a consultant, helping the two women who are actually building the pages in the new products. I deal with technical issues as they come up and provide input on web strategy. It’s a flashback to a previous season of life spent doing web consulting, but a welcome one. Especially when there’s other people handling a lot of the grunt work!

Our target launch is the start of January, meaning this project will be completed in under 6 months. Most migrations of this scale take over a year. So we’re working hard. I’ve been posting over on the Blackbaud User Society’s forum, writing about our migration experience if you’re interested in tracking on a more technical level. http://www.blackbus.org/forum/netcommunity-bbnc/4310-mtis-bbnc-journey.html

Inventory Management System
This was the big time-consumer before the website but has recently taken a back seat. For almost 30 years, inventory has been tracked on paper sheets and Excel spreadsheets. Not a problem for a while, but now that we process ship over $100 million in donated medical supplies annually, keeping track of the inventory has become more challenging. The decision was made to go with a computer-based system and I’ve been working on developing a friendly “face” for that system. The system is now in use in the warehouse, though just in its first (of three) phase. So there will be more work on that once some of these other projects die down.

Smaller Projects (and those looming on the horizon)

SharePoint – Building out an intranet. We have some stuff already up there, but we need a one-stop internal resource for many of the tools we’re creating. This is underway, I just need to spend more time meeting with various user groups to determine what they want/need built out before we launch.

Communications – We have a fancy new phone system in our Bellevue/Redmond/Seattle/wherever-they-are-now office and would really like to get a matching one down here. But now’s not the best time to be asking to make a large purchase, even if it would be really helpful. We’re also playing with some “unified communications” products. Basically a Skype replacement we can run ourselves that integrates with email, the phone system and pretty much all our other internal systems. But we don’t really have the money to move forward much on this front.

Infrastructure – A major technical component of the website project was to ensure we have enough bandwidth to handle our web traffic, especially during a disaster time when we can get a month’s worth of traffic in a day. The best solution we (and our ISP) came up with was to do a wireless shot between our facilities (less than a mile), getting us 10 MB up/down for a lot less than bonding T1s or a fractional T3. We had a lot of problems with it at first, but it seems more stable now. We still need to replace all network switches, but, again, no money.

Branch Offices – Remember that Indonesia trip? The whole point was to develop some sort of solution for our foreign offices to better integrate their systems with ours here and take a load off them. This has come up again as that office is moving to Jakarta and will have access to more resources. Still don’t have a lot of answers, though.

Funding
Things are pretty tense here, though, with the economy being what it is. The kinds of people who generally give us the most money are also the types that lost the most in the market crash. So they have far less to be giving away. I know we’re not the only non-profit feeling the pressure. And most churches are too. I want to write about how important it is to continue giving in the midst of financial insecurity, but maybe that will be another post. Also, consider the risk of electing someone who wants to raise taxes on “the rich.” “That’s not me,” you may be thinking, “and they should pay more since they have more!” Well, socialism aside, think of all the things those “rich” support and make possible. Most of the humanitarian (and missional) work around the world is financed by people with resources. If the government starts taking more of their money away to fund ridiculous mandatory programs at home, you can forget about “saving the world.” I want to write more on this, too.

I really will try to be better about posting. It’s not that I don’t think of things to write, it really comes down to time and mental energy to make it happen. There’s a lot going on right now, and I generally don’t want to be thinking when I’m done with work. So that makes it hard. Anyway, no more excuses!