The future is online and not-for-profit groups need to be increasingly up-skilling their staff if they're going to make the most of new opportunities, says Doug Jacquier.

Mr. Jacquier, CEO of Connecting Up Australia was speaking at ComVoices' Breakfast event at Parliament on Wednesday 16 September 2009. The event was hosted by Metiria Turei, co-leader of the Green Party, and chaired by Tony Mayow, Chairperson of the New Zealand Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations (NZFVWO).

Connecting Up Australia is a nonprofit organisation that is an internationally recognised leader in connecting communities with technology. As its CEO Mr. Jacquier has extensive experience working online and has a few pointers that not-for-profit groups should be aware of. These are:

• Cloud computing (hosting your files on an external service such as Google) is the way of the future. Mr. Jacquier says, "cloud computing will challenge the very foundations of what we know as the Internet."
• Online fundraising campaigns will become increasingly more important; just look at how Barack Obama raised money online. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/11/20/obama_raised_half_a_billion_on.html
• Globally, at the moment, only five per cent of fundraising is done online.
• Facebook and Twitter are not applications solely reserved for the young. The biggest user group on Facebook is people over 35 years old; Twitter's fastest growing demographic is 45-54 year olds.
• Organisations need to start broadening their vision of what is possible online; find ways to challenge the status quo, be quoted and stand out. Online, if you're interesting, people will start talking about you and your work and become ambassadors for what you're doing.
• If you can't do the work yourself, or don't find yourself engaged with social media - delegate it to people who can. You can agree what should be said and done and have them do it.
• Issues of organisations being connected, and being able to afford to use the technology also need to be addressed as a matter of priority.

Doug Jacquier also told the audience that:

• Two thirds of people online use a social network
• Social networks are more popular for communication than email
• There are over 3 million tweets a day on Twitter
• 100 million videos are watched on YouTube each day, and
• If Facebook was a country it would be the sixth largest in the world and bigger than Japan.

About Doug Jacquier

Doug Jacquier is CEO of Connecting Up Australia, a nonprofit organisation that is an internationally recognised leader in connecting communities with technology. He has been invited to address national nonprofit technology conferences in the US, UK and South Africa.

In 2007 Doug led his organisation into partnership with US nonprofit TechSoup Global to establish the DonorTec technology donation programme for nonprofits in Australia.