This is the "for further reading" handout from the "Let's Talk about Tech, Baby" session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, DC, March 18, 2011.

1. Resources Handout: Let’s Talk About Tech, Baby!
How to Talk About Technology Horizontally and Vertically
(#11NTCtalk)
The Five C’s: The five C’s make up the framework we recommend using to talk about
organizational change in general, and technology change specifically. If you were at our “Leading
I.
Technology Change When You’re Not the Boss” session last year, this will all sound familiar.
Chocolate | Credibility | Common Ground for Goals | Compelling Case | Connect Emotionally
Chocolate! We use “chocolate” as shorthand for “find a way to motivate people.” (We find chocolate quite
motivating.) If treats and prizes don’t work, you may need to use a carrot-and-stick approach—tying
performance to compensation, or posting a list of non-compliant people.
Credibility: Why should your audience listen to you? Credibility boils down to expertise + relationships.
If you feel weak in these areas, you might need to turn to outside authorities.
Expertise: This is the sum of your knowledge, experience, and authority. It doesn’t happen overnight.
How do other people perceive your expertise? What’s your track record like?
Relationships: Trust, reliability, breadth of relationships. Who are the influencers? Who are the likely
resisters? Are you on good terms with them? Are there areas of the organization where you don’t
know anyone? How can you fix that?
Outside Authorities: If you need help—if for some reason your audience won’t respect your
authoritah—you can call on authoritative sources. For example, “Here’s some recent NTEN research
that shows…” or “Idealware says…” Find an authority that your audience will respect, if your own
expertise/relationships aren’t enough.
Common ground for goals: You work in the same organization, so your goals in some way overlap—
even if you’re in IT and you need to convince management and program staff of something. Think about
the perspectives of your audience. Where do your concerns meet? Sometimes this is at the individual
level—save time, save frustration, make tasks more automatic so you can all focus on the important
things. Sometimes you’ll need to connect to your organization’s mission: Serve your constituents better,
improve outreach, make a bigger difference.
Compelling case: This is a bridge between the “common ground” and “connecting emotionally”. The way
you frame your case for a technology change can make a big difference in how it is received. It’s about
putting the change into an organizational context that makes sense to people (not just rationally, but
viscerally), and shows clearly what’s in it for them.
Connect emotionally: Find out as much as you can about peoples’ emotional state before you get into a
formal presentation or group conversation—e.g., have individual conversations with the players; pay
attention at the water cooler; heed the word on the street. Adjust your emotional tone to match—your
message won’t get across if you pretend to still be in an eager, “up” place if your audience is clearly tense
and resistant.
Let’s Talk about Tech, Baby: Resources Handout | Marc Baizman - Dahna Goldstein - Simone Parrish | March 18, 2011

2. Marc Baizman Dahna Goldstein Simone Parrish
II. Our contact information
My Computer Guy PhilanTech Innovation Network
Boston, MA Washington, DC Washington, DC
marc@mcgtraining.com dahna@philantech.com sparrish@innonet.org
DropBox: Free (up to 2GB) file storage, access, sharing, and syncing. Fantastic for when you
III. Tools we used to make our presentation
would rather not be gumming up your inbox by repeatedly emailing 8MB files.
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www.dropbox.com
Microsoft PowerPoint: Bad presentations aren’t PowerPoint’s fault. (We thought about using
Prezi but we chickened out.)
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ReadyTalk: One of the ways we talked to each other. Flexible pay-as-you-go plans—e.g., $0.20
per minute per participant for web conferencing; $0.13 per minute per participant for phone.
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Monthly and annual plans also available. www.readytalk.com.
Screen Capture Tools: We used Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing/), SnagIt
(www.snagit.com), and WisdomSoft ScreenHunter (http://www.wisdom-
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soft.com/products/screenhunter_free.htm).
Webex: The other way we talked to each other. $49.95/month for unlimited meetings.
www.webex.com
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Flickr Creative Commons: Lets you find great images that don’t cost anything and won’t cause
IV. Image sources that won’t get you sued
scary lawyers to call you out of the blue and demand three years of back licensing fees for that
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image someone grabbed from a Google image search and put in a .pdf newsletter that sat four
clicks deep on your website. (True story—ask Simone.) www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
WikiMedia Commons: More great images, still lawyer-free!
http://www.commons.wikimedia.org
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Wordle: Text in, image out. You can control fonts, color schemes, and layout, and get a
screenshot, PDF, or SVG output. It’s nifty. (It’s also a compelling way to analyze text
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frequencies, like open-ended survey responses or referrer logs or tags.) www.wordle.net.
Many web comics and blogs are being published under Creative Commons licensing. Look for
the words “Creative Commons” or the symbol.
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If you don’t see any licensing terms on an image, or you see “all rights reserved”, don’t be
afraid to contact the copyright holder to ask for permission. A lot of people are happy to give
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permission (even for free) as long as you don’t alter the work and you attribute it properly.
Let’s Talk about Tech, Baby: Resources Handout | Marc Baizman - Dahna Goldstein - Simone Parrish | March 18, 2011