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The History of The Gilbert Center: 1997 - 1998
By Michael C. Gilbert, December 27th, 2006
From the tenth anniversary of the founding of this organization through the tenth anniversary of the launch of Nonprofit Online News, I will be continuing an extended thank you notes to the people and organizations with whom we've been privileged enough to work. In other announcements, we'll look back at the best (and possibly worst) of our work. We'll take some steps in new directions, such as our 2006 year end sale. In this article, I'll pick up a trail of reflection and gratitude from roughly where we left off in Part 1.
- 1996 & 1997 - Developed Content Management System for the Nonprofit FAQ
- 1997 & 1998 - Assume leadership of the Internet Nonprofit Center
- 1998 - Facilitate merger of Internet Nonprofit Center and the Nonprofit FAQ
Over the years, we have partnered closely with a number of organizations and incubated the development of many more. Two of the most important of these organizations were The Evergreen State Society's Nonprofit FAQ and the Internet Nonprofit Center.
The Nonprofit FAQ is the oldest continually maintained resource for nonprofits on the Internet. It was originally a collection of hand-crafted web pages compiling answers from the soc.org.nonprofit Usenet Newsgroup. Developing a web based content management system for the FAQ was a chance for us to experiment with some knowledge management principles we had started to explore. Some of those principles are more commonplace today, including tag based taxonomies, email and web content submission, content feedback systems, distributed editorial roles and corresponding workflows.
The Internet Nonprofit Center was the first large scale searchable database of U.S. nonprofit organizations. It was Cliff Landesmann's vision, but we were proud to be able to improve it and help it reach a larger audience. Although we conducted some of the earliest successful email fundraising campaigns on behalf of the Internet Nonprofit Center and its Nonprofit Locator, we did not achieve the institutional support for this vision that would have been necessary in the long run. That would eventually be the role of Guidestar.
Putnam Barber, Cliff Landesmann, and I saw that there was a good match between the Internet Nonprofit Center and the Nonprofit FAQ and we negotiated a merger between the organizations that brought the Locator and the FAQ under the auspices of The Evergreen State Society, using the name of the Internet Nonprofit Center. I'm pleased to say that a subsequent merger brought the FAQ under the wing of Idealist.org and that it is still alive and well.
- 1998 - August - Launched online fundraising mailing list
- 1998 - June to December - First seven articles at Nonprofit Online News
In 1998, we started to branch out in terms of the kind of content we offered. I learned early on that the readers of Nonprofit Online News wanted more editorial content and so I embarked on the feature articles that I continue to write (and invite others to write) to this day. Those first articles included an aborted experiment with a nonprofit zeitgeist meter, interviews with Howard Lake and Rob Stuart, and reviews of three conferences. These were fairly cautious topics. Although my readers could no doubt already hear it, it would be the following year in which I would truly find the editorial voice of this publication.
We also launched a far more interactive project, in the form of the first online community (a mailing list) devoted to the topic of online fundraising. I often speak of being open about failure and that is my reason for including the project in this little history. The mailing list eventually died due to neglect, but in its first month it suffered from a meltdown caused entirely by my lack of forethought.
Just before going out of town to a conference, I invited everyone on the list (some 600 people at that point) to introduce themselves. Little did I know how many of them actually would. The mailing list server had not been stress tested at this point. When a couple of hundred people introduced themselves all at once, a geometric cascade of email was set into motion. Just the introductions might have been all right, but the replies to those introductions, the out of office messages, and the desperate unsubscribe messages all piled up in a queue that was more than a day behind. This, of course, led to repeat submissions of messages and.. you get the idea. Our little server melted down and the only way for me to stop the madness was to call a colleague to pull the plug. My lesson: Do the math.
To Be Continued...
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