TMI

Too much information.

You know the feeling. It's usually when your wife starts talking about female medical issues or your Uncle Hiram in Niceville starts telling you about all the desert choices at the retirement center.

But there's another, more insidious, danger from TMI besides being grossed out or bored to death. It's called reinventing the wheel.

Two things affecting everyone in the commercial and nonprofit world this century:
1) how do you do more with less?
2) how do you sort through the tons of information available today?

This isn't rocket science folks. Whether you're trying to avoid starting a redundant teen pregnancy center in a single zipcode or trying to build a high tech immigration data base to protect our borders. What you need is to find who's done this before you. Chances are good that someone has tried. Maybe even succeeded.

The problem is, how do you find out what's been done so you're not starting from scratch or building something new that turns out to be not so new?

I can't help you a whole lot with the past, just encourage you to look and dig and talk to others before you start spending lots of time and money on a "new" idea. But starting now, I can encourage you to start using "tags."

This is a popular concept in Web 2.0, but even this isn't a new concept. In 1989, my mentor persuaded me to include keywords in the subject line of EVERY email I sent. It's easy to do. It only takes a little discipline. Once done, it's amazing how easy it is to search for just the right email you need.

It's also amazing (and frustrating) how many emails I get with little or no information in the subject line. Heck, sometimes they're even asking a question about an email written hours or days before without attaching the old email. I've noticed that sometimes I have another distraction or thought after I sent that email. Until my clairvoyance gets perfected, you're just wasting time and bandwidth.

So here's the deal folks. Starting right now. Take a breath. Put a significant word or two in the subject line of each email you send. This helps sort the clutter into categories. It helps bring order out of chaos. It gives you the opportunity to tell people you are practicing folksonomy (your new word for the day).

It you want to see how well this works, check out the folks at Technorati. They've done incredible work by getting the masses to put category names on blogs, photos, music...pretty much all the garbage - and treasure - that's on the web today.

Trust me. It's gonna help your life get simpler. And it's gonna make it a lot easier for those following you to discover your brilliant ideas and apply them to changing the world. You might even get credit for it. At the very least, it will help you find the recipe for Uncle Hiram's favorite, homemade cough syrup.

Spies, Terrorists, and Donors

What in the world do these groups have in common?

From today's news: "since February of this year, none of our phones have been tapped without a court order. Don't know if I feel relieved or disappointed about that."

Indignant is probably a better description. I like my privacy. I think I guard it pretty well. But between my frequent buyer cards, my frequent flyer cards, my frequent stayer cards, and just about anything else that calls for either a plastic card or my phone number, there's not too many marketeers out there that don't know a lot about me.

So pardon me if I'm more than a little annoyed that big brother isn't listening to conversations of suspected bad guys. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of big brother. But do you really think the government has more of an agenda than all the marketeers collecting data on us??

Everyone has a right to privacy, but at what cost to the common good? Nonprofits are public organizations that must operate "in the sunshine" and at the same time protect the rights of their donors. Apparently some of our most noble np's are not very open about their operations. Ask the Smithsonian.

It's a good thing to give without expecting accolades. For those who really want to maintain their privacy, the BBB of giving acts as a watchdog that will bark loudly to insure there are plans to "take action to ensure that privacy concerns of donors are respected in the collection, dissemination, and securing of personal information, and allow donors opportunities to have their names removed from solicitation lists."

It's called a donor privacy policy. It's important to publish. It's easy to do.

On the other side of the coin, the public does have a right to know and a right to expect accountability of our funding - both expenses and income. That's not hard to solve either.

The answer to the question at the top? What do spies, terrorists, and donors have in common?

PRIVACY.

Some groups need the privacy of working in the dark to "succeed." But bad things rarely happen in the light of day.

Privacy is not a bad thing when kept it in balance. Take care of your donors. They take care of you.