Toward the end of September, Stephen and I attended the ArtezInteractive conference hosted by online fundraising and marketing company Artez. The conference explored ways of effectively fundraising using the Internet. The conference had some fantastic speakers who spoke on topics all very relevant to our growth as an online fundraising organization. Two very notable speakers were Ted Hart and Dan Pallotta. Ted Hart is the co author of a book called People to People fundraising that we used extensively for our first grant applications and to provide critical research for the Esther's Echo model. His site can be found at www.tedhart.com. Dan Pallotta is the author of a book called "Uncharitable" that reviews the challenges faced by non-profits from a variety of sectors that results in stunted work and confused performance indicators. One of the very interesting points he raised is the question of "overhead costs." Overhead is used to describe costs of NGO operation that is not directly linked to the work of the NGO itself but rather to expenses such as administration. Typically, donors are trained to look for NGOs that spend less than 20% on overhead. These are considered "good" or "responsible" organizations. Dan warns that this measuring stick fails to take into account the real world impact of a particular organization. For example, organization A may spend only 10% on administration while Organization B may spend 20%. We are trained, as donors, to donate to organization A. But if we actually visited organization B and found that staff treated much more equitably, that the overseas operation was far more sound and reporting was far more accurate, we would most likely switch our donations to B. He also argued that some real world problems are not being addressed because of the focus on overhead costs as these problems are simply more costly to deal with, require more logistical infrastructure and unique skills. More on uncharitable can be found at Dan's web site www.uncharitable.net. There is also a post Stephen made on the Esther's Echo Facebook Page