So where does Elgg fit into a non-profits online presence? What hole does it plug? I discussed this with Diego Andrés Ramirez, Technology Director at Somos Más in Bogota, Colombia. Somos Más (meaning: We are more) is a Non Government Organization (NGO) that works towards the articulation of non-profits in Colombia.

Ramirez and his team have setup two networks based on Elgg—RedPai http://redpai.org, a network of child protection non-profits and RedReiri http://redreiri.org, a network of non-profits that work for people with physical disabilities.

Ramirez and his team saw the social networking platforms as a way to help the organizations get together, share important information between them, and more efficient interactions. With time being one of the scarcest and more important resources in non-profit organizations, the time the organizations spend in getting along and working with other organizations to solve more high-level problems (like articulation of the offer and demand of social services, public policy problems, qualification and pertinence of the service they are offering, and so on) is very valuable.

However, as per Ramirez, traditional methods of networking weren't efficient enough. Also, the organizations were spending a great deal of the time they had together in sharing basic information and resolving administrative problems. A dedicated social network is what was required to streamline the process of communication.

Before they found Elgg, the team had been developing their own GPL'ed system for building social networking sites. However, one day while looking for information about social networking on Wikipedia, they found Elgg, reviewed it, and found that it already had many of the features that they wanted. So, they decided to throw away their code and aligned their efforts with Elgg to build the social networking engine that would fit with their requirements.

According to Ramirez, their networks are unlike any other Elgg installation. Both their current setups include functionalities to allow non-profits to publish and promote their projects, services, and products as special types of content. Additionally, they have customized the graphic design and tweaked some features taking into account some usability considerations. For example, they had to let go many functionalities that come with Elgg for the sake of reducing the complexity for their target users who have little experience with this type of virtual social platform. You can probably understand this when you take into account some of Ramirez's statistics. Less than 10% of their current users know or have heard of what a blog is, and none of them have ever written a blog.

Like many developing countries, Internet connectivity is a big issue in Colombia. Ramirez and his team customized Elgg's page design to keep the download size of the pages very small, because a high number of the non-profits that use the system have a low bandwidth, or even a classic 56K telephone connection to the Internet.

But has the network helped? Not only are the organizations interacting with each other better, but Ramirez is all smiles when he says that for many of the non-profits present in their current installations, the platform his team has set up is the organization's only online presence. Some of them even refer people to their profile pages as their institutional page even though this wasn't the original idea.

So how has Ramirez's experience been working on Elgg? He says that from a developer's point of view, once you understand some of Elgg's idiosyncrasies it's an easy and powerful tool that you can use to build whatever you want. In his case, Elgg's two strongest points were that it allowed them to modify Elgg to fit their usability demands, and secondly, presented no difficulties adding new features that were useful for their clients—in record time and without too much effort.

In fact, some of the custom tools Ramirez and his team have developed have been released to the Elgg community as plug-ins. We've covered the most important and useful ones in the book. The plug-ins they have already released include:

There are several other plug-ins that they'll be launching soon including:

Ramirez offers some advice to non-profits contemplating on using a social networking platform like Elgg. From his experience in Colombia, he thinks there are mainly two serious obstacles that keep non-profits from taking more advantage of this type of platform and technologically-mediated solutions: sensibility and resources. And he thinks these two issues are related to each other because many non-profits don't think about the opportunities these solutions provide for them. They feel they can never get the resources to make interesting things happen.

However, Ramirez clarifies that this is more of a mental constraint than a real one. Operating a technologically obsolete non-profit is much more expensive than one that's more "technologically inclined". According to Ramirez, the cost involved in running a traditional "offline" setup (physical mail, national and international phone calls, papers, photocopies, and so on) are "just breathtaking".

Now, on the contrary, in many small and mid sized non-profits of between 25 to 50 people in staff, Ramirez found a quick return of investment when buying new hardware. Figuratively speaking, buying new "decent" computers for the administrative staff (lets say, 3 to 5 computers), and a "decent" Internet connection (that is to say they don't have to connect by traditional phone line by modem), the costs were recovered in 3 to 6 months.

Painting an all too familiar picture Ramirez mentions that some non-profits don't invest in technology because they feel that those resources would make them reduce their number of beneficiaries. Hence less resources equate to less means of providing services to beneficiaries. And also, in Colombia, the price of acquiring technology and decent Internet connections are some times higher than in other, more "connected" countries. Of course, Colombia isn't an isolated example. This is true of big countries and technology hubs like India and other South East Asian countries and even some European ones.

For Ramirez, getting non-profits hooked on to technology enablers like a social networking platform requires more than just telling and persuading. For him, it's a task of demo'ing—showing that not only the possibilities but also convincing them that it's well within their budgets. Ramirez is happy with the progress he and his team are making, and having piloted a couple of networks, it seems they're on the right track.